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...

48. In The Oven

(Archangel's Amazing Adventures, Chapter 48: In The Oven)

(A/N: There is a deliberate deviation from VanDread Canon in this chapter. Please see the Author's Notes for full explanation after the chapter.)

(Day 11, 1300 Shipboard Time)

Kira entered the service entrance for the galley behind Jonesy, who was pushing a cart of hamburgers out of frozen storage for the evening meal plan (cheeseburgers and fries). The rest of the staff was cleaning up the leftovers from the lunchtime meal plan, which would be stored (refrigerated) and readily available for 72 hours for boxed lunches and late-night snacks and such. The galley efficiency was such that the meal plan consumption for the galley was 92 to 95 percent initially, and the leftover consumption was routinely in the neighborhood of 85 to 90 percent, meaning that across a crew of almost 200, the average unused foodstuffs amounted to roughly four meals in a day. It was a tally considered outstandingly efficient given the mission profile and supply stocking for the ship.

And Kira knew he would have to meet that level of efficiency as well as the cooking proficiency requirements before Chief Ryback would certify him for the meal prep for Dread Squad Commander Barnett.

"Yamato reporting for session 4 of cooking instruction, sir!" Kira reported after he came to attention.

"Get some caffeine in your bones, pilot, you look like hell," Ryback pointed him toward a cooler with several high-horsepower energy drinks in them. After Kira returned with the necessary booster in hand and two sips, Ryback continued. "You've covered the basics faster than I expected, so I'm moving your schedule up. Today, you will do your meal plan for Barnett five times in your six-hour shift, once for Commander La Flaga, Commander Chevalier, Lieutenant Commander Haww, Captain Ramius, and lastly for me. If you pass all five cooking sessions, we will begin tomorrow with desserts and drinks. Good to go?"

"Yes sir!"

"This is where it makes or breaks, kid. Get to it," Ryback pointed him to the grill, and Kira headed over to it to make sure the temperature was proper for his main course: Grilled Garlic Butter Shrimp. Kira had to adjust the temperature down a bit to make sure they were evenly grilled when he began, then made for the freezer to pull the necessary materials for the meal plan. The challenge in cooking these meals, though, was not that Kira was preparing multiple meals, it was that he was preparing multiple meals consecutively, with setup and teardown involved in each preparation loop just the same as if this was the final test.

"Look alive kid! The clock waits for no man!" Ryback chewed on him when Kira started allowing his pace to slip. "Remember, 40 minutes prep time for the entire plan, and that assumes a potato as well. Get it on the grill first!"

To point of fact, Kira had the potato scrubbed, oiled with olive oil, and wrapped in aluminum foil in less than a full minute, and then stationed it on the grill behind where he would be managing the shrimp.

" 'They shall conduct their drills as bloodless battles, until their battles become nothing more than bloody drill,' " Ryback partially misquoted a famous Roman soldier of years past on the premise of training. "Same premise when cooking, you will train as if this is the real thing, until doing the proper meal is no different from your training!"

"Damn, Strike's getting the third degree from the galley staff," Yzak said from the far side of the buffet counter. Kira spared him a quick glance and a waved with a shishkebab stick briefly before he returned to preparing the shrimp for grilling. The kebab would soak in a mix of liquid butter and garlic for about 15 minutes, then it would go on the grill and be re-coated twice with a butter mop during the grilling.

"Sometimes you have to do the training on a shortened schedule," Athrun sympathized. "And that makes things harder."

"Remember when cutting your salad, even cuts on the lettuce, either in square cuts or strips, don't mix. Your extra materials, cucumber, carrot, radish, all need to be sliced thin and small to compliment, not overpower, the salad base."

Nicol was a bit surprised at how well Kira had taken to the galley and meal prep, and filed that thought away for later — if Kira was as good as he appeared to be, Nicol figured he could always use some pointers if he ever found himself in need of doing some high-level culinary operations. Today's lunch menu was beef brisket, though with the common warning placard that the beef in question was from Halkegenia and potentially subject to bad base material — so far, every third meal prepared with primary ingredients from Halkegenia had ended with someone in the bathroom, usually more than one someone.

"You're on schedule and have everything in process, I would say this one counts as a good process," Ryback declared after Kira had the other sides going — simmered green beans with diced onion, rotini in an alfredo sauce — and the shrimp on the grill. "Keep it going, keep the heat even over your shrimp, and make sure you don't let your other foods sit too long over heat — anything that gets scorched will count against you."

"Yes sir!" Kira said between sips of energy drink.

Ryback prepared a mobile serving tray for Commander La Flaga, who would get Kira's first meal prep and would report back on opinion of the meal and if there was any problems. Mu was on the bridge doing the afternoon watch, so his meal would be delivered by one of the mess staff.

Once the preparation was completed and the meal was on the way Kira would take several minutes to clean the gear and stow any utensils as was proper galley regulation. He would then begin the process again for the next meal from complete scratch, again acting as if this was the actual meal to be prepared three days hence for Barnett. Five meal preps in six hours was a hell of a lot of work, but doing it several times without issue was critical to his success.

Ryback would not permit him to know the results until after the final meal had been judged by the Captain, and only then would Kira have time to sigh in relief.

-x-x-x-

(Day 11, 1800 Shipboard Time)

"Summon Seraphim," Murrue chanted after a few moments of consideration about what she intended.

The Summoner's Triangle took a few moments to settle in on the deck in the nursery, but once it was set up and properly colored in her Seraphim summon did not take long to appear through the modified teleport and in the room.

"Milady Murrue, I thank you for calling on me. How may I be of assistance?"

Murrue waved the Seraphim to a stool in the room adjacent to the folding chair she was using. "I have, for lack of a better way to phrase it, a looming logistic problem on this ship. For now, we are well enough provisioned to meet all necessary crew needs, but before half of our present quest is completed we will start running thin on major foodstuffs and water."

"Your present quest does not put you in the vicinity with any trading posts?" the Seraphim asked.

"We think we may encounter some, but I cannot gamble on it," Murrue admitted. It was only prudent to assume there would be no trading throughout their journey, but any trading that actually happened would be a welcome bonus.

"So, barring that, you seek to trade with the Esper and Summoned Realms?" the Seraphim asked.

"Is it possible?" Murrue asked simply.

"Oh yes," the summoned being said before she flexed her wings, then furled them. Even after having had her as a summon for years now, Murrue was still very much entranced by the wings of a Seraph. "Trade is both easy and welcomed by the Esper Realm and the Summoned Realm. In fact, both Regent Badgiruel and High Summoner Allster have made great strides in trading both money and material for goods from the two realms."

"That is — wait, you just said High Summoner Allster? As in Flay Allster?"

"Yes, why?" the Seraphim hesitated a moment, then realized what had happened. "You are unaware?"

"Aware of what?" Murrue asked. "I know Natarle became the Regent of Vector, but what is this about Flay?"

"What is what about Flay?" Mu asked as he entered the nursery. "Oh, good evening," he said with some gravitas to the Seraph in the room.

"A good evening to you as well, Commander," she answered. "I was unaware you did not have a direct news link to the Esper and Summoned Realms?"

"We do not," Murrue acknowledged the point.

"I will need to find you some linked books, then, that the news of the day would be known even here."

"So, what has Flay worked herself into?" Mu asked as he leaned up against the doorjamb.

"High Summoner Allster has had a very eventful several months, and with it has received several very significant honors. First, she located and rescued several deceased Espers in magicite form, which clued us into a war that predates the War of the Magi. For that alone, she immortalized herself in our records for her honored conduct to the fallen."

"Not expecting that," Mu admitted favorably.

The Seraphim sighed. "Weeks later, when searching for more magicite to rescue, she stumbled into a mausoleum built into a hollowed-out mountain outside of Mobliz. Thousands of Summoners, millions of deceased Espers, and the final resting place of a Goddess of Summoners. The Kingdom of Doma has declared it a historical site of immense value, and for her part in the find, Flay received a permanent credit in the Summoned Realms and several dozen Summons to jump-start her blossoming career in the art of Summoning."

"Oh man, that's a change," Murrue said in some surprise at what she was hearing.

"Even Regent Badgiruel had admitted to me that the Flay Allster who was once crew on this ship is long gone," the Seraphim explained. "At the Battle of the Albrook Northern Pass, Flay's summoning was credited with breaking the defensive lines of the Kingdom of Baron and breaking their morale when she used her Ragnarok Summon to impale their flagship airship into the side of a mountain. Baron's forces were routed and driven back to Albrook, where they were forced to surrender before they could be extracted."

"That… wow," Mu gaped. "That is a significant change."

Mu's Magic Knight Squire glove flashed bright, then settled to a dim glow briefly. High Summoner Allster has made great strides in her personal bearing and attitude, as well as immense combat skill with her summons. It is believed she may in coming years achieve Master Summoner rating, an award known to very few over the eons. Windam's telepathic voice sounded a bit pleased with having to make such a report, which to a degree Murrue could understand. There were only three Magic Knights and a handful of Squires under each knight; having one or more deceased or disowned was a blow to the order, but conversely a major award reflected upon the entire group. Selesce is no longer concerned about her outlook, nor is he concerned about the happenings on Gaia becoming soured by antagonist parties. Any party fool enough to antagonize Vector in general or Allster in particular has thus far found their lifespan abruptly shortened.

"Now that is definitely outside what I expected of Flay," Murrue admitted. "Still, it's good that she found herself a calling and has turned herself around. Now, the question that comes to mind after all this, can you orchestrate trade to or from Vector or with Flay? In addition to trading with the Esper Realm and Summoned Realms?"

"Easily. I can directly negotiate with Natarle at any time she summons me, and my sister Ezra the Archangel is contracted to Flay, so I need only speak to her to arrange details."

"The only question is, does Flay hold a grudge against the ship or us?" Mu asked.

"I do not believe so, I have heard no mention of it," the Seraphim answered.

Mu's glove flashed again. Selesce says that Flay holds no such animus toward the ship, and remembers her time on it with some cheer.

"So we have some possibilities," Murrue said. "We have been collecting a lot of scrap metal of several types, do you know who is buying?"

"Vector for certain, roughly half of the Summons in a rotating fashion. The Carbuncle and Alexander are particularly interested in titanium, if you have any," she said.

"I think we can work something out," Murrue said. They had quickly accumulated a lot of titanium as salvage from the ships, so…

-x-x-x-

(Day 12, 0600 Nirvana Shipboard Time)
(Jura's Quarters)

The intriguing part of the male half of the ship's past was that she had found other indicators that seemed to mesh with Miriallia's story. Several pictures adorned a book on her shelf, a nondescript volume that blended in with several other, more cosmopolitan publications, and those pictures seemed to confirm the tale. The pictures always had a man and a woman, and two of the five pictures had children — one female, three male.

All that was left was the videotape, of what she had available to study as outside confirmation. She had inserted it into the player last night, tried to work up the courage to play it, but could not. This morning, after thinking about it, she realized a critical fact.

"Am I really afraid of the answer?" Jura asked herself for the fifth time this morning. "Or am I afraid that the answer will change my life?"

She stared into the monitor connected to the playback device and realized that she wasn't sure which fear it was, or if both, which was worse.

"Both," she concluded after a minute of introspection. Her Meijere bias led her to reject the possibility of it being true, and that bias was fighting the necessary change that would result from the truth. The part that she was missing was that she already knew the answer and it had already changed her mindset, but her conditioning was fighting the realization of the answer. Were a telepath listening to her mental war over the subject, they would quickly become confused by the conflicting positions.

"I can't do this all day," Jura grumped, then pressed the play button on the playback device. "Either way, I have to see this through!"

The tape played through several seconds of blank video, then popped into a scene of a house front room that was clearly decorated for Christmas. After a few moments, a man entered the scene and sat down on a couch, then a lady entered the scene and sat down next to him. The two snuggled together and cradled between them —

"A baby?" Jura realized what she was seeing after a moment was a baby in a swaddling cloth, not something she was expecting to see in this video. Neither the man or the woman appeared to show anything except protection for it, which she expected from the woman but not from the other.

The video kept playing, but Jura's attention to it was already gone. Her mind was elsewhere in Existence and a hundred years in the past, trying to make sense of it.

It was the confirmation she sought and dreaded, and the confirmation she would neither admit, nor admit that she dreaded.

Another minute staring blankly into the monitor brought her to a new realization: something was missing. If they were both parents, how did it happen? Miriallia said 'by a special touch', which Jura had exactly no clue what she meant by that. The Meijere way was in vitro fertilization by splicing part of the Foma's genes into the egg, but how would a man do that without genetic splicing?

It was that realization that convinced Jura that she had a mission: figure out what exactly had to happen to produce a child without genetic splicing, and maybe become the first Meijere woman to have a baby with a man in several generations?

It'll be scandalous, and end your social life on Meijere, her conscious mind warned her about such a blasphemous thought.

I'm a pirate, I have no social life on Meijere. They want me dead anyway. I'm going to do this just to piss on the social norms, she decided hastily.

Without directly trying, she had committed the ultimate sin of Meijere life: she had accepted Men at a level, even if she didn't quite yet understand that she had accepted them.

"Now, how to do this? Who to ask?" Jura asked herself. The challenge was doing this in a way that wasn't personally damaging or embarrassing, and doing it quietly to avoid undue interference or criticism from the rest of the Nirvana crew. She doubted she would get any guff from the Archangel Team on the matter, for obvious reasons. If they had couples already, then they would likely know?

I'll need to figure out when is a good time to try to jump in on the subject, Jura decided. For that, she needed to know more about the Archangel Team, their schedules and personalities. Finding one of the more easygoing and relatable of the troupe would be best, she decided.

For that she would need to force herself to overcome her revulsion to the mercenary warship. Not a simple task, she realized.

The video kept playing even as she left the room. It would come to the automatic stop and rewind several hours later, and she would be elsewhere.

-x-x-x-

(Day 12, 1100 Archangel Shipboard Time)
(Hangar area)

"All right, we're opening storage unit Alpha Five Three!" Murdoch reported over the maintenance control frequency. "Pytor, we need the Stone Rhino moved to the number 2 battlemech berth," he ordered on the pilot hangar frequency.

"Understood, give me a minute," Pytor stepped out of the pilot's ready room and onto the catwalks that led to the battlemech cockpits. Murdoch had begun the cold start before he ordered the move, so the machine was powered up and ready to move by the time Pytor opened the cockpit.

"Gomer, you are authorized to open the bay," Murdoch ordered after the Stone Rhino began moving.

"Do you want me somewhere, sir?" Trowa asked.

"Right here is good," Murdoch said. "Gearhounds, Murdoch, clear port-side MS bay 5 for new machine. Voltage, prepare your team for a full maintenance routine, how copy?"

"Gotcha, boss," Murdoch could see 'Voltage' give him a thumbs-up from the far side of the hangar. He could see his crew marshalling for the coming maintenance routine, which would easily take several hours.

"Maintenance Control, Gomer, Bay A-5-3 is open, bringing out the load now." The 'load' was on a motorized carriage platform and slowly creeped itself out of the cargo bay and into full view of the hangar in roughly three minutes of travel time.

"Mobile Suit under the tarp?" Trowa asked.

"Yeah. Should be familiar to you," Murdoch said.

Trowa watched the uncovering of the machine, and was rightly surprised by what machine it was. "You acquired my Gundam before we left?"

"Yes, we received it from the Sanc Kingdom before we left, they got it from some rebels in southeast Asia. After the team gets it ready, you've got some time in sims to verify you're ready to go out the door."

Trowa nodded contemplatively. Since he had snapped back to remembering his past, he had been wanting a chance to start defending the ship more properly — being a mechanic was necessary, and for the Gundam pilots it was a necessary secondary skill, but his real talent was in the cockpit.

"Heavyarms," Trowa said, confirming to Murdoch that the formerly-amnesiac pilot was at least recovered enough to know the name and general characteristic of his own Gundam. "Has it been modified for space operations?" Trowa asked.

"I believe the Gundam Scientists have modified it, but I'm not completely sure how," Murdoch said, given that he had not yet received updated repair and operations manuals for the Heavyarms.

One of the mechanics popped open his cockpit and dropped in, then after a few seconds of delay the machine stood up from its flatbed storage position and taxied over to bay five on the port side of Mobile Suit cubicles. That engendered a fresh question from Trowa: "How did you activate it? The Mobile Suit control systems are password-protected." The unstated challenge was that nobody but he would have the necessary password.

"The Doctors have their own access password and backup interfaces." Murdoch had heard that much from Master O during a rambling conversation a few days ago. It made perfect sense in context, it was only prudent to have a backup method for maintenance or upgrades as needed. "From there, they programmed an access code in for we hangar pukes so we can move them around for maintenance. Every machine has maintenance access, no exceptions, it's just easier that way." Murdoch raised a hand to forestall a complaint from Trowa. "Before you say anything, we know you do your seat in position 6 with the back in position 2, your pedal resistance is 4 kilos, and your control surface resistance is 2.75 kilos. For the record, the only pilot that runs lighter resistance on the control surfaces is Tolle, though yours are the heaviest pedals in the bay. The boys know to make sure your resistance settings are set up properly before they leave the cockpit."

Trowa nodded acceptance of the point, and was a bit impressed with it. Checking resistance values and screen brightness was automatic to him, but not so much to most mechanics. He knew the Archangel Team hangar crew was top-shelf, but that little detail went a way to reinforcing that belief.

"When do I begin sims?" Trowa asked.

"One hour. Kira, the Strike Freedom, and Paxis Archangel are stress-testing your electronics right now to make sure everything is in working order after the upgrades. Supposedly Kira and Yzak were involved in upgrading the software parallel to the docs working on your machine."

Trowa glanced at the Strike Freedom in the number 2 cubicle on the port side by way of looking past his rather distinctive left-side hairline bangs. Surprisingly, when his eyes crossed the headpiece of the LRRP Mass-Production Strike Freedom, the eyes flashed as if it knew Trowa was looking at it.

"How much ammunition do you have on hand for the guns and missiles?" Trowa asked.

"That's a question with two answers," Kira Yamato answered from just inside the door of the maintenance control booth. "On hand, we have about ten tons of gatling ammo, eight tons of missiles. The gatling ammo can be rebuilt from salvaged munitions by the new nanomachine manufactory, and the missiles can be replaced with the micromissiles in use by the new Hydra missile pods."

"So my firepower is not limited to a handful of sorties," Trowa said, still looking out the window at his machine. Right now, the mechanics were doing a full inspection, lube job, and refuel for what Trowa did not know would be his first live sortie (a training run against several of the other Gundams to simulate local enemies) after he passed his dry-simulation qualification tests.

"No, we've got plans in place to keep ourselves armed for many years to come, so long as we rake in the salvage." Kira took a seat at one of the control stations and dialed it into Trowa's machine, then dialed a second monitor into the hardware tests the Strike Freedom and Paxis Archangel were putting it through. "Looks like everything so far is looking good. I was worried about recoding the maneuver systems for space, but I ripped most of the code from the Buster — similar size and maneuver profile — and modded it to the HeavyArms' control systems."

"On schedule for sim runs?" Murdoch asked.

"Ahead of schedule, we'll be ready in 40 minutes," Kira said. "Helps when you have six quantum mainframes attacking the problem at the same time."

"Six?" Trowa asked.

"Yeah, two in the Strike Freedom, four in the ship. One of the upgrade packs we have planned for the machines is new central computers for all the machines, and their basis is going to be quantum mainframes," Kira said nonchalantly.

"Oh, that's going to be fun," Murdoch grumped. He would be proven correct in more than a few fashions.

-x-x-x-

(Day 13, 1430 Archangel Shipboard Time)
(Bridge)

"Contact is firming up, Captain," Sai reported. "They have the same signal outputs and energy readings as the drone ships. Silhouette doesn't match, but I'd call this far too close to be a coincidence."

"We see them as well, Captain Ramius," BC reported by video link. "Should we investigate?"

"I could stand to get some proper answers, and taking one of their ground facilities would be a good start," Murrue decided. "Do you have ground-capable units?"

"We have the Vanguard units, though the only experienced pilot we have for them…" her sentence trailed off. "Can your team do some cross-training for ground operations?"

"We've been in on the ground a few times," Commander La Flaga answered judiciously. "Send your ground-pounders over here and we'll take them down to the surface with the ship."

"Acknowledged," BC answered. The link cut out after a few moments.

"Kuzzey, confirm link cut," Murrue said.

"We're clear, Captain," Ensign Buskirk said after he double-checked the output.

"They're trying to avoid telling us something," Mu said.

"I think they may be having some unity problems," Murrue said. "You could tell from the look on Buson's face, she's going to be hard-pressed to come up with pilots for the other Vanguards besides Hibiki."

"They're riding the edge of all-out dysfunction," Miriallia gave her opinion on the matter. "They still don't trust themselves."

"A'course not," Commander Chevalier agreed. "After six generations of being told the other sex is going to kill them and eat them, it's going to take more than a couple weeks on a tour of Hell to set things right. It's the War of the Sexes cranked up to eleven and has teenage hormones thrown in for good measure."

"God help us if they don't figure it out soon enough," Sai grumped.

"This is the kind of story that can either end very romantically, or end in disaster," Ensign Catalonia said from the operator's station. "Maybe both. I'm thinking both right now."

"I've got two Halkegenian Golds on disaster," Sai answered her.

"That's the house favor right now," Miriallia said. "Then again, it took us a couple weeks to sort our own shit out on Cephiro, so it is doable. If they want to make it work, that is."

"Big 'if' in that sentence," Sai pointed out. "Captain, I show a few more of the new-silhouette units active on the ground, but no attempt coming up to intercept. Not sure if they know we're here or not."

"Continue to monitor, we'll make ready for atmospheric entry and wait for the Vanguards to come over."

-x-

(2 hours later, 1620 Hours Shipboard Time)

"It's days like today that remind me a lot of what we left at home, even before we were sucked into Cephiro for that disaster," Tolle said wistfully from the cockpit of the Buster. "Heliopolis. Do our time at trade school Hell, grab a metro-car downtown, hang out at Willy's Grill House. Head home about 7 or so, pretend to do some homework so the instructors would pretend to teach us, then watch music videos and Luchadores Wrestling until I fall asleep in the chair. Get up next morning, quick shower and do it again."

"Do that six times a week, then screw around downtown on Sundays for hours," Kira said with some nostalgia to voice. "Not a care in the world. What about you, Athrun?"

"I had a lot of clubs after school, back before I volunteered. Monday and Tuesday, I did Adaptive Mechanicals. Wednesday and thursday was volleyball, Friday was astronomy club, Saturday was Electronic Music for me. Sundays, I'd usually hang out with Lacus, do maintenance on her small army of Haros I made her, and other stuff like that. Yzak?"

"After college prep school, my hangouts were the music clubs in Aprilius City," he said. " 'Specially when they had some of the local garage bands playing. Occasionally we'd have a group of decent-lookers come in, never got anywhere with them. They were usually trawling for the trash punkers, weren't much interested in Dearka or myself. We weren't wild enough for their tastes."

"Now there's a fallacy for you, Yzak and Dearka 'not wild enough' after all the shit we went through? That's hilarious," Athrun said. "Club-hopping wenches like that would've folded halfway through the Cephiro campaign, never mind our misadventures in the Inner Sphere or on Gaia."

"Halfway through Cephiro, Zala?" Yzak snorted loudly. "You're being generous there. I'd've given them until lunch on Day 2 before they broke down into a heap of crying and failure."

"Hard to believe what we've been through, and we still don't have a guarantee of getting home," Nicol said with a gusty sigh at the end.

"What about you, Nicol?" Umi asked.

"Before I enlisted, I was aiming for a position on the All-PLANT Symphonic Orchestra. The Piano player on the orchestra was approaching retirement, wanted to turn his position over to a worthy successor. I was in the running, until Junius Seven."

"Was he on the colony?" Fuu asked, given she knew what was involved in the Junius Massacre.

"Yeah," Nicol said dejectedly. "Visiting his daughter. I swore on his memorial marker that I'd make sure Junius Seven never happened again. So, against his wishes, I enlisted in — "

The airlock bay door on the starboard catapult began opening, which was audible to the pilots because the atmosphere had not been pulled from the hangar. "Look at this," Yzak said as the first of the four Vanguards entered the hangar. "We've been here with our thumbs up our asses for an hour."

"Watch your bearing, Yzak. We just got our contract pulled on similar grounds," Athrun cautioned him more forcefully than any of the officers would have.

"Hey, we had to get our Vanguards ready!" Dita said as her unit entered the hangar.

"Love the camouflage," Yzak said with a bit less hostility. He had no idea that his complaining had eliminated him from Jura's list.

"Where do you want us?" Jura asked calmly, rather more calmly than she felt.

"Two open cubicles on each side of the ship, park it and hang on," Commander La Flaga advised.

-x-

(20 minutes later)

"Entering atmosphere now," Newman announced as the controls began buffeting a bit. "Angle is good, hull temperature is inline with expectations," he continued. "We'll be at flight altitude in a few minutes."

"Steady as she goes, Newman," Murrue said.

"Conn, Sensors, we're passing through the ionization belt, I have complete failure of sensor systems at this time. Estimated time to reactivation is 110 seconds."

"We're blind for two minutes," Murrue said. "We're used to this, keep it steady and report when we have sensors again. Chandratta, arm but do not deploy weapons."

"Already ready, Captain," the gun-bunny answered.

"Ship is handling a bit unevenly, the armor composite must be reacting differently from what the flight computer thinks it should be doing," Newman said.

"Is this going to be a problem?" Murrue asked.

"No ma'am, we're almost down through the hard part," he said as the ship slowed its rattling down to a more manageable pace. "Stable flight level achieved, armor temperature is cooling down. We are 35,000 meters above ground level."

"Drop us down to 10,000 meters AGL and make for the contact point," Murrue ordered, then picked up a growler phone. "Hangar, bridge, we have completed atmospheric entry and are dropping down to deployment altitude. Be ready to deploy forces in the next five minutes."

"We are ready, Captain," Pytor answered over the radio.

"Be nice to get some fresh air," Yzak followed up.

"Better to take some ass-kicking to them for a change, rather than fight defensive all the time," Tolle said with some bravado.

"I second that," Hikaru chimed in.

"You'll get your chance. Prepare for deployment, we go in five minutes," Mu said as a deployment countdown timer began in the hangar.

"Watch yourselves, pilots. Especially you four from the Nirvana, ground operations are a whole different adventure from space ops."

"We'll be cautious," Squad Commander Barnett said in a tone that was less than convincing to Murrue.

"Lastly, come back alive. All of you. Bridge is out." Murrue hung up the growler phone, waited two seconds, and dialed in specifically to Mu's cockpit.

"Something wrong, dear?" Mu asked after he made sure his other radio bands were disabled. "Or, let me guess. Them?"

"Yeah, them. Keep an eye on the greenhorns, make sure they don't end up ass deep in it. I don't think it will be too bad, but you never know."

"This will either go smoothly, or very badly," Mu said. "How fast can we get out of the atmosphere?"

"Not sure? Newman, how quickly can we go from ground level to exoatmospheric?" Murrue asked.

"Calculating now," Newman plotted a course from the surface to the atmosphere-space interface "Four minutes to outside, seven minutes to get outside the gravity well."

"So we have a hard floor of four minutes," Murrue said. "Be prepared to make some tough calls, Mu. This feels like a trap."

"Don't worry, dear, we make the impossible possible," he said with a quick salute before he cut the link.

-x-

(5 minutes later)

"Kira, Hibiki, I want you two first out the door, as soon as you land begin spreading outbound from the ship and keep your eyes moving," Ensign Catalonia said. "Kira, I want your sensors up and running ASAP, just in case this is an ambush."

"Will do, Ops," Kira tapped his sensor panel twice.

"Second pair out is Jura and Barnett, third pair out is Tolle and Dita, fourth out is Umi and Hikaru, fifth out is Yzak and Pytor, Mu and Athrun are sixth, Morgan have last. I want Fuu on operational reserve in case something goes wrong. Form up in the taxiways and prepare to jump!"

"Time to ground and pound," Tolle said as he formed up behind Barnett, who was standing behind Kira.

"Deploy in 30 seconds," Dorothy said. "Open airlock doors."

"Damn, that's bright," Hibiki said after the sunlight peeked over his Vanguard's head.

"Midday over a desert," Mu said. "Look up and out, don't stare into the glare, you'll flash-blind yourselves," Morgan Chevalier said. "Learned that lesson the hard way when I got started in the Gobi against ZAFT's ground troops."

"Some days, I'd much rather take my chances against Creuset than some of the fun stuff we've been through," Mu said to his fellow commander.

"Pfft, if I had the choice of doing it again, I'd do it all again and do it twice as hard, just with less attitude," Yzak said staunchly.

The klaxon in the hangar buzzed. "Go go go!" Dorothy half-shouted over the radio.

Kira and Hibiki were first out of the ship, and the drop to the ground was short — only a second before each of them landed. "Strike Freedom is on the ground, moving to starboard. Sensors up, nothing visible, doing a deep scan now," he said.

"This is Hibiki, I'm not seeing anything except wrecked buildings," the male Vanguard pilot announced.

"Jura is on the ground, moving outward," she said briskly, then made for the center of the ruined buildings. Barnett followed close with her out of mutual support and a desire to get away from the men in general.

"On the ground," Tolle reported after he hit the deck. "I'll cover the right baffles (1), open desert gives me a damn good field of fire if needed."

"On the ground! Where am I needed?" Dita asked.

"Cover left," Kira pointed in that direction with his Gundam's hand.

"I have the left flank and quarter," Pytor turned the attention of the Stone Rhino in that direction.

"Push toward the center," Yzak started moving along the same path that Meia and Barnett had initially, but took a different route toward the center of the ruins.

"Timber Wolf is on the ground," Mu announced after he landed. "Tolle, shift toward the rear, I'll cover the right broadside,"

"Got it," Tolle moved around to a rearguard position behind the Archangel.

"Kira reporting, deep scan complete, no major hostile machines detected within 100 kilometers. I am seeing a lot of active electronic and industrial systems, though, not sure what is going on around here," Kira admitted.

"Can we find some kind of interface, maybe hack their systems in real-time?" Nicol requested as his GuAIZ landed and began looking around in the nearby ruins.

"Advance slow, eyes up and out, and keep an eye on the ruins for something we can use to access their network," Murrue ordered on the open band.

Yzak was the first to find anything of major note after a minute of directed searching. "Got something here," he announced. "Looks like an optical relay tower or sensor tower of some kind," he announced after a few moments to inspect it.

"Gah!" Hibiki shouted.

"Hibiki is down!" Nicol reported. "What happened?"

"I'm not used to piloting on a planet's surface yet," he admitted reluctantly.

"And double the fun because of the loose sand environment," Morgan Chevalier took a moment to offer the hand of his 105 Dagger to Hibiki's Vanguard. "Come on, pilot, we've got work to do."

"Definitely," Hibiki took the offered hand and hauled himself to standing.

"Kira, I think this optical tower is interfaceable," Yzak reported from the area he found the equipment. "Can your machine break it?"

"On my way," Kira jetted across two sets of ruins, then paced out the last few meters of march on foot. "Yeah, this looks like usable connection equipment, it's using a fiber-optic connection point similar to what we use on the Archangel," he said. "Cover me while I get up-close and personal with their network."

"Got your six, make it fast, Strike. This place is creeping me out." The Duel Gundam took up position behind the Strike Freedom and hunkered down, ready to absorb any hits as needed.

Kira popped the cockpit on his machine and pulled a network cable from the storage bin. True to his guess, the hardware and connection points were the same as the ones the Archangel had in use, which was the same as the Strike Freedom used for direct connection to the Archangel's communication bus. "Standby, connecting now...connected!"

"Working?" Tolle asked.

"Yeah," Kira replied after he saw what the AI in his machine was doing to the security systems connected to the communication tower. "Bingo! We're online with the host! Ai, can you data-dump them?" he asked the machine.

"Already on it, pilot," the artificial intelligence entity said. "The core of their network is quantum and decentralized, but several of the nodes are wide open to harvesting. I can have a solid core's worth of data in five minutes."

"Hot damn," Tolle said with some surprise.

-x-

(Bridge of the Archangel)

About halfway through the world 'damn' in Tolle's declaration of surprise, Sai's sensor panel lit up. It took him several moments to contemplate what he was seeing, but… "Conn, sensors, energy anomaly detected — no, multiple energy anomalies detected around the planet!"

"What? What's happening?"

"When Kira touched off the data breach, some systems went live. I'm typing them now, standby," Sai said. "Energy anomaly appears consistent with massive-scale particle cannons, Captain. I'm running a full scan on them now, ten seconds."

"Ground team, Archangel, we may have some trouble here. Standby and keep your guard up."

"Ground acknowledges," Mu answered by rote.

"Captain, big trouble!" Sai announced. "I've detected ten massive particle cannons on the order of a hundred Petajoules of output each. Their orientation is all downward, toward the core of the planet. If ten cannons of that power fire against a planet's core like that, it'll tear the planet apart."

"Worse," Athrun piped up, since he was seeing the same sensor relay info — and reading worse happenings into it. "The planet's core is potassium, which is fusable in older stars. If the core is compressed equidimensionally on the order of an exajoule of energy, it'll cook the entire planet off in less than five seconds."

"Jump-start a damn white dwarf star right under us," Yzak said. "What's the time frame before they can do that?"

"Twenty minutes," Sai reported after the Paxis ran the calculations to charge up the cannons enough to achieve that kind of cookoff, or any similar result.

"I don't want to hang around and find out how bad this can be," Captain Ramius declared. "Ground Team, after you have ripped down their data cores, return to ship immediately for emergency extract."

"I've got something!" Tolle shouted. "Incoming dust wave from the southeast! This is not a natural dust storm!"

"Full release, defend the Strike Freedom while Kira finishes up data harvesting," Mu said. He would quickly come to disdain his choice of words for reasons to be found out on that 'harvested' data.

"I see it," Pytor said as he turned the Stone Rhino to bear against the dust anomaly, and fired both Large Pulse Lasers into the onrushing sands. The passing beams scorched the sand into black glass on the way through, but the two scorches hardly slowed the incoming menace in question.

"Three minutes on data transfer, no, two minutes, Strike Freedom has fooled their Quantum Nodes into fast-feeding the system here," Kira said before he hooked in a second data line to the communication relay to increase the raw throughput of the data gathering operation.

"Make it a fast two minutes, Strike, there's a lot more of these dust storms coming in!"

"Not a chance in HELL!" Tolle shouted as one of the dust clouds made for his Gundam, but in the race of sand monster and particle shotgun, the Buster won with a blast that mostly disintegrated the cloud and the topmost layer of sand — and revealed something critical. "Guys! The clouds are being constructed by some kind of machine under the sand! We can stop these!"

"Captain, more dust anomalies coming in from the north," Sai reported, one eye on the sensor panel and another on the countdown to planetary core implosion.

"Chandratta, can you hit them with missiles?" Murrue asked.

"I thought you'd never ask," the resident big gun-bunny said with a smile. A couple quick fire allocation orders and a flight of Wombat missiles were on the way downrange. "Flight time is six seconds."

Murrue would not admit it, but she slightly held her breath as she watched the heavy missiles go downrange and slam into the ground, tossing up massive plumes of dust from the combination of primary missile blast and the secondary explosion of something else under the sands.

"What the Hell?" Newman was the first person on the bridge to ask when the entire sands north of the ruins began shifting and bulging as if something was buried below them.

"Conn, sensors, massive contact in that area! It's huge, easily over a hundred thousand tons mass!"

"Oh shit," Murrue gaped after she realized that their efforts here had awoken some manner of even nastier defensive system. "Kira, get the lead out," she ordered after the top end of the enemy machine breached the surface of the sands.

"Yeah, I think you're right," Kira agreed with the request from the Captain.

-x-

"Ho Lee Shit," Tolle half-wailed. "Massive hex-walker that's almost as big in width as our ship. Now what?"

"How do we even scratch that thing?" Barnett asked as she retreated from it instinctively. The question was pro forma but expected in such a case, given the defensive machine in question was easily five, six times taller than the Vanguard she was piloting.

To Tolle's way of thinking, it reminded him of nothing so much as a massive crab with the wrong amount of legs and no claws. "Does it have a weak point or something? Looks like it's solid armor from this angle," he asked of the team.

"Exposed leg joints!" Mu put his Omnimech's crosshairs on the forward right leg knee joint, selected his ER Large Lasers, and fired both. "Hammer the front right knee!"

"Yeah! Yeah!"

"This is Hibiki! I've figured out what is causing the dust swarms, it's got tentacles coming out of its back and into the sand! I'm going in with my sword!"

"Watch your ass, Hibiki! Umi, Hikaru, Nicol, back him up!" Dorothy ordered.

"Moving!" Nicol shouted. As he passed under the body of the machine, the GuAIZ pilot snapped several shots off at the exposed knee.

"One minute!" Kira announced.

"I've got a shot! Firing!" Tolle announced a moment before he pulled the trigger. His aim was true, but it wasn't enough to do crippling damage to the joint.

"Hyaah!" From Tolle's vantage point, he was able to see Hibiki thrust up and slash one of the tendrils clear off the mounting point that attached it to the body. Either the dust storm generator was poorly designed or had an internal self-destruct capacity, because a second after it was removed it detonated, which included a winding path under the ruins. The detonation path wound almost directly under Kira, and when it blew the explosion caused his Gundam to violently separate from the communication node — and take with it critical hardware.

"Damnit! I've been disconnected and the connection point is destroyed," Kira reported after he reeled in the cables he had been using and closed up the cockpit of his Gundam. A good two pounds of the front of the connection point were still attached to those cables. "Captain, I'm clear!"

Several underground serpentine tunnel explosions happened in a very rapid succession after Umi used the magic power in her sword to cleave through five more of the tendril connections. "Got several!" Umi shouted. Hibiki had cleared four more prior to her strike, but more remained attached to the rear of the machine.

"The armor shell is too heavy to penetrate!" Hikaru said from above the tentacle connection points. She had rammed her sword through the armor to the hilt, but all that was below her sword blade was more armor.

"I'm not equipped to fight this thing!" Jura wailed.

"Get behind me, get to cover!" Morgan Chevalier recommended as he moved forward with the Launcher Strike pack to take his shots. "Work on that right front knee!" he said mostly to the other soldier (not pirate) pilots. One shot, two shots, both struck true on the exposed knee casing, but the third shot seemed to carve out a critical joint support and caused part of the knee to buckle.

"Holy shit! It's working!" Yzak fired four of the missiles out of his missile pack at the knee joint, with three hits that caused the joint to buckle further. The unidentified machine was already starting to lean into the damaged leg, as if the engineering on it had not accounted for the loss of a leg properly?

Nicol used the beam claw on the shield of the GuAIZ to chop through the end of the last two tendrils it was using to generate the directed sandstorms, and with that damage ended the sand threat. "Last of its remote weapons are done!"

Pytor, seeing where the structure was now laid deficient in the machine's knee joint, fired his two large pulse lasers into the weakened structure. They were not minor strikes, either — each beam carried with it roughly 200 megajoules of raw thermo-kinetic energy, and that energy applied to a space not much smaller than a man's fist finished the job. The two beams scorched through what structural steel was still in place on the outside of the knee joint, and simple torsion physics finished tearing apart the joint from the translated mass of the machine. Now unable to support the weight, and being front-heavy now that it was not supporting the weight of the remote weapon tendrils, the machine collapsed forward onto the ruins it had been lording over.

"EEEKKKK!" Jura shouted as the dust and debris started flying past her machine. Morgan's Mobile Suit blocked several significant pieces of debris that would have laid out the much smaller Vanguard.

"Holy crap! We brought the damned thing down!" Hibiki shouted.

"Damn good work targeting the tendrils, pilot," Yzak said to Hibiki as the Duel put its left hand on the shoulder of the Vanguard.

"This ground action stuff isn't easy!" He bemoaned as the dust began settling.

"Ground team, Archangel, we are landing for pickup. The countdown for the planet self-destruct has not stopped, we need to evacuate the area." Dorothy said.

"Glad to get out of here," Athrun said.

-x-x-x-

(Day 13, 2015 hours Shipboard Time)
(Crew Lounge, Nirvana)

Gascogne watched Hibiki enter the crew lounge, wander around for a minute, then leave again without having grabbed anything to eat. Given his expression — lost in thought combined with the deflation of stress — the veteran crew chief figured Hibiki was mulling something over consciously and his body was operating on autopilot. Several of the girls under her command did the same thing from time to time.

A quick shuffle of the deck and she dealt herself a hand. "He'll be back here in about five minutes," she thought aloud. "Ten at the most."

The card-work was becoming something of a quirk of hers, more so since she usually used it to relieve stress of her own. Her days of wandering in a daze with her body on autopilot were long gone, back when she had been a greenhorn on a different ship before she was transferred under Magno's direct command. Nowadays, she sorted out the gaps in her mind's continuity by way of practicing card-hands, understanding the art of chance.

Except, now her mind was beginning to associate that art of gambling on the outcomes of cards with another gamble that she wasn't fully ready to take, but in no fashion was yet ready to quash.

Gascogne would not admit it to anyone in the crew, but she was already convinced that men were not the evil monstrosities that Meijere society had made them out to be. She did not, nor would she ever, track with the raw biases of the rest of the Nirvana Crew, simply because she had already understood that human is human, man or woman notwithstanding, and there had to be some reason that the two genders existed. And she was already fairly certain that reason did not include eating each other's livers. That thought caused her to shudder in disgust, but not for the horror of the act, but that the societies had been propagandized to the degree that they actually believed it.

Mostly, she would not discuss her inner thought processes because she did not need the lectures. Dita would be the only person she could think of offhand that wouldn't do so — she was farther into the 'mister alien' thing than Gascogne thought was healthy, but at least Dita was headed in what she felt was the right direction. Jura probably would have something to say about the appearance of the matter. Barnett she wasn't quite as sure about, after the very narrow victory she squeaked out against Kira Yamato, Gascogne could see some cracked resolve in her attitude. Meia was a definite: that manner of lecture would cover either the men being a threat, or relying on others, or both. Likely both, Gascogne figured.

True to her expectation, Hibiki walked back into the cafeteria, his mind grasping for something while his body free-roamed. Idly, she dealt herself one card and turned it face up — the king of spades, oddly enough, which caused a brief smile from her given her intention.

-x-

Hibiki wasn't technically sleepwalking, per se, but an analysis of his brain activity (or telepathy) would have found his mental state not far removed from the state of delta wave thought patterns. His mind was still de-stressing from the rough day he had on the surface of that desert planet, and the view of the planet as the defense mechanism converted the core of the planet into a white dwarf star. That alone was frightening enough to everyone involved, given the reality that the enemy had just nuked an entire planet in an attempt to either kill them or destroy evidence. Likely both, Yzak had admitted candidly after the mission debrief.

He was easily conscious enough to realize he had been struck on the cheek by something — the strike caused him a mental jolt, and his reaction speed was fast enough to catch the object that had hit him — a playing card?

"Huh? What?" Hibiki looked past the card to who was sitting at the cafeteria table.

"Bring that card over here and have a seat, pilot," Gascogne said.

"What? Why?" Hibiki asked, still a bit dazed.

"You've got something on your mind, and it's easier to get yourself straightened out if you work through it, not just wander back and forth." She picked up the stack of playing cards and held them up at eye level. "That, and I could use someone else to play a round with."

"Sure, why not?" Hibiki set the card down on the table and took a seat across from her. He had some experience playing cards, from after-work card games with some of the other factory workers. "What's the game?"

"Five-card draw," Gascogne said as she cut in the card Hibiki had set down, and then ran a quick shuffle.

The cards began flying, then the crew chief set down the deck and swept up her cards to sort them. Hibiki did the same. "Huh."

"So, what's on your mind, pilot?" Gascogne asked.

"Was thinking about the battle today," he said after he moved a couple cards around in his hand.

Gascogne caught the hint of hesitation in his voice, and figured it was something a bit more than just the battle itself. By all accounts, Hibiki had acquitted himself well, having chopped off some 6 of the 40 tendrils attached to the back of the enemy machine, not a mean feat against a monster machine such as they were facing. No, given the raw uselessness of the other Vanguard operators in that battle, Hibiki had not a single thing to hold against himself for that battle. "The battle, or the aftermath?"

Hibiki moved another card from one side of his hand to the next. "Yeah," he said simply.

"They tried hard to take us all out. Very hard, as in destroyed an entire planet, their entire resource gathering operation on that world, that means we struck a nerve," Gascogne said.

Another card moved around Hibiki's hand. "What was it all about?"

"We don't know yet," Gascogne said. Hibiki would intellectually know that, but his question was more groping for meaning than seeking a hard-and-fast answer. It was the same question Gascogne had asked herself more than once in the past, and that question simply reinforced her belief that the separate worlds and separate sexes were not intended to be so separate.

"Kira's working on it, I know," Hibiki confirmed Gascogne's appraisal of the question. "I'm just — it makes no sense! Who and what are they? And what do they want?"

"I expect we'll know soon enough," Gascogne said quietly. "Your call."

"Uh," Hibiki hesitated a few seconds, trying to decide which cards to turn in.

More than a few seconds, actually. "Anything?"

"It's a tough decision," he covered for his indecision. He had two options, shoot for a three-of-a-kind in one direction, or shoot for two pair in another.

"Which choice makes more sense?" Gascogne asked.

That question only made the indecision worse. He had no way of knowing what the next cards would be, and thus had no way of knowing which was the right choice. He didn't realize that, just as was issue with his stress-walking, he was in a mental loop lock, this time for a decision as opposed to his earlier lock loop pertaining to understanding.

On impulse more than judgment, he decided to go for the three-of-a-kind. He dropped the three cards that did not match his extant pair. "Three," he said.

"Sure," Gascogne passed her three cards. "I'll do two," she dropped two cards and pulled two for herself.

"So, what is it?" Hibiki asked.

"Three-of-a-kind, 7s, with an ace high," Gascogne said.

"Oh," Hibiki deflated, then set his own cards down. He had achieved the three-of-a-kind he intended, but 3s were trumped by 7s in this case.

"You chose on impulse, and made the right one, but there's more there," Gascogne collected the cards up and began shuffling them. "You're allowing indecision to freeze your mind. That's a bad thing for a pilot. I've seen a few friends go out, get caught in a thought cycle loop, and not come back alive. A couple didn't even come back intact."

"Oh," Hibiki deflated a little further.

"Tomorrow night, I want you here at 9PM sharp," Gascogne said. "Get some sleep, pilot. Rest will help with what happened, and tomorrow we work on overcoming your hesitations," she said.

"Sure," Hibiki said warily as he stood up. "Thanks for the match."

"And remember, smile," she said in parting.

Two minutes later, as she was compulsively shuffling the cards, she came to a conclusion of her own. Treat a man like any other person, and that's what you get, she thought behind a slight smile.

-x-x-x-

(Day 14, 1430 hours Shipboard Time)
(Galley, Archangel)

"What's my time?" Kira asked as he began plating up his sides and ran one last turn on the shrimp kebabs.

"Should be here any minute," Ryback checked the galley clock against the oporder for the meal. He had considered it just a shade over the top that Commander La Flaga had written up a complete deploy order (in the old Earth Alliance style, no less) for the meal, but this being the Archangel Team, Ryback simply acknowledged the oporder and delegated it to Kira (as was requested in the order).

Kira, for his part, had applied his training well. So far as Ryback and Jonesy could tell, Kira had not made one mistake for a greenhorn at the grill. Jonesy had figured that the pressure of the real deal might cause slippage, but Ryback figured otherwise: this being Kira, he figured the pressure of the moment only made the pilot harder. That reaction also would fit the encounter between Barnett and Kira in the hall of the Nirvana, put under sudden and intense pressure, Kira had drawn pistol and winged the Dread Squad Leader apparently while she already had sights on. If that was the measure of Kira's reaction speed, Ryback doubted he could beat Kira in a quickdraw match.

Once the shrimp reached their proper exterior coloration, Kira plated them and opened up the baked potato for garnishing (butter, sour cream and chives). The last item prepared, he set the plate on the warming section of the grill to keep it warm while they waited for Barnett.

After Kira began preparing a small apple fritter for dessert, Ryback's radio beeped. "Galley, Hangar, Bravo en route," Murdoch reported. "Repeat, Bravo is en route."

"Hangar, Galley, acknowledge all," Ryback responded. "She'll be here in about four minutes," the head chef warned Kira.

"Huh, was hoping to have the fritter done as well," Kira said.

"I'll serve, you continue cooking," Ryback said. "In case the rematch swings your way, no personal animus involved."

"Definitely, thanks Master Chief," Kira said with a sigh.

"She may have won, but it was a damn close match," Ryback said offhand. "Even if you lost, that's still better shooting than maybe a thousand troops between ZAFT and the Earth Alliance, tops. That puts you in the top one percent in small arms, and your piloting already speaks for itself."

-x-

"Remember, anything you find, I want an update on it," BC said directly to her junior 'spy' for the expedition.

The 'spy' nodded and headed off toward the bowels of the Archangel.

"Is that going to be safe?" Barnett asked BC as they headed for the galley.

"Better to put her to working on this side than ours," BC said cryptically as they passed the Archangel Crew Chief — Murdoch, she remembered correctly — and headed into the lower levels of the ship.

"Is she really that — "

"Bad? No, not really bad, just very much inclined to gossip." BC sighed. "While I expect some gossip around the ship, she generates a bit more than we need."

"And it's usually harmful gossip, not just the usual stuff or anything really amusing," Barnett admitted her opinion on the matter.

They passed a pair of technicians, both of whom came to attention as the squad leader and ship XO passed them. One man, one woman, working on a power distribution bus. Barnett shivered unconsciously from being accorded such an honor. BC, oddly enough, saluted them quickly and kept going, almost completely at ease with it.

After they were a corridor's length down the hall, Barnett turned left (toward the starboard side) and took two paces before she stopped. "BC, honest question."

"Yes?" Buson said calmly.

"Are we supposed to get used to the men, or get used to dealing with this crew?"

" 'Supposed to'? The Captain hasn't given any kind of orders like that," BC answered evenly, though she could sense the question was leading.

"You know what I mean, Commander. The Captain can't give an order like that, it'll cause a mutiny. I mean, do you intend us to get used to the men by common contact?"

"No," BC answered with a straight face, even though Magno's intention was almost exactly that. "What you feel is your own prerogative. You want to get used to the men, your call. Personally, I'm more concerned about learning lessons from the Archangel Team on how they've survived this long with so many different little groups in their team."

"Oh," Barnett grumped. "That makes more sense."

"Your feelings go where your feelings go. You just need to listen to them. Come on, your dinner is waiting."

-x-

Paiway had deliberately taken a different path away from the hangar than her last adventure on this ship, and for good cause. She figured that the pilots were interesting, but there had to be something even more scandalous on the ship somewhere.

She didn't take long to encounter something rather curious…

"Are you sure you wish to join us, Terra?" Commander La Flaga asked of the maid of the hot springs.

"Yes sir, I need the practice," she said.

"Come on, then," the Commander waved her toward one of the cargo bays. "And you, Paiway?" he asked without even looking at her.

Guess I can't fool him, she thought behind a quickly soured mien. After a moment's hesitation, Paiway rounded the corner. "Okay, I guess. What is this?"

"Training session, blade combat," Mu answered as she approached. "Nothing really special."

"Okay," she said warily. Paiway figured this would be a good opportunity to see how well the group trained, that might be something useful to the Commander.

The inside of the cargo bay was unlike anything on the Nirvana, Paiway realized. The whole room had been padded, unusual equipment was all over the place, and there were several wide-open areas in the room, one of which was occupied by several of the pilots — and now Miss Terra?

Paiway wandered past some of the men who were hanging about one of the machines, then realized that someone was laying on a bench attached to the machine. Naturally, she had arrived in the middle of a conversation, but it was still a bit interesting. "I think you can do it, June," the taller of the two guys said.

"You think so? I've never been above 75 kilos before," the lady lying on the bench said. From Paiway's initial angle, she couldn't tell it was a lady, but a few steps to the side and she could clearly see the lady on the bench.

"The way you're pushing 75, I think 90 should be easy," the guy behind the bench said.

"Okay, worth a shot," she said. "Slap 'em on."

"Fifteen kilos, coming up," Each of the guys added two circular plates to the bar ends and put clamps on the plates to make sure they did not move.

"Okay, here goes," the lady said. She put both hands on a textured part of the bar and pushed it up and over her chest.

"Remember, if you feel anything start to give out, call it. This is about improvement, not score," the observer to the side said.

"Definitely!" the lady said with some strain to voice. Paiway watched as the guy behind her head put his hands under the bar but never touched it. "Ready?" she asked after a moment.

"At your option," the guy said.

The bar came down to her upper chest but never touched, then she pushed it back up. "One," she said.

"Think you can go further?" the guy behind her asked.

"That wasn't as bad as I thought. I'll try a set, see how it does," she lowered the bar again, then pushed it up again. "Two," she counted off.

"Keep 'em coming, Petty Officer," the guy behind her said.

"Three — four — five — six — seven — eight — nine — ten," she did each repetition in the same form, at the same speed.

"Drop or hold?" the guy behind her asked.

"Drop," she slid the bar back again to where it landed on a pair of brackets, then released it. "Wow, okay, you two win that one," she said.

"Bullshit we win, that was you," the observer to the side said. "That wasn't me pushing the 90 kilo bar."

Curiosity finally drove Paiway to the question in her mind: "Excuse me, what were you doing?"

"Huh?" The lady sat up to see who had asked, and Paiway could tell she understood the question as soon as she saw her. "Oh, that? Weight training. Trying to improve my strength, so I can lift and move more."

"Uh, okay," Paiway took a couple notes on her notepad. "How important is that?"

"It varies," she answered. "Some of us have a lot of lifting to do, others not so much. I do some lifting at post, so I try to make sure I'm up to the task."

"Oh, thanks!" Paiway waved her appreciation as she headed toward where Commander La Flaga had gone.

"That was different," she heard from behind her.

"Everyone's gotta learn somewhere," the shorter guy had said. "Take a couple minutes, then we'll do another set."

-x-

Barnett wasn't quite sure if it would be prudent to admit it, but she figured she was obligated to say something even if what was in her mind could be construed as inappropriate for the crew of the Nirvana.

"That was very good," Barnett said. "I didn't figure Kira for a kitchen type?" she asked Commander Haww.

"He's a fast learner," Miriallia answered without much in the way of thinking about it. After the fact, she had to admit to herself that he was the fastest learner in a group that wasn't exactly known for mental slouches — all four of the ZAFT troops were nearly as sharp. "The galley staff is kinda particular about who works in there. As far as I know, he hasn't been on the grill before this week."

"Oh," Barnett grumped after she mentally processed what Miriallia had revealed.

"A few days ago, Captain Ramius said that most of the crew was cross-trained to do multiple things," BC prompted. "Are there no other cross-trained galley staff?"

"The Tonberries count for that," Miriallia said. "They're primarily cooking specialists, same as the Chefs, with secondary posting as defensive magic specialists, I think," she explained. "They're not very nimble, but they make up for it in magic power," she explained.

"I still have trouble believing that one," Barnett said before she cut a shrimp in half and took a bite. "Magic. Like the fantasy stories of old, only in real life."

"Tell me about it," Miriallia agreed with her. "Spent my life believing it was all fake, until we were dropped into Cephiro. I learned real fast that the magic was quite real, and quite dangerous. Then Gaia, Halkegenia, no clue what's next," she admitted.

Barnett had the other half of her latest shrimp piece. "What about here?"

"Dunno," Miriallia readily admitted. "May be some magic, may not be. So far, there's a lot of technology aimed at killing us."

"That reminds me, any word on the hacked data?" Barnett beat BC to the question.

"Not yet, the computers are still working on analysis," Miriallia answered. She had ordered Kira to inform her immediately when it was ready, and the data was not yet, so…

"Commander, next series of manufacturing requests," Murdoch said without much in the way of formality before he set a tablet down on the table next to Miriallia's lunch. She didn't even get a chance to pick it up before he was in the lunch line.

Miriallia groaned. "This job neither begins nor ends, it just keeps going."

"Very true," BC sympathized.

Barnett, for all her reservation about the topic of men and women, was starting to internalize one critical lesson that the Captain intended but could never say. The cooking, the banter, the problems, the personalities, they're not so different from us.

-x-

Paiway had not yet left the training room, mainly because the real attraction of it was in the sparring area — the main melee weapons users of the group.

The match was already in action, with two in the center and the remainder of the sparring participants forming a circle around them. This first match (that she was observing) was between Nicol and Umi, Nicol using paired swords, Umi with a single thin sword. It seemed an incongruent match, as Nicol had all the advantages at first glance — until they actually moved. The lady in blue was able to get in past the outside of Nicol's right sword, then in against his exposed side with her own.

"Point for Umi," Commander La Flaga scored her a tally against Nicol on the whiteboard they were using to track scores. "Call your next," he continued.

"Fuu," Umi said with a nod to the Magic Knight of Windam.

"Sure," the Magic Knight stepped forward, reached to her glove, and drew her hand away from it — and in a green flash, her sword came with it. Both gave a quick bow, then leveled their swords in a guard position.

Their first clash was fast and furious. Umi tried, again, to get inside the movement arc of her foe's blade, but Fuu was waiting for her attempt and drove through Umi with the flat of her massive blade — enough, actually, to splay the smaller Magic Knight out. Fuu tried the coup d'main strike to finish off this spar, but Umi was fast enough to get her own sword up and in position to redirect the larger blade down into the mat. With Fuu's sword grounded and Umi's right arm clear to conduct, it was a simple thing to bring the 'flat' (non-edged surface) of her blade around into the left thigh of the standing Magic Knight.

"D'oh! That smarts!" Fuu gaped after the slap of Umi's blade against her leg.

"Overplayed your length advantage," Yzak pointed out the flaw in her tactic.

"Point for Umi, again, but not a clean win," Mu marked it off as a win, regardless. "Call your next."

"Actually, I think I'll challenge you," Umi pointed at Mu. "You've gone the whole session without one round, so you're next."

"All right, who will track scores?" Mu held up a marker.

"I will," Paiway said compulsively — after the fact, she had no clue why she volunteered, but she realized it was a good excuse to watch and study them.

"You're on," Mu flipped her the marker and stepped into the circle. The weapon he pulled from his magic glove was different — it wasn't a sword, it was a long polearm with an axe blade on one side, a hooked spike on the other side, and a spear point at the end facing up. Again, the combatants bowed slightly, then took their preferred guard positions, and again the first action was very fast and almost impossible for Paiway to follow. From what she could tell, Mu had gone low for his first try, had his weapon struck aside, then pressed in with the pole and tried to bring it around into her side to try to push or trip her.

The trip action missed Umi entirely, as she took hold of the end of his halberd to prevent the strike with her left hand, then spun around in the opposite direction from his swing and brought the blade of her sword into the flat of his back just above his hip.

"Another point for Umi," Paiway marked off the appropriate field for her win against the Commander. "Call your next!"

"Yzak!" Umi pointed to him in a grand gesture.

"Sure you want to do this?" Yzak asked as he stepped up for the battle. After a moment, he reached to his glove and drew out his own sword, a longer sword that required two hands to use properly, but did not have the wide blade that Fuu's sword had. With blade in hand, he bowed as was proper for the match, then took guard stance.

This time, Umi gave the offense, she started with a low rapier thrust aimed at Yzak's left thigh, intended to work her way around his massive sword before he could begin a counterstrike. What she didn't expect was that Yzak anticipated her opening, anticipated her target, and brought his sword down into the path of her strike, forcing the rapier out and away from his leg. The natural counter was to try to move his sword forward to cut her at the exposed shoulder, but she wisely rotated her sword to guard-level to prevent him moving it easily.

With the blade trapped, Yzak quickly changed plans to counter her. The sword blade stayed in place, locked on a pivot by the guard of Umi's rapier, but he drove the handle and specifically the large hilt forward and down onto her shoulder. Umi caught the intention quickly enough, using the hilt as a bludgeon was a known and accepted european combat technique, but her thrusting stance gave her only two options: move forward or collapse down, neither a good option in these quarters. She chose to move forward, which inadvertently completed Yzak's intention: her attempt to get inside his arc put her shoulder forward of the hilt and quillon, so when he drove down on her with the hilt and handle it snagged her shoulder and hooked her into the fall.

Yzak's coup d'main for this spar was to drop a knee into the center of her back, flattening her to the mat, and reach for where a tactical holster would be on his right leg. "Gun gun gun!"

"Technical kill," Mu said. The premise was simple: any Archangel Team member was likely to be well armed, and if they could down a foe and draw a firearm with no hazard of being stabbed in counter, it counted as a technical kill. Being shot by a firearm didn't make someone any less dead than if stabbed by a magic sword, all other factors being equal.

Yzak stood up from the knee-suppress position he had held on Umi, and after a moment she rolled over. "Didn't see that one coming?" the Duel pilot asked.

"Saw it, not fast enough to clear it," Umi answered. "Over-committed the thrust."

"It happens," Yzak offered her a hand up, which she took readily enough, and a second later Umi was standing.

"How do I mark a technical kill?" Paiway asked.

"Same as a normal win," Hikaru explained.

"Done," Paiway marked Yzak's first victory of the day. "Call your next!" she said to Yzak.

"Terra, your turn," Yzak said with a nod to the green-haired lady in their ranks.

It would be several hours before their sparring match was completed, and Paiway would accompany the group to the hot springs for some rest and recovery. And all throughout, she kept coming back to one thought: They never make any mention of gender differences or separations, all they do is practice, learn lessons, and continue some more, she realized after an hour of the sparring. It was a lesson she didn't expect to see, but easily recognized when she did.

-x-x-x-

(Day 15, 0645 hours Shipboard Time)
(Medbay, Nirvana)

"Okay, abdominal cramps from here to here?" he demonstrated on Ezra's midriff.

"Yes. It comes and goes," she admitted.

"Anything else that you've noticed in the past couple days?" he asked.

"Uh, I've been a bit more hungry at meal times," Ezra noted after a moment of thinking about it.

"So, abdominal cramps and increased dietary intake. Could be one of several issues, have you noticed anything else?" Duello continued. The first step to identifying a problem was collecting sufficient information to determine what it could be, the same in medical sciences as it was in any other technical field.

"Oh," Ezra had to pause for a moment to think about it. "I have been getting tired for the past week about the middle of the day. Don't know why, I haven't been doing anything more than my usual routine. Oh, and today I've had a headache that simply won't quit since this morning," she said.

The mounting evidence wasn't adding up to anything specific that Duello recognized. Something was up, for certain, but what exactly it was didn't match anything he had encountered in medical school. That said, he did realize that he had one glaring deficiency — the Tarak medical school curriculum was completely bereft of medical knowledge and practices for women. (For obvious reasons, there would be little need for it — after all, was not Tarak mortal enemies with Meijere?)

Duello, unlike a lot of medical professionals from Tarak, was not under the common prejudices and assumptions of his profession. He knew what he knew, he knew enough to recognize what he didn't know, and he was smart enough to understand that not knowing was going to be a problem when treating female personnel.

"It's a start, but so far I'm not seeing a clear pattern as to what could be going on here," Duello admitted after a few moments of considering the list. "I'll do some quick research, see if I can narrow down what is happening. I'd like to see you back in an hour for further discussion, okay?"

Ezra was a little slow to stand up from her seat on the end of the examination table, but in so doing passed directly in front of Duello's face at a distance of less than twenty centimeters. He took note of what he saw, that her bra seemed to be incorrectly fitted and was leaving varied impressions from her shirt, and realized that he had not seen that happenstance before on her. Thinking back to the (admittedly few) times he had seen her, he could not remember having noticed that, which made it something she wasn't mentioning, probably out of hesitation due to the whole gender issue. It would be a clue, but not one he would mention immediately, he figured. He didn't want to add to any ongoing antagonism.

"So nothing serious, you think?" she asked.

"So far, nothing serious comes to mind," Duello comforted her. "I'm just not sure specifically what it may be, but nothing suggests a major problem."

"Okay, thanks! I'll be back in an hour."

Duello sighed in relief after the door closed. "Now to figure out what it all means."

Duello was thankful that the medical quarters in the old half of the ship still had a full reference system and computer with capable cross-referencing software that he could input a list of symptoms and it would narrow down a list of possible causes.

"Okay, abdominal cramps, fatigue, headache," he entered the first three symptoms into the system. The likely result were food allergies or digestive instability, chronic fatigue syndrome, insomnia, or seasonal allergies. "That's unlikely, otherwise I would see more such complaints from the crew," he grumped about the most likely issue (food allergies or digestive instability)

After he entered the fourth indicator, increased dietary intake, the likely result came up as 'Digestive parasite / tapeworm', which was not an unknown problem in Tarak, but she lacked the other symptoms of it (weight gain or weight loss, difficulty with defecation, symptoms of malnourishment). Silently he wondered if such symptoms were not likely or reduced in females? After a few minutes to read through the description, he decided against given that the old medical records did not mention a gender disparity for this malady.

So, barring anything conclusive so far, he entered the symptom he noticed but was not told: swollen chest. The computer corrected his input to swollen mammaries (a term he had not heard before), and that indicator added a new and heretofore unheard-of result to the listing: pregnancy. So, naturally, Duello tapped on the resultant entry and started reading.

"This is not what I expected this to lead to," Duello admitted quietly, given that he had not heard of such processes in the Tarak medical school system (again, for obvious reasons — males would not need to concern with such things). The necessary information, testing protocols, and term care information in the data files was extensive — and signalled that Duello was in for a nearly-40-week crash course in a whole new side of medical care, followed by possible years of crash course in pediatric care, something he only marginally touched on during his years in medical school.

An hour later, Ezra returned to the medical lab for the news. Duello put her to a couple more tests, including an ultrasound. What he found confirmed his reading, and confirmed what he knew was going to be the beginning of a very educational experience. It was also, as these things happened, rather happy news for Ezra.

-x-x-x-

(Day 15, 2030 hours Archangel time)

The decryption work had taken the two Quantum Mainframes and the AI Controller in the Strike Freedom some two days and a couple more hours to properly decrypt the contents of the stolen data, then index and begin analysis of it. The latter task was the easy part, Kira knew, given that once the data was visible the computer would mow through the collation task like a chainsaw.

After the indexing, it was up to them to analyze the data. 'Them' being Kira, Athrun, Yzak, and Nicol, the four hands-down fastest readers and analyzers of the group.

"Okay, let's start with what the hell was supposed to be going on on that desert world we were on," Yzak said. "Can the Strike Freedom isolate on just that record set?"

"Filtering results now," the tablet connected to the main computer in the Strike Freedom answered audibly. Ten seconds later: "Results have been filtered to desert planet only, including cleartext reports sent just before the planet's destruction."

"Display it," Kira requested.

"What the fuck is this?" Yzak asked. " 'Blood products and whole blood harvesting operations have been extremely successful in sectors A and B, subjects have offered little resistance to fleet elements in requested areas.' "

"Here. Listen to this one. 'Forecast for spinal column, skeletal components, and bone marrow harvesting is running at or above expected yields for harvesting fleet in sectors B and D.' I'd hope they're not referring to humans." Nicol set down his tablet computer and looked at the other crewmembers.

"It would have to be," Kira sunk Nicol's hope aborning. "Remember the programming we found in their attacker's operating system pertaining to capturing people alive? You don't go to the effort of capturing people you intend to exterminate, unless you have alternate reasons."

"And then there's this," Athrun held up his tablet. " 'Additional unidentified human settlements found in sectors F and J in excess of several thousand persons, analysis shows excellent material for multiple muscle group harvesting and for additional sources of blood products and organs.' "

"Damn, they're using human settlements as larders for harvesting biological components," Yzak said. "Now what?"

"The Captain needs to know this, probably the Nirvana as well," Athrun pointed out.

"Let's get it written up," Kira said.

"Wait, wait a minute!" Nicol half-shouted at his tablet.

"What?" Yzak asked.

"This," he passed his tablet to the Duel pilot.

Yzak took only ten seconds to read the report. "Oh, holy shit and a chainsaw," he said after it sunk in thirty seconds later.

"What?" Athrun asked after he saw the pale expression on his comrade's face.

"Tarak and Meijere. The Harvester Fleet designates them as harvesting locations for reproductive organs and related organ systems," Yzak said. "And the schedule for harvesting is only 240 days away."

"That's roughly how long we would take to get there," Kira said, having seen the travel estimates for the trip to Tarak from where they landed.

"It's gonna be close, that's for sure," Nicol said.

"We can't let them get away with this shit," Yzak challenged the others.

It was a challenge none of them would shrink from.

-x-

(30 minutes later)
(Captain's Quarters, Nirvana)

"What do you think, BC?" Magno asked her 2-I-C about the report just delivered by Yzak.

"Hard to swallow. Very hard to swallow, actually, but not impossible," she answered. "First, they have the technical capabilities that would be needed for mass-scale harvesting of body parts. Second, as the later section of the report states, they have plenty of ships to throw into it."

"At least thirteen of the primary Harvester Fleet ships, and at least two Harvester Command Ships," Yzak confirmed. "Those alone are more than enough firepower to do what they intend, never mind the lesser assets they have roaming around," he pointed out.

"Third, we found the programming in their systems that points to just exactly what they say they are doing," BC said, by which she meant the Archangel Team crew had found that programming. Parfait had checked the code after the fact, having some experience in programming herself, and confirmed their analysis. "Lastly, if the enemy was providing this to us as disinformation, what is their reason? I'm not seeing a motive in giving us this as a false flag, unless they want us to disassemble these Harvester ships? I see that as completely contrary to any plan they would have."

"We didn't catch wind of it in the data files, but they have to know of our capabilities, and we were cut off before we could pull a full core's worth of data, so there has to be more," Captain Ramius explained. "Assuming they do know about us and have a rough idea of the capabilities our teams have, provoking us by waving this kind of monstrous plan in our face wouldn't be smart."

"Honest question, do you think they knew and were falsifying information?" Magno asked Yzak directly.

"Honest guess, no," Yzak went with what he figured was the likely answer. "As BC pointed out, if this is a false flag, they're doing it wrong. You don't tell an enemy you are going to be complete monsters and where you're going to do it at, that is just asking to have your party crashed. Granted, they could be falsifying locations to divert us or lure us into traps, but given the nature of their equipment, that's a nasty gamble that I wouldn't take in their position. We've made a habit of breaking their toys, throwing more into the equation isn't going to guarantee success for their plans."

"Concur, Captain," BC agreed with Yzak.

Magno sighed. "This finally puts in place a motive for a happening in my past — the true reason why I began a career in piracy," Magno said. "I've been a pirate for almost a hundred years, but I never knew what caused the actions of the past that so disgusted me. Now I do."

"That's one hell of a career span," Yzak said. "And I thought four, almost five years as dimension-hopping mercenaries was interesting."

"We will have to discuss this further, but not today. I need some confirmation of these theories before I explain. This could all still be an elaborate deception, and I don't want to play my hand on a bluff," Magno said.

"We need to get inside their network again," Yzak said coldly. "If we can capture a quantum access point intact and not on a world about to be destroyed, we can farm their entire network."

"How would we do that?" Magno asked.

Yzak didn't have a ready answer for the question. For a few moments, his eyes ranged around the room, unfocusingly looking at random objects as his mind raced to come up with something workable. For it, he could only come up with one conclusion. "The Harvester Ships are mobile access points. The harvester ships also have their own destruct systems, but those can be easily handled since we have schematics. If we can capture a ship reasonably intact, we can pull the access node, integrate it into the Archangel or Nirvana, and use it as a stealth data farm. If we do it right, they'll never know we screwed their network from the inside until well after we've hammered their campaign flat."

"So, we're going to go hunting?" BC asked.

"They've gone out of their way to attack us already, and we know their purpose — assuming this data is authentic, that is," Murrue qualified that much of the report. "On those points, I figure bringing the fight to them would be a good idea."

"We'll get ready for it," BC said. "We won't be briefing the crew in, yet, until we have confirmation, but once we do..."

"Yeah. If we get confirmation, it's time to bring them to their knees," Murrue said.

---

Author's Chapter Afterword:

This chapter has been a long time coming but is a fulfillment of a promise that I have not yet given up on this story!

For the warning at the beginning of the chapter, and as was pointed out by Dragoon 725, Meia has a pretty severe case of claustrophobia in the anime. This is a bit nonsensical on the face of it, as working on a starship (which is mostly enclosed) and piloting a fighter (again, mostly enclosed) would trigger that claustrophobia to varying degrees. Other than the Vanguard incident on the desert planet, I don't recall it being a factor in the show. I'll let that much slide, but I omitted Meia from the desert planet mission deliberately due to this. If the fear is crippling enough as it was in the show, and with the Archangel's involvement, she would not be required.

In case it isn't obvious, I'm working on a logical way to condense the plotline of the anime for writing purposes, but also keep the major points in and magnify the conflict side of the story for the purposes of the Archangel Team ops. If I went with the pattern of conflict strictly shown in the story, it would be a cakewalk for the Archangel, and as much as a good breather is needed from time to time, nope, there is FAR too much potential in the background of Vandread to squander such an opportunity.

So, herein comes the most interesting problem thereof. Vandread, as is shown in the anime, is mostly focused on the relationship woes and strife of the Nirvana. A lot of those positions have shifted already because of the Archangel Team, but be warned that it is not all sorted out yet for obvious reasons. Not to mention, while certain persons are learning to deal with it (or actually trust the Archangel), there is a lot of the Nirvana crew that will not trust them at all or is not yet headed in that direction. As was pointed out in the story, five or six generations of prejudice and cooties are not going to simply evaporate overnight. Some will strive to do better, others will strive to make sure they do not do better. It's the old world problem of this kind: even in the face of abject evidence to the contrary, some people will believe what their ingrained biases tell them to believe.

Now, note that in the anime, the Nirvana faces only about seven of the Harvester ships and one of the enemy command ships. I've already upped that ante to 13 and 2 respectively, but you can bet your bottom C-bill that I haven't finished fleshing out the OpFor TO&E (2) for obvious reasons. I'm still not sure how hard I want to make this one on the Archangel, maybe I'll let the dice decide? Hard to say, hard to say...

On the writing front, I should apologize for the delay in getting this out. I have had a lot of loss of motivation to write anything of late, but have corrected most of that. It also doesn't help that I've become something of a Crossout aficionado, I have a love for sniper builds in that game, I do pretty good on Bridge simply shooting across the chasm into the enemy ranks. Love it! A 6lb cannon and a 20mm Autocannon goes a long way to ruining an enemy's day.

I also injured myself pretty badly a couple weeks ago, bad sprain to my left knee. Then I had two roadtrips (both 500+ miles) the following week. Oi. So that put me down for the count for a week, given that I trust hotel Wi-Fi about as much as I trust Equifax in guarding personal data. It's also harvest season, so canning is in full swing, which tends to disrupt many well-planned gaming and writing , it is what it is. I'm working on writing more and dealing with disruptions less, but I make no guarantees.

This is it for this chapter. NEXT UP: Nirvana and Archangel against a Harvester unit. Ship happens, and it won't be pretty in any fashion.

---

Review Replies: If I am doing the math right, I received 32 reviews since the last chapter. 3-2 reviews. Ho Lee Fook. THANK YOU ALL!

Psyraptor (first review): Command and Conquer has been suggested a couple times, it is certainly possible. Strange, but certainly possible!

DS Gundam00: As it stands, I am a couple Gundam series behind the curve for viewing, so I need to catch up on those as well. Thanks for the recommendations, and for any Gundam SEED fan, I think you won't object to the next one-chapter stop, I already have it planned :)

Tanker 0923: Not a very fast update, per se, but I intend at least one more this year before my Christmas Present!

Dark Phoenix Jake: On the Scientists, they will definitely be making new weapons for the Gundams shortly. Remember Yzak's fascination with add-on weapons for the Duel? Here we go again…

Infinite Freedom: The dating hijinks have not yet kicked into high gear, but as I pointed out above, there will be a lot of problems going in both directions on this matter.

Korraganatar The NightShadow: I've considered Nanoha as a possible, but I need to acquire the series first before I do so. Thanks!

Reishin Amara: I need to catch up on the Gundam releases of late, and IBO is on the list, so…

2ndsly: Trowa's Gundam is also in play, but he has yet to properly earn his place in the flight line. Give him an episode or two to finish recovering and test in, then you'll see some serious numeric kills.

Redemption Warrior: The question of how the Magic Knights would stack up in a MW:RPG scenario is dependent on how much you're willing to allow for magic in question, but suffice it to say that in close only a true master of melee combat or CQB would be a proper match to the Magic Knights. Firearms wise, they rate in about the same as regular infantry, and their Rune Gods would give them immense combat ability against most Battlemechs, overwhelming against most of them except against a numerically superior foe.

NHO: Your thoughts on DOOM are rather evil. I kinda like that.

Finnzo: Your recollection as to the last few episodes of VanDread is accurate, but I am going to both magnify that little trait and move in several different directions with it.

RC 1212: Much obliged for the words of encouragement. Hope this follows in your expectations!

Barricade: I haven't yet pushed the bounds of the Jump Pack yet, but now that Paxis and nanomachines is involved, there are options. The Strike Freedom LRRP Mass Prod unit hails from a timeline with more options for interdimensional travel than you can shake a beam saber at, and upgrades would be perfectly simple. In fact, their next destination will give them an onus to do it better.

Extreme Ninja 909: I may not directly reply, but I try to reply in my review replies, always. That codifies what I have to say for everyone to see, and gives credit where due.

Rest assured, there will be a break coming up in a few destinations. I'm not completely cruel to the Archangel, just mostly.

As to Tenchi Muyo, I never did GXP or Geminar, I did the original and Tenchi Universe. That said, I have to watch my step on that one, as there is bleed-over into the background lore of my other stories. Nothing paradoxical, mind you, as there is a massive time differential, but Tenchi is a definite possible.

Knives 91: Yzak is precisely no manner of subtle, but he's learning at least a small amount of tact from dealing with Umi over the years. Still, if this chapter hadn't nuked a Jura - yzak session, someone else might try…

CHM 01: Relax, amigo, there will be a rematch. As to adaptation on the enemy's part, oh yes, expect it.

Ryuma 085: Okay, on attacking your question pertaining to nano-laminate armor versus SEED tech weapons, that's a simple one. If a second's exposure to beam fire will flash-vaporize the beam protection in a Nano-composite armor, then by default it's not going to make a difference against more focused beam strikes, even strikes that have an exposure lapse of a partial second, and it will have no value against kinetic or explosive damage. Energy weapon damage is a factor of exposure area, transmitted energy, and exposure time. The small (57mm) beam weapons in use in SEED do their damage by hammering a plurality of megajoules of energy into a target in roughly a quarter-second of beam exposure. By that metric, I'd wager the actual net energy is on the order of 10 or 15 megajoules. Even if the armor resisted that much energy transfer at a chemical level, the kinetic transfer of that much energy in such a small area would still cause significant trauma. As to missile or kinetic weapons, if the armor begins deforming in front of a railgun slug, oops, it loses its ability to stop it and the slug just keeps on going on sheer inertia alone. On missiles, assuming the nano-layer stops the energy component of a shape-charge penetrator (doubtful at these numbers), the answer comes behind it 50 milliseconds later, as most anti-armor missiles are-dual-charge warheads and the same energy problem is repeated on an expended armor layer.

Also, weapons designed to penetrate a defensive layer of 1 micron of material will have nearly no value against either Gundanium or Phase Shift. Penetrating 1 micron of armor and then losing its ability to function does not create a fatal hole in several centimeters of armor. More to the point, the armor has defensive value throughout its entire depth, not just on the surface or even in several strata inside the armor laminate. Homogenous Gundanium would be damn near undamaged by such an attack, Phase Shift would be entirely undamaged (unless it ran out of power).

Psyraptor: I was always more of a fan of Red Alert, and I could easily see Yuri earning the wrath of the Archangel Team if they tried to mind control one of their teammates. "Oh, you just mind bombed one of my crewmembers? Let's see how well your Psychic Dominators work after I've used a Positron Cannon on them." Oops.

NHO: I was wondering if someone would go there, and you finally did. By the Gods, you did. And it sounds goofier than I could have imagined. Of course, Neuroi Archangel would be rather apeshit, but…

Synbad2: Eh, good point, nice catch on that one. I didn't really consider the recovery time when I wrote those sections. I'll keep that in mind going forward, thanks!

Dragoon 725: thanks for the review and thanks for the protip on Meia. Given, as I pointed out in my notes, the variable sensitivity of the subject in question, I omitted her completely from the deployment on the desert planet. Her claustrophobia will come into play at a later time, though, so stay tuned for further.

As to the variable logic of the harvester ships as mobile factories, oh hell yes am I going to be expanding their capabilities. That expansion will not begin in the next chapter, but what the Archangel is about to find out is that information warfare cuts both ways. That challenge will go up for them to a massive degree.

On the matter of the Nirvana crew going Mack the Knife on the Archangel, they'll think twice about it after the events of these three chapters — first the Hydra, then the incident on the desert planet, then the coming ship scrap.

The personal relationships angle — especially Meia and Athrun — will be a bit delayed due to oncoming events, but that is entirely possible an angle to play. Thanks for the idea!

Bleach 5700: I have not yet finalized the exact degree of copying they can do, but it will become a serious pain in the ass for the Archangel in coming chapters.

As to combining units on the Archangel side, as you pointed out, those units re not touched by the Paxis so natively they do not have combining abilities. That said, this is the Archangel we're talking about, anything is subject to change.

RJP: 1. No, they will get married. 2, classified due to spoilers. 3, Okay, then, Charlie, that's a hard question to answer, but I'd have to say no. By the combined ethos under which I write, killing someone with telepathy is extremely difficult (to the point that the amount of times it has happened in the combined timelines can be counted on one hand, and all but one of those incidents were a fluke).

Guest: Oh ye, be wary what you ask for, things can get strange at the drop of a hat :)

Black Hole Lord: Kira and Barnett are not yet sunk, so stand by for further.

Sabaku no Yokho: I hope the wait was worth the material, amigo! As to your suggestions, most of those are already on the list of possibles!

Perseus 12: C'mon, that's a silly one to suggest, the Archangel could mop the floor with an area target like the White Walkers. Of course, I could do as I did here, increase the size of the tangos…

Kphoenix: Always a pleasure to get a review from you, amigo!

Yzak has definitely come a long way, as is evidenced by his quick battle with Umi in this chapter.

The bridge thing is a serious question, and will require some serious work from the Paxis Archangel to correct. Thanks!

Shin 5700: An excellent thesis on the nano-laminate armor, though I did find one thing in error in your logic. Kinetic weapons are a strange enigma in the world of physics and thermodynamics, and given that energy of one type can mutate into another type (within limits) on transfer, I don't believe the railguns in question use a heated-core projectile, I believe that, as with any proper rail gun, the slug is moving so fas that when it strikes, the kinetic energy imparted at the contact point flashes to thermal energy briefly, which would compromise the nano-laminate armor. A much slower kinetic penetrator, the APFSDS in use in a 120mm cannon, produces a plasma flash in the material in front of the nose of the projectile when it impacts, such is the energy transfer brought by such a devastating weapon. Food for thought going forward, amigo.

Sabaku No Yokho: Rumors of my death may be greatly exaggerated, amigo. Never assume, always verify.

Dragon May Cry 12: Writer's block and lack of motivation is a helluva problem. Here's the next!

THANK YOU ALL FOR THE REVIEWS! It's damn good to know that so much interest still exists in this story! If you maintain interest, I will try to keep going!

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The Gripe Sheet:

A couple minor points from the last chapter will be sorted out going forward. Much thanks to Synbad2 for calling me on a logic flaw in the last chapter pertaining to injury recovery. And, as always, thanks to Takeshi Yamato, Sieben Nightwing, and Necroblade for doing the initial edit on my chapters.

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Footnotes:

(1): Baffles is a submariner's term for the area directly behind an opposing submarine where they are nearly incapable of detecting an enemy vessel unless they are using a towed sonar array. In more general use (as Tolle is using it), it represents the rear arcs, anywhere from 4 o'clock to 8 o'clock in terms of coverage angles.

(2): Table Of Organizations and Equipment, the listing of an entire enemy force's personnel, equipment, and subdivisions in their units.