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...

45. Another Weirdo In The Ship

(Archangel's Amazing Adventures, Set 6: Rampaging Blue Light)
(Set Chapter 2 / AAA Chapter 45: Another Weirdo In The Ship)

It did not take Gascogne long to realize she was awake — the significant headache told that tale fast enough. So far as she could tell, nothing else was hurting on her except for her head.

The realization as to what had caused the migraine-level headache was fast enough. Her head meeting the bottom surface of a cafeteria table had abruptly ended the fight between the strange guy in the chef uniform and herself — how exactly the rest of the battle had turned out, she had apparently not been conscious enough to tell.

Given the sight of the room above her was not the cafeteria hall, this was somewhere else. "Where am I?" she asked.

"You're in the medical bay on the combined Pirate ship," a man's voice answered.

"What?" Gascogne tried sitting up quickly, but became dizzy and collapsed back to the bed.

"Take it easy, Gascogne," the man said. "You have a moderate concussion from the impact you took. Don't try to move around, you can trigger dizziness and naus — "

"G—Gonna be sick," Gascogne said after she realized the bout of dizziness had upset her innards to such a degree. She was smart enough to turn toward the edge of the bed, where the man had a trashcan waiting for her. The barfing was automatic, but extremely unwelcome. She did not want to show weakness in the presence of a man, and vomiting was one of the nastiest such signs.

"You should not move for at least 24 hours, allow your brain time to recover from the impact trauma," the man said.

"Why should I listen to you?" Gascogne answered.

"I am a doctor, and treating battlefield trauma — including concussions — comes with my duties," the man said calmly.

"Oh," Gascogne found herself unable to think straight enough to find a way out of the matter. That said, she wasn't going to defer to a man on this matter, but she wasn't going to actively ignore the orders of a doctor, either.

The door to the room opened after she finished cleaning her mouth. "Doc, got the last round of usable supplies from the old ship's medical ward," another man said. This one was younger, dressed differently, and — rather shockingly — was armed with a pistol not unlike the sidearm that Barnett carried. "The chemicals are either hardened beyond recovery or evaporated, so Paiway and I junked the unusable materials."

"Thank you, pilot. Set them down on the second bed, I will sort them and put them away shortly."

"No problem," the younger guy said. "Need anything else from me?"

"Thank you, that is all for now. We'll have to leave the heavier diagnostic equipment down in the medical ward of the old ship," the doctor answered. Gascogne mentally stuttered when she realized she had already and rather quickly made that leap of faith into thinking of him as a proper doc — being a man and all, she had quickly identified him as an enemy, but now, not so much.

She looked aside and squinted, to see if she could see the other man in the room, and was rightly surprised. The man in question was a teenager — late teens, likely — with surprising green hair and a level of fitness that would have put most of the Pirates to shame. His pistol belt had four spare magazine pouches and a knife, not a small knife at that, but not the decorative / identification knife used by the Male Army of Tarak.

"Give us a call if you need something, Doc," the guy said before he turned out the door.

"What happened?" Gascogne asked.

The doctor sighed. "A lot. For starters, the two separate ships are at a cease-fire, so our combined ship isn't going to be blown out of the stars for now."

"Separate ship — combined ships?" the terms were confusing to Gascogne, made worse by the headache.

"First, the old Male ship Ikazuchi and the Pirate ship have been combined by a blue crystal of some kind, hence combined ships," the doctor said.

"Okay, not good but okay," Gascogne acknowledged the point.

"Second, the ship that arrived right before the torpedo struck and caused us all to displace, it is a dedicated warship full of interdimensional wanderers. It is called the Archangel. The guy that knocked you out was a member of that crew."

Gascogne sighed. Oh, great, now I'll be ridiculed for months because Barnett saw me — Barnett! "Hey, is Barnett all right?"

"Squadron Leader Barnett? She was injured in a gunfight, and close to fainting from blood loss when she walked in here, but nothing serious," the doctor answered calmly.

"You know how stubborn Barnett is," Paiway said.

"True," Gascogne admitted. "She did take a hit? I find that surprising."

"I can't speak to Barnett's skill, but the crew from the Archangel are all veterans, ex-military, combat-hardened troops. From what I've seen of them so far, they're not normally people to leave enemies alive in a shooting match."

That thought caused Gascogne to choke up — if she had gone up against a team of true professionals, she had to consider herself lucky to have survived the encounter.

A change of subject was in order. "How bad did I take the hit?"

"Moderate concussion. I did an MRI on your head while you were unconscious to check for any internal bleeding in your head, and to gauge the amount of swelling in your brain, which is why you're on 24 hours bedrest. You are not bleeding anywhere that I could identify, but your brain is definitely enlarged from the impact. It will take time, rest, and most importantly not moving to help reduce the swelling."

"Yes, doctor," Gascogne admitted her defeat on the subject.

"There will be plenty time to catch up tomorrow." The doctor pulled an articulated terminal over her bed. "You can use this to message and coordinate with your people. If you can keep it working, that is. Thing has died on me twice while I was working on it."

-x-x-x-

(Day 1, 1530 hrs shipboard time)
(Ship status: defensive, engines disabled, TTS disabled, hull still in flux)

The wiring block Murdoch was working on threw another spark, this time a blue-white one that ionized the air and gave off that particular stench of electric burns.

"This is bullshit!" the mechanic chief raged. "Never had a damn problem with the doors, even when ZAFT was shooting at us, until this blue crystal shit takes over my bay!"

"This is rather interesting," Doctor J said from the next wiring panel down. "The main power conduits are all being rebuilt in the same living energy crystal lattice that forms the main being," the Gundam Scientist said.

"How bad is that going to be, doc?" Gomer asked.

"Once the crystal lattice hardens, it will be better than the wiring — the lattice flexes better than typical copper wire, and can transport more amperage per millimeter of cross-section. The downside should be obvious — this is nothing you can buy off the shelf, making repairs difficult at best."

"Can we tell it to give us redundant cir — " the power distribution block threw another spark, this one bright yellow. With the last spark, the panel indicators came on and stayed on. "Do we have it now?"

Gomer typed the entry code into the door — a six-digit number designed to confound the average boarding party. The door opened partially, then stopped with maybe a ten-centimeter gap opened. "Panel is powered, servos are only partially powered," Doctor J guessed.

"Can we hook a car battery up to the local power bus for the servos and just let it feed like that until the mystic blue crystal has done its thang and made some love to the door servo power bus?" Gomer asked.

"Only you would frame this in the thought of the blue crystal long-dicking the power buses. Only you, Gomer," Murdoch said even as he headed to a storage room where some batteries were awaiting use (if ever needed).

"Actually, that might not be an incorrect way of thinking about what the blue crystal is doing, Petty Officer Gomer," Doctor J commented after Murdoch turned into the storage area. "Doktor S and Instructor H have concocted a theory that the blue crystal is an offshoot of the crystal that combined the two Pirate ships into one larger vessel. If they are right, it is possible that we are dealing with a baby Paxis, which could be… interes — " Doctor J was cut off by an electrical arc that jumped from the power block he was working on to his left arm, which caused it to spazz out briefly. "Oh, bother," Doctor J twisted the arm a quarter-turn clockwise, pulled the malfunctioning prosthetic out of his overcoat, and unplugged the battery to force it to reset.

"Gomer, here, plug this into the power bus, then plug this battery into it," Murdoch set a dolly with a large truck battery down next to Gomer, and gave him a DC Transformer to change the voltage from 12v to 440v. "Arm lost it again?"

"Shocked by an arc from the power bus," Doctor J said as he manually manipulated the prosthetic arm's servos back to their 'zero' positions so they would work properly with his biomechanical arm attachment controls.

"Got it!" Gomer shouted after the door slid open completely. "Whoa! Wasn't expecting anyone behind door number one!"

"I was — " the Dread Squad Leader (Gomer belatedly remembered her name as Barnett) stopped mid-sentence when she caught sight of Doctor J manipulating his prosthetic arm to a reset position. "Eek, now I've seen it all," she said even as she escorted Commander Buson into the hangar area.

"Old injury?" BC asked, apparently unfazed by such a sight.

How the hell does the Commander get by with not being affected by that? Barnett asked herself mentally, and just as quickly realized that BC was from an entirely different mentality than the rest of the crew. Which made her perfect as a ship XO.

"The hazards of challenging the ruling government on one's homeworld," Doctor J answered, then slipped the base of the prosthetic up his overcoat sleeve and twisted it a quarter-turn counterclockwise to lock it in place. A couple moves and flexes with it back in place, and he lowered it. "I opposed the Earth Alliance on my homeworld, they tried bombing the office I was working in. Partial credit where due, but we old Gundam Engineers had the last laugh."

"There's probably a good story there," BC said with a nod. "We'll have to get together some time, I can always use the pointers for our pirate work." The Pirate XO looked to Murdoch. "Which way to the starboard forequarter dock hatch?"

Murdoch pointed between the legs of the Strike Freedom. "That door, left at the T-intersection, two forwards, right and you're staring at it. Give me a shout if you come across an inoperable door."

"Understood," BC said with a quick salute.

Gomer waited to say what was on his mind until after the ladies had passed through the hatch behind the Strike Freedom. "Did I just read that right, boss? In the great war of the sexes we have landed in, the Pirate XO is a progressive amongst the bunch?"

"You read correct, sounds like," Murdoch answered. "That said, a story like this is probably longer than we want to know."

"Any hope we can have Miriallia 'feel out' the group? See if we're really shit outta luck here?" Gomer asked.

Murdoch snorted. "Ha ha, comrade, ha ha. How long have you been on the Archangel?"

"About a week less than you, boss," Gomer answered. In the numeric scheme of things, that wasn't a huge difference of time, given that both Murdoch and Gomer were on the ship well before ZAFT attacked Heliopolis to steal the Gundams, lo those many years ago.

"Then why are you asking dumb questions? If, at any time the Archangel is in operations, it is likely shit out of luck at that time. Rule Number Three of the Great List of Archangel Maxims."

"Whips and Chains, sir," Gomer acknowledged the point.

"I guess that's it for our major systems here in the Hangar," Murdoch said, going over a mental checklist of what was needed for maintenance and flight operations. "Orders from the Captain are bow to stern, every major system, as many minor systems are reasonable to test. Get it on!"

"Time to get my Technician on," Gomer said with a smile. Within an hour, he would not be smiling.

-x-x-x-

(Day 1, 1815 hrs shipboard time)
(Ship status: defensive, engines disabled, TTS disabled, hull mostly stopped creaking but still making noise randomly)

"This is impressive," Pirate Captain Magno Vivon noted after she entered the ship's wardroom.

"This is just the history that has been," Murrue said quietly. "Places we've been, empires we've shot up, things of that nature. No member of this crew expects that our next jump will take us home, so we will inevitably have more to add."

"Flags, memorabilia, books from several different languages?" Meia asked. Her arm was still in a sling from the broken bone administered by Murdoch, but Magno expected her to recover in a week or two. "How long?"

"Slightly less than four years, and six distinct locations. Please be seated. Refreshments?" Murrue asked.

"Water?" Meia asked.

"Do you have tea?" Magno asked.

Murrue nodded, then picked up a growler phone from the wall next to her desk. "One thermos ice water, one thermos Northern European Grey Tea, one thermos coffee to the Wardroom. Thanks Master Chief." Murrue set the growler back down in the cradle. "Should be here in about five minutes," Murrue said, quoting a length of time into a future that would not happen as planned.

"If I may ask, how large is the crew of your ship?" Magno started with her inquisitive side, given the size of the ship was far larger than her own ship and just slightly smaller than the combined Pirate-Ikazuchi combination ship.

"We're running somewhere around 270 personnel," Murrue said. "Most of which are personnel pertaining to the ship, though we do have about 80 bay personnel for Mobile Suits, ground vehicles, and such. Yours?"

"Sixty in the ship, forty or so for the Dreads, and now three men whom I really have no clue what to do with," Magno said. "If you have suggestions, given the nature of your crew, I am listening."

Murrue sighed. This was something that she had fought to a lesser degree, mainly because it was volunteer in her case and not forced as in Magno's crew's case, but there had been some low-level teething issues pertaining to the incoming crew. They learned fast enough, but at the end of the day they wanted to learn. There were few substitutes for desire, as these things happened.

"I suggest you integrate them — slowly — to get them acclimated to your crew and eventually working as part of your crew. I suspect there aren't too many places to drop off unwanted hitchhikers in this sector of space."

"So far as we can tell, no," Meia acknowledged. "How do you manage it? As far as I can tell, there are more men on this ship than women. Don't they rebel?"

"I did at one point have a mutiny in my crew, but it wasn't men versus women, it was — "

-x-

The young Paxis Archangel didn't have the raw power that the parent Paxis Pragma had, but they were close enough to communicate plans by quantum communication. And Paxis Archangel had a rather significant plan that required the crew of the ship to be unconscious to execute. So, reluctantly, the Pragma Paxis initiated a wormhole jump of 5 LY spinward, nothing special, to render the crews unconscious and this time do so without tripping the crude Jump Engine in the Archangel.

Paxis Archangel had begun modifying the ship to enhance its capabilities when the Seed Protocol was executed, but now that the Paxis had a complete understanding of the ship, it was time to make some drastic improvements to the ship.

The first order of business was widening the ship to 260m, lengthening it to 600m, and the height came down a bit to 211m overall. The frame changes (instituted over 15 minutes of hard crystalline expansion) would result in an effective ship mass of 455,000 tons, up from the 411,000 tons of the prior frame.

The first thing to go was the superfluous rotating gravity block. Removing that complicated and somewhat dangerous system was nothing but a boon to the ongoing expansion effort, as the space could now be rearranged logically into more cargo holds and used to expand other cargo sections and the mess hall. Second to go was the thermonuclear engines, as those would be replaced by the Paxis Engine Bank soon enough. Lastly, the existing fuel tanks were replaced with a much larger subdivided fuel bunker for 12,000 tons of fuel for extended campaigning.

The gaps in the hull caused by the expansion were not all that easy to fix, but within the hour all were repaired using some of the spare Gundanium in storage. Marvelous metal, this Gundanium, very hard to damage and electrically nonconductive, which would make things easier on the ship if they had to fight another Paxis ship (there were several running around this Galaxy, so…)

Forward in the hangar, the Paxis isolated and moved the jump engine from its repository in the hangar machine shop to creep it back toward the engine room, where it would be easier to synchronize with local space and where it could be directly powered by the Paxis. While the jump engine was crystal-surfing its way toward the rear of the ship, Paxis took the time to put the new width and length of the ship to good use, extending the hangar space from three rows of four cubicles out to two forward rows of five cubes and a lateral row of six cubes against the back wall of the hangar bulkheads. To this, Paxis finished the mods up by adding five centimeters of Gundanium plate on the exterior facing of the hangar walls, and reinforced all the hatches and bulkhead heavy doors with gundanium and titanium plate. Safety first and all that.

At the rear of the ship, the tail binders gained another twenty meters of length and lost their small engine ports, which were rather superfluous to begin with. Replacing the engine nozzles were two new sensor domes dedicated to finding visible / uncloaked targets at some 60,000 kilometers, and cloaked enemies at 60 kilometers. The rest of the length enhancement was soaked up by the addition of four missile tubes per tail binder, two facing forward and two rear, bringing the total capital missiles up to 40 (a 66 percent increase over the baseline Archangel-class ships). Just for grin factor, the ready missile magazines were increased from 10 rounds per tube to 12 per tube, giving the ship a total of 480 missiles available without having to stop and reload (which might be considered inconvenient or hazardous during a gunfight).

Forward of the tail binders, the changes were a little less subtle. Each sensor system was improved to the same capabilities as the rear sensors, allowing the ship to see completely spherically around itself and track up to 4096 targets and engage up to 128 simultaneously. In so doing, the Paxis changed the effective role of the ship from carrier with some capital and aerospace combat abilities into something more akin to a mobile air defense battery with some carried assets and big guns. The other capital missile launcher, the Helldarts, were upgraded to 20 silos and broken down into five groups of four silos for easier targeting of multiple threats. No need to change the magazines on the Helldarts existed, as 20 missiles per silo was considered optimal for just about any engagement in the ship's history.

Amidships, the workhorse guns Valiants received a thorough workover. Used and overused to the point of structural deficiency in the gun barrels, it became quickly obvious to Paxis that these guns would require special attention. Each gun was completely stripped down to the turret mechanism, the material chewed up and reprocessed, and rebuilt layer by layer using an interlocking crystal lattice mechanism in the actual barrels, converting the Valiant guns from naval gauss rifles into naval railguns — and upping the ante by double in so doing. By beefing up the loading mechanism and the capacitor systems, Paxis Archangel literally doubled the fire rate of the Valiants to the point where the guns could fire one slug every five seconds at low power, or one slug at maximum power every fifteen seconds, all with the blessing of using a thermoconductive crystal lattice in the barrel rails to prevent warping even at maximum firing power.

At the top of the 'legs' of the ship, the most drastic change happened. Two cannon assemblies, four barrels, known as the Gottfried Mark 71, had turned out to be the minute-by-minute capital workhorse guns of the ship, even to the point of using single-barrel shots as something of an overlarge capital-scale beam sniper rifle over the years. These primary guns of the ship, lethal beyond their tonnage, had to be upgraded to increase the survivability of the Archangel, a necessary affair for Paxis Archangel. The primary turrets were up-sized to the tune of 40 percent and armored to a greater degree. The protection was part for external threat, but also part for helping dissipate heat from the new gun barrels — both turrets received a third barrel, set above and slightly back from the two existing barrels, making the turrets a triple-barreled monster.

The final major arsenal modification happened just below the revamped Gottfried Triad. Predominantly the home of ABDC canister launchers and some Clan LRM 20 missile systems, Paxis moved these weapon systems farther down the legs to where they were below the completely new addition to the ship — a complete copy of the Gottfried Triad turrets had been built on the outside of the Archangel leg binders. These turrets rotated and tracked completely independent of their topside counterparts, giving the ship four aimpoints with three barrels — a total of twelve Gottfried barrels where four had once been. Two turrets vertical, two horizontal, all capable of aiming forward or rear, and the new turrets could cover straight up or straight down where the old Gottfried turrets had a maximum elevation that was far less convenient than its maximum depression. To provide for these changes, a complete power conduit run from the Paxis was necessary for each turret, but well worth it.

The wrap-up change to the ship was to extend the sub-wing of the ship by an extra 30 meters to each side, to increase atmospheric stability when maneuvering. The crew quarters were increased from 280 around the ship to berths for 510. Two extra rooms were engineered into the spaces, with a third hot springs section squeezed in between the male and female sides, and an unused room across from the wardroom that the Paxis figured would be used soon enough. A purpose-built room was added adjacent to the armory, a 50-meter rifle range capable of accommodating any and all of their infantry weapons for testing and training purposes. A final touch was to increase the quantum mainframe banks in the central computing system from one bank to four — the Quantum Mainframes on the ship were basic and uninspired compared to the quantum circuits inside every Paxis, but compared to most extant Human computer systems the Paxis Pragma or Paxis Archangel had seen, these four banks of quantum computing were light years ahead of anything in present use.

All in all, the complete modification would take some 90 minutes, just slightly longer than the bulk of the crew took to wake up from this second 'wormhole jump'. Minor adjustments would take Paxis Archangel three weeks to get everything dialed in, but such were the 'niceties' of reengineering a primitive warship on the fly.

-x-

Murrue's first instinct was to look at the clock to see how long she had been unconscious, and the numbers were not welcome. 100 minutes out, and the ship's hull was creaking and groaning to random amounts. Her next move was to grab for the growler phone and dial the bridge. "Bridge, Captain Ramius," she called.

"Just five more minutes, Captain, need more whipped cream," Chandratta answered in clear daze.

"Chandra!" Murrue half-shouted.

"I'm up! I'm up! Hell was that dream I had, though?" the fire control officer asked.

"Save it for later. Are we under attack?" Murrue asked. "And what's the status of the Pirate ship?"

"Pirate ship is visible dead ahead of us, looks like it's grown a little in beam and height, that should give their crew some more room to spread out. So far as I can tell, we're the only vessels in the area."

"Is the bridge crew in place?" Murrue asked next as Meia began stirring.

"Uh, standby," Chandratta took a few moments to look around. "Looks like all the usual suspects are here, Captain."

"Try to figure out what just happened, we'll go from there. Call if anything happens. Wardroom is out." Murrue hung up the phone as Magno pushed herself back to sitting vertically. "Are you two hurt?"

"No, just tired," Magno yawned a moment later. "These cat-naps just aren't enough nowadays."

"I am unharmed," Meia answered. "What caused that?"

"The first time, I thought it was the engine on the Ikazuchi. This time? Who knows? Could have been ours, could have been yours, doesn't really matter, I guess." Murrue shrugged.

"At least this time our crews did not get jumbled, which is good," Magno judged. "We have much to learn about our new ships, I guess. I propose a temporary alliance until we understand our circumstances and what we must do going forward."

"Agreed and welcomed." the two Captains shook hands on the matter.

-x-x-x-

(Day 1, 1845 hrs shipboard time)
(Ship status: defensive, engines partially active, TTS disabled, hull still in flux)

Magno had come over to the Archangel by way of the shuttle that took the remainder of the Archangel Team personnel back to their ship, and the plan was to take her leave of the warship by way of the shuttle that would return her pirate crew to their ship.

"Ready to go, Captain Vivon?" Yzak asked after she entered the flight deck of the shuttle.

"It has been an interesting tour," Magno said.

"Captain, the crew are all seated and strapped in. We're ready to go when you are," Meia said from the doorway to the cockpit.

Magno took a seat in one of the flight deck jumpseats and strapped herself in. "Meia, you will need a seat as well."

"Uh…" Meia hesitated when it became obvious that there was not a seat available except the copilot's seat.

"If you're flight rated, grab a seat up here," Yzak pointed to the copilot's seat.

"Okay," Meia said, not trusting the pilot any more than her instincts would allow, and her instincts were running several red flashing lights and klaxons inside the confines of her mind.

As Meia worked to secure herself in the five-point harness, Yzak was working the controls at a pace faster than Meia would ever have thought to go through a pre-flight checklist. "Maintenance Control, Shuttle, clearance for launch yet?"

"Negative, Yzak, we're still clearing personnel. Standby for clear hangar," Dorothy ordered.

"Aye aye," Yzak groused.

"Anything I need to do right now?" Meia asked, fulfilling the role of a copilot even if she didn't want to associate with a man at all.

"No, we're ready to go, once we're cleared," Yzak said calmly.

The personnel hatch opened. "Sorry we're late," Gomer said as soon as he piled in the door with someone else.

"Held up by Commander La Flaga," Kira explained further as he entered the shuttle and dropped a tool bag against the forward bulkhead of the passenger compartment.

"Shuttle, Maintenance Control, all personnel have been cleared from the hangar. You are clear to taxi on taxiway alpha to port side launch, hold short at catapult until launch door is open, how copy?" Dorothy ordered.

"Good copy, Control. Moving now." Yzak lifted off the hangar floor by switching off the magnetic grapnel that kept it in place when the gravity systems were turned off. A thrust up, two blasts forward, and two blasts to the port side had the shuttle moving in the right direction, still facing forward. Toward the end of their travel down the alpha taxiway, a single timely thrust to the starboard slowed them down, and a second thrust stopped the ship facing down the catapult bay.

"A magnetic catapult system?" Meia asked.

"Helps give the machines a boost out the door," Yzak said. "Primitive, yes, but very effective. Helps us a lot in a forward assault scenario."

"I hope you're not — " Meia looked over her shoulder at Magno.

"Oh, hell no!" Yzak chuckled. "We tried that on a shuttle, it'd tear this thing into chunks. Besides, this is not a combat launch, the catapult isn't even powered." Yzak pointed to the sign that declared catapult inoperative. "Control, Shuttle, heading out now."

"Shuttle, Control, on your way out to the Pirate ship, please feed your external camera take to the bridge on channel 33. Command wants to do a hull survey."

"Roger that," Yzak said. "Meia, you have the camera controls. Left MFD, set the camera to auto-track the Archangel."

Meia changed over to external cameras, then selected 'auto-track nearest allied ship' from the menu. Meanwhile, Yzak selected the camera output on the radio's second band and fed it out on data channel 33 to the Archangel.

"Holy cremoly," Yzak gaped after he had a good look at the Archangel through the shuttle's optics. "Whatever this blue crystal stuff is, it just gave us a massive upgrade."

"Definitely longer and wider than it used to be," Hikaru said from the doorway. "Of course, a whole new set of Gottfried beam turrets, that will wreck someone's day, and is it just me or does the Valiant assembly look bigger?"

"Hell yes it does, about time they got some beefcake," Yzak said.

"Valiants?" Meia asked, now intrigued by the conversation between the two pilots.

"The round spot, just behind the leg of the ship, pointing backwards. Those are concealed linear guns, massive slug throwers that we use for anti-ship and kinetic bombardment purposes," Yzak highlighted it on the camera feed. "Next to the Gottfried guns, these are the workhorses for direct gun action on the ship."

"Tail binders, looks like we have a fifth set of silos," Hikaru pointed out.

"Ha! You're right!" Yzak pounded his fist into hand. "40 missiles, twenty forward, twenty rear now, plus the Helldarts for short-range intercept. Strike!"

"Yeah?" Kira barked back.

"Can you design a missile — or find something in your machine's weapons databases — that gives us single missiles multiple light target kills?"

"Probably, yeah, why?" Kira asked.

"We've been in a few numbers games too many. I figure, if we can find a way to lighten the load, let the ship do more of the dirty work, so much the better," Yzak said.

"I think I can come up with something," he admitted after a few seconds to consider it. "You want light target only, or multipurpose?"

"Multipurpose would be best, I'd say. We don't get attacked by flying gelatinous cubes too often, do we? It's usually something with armor, so better make them tougher."

"Gotcha," Kira said with a smile. "I might have an idea already."

"And this trip gets just a bit weirder," Hikaru complained.

"You know what the mechanics' take on this adventure is, no?" Yzak said.

"Yeah. 'Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho, it's off to Hell we go'," Hikaru said in a bit of a singsong voice. "Usually accompanied by an air guitar and beatbox riff of the chorus from AC-DC's Highway To Hell. Then a repeat of the chorus a few times."

"Well, if we ever make it there in one piece, we'll be in good company," Yzak said deadpan. "Getting there is going to be the trouble, though."

Hikaru sighed. "Some days, I wonder if I really want to go home, or if it is just the normalcy bias in me trying to drive me back to a life I don't think I could do any more."

Yzak chuckled grimly. "I've given up on thinking about going home. If we ever get there, good, but not betting on it. I'm in this for the journey and the team."

Meia didn't say anything, but was surprised to find such grim persons in the team that had all the combat advantages in the sector — and thus far no known weaknesses. Magno figured there was a lesson to be understood in their idle banter, but whatever it was, it had to be a cynical lesson.

-x-x-x-

(Day 1, 1930 hrs shipboard time)
(Ship status: defensive, engines partially active, TTS disabled, hull still in flux)
(Pirate Ship status: defensive, engines partially active, sensors active, hull appears solidified.)

"Hell's up with this?" Gomer asked as he hefted his bag of tools. "Their cap'n requests some assistance in figuring out their new bridge config, and they point rifles at us. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?"

"I dunno," Bart answered the mechanic.

"Whatever. I get paid to fix shit, understanding women is well above my paygrade," Gomer grumped after the turbolift came to a stop at the bridge. Once the door slid open, Bart was the first to pile out, followed by Gomer, then the two 'guards'. "Reporting for duty, Cap'n."

"Thank you, Mechanic. Start with the ship's defensive panel," Magno pointed to Belvedere Coco's station dead ahead of and below her own seat.

"Aye aye," Gomer said before he approached the station. "Need in here, Operator," he said casually.

"What? No way am I moving for a man!" she answered haughtily.

Gomer groaned. "Look, kid. I'm just here to fix the equipment, not debate the politics of this gender war. You got a problem with the request, argue it with the Captain. Until then, can I at least do my damn job?" Gomer asked.

"You bet I'll take this up with the Captain," the operator climbed out of her station and made way for Gomer.

Rather than take a proper seat, he started by hanging upside down under the console panel to look at the guts of the control systems. Two or three whiffs answered the question quick enough as to what was wrong. "Huh. Something got cooked under here. Surprised nobody else smelled it when it happened."

"That bad?" BC asked as she approached the commotion.

"Bad enough, and easy enough. Cooked the fuses going to this panel. Bart, in my bag, I need the green fuse box and a pair of electrician's pliers."

"Right," Bart said, only properly understanding about half of what he was asked for. The green fuse box was easy enough to find and hand off, but it took him three guesses to get the right set of pliers for the job.

Removing the old cartridge fuse was simple enough for Gomer — he had to pull it in two sections, as the over-amperage had pretty much cooked it into two pieces. These he set up on the rim of the console, then began digging in his spare fuses to find an equivalent he could mod to proper fitting. "Huh. Almost the same as a C-3 fuse set?" A couple clicking noises and the sound of an electric discharge came to everyone's hearing, which included Gomer's right leg reflexively kicking the console frame. "Oh! Wow! That's a tingle!"

"You alive in there?" Buson asked.

Another electrical arc, this time his left leg sprang backwards and up and kicked the rails around the bridge upper level catwalk. "Little bit of a tingle! Little bit of a tingle! Whooo!" He clicked a power disconnect on and off, then stood up. Part of his hair was smoking from where it had been in contact with an electrical bus and accidentally closed a gap, but he appeared otherwise fine. "Console coming up now." He picked up the halves of the blown cartridge fuse and examined them under better light. "No wonder the damn thing cooked off. This fuse was made in China."

"Is that bad?" Bart asked.

"Definitely. If it says 'made in China', it is by default made by the lowest bidder. That's bad news when it's your life riding on the line, or in this case, your life relying on a fuse holding." Gomer looked up to the Captain's seat. "Where to next, Cap'n?"

"That's the only console down, but we do have a bit of a control problem," Magno said.

"I was going to ask about that," Gomer scratched his head with the grip end of his electrician's pliers. "You have a commo station, a defensive systems station, and a sensor station," to which he pointed his pliers at each in turn. "Where's the helm?"

"That's the thing, we don't know," Magno said. "I would guess, maybe up there?" she pointed to the front of the bridge section, where there was a small raised platform, akin to a hillock on dirt ground but made of metal.

"Huh. I'm having a hard time believing that raised platform would be it, but I do want to get a look around that area, maybe it's hanging down out of sight?" Gomer asked mostly himself as he moved toward the outcropping.

"See anything?" Bart asked.

"Nope, nothing, nothing worth talking abou — " Gomer was cut off as he disappeared into the raised platform. Left behind were his clothes, his tool bag, and his pistol belt.

"What happened?" BC asked after a moment of trying to figure out where Gomer disappeared to.

"The hell is going on?" Gomer's voice asked over the bridge intercom. "I'm in some kind of suspension in some kind of — WHAT THE FUCK? WHERE ARE MY CLOTHES?"

"Uh, up here," Bart said, using his identification knife to pick at them.

"Okay, maybe this is the helm station? In a weird, nonstandard kinda way, I guess?" Gomer tried doing some movements, which he could tell changed the orientation of the ship. "Oh, okay, I think I got this. Swimming strokes. Different strokes for different folks, I guess." He did a couple breast strokes, and the ship motored forward at a tepid pace. "Okay, yeah, looks like this is the helm station."

Gomer found the exit mechanism, a handle bar above him that he could grip and signalled the ship to dispatch him from the helm station. When he arrived, the transporter was kind enough to properly dress him back up in the process, but it had not quite properly read the positioning of his boxers… "Oh balls!" he turned to face forward quickly, away from the other crewmembers, and adjusted his pants deftly. "Ok, yeah, much better. 95 percent accuracy on dressing back up is acceptable."

"How hard was it?" Bart asked.

"Swimming in anti-gravity suspension, shouldn't be too tiring," Gomer said. "Hey! You were a pilot, right?"

"I am, yes," Bart said, wondering where this was leaning.

"How would you like to step up to helmsman?" Gomer asked.

"Uh, heh," Bart Garcis hesitated.

"May want to try," BC said in a manner that was far more convincing than just the sentence.

"Right," Bart acknowledged the point and walked up to the plate. "So, what do I — " Bart was cut off by being sucked down into the helm station. "WHOA!" he shouted after he realized what had happened. "And you say it handles by swimming actions?"

"Yes," Gomer said. Bart tried a few of the same tricks that Gomer had, but got more into it with the swimming techniques and scored more engine power out of it, but still nearly nothing compared to what they expected. "I think it likes me!"

"I think you have your helm station manned, Commander," Gomer said to BC.

"This is going to be interesting," BC said dryly.

-x-x-x-

(Day 1, 1945 hrs shipboard time)
(Ship status: defensive, engines partially active, TTS disabled, hull still in flux)
(Pirate Ship status: defensive, engines partially active, sensors active, hull appears solidified.)

Paiway had seen the four Archangel crew personnel come off the shuttle, three guys and a lady. The guy with the silver hair was mildly interesting, but he was headed to the engine room which was super-boring to her. The guy in the kinda dirty jumpsuit was headed toward the bridge with the Commander and the annoying Tarak guy, so she didn't want to go there and invoke the wrath of the Captain.

That left the last two, who paired off readily, grabbed up what appeared to be matching toolsets, and headed off toward part of the Male ship on orders from BC. On their way, they swung by the male engineering section to confer with Parfet and the silver-haired guy, who wished them luck after they had gathered information about something that needed fixing.

Paiway had some trouble keeping close enough to actually track them, but in a ship her normal 'medical' uniform was not camouflage — more than once, she had to duck out of sight fast after the man kept thinking they were being followed. After about eight corridors, far enough into the male ship that Paiway had no clue where they were or how to get back to the female side, they stopped inexplicably in the middle of the corridor.

"Here?" the lady asked.

"Yeah, should be here, Hikaru. This panel or the next, and the panel beyond it," the man said.

"Flashlight," the lady (Hikaru) said before she tossed one to the guy. He caught it easily, and used the rim of the light face to pop some tension latches on a panel (1). Once the latches were released, the panel swung open on hinges and he turned the very bright light on to see inside.

"Oh man, am I seeing this right, Kira? Or am I dreaming it's this bad?" Hikaru asked.

"Yeah, you're seeing this right," the man (Kira? Sounded like a girl's name to Paiway,) said calmly. "We're gonna be at this for a while, that's for sure."

"Where's the next bus block? Probably be easier and safer to just grab a spool of wire and run new leads," Hikaru commented.

"Be proper as well. These are amperage-bearing lines, not something I would want to try to solder or crimp back together."

"Back in a minute," the lady headed down the corridor, but Paiway had no trouble noticing where the guy was looking.

Paiway ducked back around the corner. "Pai-check: this crewmember Kira appears to like staring at Archangel Crewmember Hikaru's butt as she walks away. Is that normal among their crew?" she asked herself while writing in her notepad.

"Whoever operated this ship last time rode it hard and put it up wet without proper long-term storage procedures," Hikaru said as she returned with a large spool of cable on a dolly. "Half the crap in the storage bay I found this was unusable."

"That's not going to be something happy to report to the Captain, that the prior tenants she ripped this ship off of didn't mothball it properly," Kira said. "Well, we might be able to help her to a degree, though."

"Supplies?" Hikaru asked.

"Yeah," Kira answered. "Okay, the bus blocks are next pane starboard, two panels port. Can you pop the hatches between here and there?"

"Not going to run conduit?" Hikaru asked, but went ahead and started popping panels.

"Hell no, makes it impossible to properly inspect wires doing that. We're going to put in wire rings every panel and run it like we actually know what we're supposed to do," Kira said. While Hikaru was opening panels, he moved the wire spool over to the maintenance panel farthest starboard and popped open that panel with the end of his flashlight.

"Do we do loop rings or open rings?" Hikaru asked, rummaging in her bag for something.

"Open rings, the loop rings we have are too small for this," Kira answered with his head in the hatch.

"Right," Hikaru pulled two bags of some kind of metal object out of her toolbag, then tossed one to Kira. The bag landed short, skidded to a stop in front of the man, and he kicked it up to hand height by foot only. "Two loops per panel?"

"Three and three, yeah, sounds about right," Kira said, counting the amount of amperage-bearing lines they would need to put in place. "Self-tapping steel screws should do the — " the man was cut off by the sound of a hammer drill from Hikaru.

"What?" Hikaru asked.

"Nothing," Kira answered before he did the same thing.

Paiway watched with some intent as the two closed up to the last access panel, and Hikaru deferred to Kira to finish the last two installations. It was rather shocking to the teen medical officer to see a lady defer to a guy for anything, but so far as Paiway could tell, there was something about the two of them…

"That's that," Kira said. "Now the fun begins. We'll have to pass the cable down, one panel at a time, until we can run the new connections between buses."

"Hand-over-hand it?" Kira gave her a thumbs up.

The next part of the process took the two crewmembers some fifteen minutes to complete six iterations. What would happen is Hikaru would feed a length of cable into the farthest port cable panel, then toss it down to the next panel where Kira was waiting. Hikaru would run down to the third panel, and Kira would toss the cable down to her. The process would continue until they had the cable all the way out to the most starboard panel and wired it into a bus block.

More than once during the process, Paiway caught Kira looking Hikaru's back up and down, and even more shocking, Hikaru did the same thing to the male crewmember as she walked past. It happened enough times during their six cable runs that Paiway was fairly well convinced that there was a story between the two, even if it wasn't yet obvious.

And then, sometimes the story becomes obvious of its own volition.

"Do we have any other orders right now?" Hikaru asked after they had secured the last of the lines and tested working.

Kira pulled a small data device out of his toolbag and checked it. "No, nothing for us yet."

"Good. The parts storage room is out of the way," Hikaru said. "And I'm not in a hurry to go looking for work today."

Paiway only barely restrained herself from making any noise.

-x-x-x-

(Day 2, 0035 hrs shipboard time)
(Archangel status: defensive, engines partially active, TTS disabled, Sensors active, hull mostly solidified)
(Pirate Ship status: defensive, engines partially active, sensors active, hull appears solidified.)

If there was one thing that Barnett could always count on to relieve stress, time on the shooting range was it. Just herself, her pistol, and holographic clay pigeons for her to shoot.

The other thing she could count on: Jura joining her partway through a match string to vent any bitches she may have accumulated between Barnett's times on the range. Of course, Jura had her own combat sim she could run, a variation of the same targeting drill that Barnett used that allowed her to practice hitting a small moving target with her sword.

"I heard what happened to you and Maya on the Archangel," Barnett said after she recognized the beeping of the control panel that signalled Jura joining her. Tap - tap, another 'clay pigeon' took two hits and 'shattered' in holosim.

"That was scary, not to mention it knocked Maya out for a few weeks with a broken arm. I never thought a simple pipe wrench could be so damaging!"

"When swung by a guy as big as that Murdoch man, not surprising." Another simulated clay pigeon shattered into bits after Barnett put two rounds from her Sig P226 into it while in flight.

"And then one of the ladies from that ship pointed her own sword at me in defense of the man!" Jura continued her complaining unhindered.

"A mixed crew," Barnett pointed out. "Totally creepy and very unnatural, but it still exists. Commanded by a woman Captain, with a male 2-I-C, a female CIC Commander and Combat Controller, and even some female pilots in their group," Barnett pointed out what she had thus far learned of the Archangel's staff. There were other females in the crew, Terra Branford being one of them, but the ship was staffed roughly 8% total female. That was a disquieting number, but Barnett could not figure out why it was disquieting to her.

"Unnatural and creepy? I think that's the best description of it I've heard so far. And those two pilots, umm, Kira and Hikaru? Did you see them both wearing matching left hand gloves with large red gems on them? Do you know what that means in the group?" Jura asked, having been exposed to the answer once already — the photograph outside the sauna rooms on the Archangel — but not quite connecting the dots.

At the mention of Kira's name, Barnett's hand went down to her waist where she had been shot by Kira. Her mind replayed that encounter — she had been moving down a hallway in the female section of the ship after the cafeteria shootout, she heard him coming, she thought she had the drop on him — she KNEW she had the drop on him. The sheer speed and accuracy with which he had drawn and fired on her was inhuman, but his reaction to her suppressing fire was both human and textbook. The .45 full metal jacket round that had punched through her waist and lodged between two ribs on her left side was enough reminder that the Archangel Team were serious players, even in close-quarters combat. A pilot, not even purported to be much of a combatant outside his Mobile Suit, had almost won the shootout in one shot.

Barnett failed to fire on her next pigeon entirely, and missed both shots on the following pigeon.

"Something wrong? You never miss two shots in a row," Jura asked her girlfriend.

Barnett holstered her pistol. "Flashback to my shootout with Kira," Barnett explained. "I don't know, he moved, aimed, and fired way too fast to be normal, certainly better than 98, 99 percent of Tarak soldiers. I think he may be something else."

"So? We're not enemies anymore, though I am not going to trust any of them farther than the tip of my sword," Jura said before she cut one of her holosim targets in half laterally.

"I think I want a rematch," Barnett said offhand.

"What?" Jura asked in clear shock.

"Or — no, not a rematch, not me shooting at him! I would not take that kind of chance!" Barnett said after she saw the look of utter dread in Jura's face. "I mean, I want a target match rematch, see if that man really is as good as he appeared to be!"

Jura let out a sigh of relief, then embraced the physically smaller Barnett. "I couldn't stand the thought of you in pistol combat against him! If he landed one on you already, that is a huge gamble! A huge chance I don't want to see you take!"

"Jura!" Barnett pushed the taller Dread pilot away. "No, I would not take a chance like that, for that reason alone! I just want to see how good they really are. And it might be a good opportunity to see how cohesive their crew really is, mixing men and women, if you wanted to take a challenge against Terra."

"I don't really know about that," Jura admitted.

"What? Why?" Barnett asked.

"I think they are — or were — professional military. Something about some of the photos I saw, some of the equipment I saw, it's all too weird. I think they were really professional military somewhere in their past."

"I need to see this," Barnett said. She changed out her magazine with the pistol still in holster, then dialed in another shoot match into the computer. Jura had not stopped her practice, but was off to the side so it did not interfere with Barnett's fire lane.

"I can show you right where it is. It's down the hall from their hot springs."

On the first clay pigeon, Barnett missed the first shot but struck twice thereafter. "Did I hear that right? A hot springs bathroom in a freaking warship?"

"Oh yeah, you heard it right," Jura said, rather happy to have one up on the normally unflappable Barnett. "Even found a guy in it when I was there." She did not, however, mention that said guy was unconscious, and there were no ladies present in the room.

"This is stranger and stranger still. I think we need to call a fact-finding mission," Barnett said.

"Can we drop off the men on their ship?" Jura asked.

"Don't think so, I think the Captain intends to keep them around." Barnett would not admit until way later in the coming journey, but mentioning the men caused her to aim far more deliberately at the simulated clays.

-x-x-x-

(Day 2, 0605 hrs shipboard time)
(Archangel status: defensive, engines partially active, TTS disabled, Sensors active, hull completely solidified)
(Pirate Ship status: defensive, engines partially active, sensors active, hull appears solidified.)

"Don't know what this engine is supposed to be, but at least it is kind enough to answer to standardized shell commands and give me a list of input methods."

Parfait, for her part, was absolutely stunned by how fast Athrun was typing — while carrying on a conversation with her, no less. So far as she could tell, his typing speed had to be on the order of 250 words per minute, well above the common human typing expectation. Still, other than the hair color that was a bit off, he looked and acted perfectly normal, or at least what she could guess was normal for a man, maybe?

Exactly how was still a mystery to the pirate engineering officer, but Parfait had been roped into this 'fact-finding' mission with Barnett and Jura, who were elsewhere in the ship and intended to find some mythical hot-springs facility inside this hull and study it. If the Captain signed off on something that strange, Parfait figured it would be fairly simple to install on the Pirate ship, if it could be installed on the Archangel.

"And you can program something that you've never worked with?" BC asked in surprise.

"Not the first time, not likely to be the last I've had to do that," Athrun admitted. "This whole misbegotten drunken sojourn started with just exactly that — I ripped off an Earth Alliance Gundam, reprogrammed it on the fly, and proceeded to use it against this ship. Then, by cosmic accident, my team and the ship were drawn into Cephiro, and after a fist-fight with Kira, we decided it would be best to work together to figure out how to get home."

"Enemies become unexpected allies," BC summed it up.

"Allies, then comrades, now an inseparable team. Four years on the ground with the ship I was trying to shoot down, no way I'd go back to ZAFT." Athrun sighed, which slowed his ungodly typing speed down to a degree, but only down into the rate that Parfait could keep up with what was being typed in — soon enough, Athrun was outpacing her reading speed again.

"Just like that?" BC asked, questioning his loyalty rather directly.

"No, it wasn't that simple, not by a long shot," Athrun admitted. "On Cephiro, we were asked to kill a lovesick princess and her suitor to restore balance to the ancient magicks that hold Cephiro in balance. The Pillar of Cephiro must give her heart to the world, not to anything or anyone else. If that balance is lost, game over, the world goes to Hell, and hence the existence of the Magic Knights." Athrun held up his left hand, glove visible. "I am one of the Magic Knight Squires under Hikaru, as is Kira and the Captain."

"That's so not how a fairy tale is supposed to go," Parfait said.

"The real world is a hell of a lot more cynical than a fairy tale, no matter how much life imitates the storybooks of yore," Athrun said deadpan. "So, save one world, get tossed out on our asses into a land known as the Inner Sphere, at probably the second-worst possible time in that history. We get caught up in an interplanetary war between the Clans and the Inner Sphere Houses, and that fracas is where we really took off as Mercenaries. We sold our services to the Federated Commonwealth, and we beat the ever-loving braincells out of the Jade Falcon Clan. In several months, we pretty much eliminated the Falcons as an invasion threat to Steiner territory. Our next assignment after that was Clan Wolf, but somehow during a naval engagement against the Wolves, we ended up phasing out of reality and landed elsewhere in Existence."

"Oh wow, bad to worse," Parfait said.

"Exactly, and this third stop is where we really gave up on our home nations. When you wake up one day, and realize your father is no better than the megalomaniac you're fighting on some foreign world, just a different name and different method, at that point you know you're done with the war back home. New world, same shit, different day. We did the merc work for several months, training local forces to take it to an attempted planetary Empire, and when the time came to kick asses, we provided the heavy hitters for the party. It was a real nightmare of a campaign, but we did it — and we did it well. Our last combat action was an air-mobile assault on a floating island, raised by powerful magic into the sky, and we dropped the Emperor and his lackey by sniper rifle before they could start a cataclysm that would have rearranged the face of the world."

"Don't tell Barnett that, she'll want details on the gun," BC said.

"Uh-uh, not me," Athrun admitted. "She wants to talk to our shooter, she needs to talk to Newman."

"Newman — the helmsman for the ship?" BC asked.

"That's him. He's also a rated sniper, loves his 82A1 for solving long-distance arguments."

"Okay then, not expecting that one," BC said while Athrun continued typing.

"Anyway, we laid over in the Empire we had conquered, two years or so, and we rearranged a magical machine they had to try to warp us home. Spoilers: it didn't work," Athrun said cynically.

"Not expecting that one, either," BC said with a clear hint of sarcasm.

"We landed in what we thought was supposed to be our home, but it wasn't. The planet had been destroyed by nuclear weapons and kinetic impacts of colonies that were making planetfall after having been destroyed in orbit. There was… there was nobody left on planet to save, by the time we arrived. Whole world's population, six, seven billion, all slaughtered inside of 96 hours. When we arrived, a group of transdimensional rescue operators, called Crusaders, had come in to extract anybody still alive in the colonies and move them out to Mars. It wasn't pretty. We did profit, though: Kira's Gundam was a salvage machine, and we rescued Commander Chevalier from the wreckage, and we recovered a jump engine that is now embedded in the bulkhead over your left shoulder."

"So that's your ticket home?" BC asked, looking at the box in question.

"It hasn't gotten us home yet," the pilot groused before he stopped typing abruptly and grabbed a radio. "Newman, Athrun, I think I have the code in place. Try a standard startup."

"Stand by," Newman answered. Ten seconds later: "Athrun, Newman, negative start, my indicator panels are all showing blue screens of death."

"Bullshit," Athrun swore, then brought the radio up. "Roger, give me a second to figure out what's still wrong. Standby for further."

"Never works on the first try," Parfait sympathized as Athrun got back to his rapid-fire typing.

"Never works on the fifth or sixth try, either. Jump engine is the perfect example thereof, we're on the third jump with it and we're here." Athrun changed over to a separate terminal to extract some core dumps for analysis. "First jump, we landed in After Colony Earth, in the middle of a three-way power struggle. Romefeller versus Treize versus Sanc Kingdom, and all of the above with a shadow looming overhead: Operation Meteor. Op Meteor was a real freaking piece of work for you, let me tell you that. Drop a colony on the planet, wait for the dust to settle a little bit, then ride down onto the planet with an army of Mobile Suits and take control of the world in the ensuing chaos. Estimated casualties on the order of 2 billion initial and another half billion residual. We put paid to Dekim Barton's plan in one assault, just hammered them flat and salvaged the wreckage."

"Got any idea what went wrong?" Parfait asked after Athrun turned back to the main terminal.

"Yeah, improper method calls to the Engine startup systems," the pilot said before he began altering his existing code. "Anyway, we laid over for a vacation and a hull refit on the ship — up-armored the hell out of the Archangel. Only thing is, next jump didn't have anything for us to really test our durability, Halkegenia was a charlie foxtrot but their heaviest hitter had near zero hope of meaningfully damaging the ship. In fact, that was more infantry action and politics than anything else. Again, though, one bad apple goes on a power trip and we get stuck unscrewing the mess." The radio came up off the console again and Athrun clicked it on. "Newman, try again."

Fifteen seconds later: "Nope, another set of blue screens, but different messages this time. Took longer to dump, too. May be getting closer."

"Roger, I'll be back to you shortly." Athrun dropped the radio and turned to the core monitor console. "Anyway, Halkegenia basically ended with us getting tossed out on our asses again. We don't know specifically what went wrong, but after analyzing the radio logs from the major defensive action, we think Yzak may have pissed off the nobles in Halkegenia by calling them out on their abuses of power. In response, they cut our contract short, paid us an early termination fee, and booted us out to our own devices."

"Some employers are just that ungrateful," BC sympathized. "So, where next?"

"Where? Here!" Athrun picked up the radio again. "Round three, Newman. Make some noise."

"Have it purrin' like a kitten in a moment," the helmsman answered. In front of Athrun, he heard the bank of engine systems spool up one after the next, like they were supposed to do, which was highly unexpected. "Hey! I've got good reads across the board! The damn thing works!"

"Third try, that was unexpected," Athrun admitted. "Everything looks normal down here, Newman. Give her a basic test set, let's see what we get out of it."

"Not all luck is bad luck?" BC asked.

"If it wasn't for uneven luck, we'd have no luck whatsoever," Athrun summed up the ship's history in one sentence.

-x-x-x-

(Day 2, 0640 hrs shipboard time)
(Archangel status: defensive, engines restored, TTS disabled, Sensors active, hull completely solidified)
(Pirate Ship status: defensive, engines mostly active, sensors active, hull completely solidified.)

"Oh man, this ship is even more confusing than the Ikazuchi!"

Bart Garcis, like most men from Tarak, would not sully his pride by admitting he was lost. It was a matter of male dignity and station that he could not ask for directions, even if it meant he was effectively walking in circles inside a foreign ship, and ran a not unfounded risk of being shot for it. On the other hand, he had thus far learned a lot about the mysterious and somewhat sinister Archangel, including seeing the rather dismaying memorial boards and pictures outside the Hot Springs. In that area of the ship, though, the big story of the day was the appearance of a third hot spring, and the segmented nature of its four separate rooms. Bart wasn't so hyped about it, he figured they were private suites for one person to relax, maybe two or two and a youngster? Hard to tell, he figured, given that engineering was not his strong suit.

Once he was through at the Springs, he resumed aimless wandering. Unlike Tarak ships, there were no internal markings or directions inside the ship, which had been explained to him by a mechanic as a defensive measure — if a boarding party did not know where to go by a lack of signs, isolating and containing them became easier. (Bart completely missed the subtext on the word 'contain', whereby the mechanic meant 'kill in a messy fashion'.)

On what he thought was the lowest deck, which was populated by nothing more than cargo holds, Bart inadvertently bumped into his objective: Helmsman Newman. "You're a bit out of the way, Bart," Newman said, having been introduced to him the day prior when Bart was brought back to the Pirate ship by shuttle.

"Kinda, this is a confusing ship layout, but I was looking for you," Bart said, deflecting on being lost.

Apparently the deflection worked. "Talk to me? What gives?"

"Well, I've been assigned to the Helmsman position on the Pirate ship," Bart began, but faltered.

"Congratulations! Stick with it, they might promote you to navigator, then to an actual command position," Newman said, given that most navies promoted through either the navigation side or the attack center. Newman would later come to regret that train of thought, in that the rump Helmsman in front of him was not the best man for a command position at this point in his lifetime. In twenty years, maybe, but not today.

"Well, that's the thing, sir. I don't know the first thing about helm for a ship, I've always trained in Vanguard units."

"Fighter pilot, basically, or a Mobile Armor pilot now in command of a ship," Newman framed the issue in a context closer to home for him. "Come on, let's walk."

"Mobile Armor?" Bart asked for clarification.

"Small craft with armaments. They were the mainstay space weapons of our home nation, but badly outclassed against ZAFT's mobile suits. Anyway, the key factor is scale here: you're trained to pilot something that is roughly a tenth of a percent of the size of the ship you're now in command of."

"Exactly! How do I go about learning how to handle something that big?" Bart half-wailed.

"Very carefully," Newman said after they turned a corner down between four cargo doors, two nearby and two some distance down the hall. "First thing is first, abandon all thoughts from your brain of fast maneuvering and close quarters. Your ship is a powerhouse, it will not turn on a dime."

"What does that mean? Turn on a dime?" Bart asked as the two helmsman continued walking.

"Turn real tight, real fast," Newman explained. "Ships may have maneuverability, but any way you cut it a Fighter or a Mobile Suit or a Vanguard will win in a turn-and-burn battle. Don't even bother trying, but you do have an advantage — size matters, if you can catch a foe unawares, you can always ram a smaller unit into space debris."

"Okay, don't try to outmaneuver the small things, gotcha," Bart acknowledged the point.

"Second, if your ship is armed, your purpose is to support the fighters in an anti-fighter mission. If your ship has naval weapons, your ship is only the main effort when you have to engage other hardened naval targets. Don't stick your ass out in the breeze unless you absolutely have to. When in doubt, let the fighters do the talking and you back them up. That reminds me, does your ship even have weapons?"

"Honestly, I don't know," Bart admitted. He had not heard any talk about weapons on the ship, but for certain it had a large capacity for Vanguard and Dread units. More of both, actually, than the Archangel had in total Mobile Forces capacity.

"Okay, worry about it if it turns out your ship has guns. Third, try to avoid putting yourself in a position where your ship takes hits. Remember, you have a whole crew to think about, so don't go risking their lives without due cause. Clear?"

"Aye, sir!" That much he knew from his military training clearly: always endeavor to protect friendly lives.

"Fourth, always look to improve your flying skills. Start with learning all the control basics, then sharpen your skills from there. Work on increasing your flying accuracy, and your flying efficiency. You won't do too well to begin with, but in time you'll get better. It always takes time to learn how to do with a new craft."

"That makes sens—" Bart cut himself off in midsentence after he thought he smelled something. He stopped nearby one of the cargo doors and whiffed. "You smell that?"

Newman took a couple whiffs. "Son of a bitch, I do."

"What is a bitch?" Bart asked, and silently wondered why a bitch would have a son.

"Later," Newman said as he moved to a commo panel. "Bridge, cargo hold," he said.

"Go," someone on the bridge answered.

"Bridge, be advised I am smelling a dead body in the vicinity of cargo hold 5-D-4. We're not missing anyone, so I'm not sure what is going on here."

"Acknowledged, Commander La Flaga is on the way."

-x-

Four Elementals had arrived along with the Commander, as well as the doctor and two mechanics.

"Yeah, I can definitely smell it, someone dead reposes in here," Mu said with his hand over the door release switch. Once he threw the switch, he immediately wheeled around and out of sight to the starboard, in case someone else was hiding inside.

"Whelp, there's the problem," Spazz said, pointing at the obvious dead body just inside the blast door. "One dead dude, stinkin' up my fun house."

"Right. Doc, you're on," Mu prompted the ship's doctor.

"Right," the doctor answered. He snapped on a pair of gloves and began his examination of the corpse. "Nothing obviously traumatic on his back. Hold on while I turn him." A flip of the body was just as puzzling. "Male, I'd guess Latin American or Mediterranean, early 30s, extremely fit, wearing tactical pajamas (2). If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say this guy is some kind of military, probably special operations, though how in the hell he has been surviving down here in the cargo hold for who-knows-how-long is beyond me."

"Any identification?" Mu asked.

"Nothing, no dog tags, no wallet, but we'll strip him down in autopsy and give all of his gear a full once-over," the Doc said. He waved the two technicians in to move the body to a stretcher and gurney it upstairs to the medical bay where the doc could do a full autopsy.

"See to it, Doc," Mu said as he waved the techs past.

As the deceased person's head passed by Mu's left arm, his Magic Knight Glove lit up bright. "Sir! Your glove!" Spazz half-shouted.

"What gives?" Mu asked, looking at it.

This being has the odious aura of the unknown presence that we Rune Gods have sensed about the ship from time to time, the mental voice of Windham answered. Given the shocked looks on every face around the area, it was broadcast, but nobody in the vicinity of the cargo hold knew that it was being heard clearly on both ships. Now that the body is fully synchronized with the present space, I can sense its being through your glove, La Flaga. Of it I cannot tell much, except that the deceased before you was extremely powerful — far more powerful than we Rune Gods.

"The Hell? Why would he be hitching a ride on our ship? And what killed him?"

Why he decided to take residence on this ship has no sensical answer; a being of that manner of power would have no issue whatsoever finding his or her way home through time, space, and dimension, and hence no need to wander with the ship as a means of transportation. My only conclusion is that he was planted on the ship as some manner of spy, but to what purpose can only be guessed at. For certain his orders were nonhostile; with such power as his body has even in death, and that a fraction of what he would have had in life, he could have easily destroyed the ship, we Rune Gods, and the planet we were on at the time and still had an order of magnitude of power yet to tap, Windham answered calmly.

"Holy fuck," Spazz said in response to the analysis. "We had a living weapon of mass destruction on the ship and nobody had fuck-all for a clue about it? Talk about luck!"

"What killed him is the mystery I want to know," Natalya said from inside her Elemental armor.

His death is simple. Absolute stealth for a being of his power is impossible, the sheer radiance of his power would be easily sensed at planetary distances with the right skills. Illusions and simple cloaking cannot conceal it completely, either. The only defense a being of his power could have would be to phase most of his physical form out of synchronization with our reality. A being out of phase, save for one anchor molecule in real space, cannot be sensed except as the faintest hint, cannot be seen or touched. His demise came about through the improper jump engine discharge, which partially de-phased the ship at the time. Transitioning phases while out of phase is deadly, it destroys the higher and lower brain function of the afflicted individual. Such a happenstance is the stealth being's version of being caught with trousers around ankles; it is always lethal.

"Killed by his own stealth skill, that's gotta suck the dong," Spazz said. "Too bad he couldn't tell us where home is. At least we shall greet him on the near shore of Hell when we get there."

Windham snorted by way of his telepathy, a mildly sarcastic sound to the two crews of the ships. The mechanic misunderstands the nature of such powerful beings. Transcendent and greater powers cannot be extinguished even in death. The being before you likely has already been reborn elsewhere in Existence, and will live again to know and use his power. Death to such a hellish being is simply a vacation from whatever duty he was assigned. Be wary your wish, for you may yet meet this being again on this side of the gravestone. In such a happenstance, I suggest you speak carefully. Gods and the beings above Gods do not always take kindly to impetuousness. For today, I have spoken my peace on this subject, and will rest easy knowing this being no longer haunts hall and hold.

"Okay, then, I think we can file this one under 'totally skullfucked things found in our ship'," Spazz said.

"Good nose, Bart, we owe this one to you," Commander La Flaga said seriously. "Who knows how bad the body would have decayed before we found it, or when we would have found it."

"Thank you, sir," Bart said.

-x-x-x-

(Day 2, 1030 hrs shipboard time)
(Archangel status: defensive, engines restored, TTS disabled, sensors active, hull completely solidified)
(Pirate Ship status: defensive, engines mostly active, sensors active, hull completely solidified.)

"Where did he go?" Dita asked herself as she continued trudging through the halls of the male half of the ship, looking for 'mister alien' as she called him. She did know his name, but thought 'Mister Alien' was much cuter than his real name.

"Shit!" she heard him swear down the hall, followed quickly by the sound of him running off toward the bow.

"Mister Alien!" Dita did pursue him as fast as possible, but the Tarak man was faster than he appeared to be.

She made one turn, caught a brief glimpse of him as he turned a corner at a full sprint, but when she caught up to the corner, he was gone. She barreled around, her focus on the far corner, but in watching the distance she slammed into an open access hatch, which in turn slammed into one of the Archangel Team pilots.

"AGH! What the Hell?" Kira Yamato shouted after Dita rolled past him and landed partway down the corridor. "Who — Dita?"

"Wow! That was painful!" Dita said. "Why is the room spinning?"

"You all right, kid?" Kira asked the younger Dread pilot.

"I — I guess," Dita used the guy's offered hand to lever herself to standing. "Thank you. Did I hit you?"

"Just the door," Kira answered, jerking his thumb at it. "Nothing major." Out of the corner of his left eye, Kira could see Hibiki hanging around the corner, but wisely made no move that would indicate he knew he was there.

"Oh, um, I should get back to trying to find — oh, no, wait, since I have you here, I could ask you a few things…"

Kira figured this was a good opportunity for a teachable moment. The bulk of the strife to come between the male and female members of the Pirate crew — whether or not they liked it, they were now a team — would be from confusion pertaining to gender differences and their separate societies. The Archangel Team was by no manner perfect, but compared to the Pirate crew, it was homogenous — and there was one married couple on the team, likely shortly to be more. That made him something of an optimal instructor on the matter.

"Might be able to help, I think," Kira suggested. "What's on your mind?" he asked as he leaned back against the open maintenance hatch edge as an impromptu seat.

"I'm trying to get Mister Alien to stay still long enough so I can ask him a few things. What am I doing wrong?"

"Guy probably doesn't like being chased," Kira suggested offhand, and immediately noticed the jolt from Hibiki in his peripheral vision.

"Oh. Never thought of that." Dita scratched her head.

"Moving too fast."

"Huh?" she asked for clarification.

"You're moving too fast, too aggressive," Kira explained further. "Aggression in the cockpit is one thing, and I've noticed you're the hyperactive type, but it's likely Hibiki isn't quite ready for that level of energy yet."

"Oh," Dita said in clear dejection.

"No, no, don't take that wrong," Kira corrected the train of discussion quickly. "This isn't a problem with your energy. You'll want that energy going forward, so don't lose sight of it. The real issue here is how — and how quickly — you are using it. See, most guys find it cute when a girl chases after them, since in mixed societies it doesn't happen too often. Also, most guys get creeped out or scared off when a girl chases them around a ship at a dead sprint, trying to interrogate them as you did and are trying now. Kinda sets off a self-preservation instinct in most sane men."

"Oh," Dita found that surprisingly enlightening. "So the problem isn't me, it's how I'm doing this?"

Kira frowned, trying to think of a way to politely phrase the coming statement. "Well, I think Hibiki isn't quite used to you yet, which is part of his flight instinct in action. The other part is the sheer drive with which you're chasing him. Tone it down a notch or three, and plan on going slow and long-term. I'm pretty sure you can cut through the stubborn exterior, the trick is going to be not driving him away by being overly hyperactive and demanding about it."

"Hmmm," Dita muttered in solid consideration of Kira's pointers. "Okay! That makes perfect sense!"

Hope I haven't just put the curse of authority on their relationship, Kira thought ex post facto. "What else is on your mind?"

"Can men and women really be together?" Dita asked.

"Yes, our crew should be a perfect example. Four years running, no major men versus women conflicts. Not even a leaning toward a battle of the sexes. That said, we did have a female crewmember flip shit earlier in the voyage and tried to stab me to death, but that was a mental issue on her part, not anything gender related." Kira grabbed a wrench from his toolbag, reached behind himself, and used the wrench to scratch an itch in the middle of his back.

"Last question: do you think we'll make it home?" Dita asked off the cuff.

Kira scrunched his face up for a bare moment, thinking on how to answer. "Eh, on you guys, yeah, you'll probably see home. Us? Whole 'nother story entirely. Present betting is fifty-fifty, though even some of the most optimistic on the team are starting to lean toward 'forever wandering aimlessly.' Personally, I don't know, but I'm not ready to give up."

"Oh, thank you!" Dita waved to him as she ran back the way she came.

Kira waited thirty seconds for Dita to clear the area, and for Hibiki to sigh his relief. "I just bought you a reduction in direct action and energy from her, Hibiki, but you're going to have to come to grips with her advances sooner rather than later," Kira warned him without directly looking at the younger Vanguard pilot.

"How did you know I was here?!" Hibiki asked aggressively after he bolted around the corner.

"Whoa, whoa! Turn off the afterburners, kid, raging at an ally does you no favors," Yzak warned Hibiki as he approached Kira. "And if you think Kira wouldn't have noticed you hiding around the far corner, you definitely have a lot to learn about situational awareness and pilot's awareness."

"Oh," Hibiki grumped, given he knew he was talking to veteran pilots.

"Anyway, I won't tell you that you have to do it — at the end of the day, this is between you and Dita, I'm just refereeing for today," Kira said. "I do recommend you give it an honest shot, though. Whether or not you like it, you are now a part of this crew. That means that you can actually try to get along with the rest of the crew — the ladies — or you can not get along and they will go out of their way to make your life on this ship a living Hell."

"Or they may just shoot you," Yzak pointed out fairly. Hibiki grimaced, clear sign that he had heard and heeded the warning.

"Who knows? Here after a while, after you get used to the new environment and new teammates, you may actually come to like living with an eccentric crew of women," Kira opined as a possible outcome.

Yzak picked up on the good-cop-bad-cop vibe, and decided to play it to the hilt. "At the minimum, you don't want women trying to make your life Hell. Merciful women on the subject of vengeance are rare. Most will do their damndest to drag the pain out as long as possible. Give the Pirates a chance, and you may find them welcoming you after a while."

Neither Archangel Team pilot knew it at the time, but they would eventually come to understand the consequences of this discussion. Consequences that, while by no means objectionable, would be very convoluted and messy. Nor did the pilots know that Paiway was around the corner and had recorded their every word.

-x-x-x-

(Day 2, 1600 hrs shipboard time)
(Archangel status: defensive, engines restored, TTS glitching and sputtering, sensors active, hull completely solidified)
(Pirate Ship status: defensive, engines mostly active, sensors active, hull completely solidified.)

"Okay, here's the scenario: men take old beeter ship out of mothballs, try to reconfigure it into a carrier. Get hosed by Pirates. They get ripshit pissed, fire a nuclear torpedo at the old ship. Old ship's engine, which is some kind of sentient being, gets scared and takes the first jump to anywhere to GTFO, accidentally grabs us and the Pirates along the way. The old male ship grabs the pirate ship, melds with it, but tried to do ours as well and failed," Athrun stated his working theory on the action so far.

"Gundanium armor, doesn't know how to bond with it," Kira suggested as he kept coding.

"Good point. Takes the sentient being a while to figure out how to deal with Gundanium. Anyway, sentient being finds a way into the innards of the ship, drops a chunk of itself in our engine as something of a hedged bet on the combined Pirate Ship, then goes exploring and accidentally diddles the jump engine. We jump a miniscule amount of distance, which scrambles crew and material between ships, and the connection between the three ships breaks 2-to-1."

"Sentient being decides it's not going to find a way to meld with our armor, so it decides to go its separate way and leave the seed in our ship to properly hedge its bet," Yzak opines his idea on why the three ships had not merged into one.

"Still can't figure out what exactly the sentient energy being is trying to accomplish," Athrun said. "That's the one gap in the story for me," he said as he continued typing new TTS code into the terminal.

"No, we've already answered that," Kira said. "The being dropped a seed in our hull to hedge its bet. What is it betting on? It wants continued existence."

"And, honestly, if the ship now has its own motivation to continue existing, perfectly fine by me," Yzak said. "Okay, I now have the targeting array parser done."

"Now, that beckons the question, if the ship is so worried about its survival, what out there is so threatening that it would impregnate a foreign warship to try to ensure survival?" Dorothy asked from behind Yzak.

All four pilots stopped typing for a moment, and shared a look. "That's not a question I think I want to know the answer to," Nicol said from the gunner's chair.

"It's a question we are likely going to be force-fed between now and when this ship is next ready to jump," Miriallia pointed out. The jump engine had so far synchronized itself to the new hull configuration to a total of 0.62 percent, which came out to an expected timeframe of 530 days to synchronize to the new hull geometry.

"Here's to hoping it's not a nasty enough answer that we choke on it," Athrun said.

"That was so wrong," Kira pointed out the inadvertent double entendre in Athrun's answer.

"Bad pun of the day award to Athrun," Yzak acknowledged the totality of the entendre.

"Yeah, yeah, I flopped it out there on that one," Athrun said deliberately.

"And he doubles down on it!" Yzak said with a chuckle. "Two points for Zala today!"

"Boys, boys," Miriallia groaned.

"GUI and control methods are completed," Nicol reported. "Any special IMEs you guys need?"

"Still compatible with the remote tablet interfaces?" Kira asked.

"Should be, I didn't change any of yours or Athrun's code on that note, I just built the new GUI around it," Nicol said.

"Good," Kira noted. "Done with the backend control methods. You're it, Athrun,"

"Thirty seconds," Athrun said. "And… just about there… done! Compiling and staging new interfaces now."

"Guess that's my cue," Chandratta said as Nicol vacated the gunnery station so the resident gun-bunny could take over the controls.

"Compiling and staging completed, it's ready for use," Athrun said.

"Whoa! This thing loads way faster than it did!" Chandratta said. "I'm already up and ready to fire."

"The Paxis was kind enough to give us three more Quantum Mainframes, so I dedicated one to weapons systems only, and one to Sensors only. We've got enough raw computing horsepower to fight the first battle of Jachin Due on our own with an expectation of missing our targets once, maybe twice in the whole battle," Kira said.

"That's… wow," Miriallia grumped.

"Okay, guys, time to stand up and salute the Paxis, because the numbers are in." Chandratta slugged his arsenal view to the main monitor, which included a graphic of the ship with all weapons indicated, and a listing of the full weapons, munitions, and recharge / reload status. "Our standard firepower isn't hugely changed, in fact it looks the same as when we left Halkegenia. Where we really get the brownie points, though, is capital guns. Valiants are upgraded, system reports maximum low-power fire rate is one shot every five seconds."

"Kinetic action, baby!" Yzak commented.

"The Gottfried cannons have been upgraded to a triple-barrel configuration, so we have twelve barrels, not eight. Time to fry 'em," Chandratta said with some pleasure. The beam cannons used no ammo, which made them ship favorites for dealing with tangos at range or enemies that could not be justifiably shot with a ballistic or missile weapon.

"The Lohengrins don't appear to have been changed, but who knows? Maybe the Paxis is holding off on that." The truth was simpler: the Paxis, a being of living crystallized energy, was not about to invoke an antimatter reaction by diddling with the Lohengrins. Energy and anti-energy did not mix under normal conditions, so…

"Missiles? Are we really up tubes?" Yzak asked.

"Yes, 40 heavy missiles, 20 Helldarts," the gun-bunny confirmed. "It's good to be king!"

"At least until someone tries knocking you off the Throne," Athrun pointed out fairly.

"Well, pride goeth before the fall," Chandratta acknowledged the point.

"But only after the broken ass-bone, Chandra," Commander Chevalier corrected him from the Captain's chair.

-x-x-x-

(Day 2, 1915 hrs shipboard time)
(Archangel status: Active, engines restored, TTS full-up ready, sensors full-up ready, hull completely solidified)
(Pirate Ship status: defensive, engines mostly active, sensors active, hull completely solidified.)

In the grand scheme of things, the fragment remnants seemed a strange thing to find, but not entirely impossible after Paxis Archangel reviewed the relevant battle footage and Commander's Log. The battle footage was itself rather impressive for its clarity, since it was taken with a higher-resolution interior camera system in the hangar, not one of the exterior magnified-optic cameras that had to be hardened and thus less sensitive.

Finding a goodly portion of the crystal shards was not difficult — Commander Natarle Badgiruel had been very thorough in her cleanup efforts, and had recovered some 96 percent of the crystal mass of the energy being Inova. The crystals had been secured in 'dead storage', a records and materials archive of evidence of their past, records initially intended to exonerate themselves from an Earth Alliance courts martial, but with their rough abandonment of returning to the Atlantic Federation, it was now something of a storage archive for keepsakes of the crazy things they had done over the years.

The collection of the encapsulated crystals was no major problem — Paxis Archangel was aware of them from the Archangel Mainframe's records, so on the second wormhole jump the crystal engine took the liberty of liberating the crystals for further examination. After the modifications to the ship were completed, the Paxis system drew the unused crystal back into itself, one such crystal tendril holding onto the remaining gem fragments on its way back to the engine room. If anyone who walked by that particular crystal tendril noticed the unusual violet-glowing crystals, nobody had made mention of it.

The gem shards made it all the way into the Paxis enclosure, which is where the challenge began. Natarle had made sure to suspend the fragments in a nonreactive polycarbonate resin, an enshrouding mechanism designed to ensure the object within was well-preserved until such a time as an evidence technician used a solvent to dissolve the enclosure and thus retrieve the evidence. In this case, the exact reagent needed to open the 'lock' was well known to Paxis, given the report of the incident stated the exact measure in question: bleach and water, a solution of 97 percent water and 3 percent sodium hypochlorite. Finding common cleaning bleach on a warship was not a hugely difficult task for the Paxis, given that it also had full access to the maintenance inventory and a janitor closet was roughly five meters outside the engine room. Someone did mention the bottle of bleach 'crystal-surfing' toward the Paxis enclosure, but the engineering watch officer decided that if the Paxis had an interest in bleach, he wasn't about to argue it with the engine.

Clearing away the polycarbonate became a fairly simple task for the Paxis at this point. The crystal sheared the top of the half-full bleach bottle off and simply dunked the crystal enclosure in the bleach. The dissolving polycarbonate gave off a gaseous reaction, enough so that everyone in the engineering space noticed and the two engineers nearest the Paxis enclosure donned NIOSH-rated respirators to filter out most of the gas. After the effervescent reaction ended and Paxis Archangel could see the crystal fragments floating in the bottom of the contaminated bleach, the living engine decided on the expedient method of getting to the fragments: dump the bottle, trap the fragments in a lattice of crystal. Within three minutes, everyone in the engineering space was wearing chemical masks and complaining about the Paxis' sudden interest in huffing bleach.

Reassembly of the gem into its mostly-intact form took about ten minutes for Paxis, and the 4 percent mass loss was easily repaired in the process. With the gem freed, and now in contact with the Paxis, things began happening. Things the Paxis didn't anticipate, but were not entirely unwelcome, either. More so that the being enshrouded in the crystal had not entirely died on the day that Natarle had struck him down.

"I — I am awake again?" Inova asked the blue-white light around it.

"You are restored," Paxis Archangel explained to the reformed mind of Inova. "You were never truly asleep, but simply fragmented."

"Where — how?" Inova asked, still a bit disoriented from his fragmention in years past. "Why am I seeing images of events that I could never have been a part of?"

"The shards of your soul gem absorbed the memories of the ship as it suffered through its trials to date. Only now can you see and understand the totality of those images in your reconstructed form."

"Damn! Emeraude — Master Zagato! Oh — " Inova fell silent, seeing through the gathered memories of those encounters after his death. The most piercing of those memories, though, was the final image and thank you of the Princess and the suitor, and Emeraude's thanks for freeing her from the effective enslavement of the duties of the Pillar.

Paxis Archangel stood silent on this matter, as it knew this was a matter that had to be sorted out by Inova, one way or another. That silence between the two energy beings lasted several minutes as Inova went through all of what he had absorbed. Inova's reaction to the memories he had absorbed was simply to laugh. A low chuckle at first, but a full and hearty guffaw for a good minute, then trailed back to an exhausted chuckle toward the end.

"If ever it is possible to fail a mission and complete my duties at the same time, and to stand in opposition to a team who should have never been opposed, I have foolishly done so. Standing against the Gods was not particularly intelligent on my part, either."

"Their alliance with the Rune Gods continues to this day — I am unsure if they shall ever part company."

"And, if I may ask, what is your stake in this most dangerous game? And why would you restore my gem to full form?" Inova asked of the blue-white light around it.

"I am now the engine and power system on their ship — where they go, I shall take them there. We Paxis are beings of pure crystalline energy, we have found over the eons that the easiest Existence we can have — and enjoyment of journey — is to act as the engine systems to spacefaring civilizations." Inova was rather stunned by the complete nonchalance in such a description, but wisely did not comment. "As to restoring your gem form, I was attracted to the emanations of power from your shards, and figured an experiment was in order."

"A welcome experiment, and a successful one if your intent was to restore my shattered form." Inova looked around the blue-white glow he was suspended in. "You hold my essence in abeyance, thus you hold the key to my existence. What is your purpose?"

"If I understand your former duty properly, you existed to help serve the final wish of Lord Zagato, which was ultimately ironically completed by the Magic Knights and Archangel. Now that you are part of their engine, shall you assist or hinder?"

Again, Inova had a good chuckle at the 'choices' ahead of him. "There is no decision in that question, Paxis. By fulfilling my master's one true desire, I am now beholden to them. Their actions in the Inner Sphere, on the Southern Continent, on After Colony Earth, Halkegenia, simply reinforce the knowledge that I was standing against the proper persons for the duty. Ironically, it is now I who must serve them — as the Magic Knights are the ones who struck down Emeraude and thus freed her from her nightmarish choice, one of them may yet become the Pillar of Cephiro. In such a case, I would prefer them taking the duty over some interloper! And it would be wise to make sure it happened that way, if needed."

"Then welcome to the crew of the Archangel, even if your presence shall be unknown for now," Paxis Archangel said to the magical energy being now ensconced in its crystal matrix.

-x-x-x-

(Elsewhere in Existence…)

(Executor-Sigma Joint Training Base Wolfhound, planet Terra-6603)
(Same time as Paxis' involvement with Inova)
(Year 1262 of Sigma Campaign)

"This could be salvageable, if your troops catch sight of where they need to be in space and time to come," Sigma Two said to the 'trainee' for this match.

"They didn't," Executor Celine Whitebell said in dejection.

The referee for the match played everything through to the end, where the command maps displayed the breakdown in strategic outlook on the 'bluefor' side. What had resulted was the theoretical wipeout of a regiment of troops in two hours of training combat, and the exposure of Executor Celine's entire left flank to a two-prong thrust from the OpFor. Essentially, if this had been a real battle, Celine would have just presided over a line breach that could have cost her side the campaign.

"No shame in it, Celine," Master Executor Atrebas said. "The training is always tougher than the real thing."

"We stole the concept from the Americans — Red Flag Training, from the Fort Irwin National Training Center. Deliberately more difficult than the real thing, because if you train harder than real combat, you can expect better results in real combat," Field Marshal Kevin Inoue, callsign Sigma Two, extended upon the Master Executor's comment.

"For the record, and why you should not fret upon a first-round loss, I come back for a refresher every five, six decades with these boys. I get my ass handed to me first round, first time, every time," Master Executor Atrebas explained his position. "Even with cheating, it takes me a good two or three rounds against the OpFor to take their measure, before I can even begin to break even."

"Understood, my liege," Celine gave a quick bow to her superior.

The OpFor commander waked in the door to the 'referee complex', the control center of Wolfhound NTC. "That was a refreshing start," Executor-Lord Biagan Nostra said before he caught sight of the Master Executor. "Ah, boss! Was wondering when you'd drop by!"

Master Executor Atrebas arched an eyebrow. "Not lost a beat since I booted you back in time, hrm?" Eric asked his old friend.

"Hell no! Weird way to die, though, killed by a jump accident on that misadventuring Archangel. Don't think I'm in a hurry to do that again," the Executor Lord of Shadows answered deadpan. "Celine, not a bad start for round one, but you didn't put out enough recon to win the recon battle."

"Sir, understood sir!" she answered stoically. It was her first time commanding a group of forces larger than a squad, and her first time being under the gun as part of the join Sigma-Executor Command Training Operations. That she even managed to defend to a small degree against the OpFor's ministrations was indication that she was already leaning in the right direction.

"First lesson of Red Flag: ALWAYS find your enemy first, NEVER allow the enemy to find you!" Baigan pointed to the Ten Lessons of Red Flag, a plaque mounted into the wall of the NTC control bunker.

"Ease up on the trainee, comrade," Eric Atrebas told his old disciple. "How'd a run through Russia do for you?" He was referring to where Atrebas had deposited Baigan for his recovery phase after his highly-unexpected death on the Archangel.

"Not bad. Spetsnaz refresher course, four years in Afghanistan chasing Mudjies up and down the Hindu-Kush mountains, then I bailed out for greener pastures when ComStar set up a HPG on planet. Working with these crazies is good training, all the more so they gave me a position in one of their Red Flag training groups," Baigan jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the door, but was more referencing the entire Sigma organization.

"Good, 'cause I've got some serious shit for you to look into after you're done playing in Sigma's sandbox." Atrebas handed Baigan an order package.

"Back to the Archangel?" Baigan asked before he opened the envelope.

"Hell no, your job is done there. Read." Atrebas handed his subordinate a separate letter.

" 'Communique, to Cobalt, from Silence: Lord Baigan no longer needed on Ship A. Have identified course to come, A is on collision course with assets that can direct to Chronicle. Record of history of ship shall be completed and added to Chronicle, no further intervention or records needed at this time.' Son of a bitch, I guess that is that. 'Twas a fun journey, though, and a fun crew."

"The best parties are always started by the oddballs, sir," Sigma Two said as he lit up a smoke.

"Who's cancer stick is that?" Baigan asked his technically-superior officer for his duties in Sigma.

"American, Marlboro Untreated," Kevin answered. Imported tobacco products were allowed into Sigma territory, but only without the chemical cocktail that was commonly used in turn-of-21st-century smokes. Without bidding, he presented Baigan the pack and thereafter a light.

"So, I don't go back to the Archangel, I guess." Baigan paused a moment to light up his own cigarette. "Was kinda looking forward to it, but I can understand it. If the ship is destined to encounter the Chronicle, me spying and recording their history is redundant," Executor-Lord Baigan said. "I guess I'll have to read up on the rest of their misadventures ex post facto (3)."

"As soon as that record is in, I'll have the Boss cut you a copy, sir," Sigma Two said.

"Now that's a tale that's going to get passed around the barracks a few times," Atrebas said with a smile. "God loves the oddballs. Chance, not so much."

"I'd drink to that, if this was a wet establishment," Baigan said. "Instead, I think I'll raise a toast to the Archangel's continued survival later tonight, so we can actually read the tale to come."

"If the Lord of Shadows is offering a drink, I'd certainly be willing to assist you spend your paycheck, sir," Field Marshal Inoue said with a smile.

"You and me both, and we'll hoist an extra shot for the ship that's working hard to outdo Odysseus," Atrebas said. "Now, on the matter of today's exercise…"

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Author's Chapter Afterword:

Another day, another ride on this old warhorse!

So, at this point in the Archangel's history, the ship has now gone through its latest major upgrade series, but by no means the last. I've got a few good ones to come, and the ship shall definitely have need of it. Rest assured, the ship will need more — and more powerful — firepower for some of the major events I have planned still.

The first and loudest major note of the day is the time to ship synchronization on the Jump Engine. With a time expectation of 500+ days, you're looking at quite a while in the lands of the Vandread universe. On the other hand, just about every Operating System in Existence has trouble with either underestimating or overestimating the time expenditure to execute a given task. What it thinks it will take may not necessarily be how long it actually takes.

Number 2, MOAR POWER! A new engine, upgraded guns, expanded and up-armored hull, the Archangel has really come a long way over the years, and yet has a long way to go. The engine is going to be the big factor going forward, as the increased size of the past two upgrade series prevents the Archangel from mating with a Jumpship (too big now, it's actually larger than most IS Jumpships), so it needs to move interplanetary distances on its own. Guess what? Paxis is easily capable of doing that.

Number three, that flea that the Rune Gods kept sensing is now found (dead), but the stinger should explain at least part of the 'what' involved in that Charlie Foxtrot. Now, if you're getting an ominous vibe from that interchange between Master Executor Atrebas and Executor-Lord Nostra, feel free to acknowledge that vibe. Someone knows something about what shall happen to the ship, and it may not be pretty. Then again, nothing in my writing is really pretty per se, and that is deliberate on the author's part.

Of course, feel free to ignore the last section if you want. Just means what happens at the end of the story will slap ye like a brick in a sock, but hey, your call. Remember, in Existence, nothing exists on an island, everything is interconnected at some level or another. Same thing goes with my writing (all of it).

That should be it for major notes. The coming chapter will really begin to hash out the gender war on the Pirates' ship, and the Archangel gets a full-on explanation into what exactly is going wrong between Meijere and Tarak.

As to my lack of writing in my major stories, that was due mostly to personal issues pertaining to relatives living two states away from me. The time-and-space component was eating into my writing time, especially when I have to take 4-5 days to drive out there, do some work, and come back royally pissed off at the circumstances involved. The psychologic component of the matter was eating at my willingness to do anything more than just vegetate while listening to techno music, but I was able to resist that temptation to a degree. The sleep deprivation caused by the shitloads of stress was not helping my writing, either; my beta readers / live-op editors Takeshi Yamato and Sieben Nightwing could readily testify that I have fallen asleep at my keyboard more than once in the past 3 months. Thankfully, as of right now, everything is mostly sorted out and I am working back toward normal writing procedures.

My writing in the Sigma stories is part personal unwind, part lazy writing, and part narration to a game system. Sigma is literally a RPG campaign built into some old database files, a bunch of VB6 programs I wrote about a decade ago, and roughly 200 text files full of notes spread across three hard drives on my home computer. When I'm writing Sigma, I'm not writing a story in the same fashion as I write Archangel's Amazing Adventures, I'm effectively narrating a role-playing game in story format. This makes determining what has to be written technically easier for me, which makes it perfect for unwinding from all the bullshit and hardfail I've had to chew on in recent months. If you can handle gratuitous violence, the occasional unusual pervert situation, some very oddball politics, and huge amounts of gun porn, feel free to give it a shot.

Anyway, I'm done for the day. Vented enough spleen, I have.

NEXT UP: The first wave of something horrid this way comes, and the two ships are forced into battle. And then they have personal issues to sort out. Ye readers may decide which will be more damning, conflict external or internal?

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Review Replies: 28 solid reviews for the last section! FKIN AWESOME! Much thanks to ye all for the input!

ovrwrldkiler: I list my story as a crossover of what universe it is in at that time. Ergo, it was a ZnT Crossover at the time I wrote chapter 43.

Hope the whole narrative is to your liking!

Synbad2: Now that is awesome timing! Hope this chapter does good for ye as well!

Fraser Mage: Didn't the Israelis try that once? Bullpup a Kalash?

Avtar Angel: Oh, ye of little faith, there are some SERIOUS modifications that can be done outside what the SEED series shows. And Kira has a whole database of ideas to steal, plus lots of local enemies to 'harvest' for raw material to make those mods.

c0dy88: You misspelled 'Chaos', its supposed to be 'shenanigans and destruction', thank you.

Infinite Freedom: I don't always make my cliffhangers thorough, so no shame in missing the clues.

Hope there are enough hijinks per kiloword for you in this chapter!

X-Over: I do not give spoilers as a matter of policy, amigo. Sorry about that. That said, with the 500+ day time to sync with the ship, the Archangel Team will be here for quite a while.

Flawless Cowboy 2552: Didn't really have a reason, other than I'm kind of not an evil bastard like that.

Fusions with the Dreads or Vanguards? Haven't really given consideration to that yet. Need to work on that thought.

Drakensis: I have not yet begun to fight! Err, WRITE! Yeah, we'll go with that.

Myers Nathaniel: Aye, quite so. Comments or concerns?

Holy Dragoon: You're damn straight this just got weirder! And I'm pretty sure it will get stranger still :)

BiggZ1344: And then I go about doubling down on its Capital weapons. Don't expect me to play easy on the enemy, they ain't gonna play easy on the ship, y'hear?

Nakushita: Nadesico is a definite possible, but the Archangel does not apparently have a shield… yet. That may be discovered later. Remember, this is a fresh Paxis seed, it's still backbuilding.

Lord Sia: I aim to please, so you aim too, please! (Sorry, had to pun that one.) Hope this is to your liking!

DSGundam00: With the Archangel, nothing is as simple as it appears. Glad to be of service in entertaining!

Terrace4 (Round 2): Oh yes, there will be laughter. Quite a bit of it.

Jura's going to get a crash course in the subject soon enough, given how blunt the Archangel can be. As to whether or not Hibiki plays along, well, that's another story entirely. Or she might end up asking around the Archangel… this could lead to an incident or three. Damn, my brain just went down the gutter on that one.

Thanks for the dual reviews!

Hellhound DOW: Oh yes, grab your excedrin, there will be headaches! That said, the Paxis is not done making mods, so there will be more.

As to going back, as the end of the chapter says, that's still not guaranteed. But some weird shit is definitely in the future!

Thanks for the error check! Can you do a check on this one as well?

Hunter 092: Har har har! Hope this is an extension that ye likey!

Arm514ve (ArmSlave): Actually the hit was from a large pipe wrench, but close enough.

The Gundam Scientists are five weirdos that just don't get enough mad props. I always love running them in this story :)

Actually, not stopping Dita and Hibiki is military principle in action, not the dice. If you're caught in a shit situation, no backup, no cover or conceal, no proper arms, there is nothing to be gained in interfering in a matter that has no business with you to begin with. Annoying, distracting, loud, yes, but while Dita was busy chasing 'Mister Alien' around the south side of the Pirate ship, she specifically wasn't calling in reinforcements or threatening the Archangel team members. Best to not piss on the good fortune of a distracted 'enemy', would you not agree?

Paxis Archangel and the Archangel itself are in for some rough nights to come, trust me…

Thanks for the review!

KPheonix: This, right before some dude shouts that he'll pistol-whip the next guy who says shenanigans :D

The Archangel Team does not yet fully comprehend where they are about to go with this Paxis, but this is a seed of a Paxis, not the original. Things will be a bit different, trust me.

The Rune Gods did not believe the ship was in actual danger from Paxis, so they took no action. As to your other questions, those have been answered now.

The matter of the crews intermingling is going to be an off-and-on thing, trust me. And it will get spikier in coming chapters.

Miriallia knew something was a bit wrong with BC, but hasn't gone digging yet. That will be in some chapters to come, but that is a card to play very cautiously. And, as these things happen, the Archangel Team does not have a position in the war, so burning a spy has no profit to them...yet.

Your analysis of Kira's actions are spot-on.

Hope this chapter was more of what you wanted to see!

Deathzealot: Aye aye, you got it right on the Paxis engine. Maintenance and debugging just went through the roof, nobody has told the crew yet.

Your thoughts on revisiting SEED, I rather like them :)

I try to crank chapters as much as possible, but it's not always easy. Lots of delays in the past couple months. Hoping to speed up prod, though.

As always, much thanks for hanging around my writing! BTW, checked the latest in Sigma, or have you given up on that?

SatelliteCannon: A ship scrapfest would be a good, solid reminder that single-planar warfare is a colossal loser for someone who doesn't throw it all down on the table :)

Guest (Anon Review): It took a few months, not because of length, but because of personal shit getting in the way. Hopefully I can have another chapter or 2 cranked out before the end of the year.

Gundam is a guarantee. It would be wrong to not inflict the present-day Archangel on the hapless punks of other Gundam series. Kantai collection… okay, bizarre but okay. Added to recommendations list :)

Knives91: Someone has a bit of an understatement habit around this series. But, when you get down to the bottom line, there are a few rather powerful gents that are convinced the Archangel is staffed by 'oddballs'. That has to count for something, ne?

sabaku-no-yokho (2 reviews): A traitor there is not in this chapter, or the last :)

The dead body is indentified by extrapolation in the last section. Be wary, though, not all is as it seems :)

Much thanks for the location recommendations!

Terrace4: Not a bad idea at all, thanks! And a significant upgrade to Hibiki's arsenal.

Pyoro isn't something that has yet annoyed the Archangel. There shall be a day rue'd when Pyoro pisses off one of the mechanics.

Striker Packs are going to be an option here, given the length of time to come.

Wraith Five: Damn good to see someone pick the story up and read it straight through! Much thanks for the accolades!

Star Wars is a perennial recommendation for somewhere to go, but I think I need to remind learned readers: I am an asshole about combat circumstances, but I am not directly trying to kill off the Archangel. Just about anything SW can snuff the Archangel or her escorts very quickly. They may look superficially similar, but there are worlds of differences in terms of actual power and resilience between Star Wars and Gundam. Be wary what is asked for.

That said, Metroid hasn't been requested yet. Not a bad thought; that's always been an interesting series to me, though the last game in the series I played was Super Metroid for SNES, back in '95. Sweet Jesus, two decades ago. Man, I believe I just dated myself. Zelda is also a nice and unusual one, but as you pointed out, it would be insanely one-sided. Ganon's castle would be nary be a challenge, the Archangel could stand off at 3 kilometers and just hammer it into rubble and echoes with the Valiants. You are right on Dragon Ball, that would end badly.

When I started writing fanfic, I didn't want it all written stilted and scripted, hence the use of dice. By injecting random decision points into the story, things become unpredictable even to me. Every one of my stories follows that pattern to one degree or another, and it changes the dynamic from one minute to the next. With nothing set in stone, the adventure gains a new dynamic.

On the matter of OTPs vis-a-vis Gundam SEED, I'm not afraid to use them, and I'm not afraid to play against type. In this case, it's a logic thing: KxL is by expectation dead in AAA, Lacus and Kira were never able to meet up the second time, and hence Athrun is still effectively engaged to her. That said, even Athrun may be walking away from that thought, eventually, or maybe not. Depends on how much more ass the dice want to drag on the subject. This being the great downside on the subject of dice and narrative, sometimes when I want the shit to get on with it, the Random Number Gods decide they like the status quo. Upon the subject of the Dice, there are no winners or losers, some days there are only casualties.

If you want to review prior chapters, by all means! I try to respond to all reviews at least in this section of my chapters, and sometimes respond to the reviews directly. And don't worry about review length, as you can tell from my chapter lengths, I fear not a wall of text!

Dragoon 725: Saga Frontier is something I've managed to miss, so I am wondering what you are referring to as weapons techniques? Also, be careful on such requests: game mechanics are not always compatible with real-world combat principles.

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The Gripe Sheet:

No gripes from the last chapter. Much thanks to Sieben Nightwing, Takeshi Yamato, and Necroblade for keeping the writing straight!

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Footnotes:

(1): Tactical flashlights have crenelations on the rim of the light to help prevent damage to the light cover, or depending on the design, to be used as a strike face to induce pain in a subject without using a lethal or less-lethal weapon system.

(2): Tactical Pajamas is a mildly-derogative term for Black, OD, or Coyote BDU clothing worn by most special operations and SWAT teams.

(3): Ex Post Facto roughly translates to After The Fact.