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...

49. Gone Hunting

(Archangel's Amazing Adventures, Set 6: Rampaging Blue Light)
(Story Chapter 49 / Section Chapter 6: Gone Hunting)

(Log Entry, Nicol Amalfi, Arrival Dimension 6, Day 16, 0100 hours Archangel time)

I can only hope that, as this latest journey continues, we have seen the worst of depredation and horror that can be thrown against humanity. Simultaneously, I am forced to admit that even I can imagine worse, and given enough time wandering dimensions, we will find worse. It is not only the stark possibility that worse will happen, but the explanation that we will find it, that fuels a lot of the cynicism around the ship nowadays.

The latest horrors that the Archangel has encountered are, without a doubt, more than ample to dwarf the worst grievances inflicted upon our homeworld in the Cosmic Era. For certain, there are hardliners in ZAFT that want Naturals exterminated (or, as a 'compromise' position, 'bred out of existence'), and there are hardliners in the Earth Alliance that wish similar depredation on Coordinators. Neither group is comparable to the 'Harvester Fleet' we have found ourselves engaged against. Autonomous machines sent forth from unknown parties with the express purpose of capturing and disassembling humans throughout inhabited space.

I use the word 'disassembling' in deliberate phrasing in this case: their purpose is to harvest human body parts and major components for some unknown purpose. That alone is horrific enough that my stomach turns at the thought of it, but now we are faced with an even more potentially nasty question: what purpose does this harvesting serve? We have no information garnered on exact reasons, but if we cannot isolate that information at the least we can deny this otherwise unknown adversary the spoils of his effort. If nothing else, we may be able to determine the who / why / when of this ghastly project by smoking out the command elements.

For now, we'll do the moral thing by defending others, but as we have proved more than once, it is easier to achieve moral ends with judicious offense than it is fighting a constant defense. We need to know where to take the fight to the enemy force, though, before we can begin.

-x-x-x-

(Day 16, 0130 hours Archangel time)

Captain Ramius had ordered the pilots to bed after the soiree with the Nirvana's Captain, mainly because she wanted them rested and fresh for the analysis of who they wanted to intercept in the coming days. Not all fleets are created equal, and Murrue figured taking out one of their lower-string groups would be preferable as a starting move.

Since Morgan Chevalier had the night watch today, Mu and Murrue had some time alone for themselves, a rare commodity on an active warship.

"Captain," Terra acknowledged the person approaching her scheduling podium.

"Anyone in the center rooms?" Murrue asked, referring to the cluster of smaller Hot Spring rooms set up by the Paxis Archangel. Nobody had really figured out if they were supposed to be small group rooms (platonic), family rooms, or lover's rooms, but as was always the case with the Archangel crew the ready assumption was the most lewd, crass, disgusting, unusual, insane, or destructive choice, therefore the rooms had been dubbed the 'couples' rooms'.

"All clear," Terra answered. "I'll put you in the back room, Captain, Commander."

"Thank you," Murrue led the way into the springs area, with Mu not far behind.

"You know, regardless of what we do in here, someone is going to think we were in here getting it on," Mu pointed out as he started stripping down.

"That's normally not a bad thought, but I'm a bit too tired for it," Murrue admitted. She had taken a round in the physical training room today, something she tried to do twice a week to maintain physical condition, but shortly she knew her workout would be reduced to light exercise as she approached full term.

"Weightlifting again?" Mu guessed at the cause, to which she gave him a thumbs up with her free hand. "Doc said when you need to cut back?"

"Not for a while, but I'm reducing each week," Murrue set her shirt and bra into her chosen cubby for their soak. She sighed unconsciously about the latter article, as she knew she was going to need to go shopping for new clothes soon, but there really wasn't anywhere to go shopping in this region of space. Maybe I can have the nanomachine systems run me a new set of underwear? Need to inquire about that, she thought quietly.

"It's funny, we went out of the way to ensure Tolle and Miriallia were married as soon as possible, and our firstborn will win that race," Mu said as he leaned up against the doorframe to their assigned spring.

"I know," Murrue had to take a seat to remove her boots and socks, which Mu noted she used to be able to do completely standing and rather gracefully in the past. Her weight was not yet shifting too far forward, maybe the pregnancy was messing with her inner ear? Mu wasn't even sure if that was a common issue or even a feasible side-effect? "It's like we went about this in the wrong order."

"Hey, if it's fine with you, I'm fine with it," Mu headed that one off quickly.

"I am, but we're going to need to work on this when we next reach notable civilization. Or maybe find a Chaplain for the crew?"

"Now there's a thought," Mu giggled a bit at the thought of there being a religious authority on such a misbegotten and profane ship as this one. "Hope this padre has a helluva tough stomach."

"Yeah, we do go through the wringer on a routine basis," Murrue giggled about it for roughly the same reason as her someday-to-be-husband. After that bit of levity, she was on her feet and in a modesty towel for the short jaunt to the private spring room.

"My lady first," Mu offered his hand to help Murrue down into the spring in proper fashion, to which she obliged. He settled into the spring a moment after she did.

"Days like today remind me that for all the nasty parts of this trip we go through, we've got each other to go through it with. And that's not a bad thing, we've got a good crew." Murrue sighed and settled herself back against the rock face she had taken seat against.

"And we've got each other," Mu gave her a kiss on the cheek, which quickly went more romantic.

-x-x-x-

(Day 16, 0900 hours Archangel time)
(Cafeteria)

"All right, the mandate from the command level is, go over everything we have on the fleets and determine which fleet we want to hammer to try to capture material, equipment, and data," Athrun read off the short version of their official orders from Commander La Flaga and Captain Ramius.

"Time frame?" Yzak asked between bites of breakfast omelette.

"Before Captain Ramius starts her watch, which is 1600 hours," Athrun continued.

"So, effectively, we have seven hours to pick which fleet is going to be the best bet for a surprise attack," Nicol said. "I'm in."

"What we need is a miracle," Kira said. "I didn't sleep more than a couple hours after we were shooed off to bed, so I've been up studying this stuff."

"How bad?" Yzak asked.

"Erm," Kira hesitated.

"How bad?" Yzak asked again, this time a shade more forcefully.

"Bad, but not ohmygodwereallgonnadie bad. That part comes up when we have to do their command ships," the Strike Freedom pilot explained.

"Sure, Strike. Make it sound like we're gonna survive this, why don't you?" Yzak grumped at the mixed message Kira had just dumped on them.

"Well, what do you want me to do, man? Lie to you about it? After what I read, it's obvious we're going to need an army to do this. A big army, at that."

"How big?" Athrun asked.

"Let's just say that the Harvest Motherships each carry over a hundred fifty of the pod ships per docking strip, three dock strips per hull, a large anti-ship particle cannon and some other defenses we haven't fought yet," Kira explained.

"So, 450 pod ship per harvest mothership, which comes out to 21,600 cube fighters total, not counting if the mothership has its own hangar space?" Yzak said.

"No, the motherships have docks for other, so-far-unseen craft, but not fighters. They rely on the pod ships for their cube fighters." Kira remembered that much from what he had seen of the schematics.

"And, on 21,600 cube fighters, that's 85, 86 of the Hydra Micromissile Systems for their entire compliment, assuming a P-K of 1.0," Athrun said. "Realistically, assuming they will eventually grow a brain, we'll have to downgrade that to a P-K of 0.9 or lower, which means more missiles for the same result."

"Yeah, at a P-K of 0.9, you're looking at a minimum of 95 missiles. And it only gets worse from there," Nicol set down a tablet computer. "What's the benefit of trying to do a capture run on something that can power-crush us?"

"We want inside their network, even if it's a bit painful to make it," Yzak pointed out the intention. "Question is, can we do it?" All eyes turned back to Kira.

"Can we do it? Yes, easily, once we overcome the defenses," Kira said. "Getting through the outer ring of defenses is the challenge here, the ship itself is fairly brittle. The Valiants and the Gottfrieds both can punch big holes in it for us."

"Again, I repeat myself, why don't you make it sound survivable, Strike?" Yzak grumped.

"Yzak, cut it out," Athrun cautioned him. "Yeah, it's a shit job. Yeah, this is going to be an absolute shit fight. Pissing on the rest of us is not going to make it any easier."

In years past, the team would have expected something of a sharp rebuke from Yzak, but the Duel pilot simply rolled his eyes in response this time.

"Okay, assuming we win the fight against the defense shell around the ship, what's the process for taking control of the ship?" Nicol asked.

"First, we have to disable the self-destruct system, which we can do with the Valiants. It's in the center column of the ship, but our upgraded cannons can do the job. Second, we have to either disable the enemy lightspeed engine or we have to attach ourselves to the ship to ride along if they decide to run for it. Third, we disable the power system…"

-x-

(6 hours later)
(Pilot's Briefing room)

"…By way of taking out the three axial power transfer systems, here, here and here," Kira highlighted the three cable sets. "Each bundle will require some work to cut it, or we can have the Gottfried Cannons shoot through the target points during the battle. The cables are not survivable, sever all three and the ship loses power. At that point, we have free reign of the inside of the mothership and can do whatever we want."

"If the ship is not as resilient as its size would suggest, then the major concern is dealing with the numbers of pod ships and point defense weapons," Mu summed up the presentation by Kira.

"That and we need to make sure we avoid the big gun on the bow of the ship, it is powerful enough to cook off the ship in a second or two of beam exposure." Kira flipped to the next view on the holoprojector, which had several locations on the ship highlighted for the officers. "Okay, this is several views of the ship with the major target points for the naval guns. First, our primary target should be the self-destruct system. The system is inert until armed, so if we do it first they can't blow it and we can proceed from there."

"How hard will it be to get to?" Chandratta asked. It would be his gunnery that achieved the necessary breaches, so…

"On this, we're lucky twice over. First, the data dump we pulled included full construction schematics, so we have complete system and material analysis. The second dose of luck is in the placement. As long as we hit the fin head-on, or hit the valley head-on and minimize the angle of material we have to punch through, we can do it with one shot, 80 percent power or better, from the Valiants. Same with any of the other targets, Valiants at 80 percent or better or the Gottfrieds with all three barrels will do the job."

"Doable, easily," Chandratta said.

"Next target?" Murrue asked.

"Second is the enemy lightspeed engine. I recommend we do Gottfrieds for this, all four turrets, spaced along these target points to cause maximum damage. We take those two systems out, all they can do is try to fight it out because they have no way to abort the battle at that point," Kira said.

"It'll be tricky aligning the ship for a four-turret salute, but I think I can do it," Newman said. "What about the Valiants as a backup?"

"Keep 'em in reserve in case we need a fast follow-up shot," Chandratta recommended. "What's third?"

"Third is the axial power relays, three of them total. These relays are not survivable: cut one, the main gun and the quantum commo node are useless. Cut two, the ship can maneuver or use defenses, not both. Cut three, she's dead in the water," Yzak picked up the last part.

"If we cut the enemy commo node, what happens to the pod ships and cube fighters?" Miriallia asked. She was doing the briefing while eating a sandwich, which was decidedly against protocol but nobody intended to call her on it.

"They'll lose coordination briefly, but once the central communications node is cut the pod ships will take over on their own. We'll have a ten second gap at most while the subordinate systems determine what ships have command primacy," Kira explained.

"It's enough," Murrue said. "Okay, Kira, what are the failure conditions for this operation?" she asked.

"First, if we are overwhelmed or allow ourselves to take a direct hit from their main beam cannon. Second, if we can't destroy the self-destruct charge. Third, if we destroy the charge but fail to get to the lightspeed engine in time. Once we pass those hurdles, we have the objective so long as we don't take excessive losses."

"By the numbers, do you think it is doable?" Murrue asked.

"I think it is, but it'll be tough," Kira said. "I have the Strike Freedom working on a sim for the entire group to make sure we can do it. If we can pass it at 110 percent difficulty, we can do it for real," Kira half-boasted.

"We'll do it twice a day with ramping up difficulty until we're sure we can do it first time every time," Mu decided. "How soon to intercept one of these ships?"

"If we put the hammer down, we can be on top of one of the ships in 10 days," Yzak said. "Or we can bypass this first ship and hit the next one toward Tarak in 22 days."

-x-x-x-

(Day 18, 1900 Hours shipboard time)
(Nirvana, crew galley)

"Come on, Barnette, I need some food after all this training," Jura complained.

"How can you think about eating at a time like this? We've been up 14 hours and done two simulations, I just want to sleep," Barnette grumped. She would not admit that she was every bit as hungry as Jura, but her present complaint was more fatigue than anything else and she wanted to see to that first.

Barnette would also not allow herself to admit that she agreed with the premise of the simulations, the training specifically on fighting and destroying the Harvest Motherships. She just didn't want to stomach the thought of admitting that Kira had the right of this one — stubbornness to a fault — if for no other reason than maintaining the slight edge she had in opinion over the Strike Freedom pilot. (She would, of course, readily admit that Kira could easily disassemble her Dread in a one-on-one match against his Gundam, but she also knew it would never come to that. The Nirvana didn't run duels, Magno's Pirates ran raids and ambushes. Dueling is for swords or pistols, she scoffed at the thought.)

"I'm going to get some dinner, then I want to go back over the recordings and see what went wrong," Jura admitted. The battle had been a technical win, which was better than the first match of the day, but the casualties across the board had been unacceptable. The Nirvana had been stripped of her entire fighter compliment (most of the pilots were administratively dead) and had been heavily damaged, the Archangel fared only slightly better in that two of its Gundams had survived but the ship would still require a month's overhaul to return to full operational capacity.

"Okay, this is different," Barnette said as they arrived at the cafeteria. "What's gotten into you?" the squad leader asked.

"I have my reasons," Jura dodged the question before she stepped through the door. "There's more than a few reasons," she said, mostly to fortify her own resolve on the subject.

Barnette said nothing as she entered the room behind Jura, she just went along with it in the hopes that Jura would do her usual thing and simply let loose the reason why she was this driven of her own will. Just a matter of time, Barnette thought.

Given timing, most of the crew was winding down their day so the cafeteria was fairly empty. Except for one group, there was nothing going on. Barnette wasn't immediately surprised to find Murdoch here with Gascogne, she was a bit surprised to find three of the Nirvana's hangar crew with Murdoch and Gascogne, with the Archangel's 2-I-C of the hangar dealing for the five players.

Jura picked her meal, a dinner salad with ham bits and croutons, and took a seat two tables away from the poker game with a clear view of them. She would not admit that she was happy to see the Mechanics in the room, it was more learning experience for her.

-x-

"Call another round, Gomer," Murdoch said. "I need to lose a few more beers today, might help me lose a little weight."

"Another round, aye sir," Gomer ran a couple quick shuffles of the cards and began dealing. "Watch out for the 3rd squad mechanic, her streak's up to 4."

"Hunh," Gascogne grumped at the reminder that she wasn't doing all that hot against the casual card player tonight, though she had to admit she was doing better than Murdoch.

The group was silent for a few moments while cards hit the table, then picked up a bit with the fanning and rearranging. "Make your calls," Gomer said.

"One," Gascogne slid one card into the discard pile, and received one in return.

"Two," Murdoch traded out his 'junk' cards as was his intention.

"One," the aforementioned 3rd squad operator said.

"Four," the mechanic from 1st squad traded in most of her hand.

"Two," the last person in the match said.

"Call 'em!" Gomer declared

"A pair of 9s," Gascogne said.

"Jack," and Murdoch put down a single Jack. "And shit." The rest of his hand was mixed cards, not even a pair worth talking about. He flipped the Jack onto the discard pile. "And Jack left town."

"Pair as well," the 3rd squad mechanic said. Hers was a pair of 7s, not enough to trump Gascogne.

"Broken straight," the 1st squad mechanic grumped. She had the 7-8-9-10 of spades, but the last was a 4 of hearts.

"Two pair," the deckhand for 3rd squad dropped her cards.

"Winner winner," Gomer said, then handed her a can of beer. "That's it for the case, boss. Drop down to can bets, or call it a night?"

"Your guys' call, I don't have to be anywhere right now," Murdoch said. Despite the wagers of beer cans, he wasn't drinking any, his was a glass of water.

-x-

"So, when are we planning on doing the real thing?" Jura asked.

"Here in about three weeks," Barnette said as she picked at her bowl of ham and potato soup. "We're planning on another 14 training matches, at least 14, and a stand-down for maintenance."

"Three weeks," Jura sighed. "Can we do it?"

"We have to do it," Barnette said. "They're targeting Meijere. If we lose, everyone we care about back home is gone."

"But can we do it?" Jura asked. "I mean, even with the training, is this going to work?"

"If it was just us, no," Barnette grudgingly admitted after a moment of silence. "Since the Archangel is supposed to do most of the enemy fighters and ships, we should survive."

"And the big ship itself?" Jura asked almost in a nervous whisper.

"As long as we avoid the big gun, we should be safe." Barnette sighed between spoons of soup. "I know, I'm nervous as well."

Jura continued on her salad in silence, alternating between a blank stare off into space (thinking about the sim-ex) and paying attention to the poker game. As much as she was suffering nerves about the coming operation, she was also rather intrigued by the way that Murdoch and his 2-I-C were not all that nervous, even being at a poker table outnumbered 2-to-1 by females.

Apparently, enough attention was paid by Jura to the poker game that Barnette twigged to it. "Still thinking about their group?" Barnette waved her spoon at Jura after a moment. "For about a week after we met, I wanted to believe what we were seeing is impossible. I sort-of still do," she admitted.

"I've gotten the feeling we've been lied to," Jura admitted. "Lied to a lot."

"Ghuh?" Barnette was expecting something, but that conclusion was outside her imagination. "Where did that come from?"

"Think about it, Barnette. We're pirates because something is wrong with Meijere society, not just the government. Now that we've encountered a group that is obviously not split men versus women, and the evidence we've found on this ship, it makes sense."

Barnette stared at Jura for several seconds, processing what she had said, until it finally clicked. "Oh, not good," the senior Squad leader grumped.

"Yeah. We've been lied to," Jura said. "What else have they been lying to us about?"

The mental tangents involved in that question went a long way to spooking Barnette for a night. By the next morning, however, even she found the logic unassailable.

-x-x-x-

(Day 23, 1130 Hours Shipboard Time)
(Archangel CIC)

"Captain, strong signal return in the bands used by the Harvesters, we have a contact in proximity to a planet," the sensors operator reported after the contact had firmed up on his screen.

"Sensors, Conn, aye," Murrue acknowledged the report from Sai. "Does this area match a harvest classification?"

"Hold one," Sai had to refer to a cheat-sheet Yzak had provided for the necessary commands. After he processed the location and contact data, though, the news wasn't all that welcoming: "Confirmed, Captain. Spinal columns, vertebrae, spinal cartilage discs, and spinal nerve fibers."

"One-stop shop for dealing with paralysis," Mu guessed. "We're going in, right?"

"Definitely, we're going in. Kuzzey, signal the Nirvana, we have a contact."

"They've beat us to it, Captain, their radio operator just messaged that they're going to alert status and changing course now," Kuzzey said.

"Looks like word's getting around their ship, then," Murrue said. In prior days she had been a bit surprised to find out just how much of their crew was still resistant to what the Harvest was about, but part of that Murrue expected — stories of that level of horror were very much hard to stomach, much less accept. Maybe the fast and direct reaction of today was because they were coming to grips with reality?

"Go to battle stations, Captain?" Mu asked.

"Yes, signal general quarters then get down to your machine," Murrue ordered.

"On it," Mu tripped the klaxon for General Quarters, then made for the bridge turbolift down to the decks. Miriallia was next up the lift 20 seconds later to take her CIC seat.

-x-

(Custom Dread Flight Deck, Nirvana)
(5 minutes later)

"Bridge, Barnette, where are we?" Jura heard over the radio.

"Captain's authorized a mission against these Harvesters," the Dread Squad coordination operator said. "You squad is ready to go in the #3 hangar."

"Jura's up and ready," Jura reported between radio messages. "My squad, sound off," she said in quite the more businesslike fashion than normal.

"J-9 is down, severe food poisoning. She's down in medbay right now, Jura," J-3 reported.

"Rest of us are ready!" J-2 answered.

"Meia's in," the last of the three Squad Leads said. "My squad, anyone down?"

"M-8 is down, engine blew up on startup," M-1 said.

"Injured?" Meia asked. Engine explosions were highly uncommon in Dreads, but as with anything mechanical, far from impossible.

"No injuries, just smoked out of her cockpit," M-9 answered. "Her Dread's going to need some serious work, though."

"Wonderful," Meia grumped.

"Have her take over on J-9's unit," BC ordered. "We'll worry about the Dread after the fight."

"Roger," Meia made to call Gascogne, but was beat to the punch by said hangar chief:

"Already have her headed over to Hangar 2, Meia," Gascogne piped up on the radio. "We're down a total of one fighter for this sortie. Not bad, considering."

"Archangel has started launching Mobile Suits," The bridge sensor operator said.

"Meia, Barnette, Jura, your teams are cleared to launch," BC ordered. "Come back alive, all of you," she finished the order.

"Roger, Meia has lead," she maneuvered her fighter sideways to the centerline catapult and was quickly ejected by the launch system into the space immediately behind the Nirvana. Dita and Jura were not more than a few seconds behind her.

Meia looked over to her left, where Kira had installed a Modular Monitor in the left side of her cockpit that right now showed an at-a-glance view of her squad. Nine fighters, one listed as INOP. Unconsciously she shuddered at having a man in the cockpit of her machine, but today that reaction was a lot less vehement than it would have been two weeks ago. She did concede it was handy to have data on her entire squad available that fast.

-x-

"Type classified, one pod ship, one addon collection module," Kira announced as the Dread Squads began forming up for action. "Two other pod ships in close support."

"They're still in docking phase, if those two ships mate up, they'll suck up the population of that planet one island at a time," Athrun pointed out the intention.

"Then what?" Dita asked.

"Then those people get chopped up into pieces for whatever the Harvest is for," Meia answered the junior Dread pilot.

"Did we ever confirm what they're trying to do?" Barnette asked.

"Not yet, we lost a lot of data when Kira was disconnected," Athrun said.

"That's why we want to capture one of their ships mostly intact, so we can finish data mining them," Kira said. "We need complete answers."

"Locations would be nice, as well," Yzak said.

"Pods are deploying cube fighters, count 72 in the air so far," The Nirvana's sensor operator declared.

"This is what we're training for, Dread pilots," Meia said briskly. "J and B squadrons, take on the cube fighters on the right side, my squadron tackles the fighters nearby the docking ships!"

"J Squadron, follow me in," Jura said with increasing determination. "Hold the inside track, make sure those cube fighters don't interfere with Meia's group or the Archangel Team."

"We'll deal with the fighters coming out of the docking units, Archangel Team, can you deal with the ships?" Meia figured it was a good distribution of effort to have them do the ships, so the Nirvana could conserve its force for other threats. Besides, destroying the cube fighters was more of a fighter's challenge, and stacked higher in the pirate fighter pilot's ethos than the slower, lumbering ships.

"We have them," Pytor answered gruffly.

"They've changed their defense pattern, they're coming in hot!" Tolle shouted before the Archangel Team and Meia's Squad could separate from Barnette and Jura.

-x-

"How do we — " Jura started to panic, but was overridden by Barnette:

" — Mow through them! Mow through!" Barnette lit off her particle guns at the optimal range to the enemy swarm, and simply laid on the trigger until she was through.

"This is NUTS!" Hibiki shouted as he drifted left — away from the centroid of the enemy formation and unconsciously toward the Archangel Team. Despite the dodge, four enemy fighters had him locked on and followed his maneuver to intercept.

Jura had two locked on to her, but she had the means to deal with them at range — the particle gun on her fighter easily dispatched both fighters in one shot each. She did not see Hibiki preparing to cross her path until it was too late for her to maneuver, and with it everything around her flashed white for a few seconds.

Her vision was washed out, but her hearing remained. "White flash! White flash at Jura's position! I think the Vanguard collided with her!"

"No, that's a merge flash! They combined!" Athrun pointed out.

"That's big," Umi said in shock. "That's real big."

"Holy shit big," Yzak said.

"Easily bigger than the pod ships, approaching the width of the Archangel," Kira gauged.

The flash subsided, and with it the sensory overload receded to allow Jura to think and react to her (new) environment properly. "What happened?" Jura asked.

"What? I merged ships with yours now?" Hibiki asked in shock. "How did — what — why — huh?" The Tarak pilot asked from the far side of the status orb in the center of the cockpit.

Jura was a bit taken aback by having merged with Hibiki's craft, but she mastered her immediate reaction in light of her overall goal. Hmm, if I play this card right, maybe I can get him to trust me a bit? She thought aloud but didn't say. "Better question, what did we merge into?" Jura asked to cover for her internal goals. She tapped on the display crystal twice, which changed the view to that of the ship — a large crab-like craft with flexible arms and surrounded by some kind of floating discs?

"Craft analysis complete," Kira said, then whistled. "Combined craft is shielded, defense capable of withstanding a direct strike from the Lohengrin Cannons on the Archangel. Offensive capability is sixteen point defense lasers, one capital laser with terajoule-level output — same power level as the Gottfried cannons on the Archangel."

"Okay then, that's different," Hibiki said. "How do we control this thing?"

"These controls," Jura checked the glowing buttons and plates below the viewing orb, and started getting results.

"Come on guys, we have a fight to win!" Barnette pointed out.

-x-

"Archangel Team, Command, support Jura and Hibiki while they regain positive momentum, remainder of team proceed to and destroy enemy shipping," Dorothy ordered.

"Fuu, Umi, we're not going to be helpful against the ships, we should provide escort for the Vandread," Hikaru said.

"Did you just portmanteau their craft names?" Fuu asked. "Merged their names, I mean?"

"Well, yes?" Hikaru asked. "It sounds right, at least to me," she admitted.

"Works for me, too," Tolle said. "Vandread. Has a solid ring to it."

"Huh, my sensor suite has already set that as its identifier," Kira admitted. "I think it just became permanent."

"Witty naming conventions aside, the pod ships have launched second-wave fighters, we've got business," Commander Chevalier reported.

Hikaru, Umi, and Fuu settled in over the top of the Vandread. "Any luck, Hibiki? Jura?" Umi asked.

"Working on it," Jura answered tightly. "This control system is so different from — there!" The Vandread lurched forward. "Okay, that's how we move it, now for turning — there!" It did a couple turns and a barrel roll. "Now for the weapons — "

"These orbs are the weapons, we tap on the targets around us in the view orb, then use the orbs in the panel to fire. Here," The smaller discs began tracking outward, and fired sequentially to destroy a fighter with each shot.

"That's good shooting!" Fuu cheered.

"Command, Buster, one pod ship downed," he reported after the first ship went up.

"Second ship is toast," Yzak reported after he sabered through the engine block of the second ship. "Kira, you have the last — "

"On it," Kira blasted the third pod ship from the ventral side with his combined beam rifles, the raw energy transfer caused the port and starboard halves of the ship to violently separate. "Three down. Harvest unit is all that is left."

"Hey, Jura, can we hit it with the larger laser?" Hibiki asked.

"Yeah, let's try that," The entire craft reoriented on the Harvest Module and the main disc started glowing. "Ready!"

"Fire!" Hibiki slapped something in the cockpit, which caused the laser to fire. A half-second later, the Harvest Module shredded itself from the inside out, not much of an explosion visually but clearly destroyed.

"Last unit is down! This one is done!" Tolle said.

"Good, quick shooting, team. Looks like the training is paying off," BC declared. "Also, good work under pressure, Hibiki, Jura. We'll need to factor in your craft to the training going forward. Everyone return to ship, get your craft fueled and rearmed, and take a breather."

"Archangel Team, police up what salvage is available and stow it in the hangar bay," Dorothy ordered. "30 minutes before we get moving again."

"Y'know, just noticed this planet is 99 percent ocean, there's an island here and there and that's it," Yzak said. "Wonder who's down on planet?"

"Well, it all works, all the training. When's the next sim-ex?" Barnette asked, having missed Yzak's prior question. There were a couple groans from both Archangel and Nirvana crews, but nothing serious.

-x-x-x-

(Day 23, 1815 Hours Shipboard Time)
(Nirvana Shooting Simulation Range)

"So, there's two of us confirmed, and I think one more possible," Jura said.

"I know," Meia grumped. "I am trying not to think about it," she said before she fired two shots from her laser ring into a target in her field of fire.

"Okay, but you're going to have to prepare yourself for it. I wasn't," Jura admitted.

"I expected you to freak out," Barnette said before she double-tapped a clay pigeon.

Jura laughed to cover for her nerves on the matter. "It wasn't that bad. Just had to think fast and learn the new controls." Two quick slashes and she dropped a clay pigeon aimed at her chest.

"Okay, this is getting a bit serious," Barnette said, then paused her side of the simulation chamber. "What is going on with you, Jura?"

Jura sighed and sheathed her sword. That caused Meia to pause the simulation completely and look at the junior Squad Lead. "I told you already, Barnette. We're being lied to by all sides. I'm going to get to the truth, one way or the other, and to do that I've got to get ready for it."

"And what truth is that?" Meia asked. "And who's lying about it?"

Again, Jura sighed. This wasn't something she was 100 percent ready to go public with, she wanted more (and harder) evidence, but now was now and they wouldn't accept a dodge. Jura knew enough of the other two squad leaders to know when they could (and would) force an issue, and both showed all the signs of it.

"I've found enough evidence to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that male and female societies were once one society," Jura announced. "And that's before we count the Archangel for or against it."

"So, who's lying…" Meia let off the sentence she almost said.

Jura waved her off. "Before you say anything, no, I am not accusing the Captain or BC of lying to us."

"Either they don't know, or they aren't telling because they know the crew would mutiny," Barnette pointed out.

"Or something else," Meia wanted to hold onto the belief that Magno, the one person that had dragged her out of a deep self-loathing and given her an avenue to move forward, was not in some way bullshitting her own pirate company.

"The problem goes deeper," a haunting voice brought all three of the Squad Leaders up short.

"Commander…" Jura trailed her sentence off.

"You haven't said anything to land your butt in the frying pan yet, Jura," BC said after the sim room door closed behind her. "More or less, you've compiled the same list of reasons I have over the years."

"So it is true," Meia said acidically.

"Yes, all evidence does point to Tarak and Meijere having been artificially split sometime in the past. The records get hazy about four generations back, so that is probably when the truth was memory-holed." BC stepped past Barnette and activated the fourth station for simulation targets, and selected her custom preset (optimized for her personal preference of weapon, a whip).

"Now that I'm pretty much proven correct, I, uh," Jura hesitated. "I don't know what to think about it," she admitted after a moment. "It's like I just solved the greatest mystery, only to walk into another. What a headache."

What ruminations they had on the newly-changed shape of their world ended when the battle alarm went off throughout the ship. "Incoming pod ships detected! Four marks!" Ezra announced shortly after the first cycle of the klaxon.

"That's us," BC said before she thumbed off the simulation.

The Commander did not know the battle would terminate itself before she arrived at the bridge.

-x-

(Archangel Bridge)

"Enemy pod ships opening, discharged — wait, those aren't cube fighters," Sai said in shock. "These are something else, Captain. Round balls of some kind?"

"What are those?" Chandratta asked.

"I have no clue," Sai answered. After a moment, the craft ejected a bunch of spikes around its entire sphere area. "Okay, we have our answer. It's a bigass spiked wrecking ball."

"And they're coming for us!" Dorothy half-shouted after they started moving.

"Chandratta!" Murrue half-shouted.

"On it!" Fire commands went out to the guns as fast as he could type them in, but the angle of attack — broadside from the starboard — limited his options. The first three of the eight balls he single-barreled with the starboard upper Gottfried turret, and one shot did equate to one overkill in this case. Four and five were kinetic kills by the Valiant, with the sixth slain by missiles. Seven was also targeted by missiles, but the spikes intercepted the Sledgehammers before they could get to the hull of the spike ball, so it plowed through into a cloud of Helldarts and was dismantled by the smaller missiles that largely slipped in between the spikes.

Nothing remained to intercept the final of the attackers, and a couple seconds before impact Miriallia pulled the collision alarm to warn the crew they were about to take a hit.

"This is gonna suck…" Chandratta said a moment before impact.

The ball plowed into the side of the Archangel forward of the Valiant and for a moment looked like it would penetrate, but the mass and armor of the venerable (and heavily upgraded) Assault Ship was not something so simply defeated. The spikes failed to penetrate the Gundanium hull plating, and because of the lightweight engineering of the way the unit was assembled, immediately began shearing off the base orb. What resulted was a cacophony of breaking spikes until the ball itself slammed into the hull and flattened out against the ship, then rebounded off into space.

"Damage report!" Captain Ramius ordered.

"Uh, none, no damage Captain," Miriallia read off her ship status panel. "Scratched the paint, looks like."

"I've got this," Chandratta loosed a fire command to the Igelstellung guns on the upper side of the ship, and watched with savage glee as the 4000-rpm guns tore the final orb to shreds. "Last unit down," he reported after five seconds of fire had rendered it nothing more than scrap and bad memories.

"Destroy the pod ships, please," Murrue ordered.

"Thought you'd never ask," Chandratta released a set of fire commands for the missile launchers.

-x-x-x-

(Day 35, 0605 Hours Shipboard Time)
(Archangel Hot Springs)

"So, I'm pretty well convinced that Jura's got the right of it, given what she's presented. And BC came to the same conclusion?" Dorothy asked.

"Yes, though by different evidence," Magno admitted. This wasn't her first pass through the Hot Springs, and she was considering hiring on the Archangel Team's engineers to fit one into an unused bay of the Nirvana. "Just makes it more damning, though."

"That leads to the inevitable question, what do you do about it?" Dorothy asked in follow-up.

"Oh, I'm already promised to beat an explanation out of Lord Grandma and probably Lord Grandpa as well, depending on how easily they'll give in on it," the Pirate Captain smiled. "They will answer on this, and a few more things."

Paiway sunk herself down to where her face was mostly below the water's surface, her eyes still barely above the water level, and blew bubbles. She was fortifying herself for a question she had to force herself to ask, but to the others in the hot spring the bubbles thing came off more as an amusement.

"So, if the evidence is right, and assuming we get a straight answer out of the powers that be, then what?" Gascogne asked.

"I'd say force the societies to come to grips with the truth," Dorothy offered. "Spread it far and wide, let them decide what is truth, and how to handle it."

"We could become the example," Fuu said.

"What do you mean?" Gascogne asked.

"Become the example," Dorothy echoed, then laughed. "The two separate societies are convinced they can't live together. Be the example, run a mixed male / female crew and make it work, that more than else will destroy the separate societies. Won't be that day, won't be that week or month or event that year, but you will win."

"To win, we have to break the rules," the Nirvana hangar crew chief said, then laughed herself. "That old scientist had it right. And this isn't a difficult rule to break."

"Doctor J?" Fuu asked. "He always has a wise word, no matter how difficult things become."

"Wait!" Paiway half-shouted as she straightened up to where her head and neck were above the water's height. "If we break that rule, what do we become? What meaning does it all have?"

The question from the normally-less-than-serious Paiway caught everyone off guard, but it also cut to the heart of the matter. Meijere prided itself on hating the men of Tarak, and even in the Pirate / Rebel factions there was no love for the men. Challenging this generations-old attitude was not just a faux pas in many eyes, it cut to the heart of being a citizen of Meijere at a level that nobody considered touching — at least until today, apparently.

"We were never at war with the men," Magno answered. "Never have been, since I started the Pirate Group many years ago," she pointed out. "We are at war with the government of Tarak, for the same reason as we're at war with the government of Meijere. That's not the same as being at war with men."

"But then, aren't we going against our entire society if we do that?" Paiway asked in semi-shock.

"You do realize you are pirates and rebels?" Dorothy asked seriously. "Rebellion is the raison d'etre of a rebel and a pirate, when you get down to career choices."

Magno decided a different direction was in order for this issue — if not Paiway, someone else in her crew would object along the same or similar lines. "What do you do if someone lies to you?" Magno asked as a way to defuse the direction of the argument.

"Well, you call them on it? And try to do better than the lie?" Paiway asked in response.

"And why would you not apply that to the whole society if the society is built upon a lie?" Magno asked in follow-up.

"But — oh," Paiway sunk down again to where just her eyes and the top of her head were above the water level. She had been trapped by her own premise and realized it. After a moment, she shot up to standing and was out the curtain, looking severely frustrated.

"She'll calm down, give her a few hours to process it," Gascogne guessed incorrectly.

"It's a hard thing to swallow, knowing your entire society is built on falsehoods," Fuu said solemnly. "I watched the fight in the ZAFT troops as they realized they were fighting under false pretenses. And it took them a while to win, months, almost a year."

"Uh, which ones are the ZAFT troops?" Gascogne asked.

"Athrun, Nicol, Yzak, and Dearka." The strain she put on the last name told Gascogne and Magno enough about what happened to him.

-x-

"Well, it's not often we all get a shift off at the same time," Athrun said.

"Too infrequent," Nicol acknowledged the point.

"They just don't let us out of the madhouse all that often," Yzak joked.

"Tell me about it," Kira grumped. "Between sentry post, the training regimen, and manufacturing improvements, I feel like I'm running on caffeine and good intentions at this point."

"Unh, just about the story of our lives at this point, caffeine, good intentions, and bad circumstances," Yzak expanded on Kira's point. "At least we're in with a good crew. Makes things a lot more bearable, even if I still have to dodge Umi from time to time."

"Still on you about language?" Athrun asked.

"Every now and again," the Duel pilot admitted. "Mostly when she's already frustrated with something else."

"She doesn't have a hangar-worthy mouth, but she's let fly a few good ones recently," Kira pointed out.

"Of course, because I like parts of my anatomy to remain intact, namely my face, I'm not about to point that out to her," Yzak wisely admitted.

"Always makes me feel like this is either going to be a long story that leads to you two slapping each other a couple times, then ending the feud with either a kiss or by running each other through," Murdoch said from just inside the bead curtain to the men's sauna room.

Yzak opened his mouth to answer, but after a moment closed it. Truth to tell, he was anticipating the same set of outcomes, and he wasn't yet sure which was the more likely to happen, or even if he liked the thought of it.

The hangar crew chief dropped into the water before anything else was said. "Not like I was intending anything like that, it just seems so surreal to me, worrying about being slapped for language instead of any of our old problems." Yzak slugged a gulp of fruit smoothie. "4 years ago, I don't want to say I hated Naturals, but I wasn't far from it. Today, however, I don't really know what I want to feel. Or if I should be feeling anything."

"Still not happy with the Earth Alliance," Athrun said.

"There's nothing there to be happy about, the Earth Alliance is a politically expedient hardfail." Murdoch slugged his drink of choice, a cheap beer he had purchased in quantity during their contract with the Treize Faction. "Hell, if the Captain orders us into battle against them, I don't think there's anybody left in the crew that would say no."

"True," Nicol said. "Came to that conclusion some time ago, but the more I think about it the less I like ZAFT and the Earth Alliance."

"And you're already proving you can lean in Fuu's direction," Athrun shifted the conversation back toward a more interesting (and less morose) topic. "It's not as hard a conflict as Tarak versus Meijere, but…"

"But yeah, it took me a while to start thinking away from the whole ZAFT versus Earth Alliance paradigm, and even longer to step away from the Coordinator versus Natural thing," Nicol admitted candidly. "It will be tough, different societies, different origins, very bad dating scene, but a lifetime of adventure before either of us turns 20."

"Of course, we get to discount Strike because, well," Yzak faltered midsentence, looking toward the Strike Freedom pilot.

Kira took a slug of watermelon juice, his drink of choice for the day. "Yeah, I never was one of those 'Coordinator First' kind of guys, my attempted disaster with Flay proved that very quickly. And because Hikaru doesn't think that way, or she doesn't care, I'm not sure which."

"Same, once you get past the whole 'kill all Coordinators' problem, it doesn't matter all that much." Yzak shrugged. "Guess we'll just see what we'll see."

"And that leaves Murdoch," Athrun saluted the Hangar Crew Chief with his bottle of water. "How's things going on your end?"

"Verdict's still out," Murdoch returned the drink salute. "She runs a mean card table, but I'm still sizing up the situation. At least she isn't outright hostile to us men, unlike about half of their crew."

"Think she'd want to join up with us?" Kira voiced the question that any person had to answer on this ship.

"Eh, fifty-fifty, if she really wanted to come along for the ride or come along with me…" Murdoch trailed the sentence off, suddenly rather contemplative of expression. "Don't know, honestly, it isn't anything she's hinted about one way or the other."

"Well, first we have to survive the battle in a few days…" Yzak left the thought hanging in the air before he departed the hot spring.

The Duel Pilot would encounter a flustered Paiway on the way out of the hot springs, which encounter would only darken her mood even more — and contribute to coming troubles on the Nirvana.

-x-x-x-

(Day 38, 1130 Hours Shipboard Time)
(Nirvana Hangar)

Gascogne harnessed herself into the pilot seat for the support ship and started powering it up. "You going to be alright back there, Rose?" she asked of the 'on loan' tech from the Archangel.

"I'm here to learn, easiest to do it if you're ass-deep in it," The Technician answered.

"Well, that's exactly where we are headed. Radio's up," Gosko said.

"…Situation has changed, I repeat, situation has changed from training scenario," Commander Haww reported. "Sensors are now showing a small fleet of ships engaging the enemy mothership in a pitched battle. We will assume they are non-hostile until or unless they prove otherwise, so recommendation is we make any effort possible to support the natives as we also engage the ship. The more allies, the better."

"Concur, Commander," BC acknowledged the point. "Dread Pilots, we'll lock out the non-Harvester units as neutral or friendly when we have a clear sensor read on them, use your best judgment when dealing with them. Remember, our primary task in the coming battle is to ensure the Archangel can disable the Harvester Mothership and destroy the fighters or pod ships. Squad Leaders acknowledge."

"Barnette, I acknowledge."

"Meia, understood."

"Jura, I hear. Will be good to have them shooting at someone else as well."

"Okay, we have them on sensors now," Ezra declared. "I have the unknown units locked out, we're showing only the harvest units as hostile now. We'll be in range in five minutes."

"Five minutes, girls!" Gascogne ordered on the hangar frequency. "Rose, I want you on the cargo feed system, make sure you have weapons ready as they are requested!"

"I'll be ready, lead," the Archangel Hangar Tech assured Gascogne.

-x-

"Gotta give them credit, they're trying, but they're heavily outmatched against the Harvesters," Mu La Flaga admitted after watching a couple minutes of the evolving battle.

"Desperate times, desperate battles," Morgan Chevalier said.

"When death is expected, one cannot but fight to the last," Pytor pointed out the expected motivation.

"We'd do the same," Athrun acknowledged the point.

"We did the same, if you look at the war back home from that perspective," Nicol dropped his opinion. "Not like Blue Cosmos was going to let us skate if we lost."

"I still want to know what they intend to do after harvesting a human. That's the big unknown here," Mu said.

"Time until deploy?" Hikaru asked. She did not want to think about what Mu was asking.

"Thirty seconds. Opening catapult doors now," Dorothy released the command to open the doors. "Launch order is established. All pilots, come back alive."

"That's the intention," Chevalier said.

"We'll make good on it," Umi piped up.

"Fifteen seconds, Strike Freedom, Heavyarms to the catapults," Dorothy positioned the first two machines, who stepped up and had their suits locked down for the cat-shot. "Five seconds, four, three, two, one, launch!"

"Strike Freedom, launching!" Kira hammered his throttle forward.

"Heavyarms, Trowa Barton, launching!" Trowa's suit did not have the same engine power that the Strike Freedom enjoyed, but it cleared the ship in good order.

"Next machines up," Dorothy ordered. "Launch when ready."

"Tolle Koenig, Buster, launching!"

The right-side machine took a few seconds extra to ready for launch due to receiving its Gunbarrel Striker from the Archangel's mounting mechanism. "Morgan Chevalier, Strike Dagger Gunbarrel, launching!"

"Selesce, Umi Ryuuzaki, launching!"

-x-

Admiral Rayn cursed his fortunes, but more vehemently cursed his failure to his men and civilians he was sworn to defend.

The exterior defensive line was his to command on this side, and he thought he had enough forward-deployed assets to take on a Flagship, but with how the battle was progressing that was not the case. Something had changed since the last encounter with the Harvesters, they were operating much more fluidly, much more aggressively than in the past. His paltry thirty ships were not going to be enough to hold the line against these kinds of odds, much less stop the Flagship in its tracks.

He was the vanguard, the front forces designated to keep the Harvesters away from the homeland, and his ships were easily the match of the enemy Pod Ships and Fighters. One ship from his world could easily scratch six pods with no issue, and the 30 to 50 fighters they carried could easily account for 8 to 14 Cube Fighters each, giving him the edge in a stand-up fight. Unfortunately, all their theories about fighting a Flagship were faltering in practice, as the enemy numbers simply became more and more massive while his own fighters were searmed to death quickly enough.

"Redirect the Destroyers 486 and 503 farther down the port flank, try to draw their forces across our front!" Admiral Rayn ordered.

"Sir! Major shift in enemy deployments and tactics!" the sensor operator shouted out.

"Report, sensors!" the Admiral shouted. This could be a game breaker or a relief, he thought immediately thereafter.

"Some 130 pod ships have reoriented to the starboard and deployed their second set of cubes! They're moving away from our line!"

"What? Why?" Admira Rayn certainly wasn't going to complain about roughly a third of the enemy losing their brains to go off on a wild goose chase, but an engagement like this would only be stifled by something significant coming their way.

"New contacts! Two unidentified ships, rough sizes equivalent to our Frigates and Cruisers, count about 40 mixed humanoid and fighter type small contacts! On the main screen!"

All eyes looked at the new contacts, though some of the gunnery and sensor officers quickly turned back toward their consoles. "What are those? I've never seen ships of that type," Captain Reija (Rayn's wife) said.

"One on the right is a warship, she just deployed guns," Rayn pointed out. Four sets of green beams flashed through the cloud of cube fighters (with multiple explosions to effect) and struck four separate Pod Ships. "They're fighting the Harvest!"

"YEAH!" Most of the bridge staff shouted, a cheer that lasted thirty seconds — and grew in intensity as some kind of micromissile unit shredded through a goodly portion of the Cube Fighters.

"Open a radio channel," Admiral Rayn ordered.

-x-

"Mow through the cubes! Our prey is the Pod Ships!" Commander La Flaga ordered as he began weaving his improved GuAIZ through the enemy survivors, using beam saber and beam claws to kill them as they tried to close with him.

"First-pass Hydra P-K is 0.92, their improved maneuvering is cutting their losses marginally," Yzak did the math mentally after his sensor suite counted off the survivors versus what had been targeted by the first six missiles.

"Don't sweat it, Yzak, a six percent survival drop is no big deal," Athrun pointed out. "It'll cost us another four missiles given the present battlescape," the former Aegis point pointed out the numeric disparity. His pass through the enemy cloud was marked by using the Planet Defensers on the Mercurius in beam attack mode to cleave apart fighter after fighter after fighter — of the 252 survivors in the first wave, Athrun accounted for another 55 on his own.

"I made sure to have a hundred twenty missiles ready for this battle," Kira cut the numbers disparity short. "We've got plenty, and the salvage haul we'll pull from this will recoup expenditures quickly."

"Attention unidentified ships and craft, identify yourselves," the guy on the screen wasn't alien to the Archangel Team, but he wasn't a known person to any of the pilots or bridge staff

"This is Captain Murrue Ramius of the Independent Warship Archangel, we're here to capture this Harvester Ship for further actions."

"This is Captain Magno Vivon of the Meijere Pirate Ship Nirvana, we're supporting the Archangel's mission here," Magno answered for their crew.

"You want to capture a Harvester Flagship? Why?" the older guy asked in clear shock.

"Reason's classified, not over the radio," Murrue answered quickly before anyone did blurt the answer. "Security principle, we'll explain after the battle is completed."

"Understood," the old guy answered. "I am Admiral Rayn of the world Malanas. It is welcome to see another group fighting the Harvest."

"Keep the pressure up on their Pods and Cube Fighters, we'll handle the capital ship," Captain Ramius requested. "Gundams! Continue suppression of enemy fighters while the Archangel maneuvers for fire plan!"

"You heard the boss! Keep the pressure on!" Commander Chevalier ordered.

"First group Cube Fighters eliminated," Umi said after she chopped down the last of them.

"We've got a breather for a few, support the Malanas combat group while the Archangel finishes pre-positioning," Dorothy changed up the present operation plan for the machines.

"Nirvana Dread Teams, hold close to the Archangel and Nirvana for our approach, don't want any surprises before the main shooting match begins," Operator Coco Belvedere ordered for her group.

The Archangel and Nirvana continued drifting toward their chosen firing point. "90 seconds until proper firing position," Newman reported.

-x-

"Miss Gosko, Barnette, need a new missile load," the Dread Squad Leader requested during a brief pause in the action.

"Bring it in, Barnette," Gascogne said. Normally she would have chewed on the Dread Squad Team lead for using a diminutive of her name, but lately Gascogne had cared quite a bit less about it than in the past. "Rose, incoming!"

"I heard," Technician Hayward replied. "Still have pod ships out there?"

"Some, why?" Gascogne asked.

"Got it," Rose dialed in the staging for Barnette's reload.

Gascogne's support ship, an underway replenishment ship for the fighters, worked on an unusual premise for the task — enough so that Rose was pretty sure the ship had been designed for some other task and was simply press-ganged into the UnRep role by the Nirvana's crew. Thankfully, the ordnance handling and staging system was purpose-built and very robust, enough so that Rose figured it would have been a good unit for the Archangel — if it was launchable.

Rose dialed in an appropriate missile selection that consisted of light missiles for use on the Cube Fighters and Medium Missiles for use on the Pod Ships or for use at long range. The supply system assembled the missiles into a set of replacement pods, then moved the pods to staging for replacement on the Dread after it was captured and moved into ready position.

"Capturing three, two, one, lock!" Gascogne arrested the Dread and brought it in for UnRep. "Rose!"

"On it!" Hayward used two of the free arms to unlock and remove Barnette's existing pods (which included fuel, power cells, and countermeasures in addition to missile sets), then cleared them into storage induction. A second set of arms moved the replacement pods down and locked them onto the Dread. As an 'idiot check', Rose gave both pods a quick shake to make sure they were properly secured, then cleared the arms. Total time: 15 seconds. "Good to go!"

"Barnette, you're clear! Go get 'em!" Gascogne said.

"On my way!" Barnette hammered it as soon as the arms cleared away from her Dread.

"You know, Rose, she's not going to be thrilled you set her up to hunt the Pods," Gascogne. "And that one's a hothead."

"And she's a damn good shot, if she can go toe-to-toe with Kira," Rose said while she started the resupply process for the modules Barnette just turned in. Fuel and power cells would be recharged while the active countermeasure systems (chaff, flares, and electronic noisemakers) would be reloaded. Any remaining missiles in the pods would be pulled and returned to stores, so that they had an accurate count of munitions on hand, rather than guess what was or was not in the standby pods.

"So?" Gascogne prompted her.

Rose grunted. "The mission drives the munitions choice. Pilots are the same throughout Existence, every one of them wants to notch up one more kill while pulling an inverted 10-G Pugachev. Problem is, personal kill count doesn't always win the battle, sometimes you have to suck it up and truck in a load of bombs to do what has to be done, rather than what will win you an extra beer at the bar that evening."

"Huh. Murdoch really does train a tight hangar crew," Gascogne said. "I'm starting to like this more and more. Now, if you can just survive Barnette's wrath…"

"Now that's a bit more narrow a challenge, ma'am," Rose said. "If Barnette calls a duel, it'll be my choice of weapons."

"And what would be your choice of weapon?" Gascogne asked, but she already had a sneaking suspicion what it would be…

"Half-Meter pipe wrenches," Rose said deadpan.

Don't think that battle would favor Barnette, Gascogne thought but did not say.

-x-

"If this is the best Tarak and Meijere can muster, we're safe," the sole officer in the command deck of the Harvester Flagship (number 12) mused to her viewscreens.

Harvest Captain Jasna Wyatt watched the newcomer ships with some shock and bemusement, but could not help herself from scoffing at them. The bigger of the two ships was so far unarmed, the armed smaller ship was clearly not something designed in her sector of space but did have some decent guns. The fighting units carried by the two ships — a little over 40 total — were nasty customers, though. If anything would give her trouble, it would be the smaller units.

Still, she sighed. Her job was to harvest the body parts of these fodder colonists, she really didn't want to have to explain to her Harvest Admiral or the Supreme Commander why she had to destroy their ships and with it the precious body parts of the crew and pilots within.

On her command terminal, Jasna swiped active the command systems on the first hundred pod ships for her number three side, and released the command processor to automatic (capture intact all available humans) as the primary directive. "One hundred pods and 4800 fighters should do the job on two ships," she mused to her control screens. Seconds later, the hull of the Harvester Flagship rattled to the metallic clanging of the Pod Ships unlatching from the main vessel, and after that, silence. The inside of the Harvest Ship was unpressurized, for the Harvest Captains only the command deck at the geometric center of the ship was pressurized. Unless a sound-producing impact was in contact with the hull, she had no hope of hearing it.

The pods released from the underside of her Harvest Flagship and began to fan out in a fairly standard area-sweep pattern. A first wave of Cube Fighters were launched, followed by the second group quickly — the AI control systems had learned that spaced waves were counterproductive against these groups, so a mass attack was the likely workable solution.

The release of new pods caused the enemy forces to change their operation tempo again — the fighters reoriented and arrayed to engage the fighters, the enemy humanoid armors moved toward a blocking position against the pod ships? It seemed nonsensical to Jasna for them to even try against such overwhelming odds, but here they were — and with them came a cloud of missiles from the armed warship. Just ten missiles, though, or maybe eight? Her sensors automatically filtered out missiles below 200 tons, as such weapons were statistically unlikely to harm her ship and were only a marginal threat to the pod ships —

"What in the name of the Great Star?" Harvest Captain Wyatt asked after the missiles' outside shells explosively separated, revealing a segmented interior — and a moment thereafter, a shower of much smaller missiles that were only barely visible on the visual systems, entirely too small to be considered a threat by the sensor suite on the Flagship. The result was much easier to see, as the micromissiles plowed into the mass of Cube Fighters and began destroying the lightly-armored fighters with aplomb.

The horror of the level of carnage she just witnessed was not lost on her, though. Only seventeen years of age, Jasna Wyatt had paid the price for her life years ago, when she signed up to join the Harvest. In compense for her continued life and health, she would harvest the fodder colonies for the body parts and tissue to keep the few 'allowed to live' Humans on Earth alive. If she failed, her family would be harvested, so there was plenty of incentive to do the job properly. And having roughly 20 percent of her fighter compliment destroyed in seconds was not a good omen.

In her haste to get the word out, though, she turned away from her sensors and cameras to look to her communication panel so she could call her boyfriend on Harvester 8. The call beeped four times without answer before her ship jolted sharply and violently, followed quickly by the damage panel flashing at her. Jasna reflexively cancelled the call with her right hand as the left hand went to her command panel and activated everything else in her inventory, weapons, pod ships, and cube fighters. Then her eyes settled on the damage panel. "The self-destruct charge is down? As is the automated control unit for the harvest containment? Ah, they must have been firing toward the centerline," she quickly convinced herself before her eyes returned to the cameras.

The two foreign ships had separated, the larger fighter carrier was providing frontline screening for the Malanas Vanguard forces, where the Malanas warships were now destroying the exposed Pod Ships in support of the smaller foreign warship. And it was that ship that was now aiming four sets of tri-barrel naval cannons at her flagship. The strange part, though, was they weren't aimed anywhere near the front or middle of the ship, they were aimed toward the rear.

Only a second before the enemy gunnery officer fired did she realize what was happening. "Oh, Great Star, they're disabling the sh — "

Despite protocol, Jasna normally did not wear her safety harness when in the command seat, mainly because there was damn near nothing that would challenge a Flagship and thus not much hazard of being thrown about. The explosion from her interstellar and interplanetary drives slammed the ship forward briefly, and on this inertia worked against her. The ship moving forward violently drove her backward into the command console. Jasna Wyatt would never wake up from the impact, given the strike broke her neck in two places and caused a bleeding depressed skull fracture, either of which would have been fatal.

-x-

"Enemy engines are offline, Captain, looks like we got both the locals and the long-haul systems," Chandratta said.

"She's dead in the water, Captain, that blast must have taken out her powerplant as well," Sai reported after the point defense guns fell silent on the enemy capital ship.

"We see it as well, Captain Ramius," BC declared from the pirate ship. "Looks like all that practice has paid off in full on the first try."

"Definitely, BC," Murrue said since the two bridges were operating open microphone between the ships to facilitate rapid coordination. "Miriallia, issue mop-up orders and have Elementals and Marines prepare for unpressurized operations boarding action."

"BC, have the Dreads join in on the clean-up and hold guard for the boarding action. Prepare a crew to board the ship as well, we need photographic evidence for ourselves," Magno ordered.

"Aye, Captain," BC answered quickly. "Coco, move the Dreads to holding defense positions forward of the ships and eliminate the remainder of the enemy Pod Ships."

"Attention crew, Elementals and Marines are to muster in normal suits for boarding action at the enemy capital ship," Miriallia broadcast on the ship intercom.

"Gundams Strike Freedom, Duel, Mobile Suits GuAIZ and 105 Dagger are to move forward at intervals and mop up remaining fighters," Dorothy began her phase of the orders.

"We're on it," Nicol acknowledged and began maneuvering.

"HeavyArms, Rune Gods are on reserve and are to hold in close protection of the Archangel and Nirvana," Dorothy dropped her next set of assignments.

"Acknowledge orders," Trowa said dryly. Truth to tell, he wasn't objecting to those instructions because he was running low on munitions.

"Mercurius, Vayeate and Buster are on Pod Ship hunting detail," Dorothy issued out her plan for clearing the rest of the opposition. "Once active resistance is quelled, begin salvage operations."

"Copy all, Ensign," Mu gave the operator a cheeky salute.

"And now for the last little bit of shit-mopping," Yzak said with some cheer. "Those Hydra missiles really do the business, Strike."

"It just works," Athrun said with a devilish smile.

"P-K on the missiles fell off a bit toward the end, our second and third salvos were 0.89 and 0.87, we can do better," Kira grumped.

"Well, if I may interject, even a 9-in-10 strike ratio is something to cheer," Admiral Rayn added on the open frequency. "You've done more in one battle than some whole worlds have accomplished fighting the Harvest. Your actions here will not be forgotten."

"Thanks, sir," Kira said. "Now for the fun part. We need to find out what exactly the Harvest is for," he said.

It would be an hour before any more major movements occurred, but what few Pod Ships and Fighters survived provided little resistance to the combined forces of the three teams.

-x-x-x-

(2 hours later)
(Inside the Harvester Flagship)

Kira was careful to not cut through any of the fuel pipes in the C-3-30 pod dock area, as he needed to get inside the ship but he didn't want to cook off the ship. After some serious consideration of the matter, Gascogne had suggested that the remnants of the ship be turned over to the Malanas fleet to be repaired, rearmed, and turned against the Harvest on their own terms. Both Magno and Murrue had approved the concept immediately, so Kira's orders for after capturing the Quantum Communications Node was to clear all control systems and reauthenticate for Malanas to take control of the ship.

"All right, I have a hole!" Kira shouted in triumph after he pushed the severed pod frame segment into the ship and could step inside with his Gundam.

"On your six," Athrun followed in close by way of the Mercurius, Yzak and Mu immediately behind. Kira did not have any transported troops, but Athrun, Yzak and Mu La Flaga did carry troops for just this purpose from the Nirvana, Archangel, and the Malanas Vanguard respectively.

"Wow, this thing is spacious," Murdoch said after he had a good look on the inside of the ship.

"It's mostly hollow, just support systems for the Pods and the Harvest," Yzak said. "The command center is up there."

"Commo module is adjacent to it," Kira landed his Gundam next to the communication and unit control system. "Murdoch, you're on!"

"Got it," Murdoch's group of six hangar mechanics were quick to drop off the hold latches on the outside of the Duel's Assault Shroud armor plates and maneuvered over to the commo unit. It wasn't particularly big, a quarter the size of the Gundams overall, but it was heartily secured to the central control axis. Removing it would require industrial hammer drills to remove the torqued bolts for the unit, as well as some deft maneuvering to pull the cable harnesses that attached the commo unit to the

Natalya was dedicated to a different task, though. "This is Elemental Point, we're moving to breach the control center."

"Watch your asses, no telling if they have traps to prevent access to the control center," Athrun cautioned the Point Commander.

"Aff, sir," Natalya waved the Malanas ship's engineers forward to the entry for the pressurized command and control bay.

"Athrun, we've got this, you can go in with the Malanas crew," Murdoch said.

"Got it." Athrun maneuvered the Mercurius over to where he could pop the hatch and simply walk out onto the control axis. After he opened up, the Gundam pilot loosed his harness by left hand while he pulled an AKM from the storage area behind his command couch. Even in vacuum, a ballistic firearm was effective: gunpowder self-oxidizes on combustion, so no air would be needed to fire. The downside was, depending on how he braced for it, even a single round could cause him to spin out of control in zero-gravity if things went wrong.

"I have the point," Natalya waved Athrun in behind her, which the Mercurius pilot willingly took.

"You really don't want this ship?" Captain Reija asked. It wasn't the first time she had asked it, but she was still in shock about the thought of the Archangel Team simply capturing it, salvaging several hundred of the Cube Fighters, and turning the rest over to Malanas.

"All we want is the communication module so we can data mine their network, maybe cause some disruption with network worms or such," Athrun posited. "The ship is slow, wouldn't be of much use to us. Once we can, we're headed out on our next cross-dimension journey."

"This is Kira, commo gear is half removed," Athrun's old friend reported from the area of the QCN.

"Copy, Kira, keep on keeping on," Mu said. "We'll be ready — sweet Haumea, what is that?"

"What — oh," Captain Ramius said over the radio. "Bone piles, stripped offal, this must be a waste pile for the Harvest. Get recorded evidence, Mu. When we take our list of grievances to their homeworld, we'll shove the proof in their face before we blow their brains out."

"Aye aye, Captain," Athrun heard just before Natalya opened the pressure lock for the command center.

"Enough room in here for myself and three unarmored," the Elemental point Commander said.

"I'll take lead." Athrun racked the bolt on his AKM to make sure he had a round chambered and ready to go. All signs pointed to the commander of the ship being dead or incapacitated, but Archangel Team members generally weren't in the business of taking unnecessary risks.

Two of the armed Malanas troops piled in behind Athrun, and Natalya tripped the close and repressurize controls for the airlock. Thirty seconds later, the pressure door on the inside of the command center opened and admitted the four persons.

Athrun was the first to spot the ship's lone officer. "Guess we were right, enemy commander didn't survive the encounter."

"That's disgusting," one of the Malanas Marines grumped. The body of the enemy officer was free-floating with some drops of blood hanging around in the air around her, the product of bleeding from her nose courtesy of her injury, but the obvious killer was the impossible angle her neck and head were hanging at and the busted monitor on the forward panel. Some manner of impact had driven her into the monitor face-first, and in the battle between angular resilience and her body's (admittedly small) mass, her neck had lost.

"Death comes to us all, not always peacefully," Natalya said stoically.

"God rest her," Athrun said equally as stoically. He rotated the body to face up, swiped her eyes closed, and moved the deceased into her sleeping pod for storage until the Malanas Navy could properly see to her. While he was in the vicinity of the pod, he found some paperwork that looked important, a couple sketchbooks, and more than one diary or personal notebook. All of these docs he bundled up in a backpack she had in her locker, and the pilot strapped the backpack on so he would not lose track of it.

"The ship's control systems are semi-active, it has power but the damage panel shows everything is busted to a degree," one of the Malanas Marines said as he looked over the controls.

"Commo core just went offline," the other Marine / naval technician said.

"This is Kira, we have the core. I am exiting the ship now," kira reported by radio a second later.

"Good work, return to ship and secure critical hardware. We'll begin operations after salvage and mandatory crew rest," Murrue ordered. "And I mean actual, Honest-to-stars rest this time, Kira."

"Will do, Captain, if my mind ever stops wandering," Kira half-complained, half-acknowledged the point.

A clap inside the command center brought Athrun's attention back to the ship's control console. "We're in! Security on these systems are a joke, didn't take me anything to take control."

"Start disabling all harvest functions and begin the automatic repair system," Athrun recommended.

"Already on it," the Marine said as a second group of Malanas persons entered the command deck, including the Captain of their team.

"No resistance?" Reija asked as Athrun scooped up a blood bubble in a containment bag and sealed it.

"She was dead when we entered," Athrun waved at the sleeping pod. "In there."

"Thank you, pilot. We'll take it from here," Reija gave him a clap on both shoulders, as was custom for their group. "Your kindness and defense of our people will not be forgotten."

Athrun returned the gesture. "We're going to take the fight to them, Captain. If you can muster it, we could use the help."

It would be months before Athrun knew the extent that his off-the-cuff request would change everyone's fate.

-x-x-x-

(Day 38, 2200 Hours Shipboard Time)
(Archangel Star deck and crew lounge)

Given the sensitivity of the equipment and the necessities of intelligence and secrecy, Murrue had ordered the Quantum Communication Node to be stripped down to parts and guarded by the Elementals to ensure it was not tampered with until the following day, when everyone would have had enough rest to be completely clear-headed and calmed of soul before they began. There was some grumbling from the ZAFT troops and Kira, but they did as ordered. Even being faster than Natalya, none of them wanted to take a chance on being on the wrong end of an Elemental's armored boot to their asses. And Natalya had enough of a sense of humor to actually do so.

So, the team broke up and went their own ways after the units were stowed and rearmed. Salvage had been pretty decent, more Cube Fighters and Pod Ship hull plate, all good scrap for the nanomachine manufactory in the lower decks of the Archangel. Most of the salvage went back into the Flagship so the Malanas crew could use it to make underway repairs, but both the Nirvana and Archangel received a hefty cut and heftier gratitude for their assistance.

And then, silence. Athrun and Nicol returned to quarters to think and rest. Yzak had gone down to the cafeteria for a holoprogram of Immortal Warrior, but that didn't last long before he returned to quarters and crashed. Trowa, Mu, Chevalier, Fuu and Umi took a quick run through the springs, but even they did not stay up past 2100. Pytor, the odd man out of the crew, had been assigned foredeck guard and thus was not involved either way.

Kira, though, simply disappeared. After 2030 hours, nobody could account for where he had went. That alone was enough to worry the Magic Knight to whom Kira was a Squire, so Hikaru went looking for him.

The Star Lounge, on the middeck below the Archangel Conning Tower, was a favored hangout of engineering personnel but not so much of the pilots or hangar crew. Doubly so now that the Archangel had faster than lightspeed engines, sitting in the chairs facing the windows gave one a vibe of the old television series 'Star Trek'. Truth to tell, Hikaru liked looking at the stars from an outer-space perspective, but she mostly dismissed this room because the pilots didn't hang around here much. She was really passing through to check the cafeteria further aft, and —

A variation in the chair spacing on the port-side viewing chairs caused Hikaru to stop and look closer. It had to be a person laying across several of the chairs, and the amount of chairs blocked by the person roughly equated to Kira's height, so she decided it wasn't a big deal to check it out, four seconds deviation from her prior jog. She peered over the back of the chair bank to see who was laying there, and was a bit surprised to see who was there.

"Hikaru?" The Strike Freedom pilot asked after he saw the movement.

"Can't sleep?" She asked as a cover for her momentary surprise.

"No," Kira sighed. "I saw in there some horrible stuff, and I'm afraid I'll find more when we reassemble and activate the Quantum Core."

Hikaru vaulted over the bank of seats and, on landing, deliberately fell back into the seat that Kira's head was partially resting on — putting it right next to her right leg.

"What about you?" Kira asked.

"Can't sleep, busy worrying about you," Hikaru admitted.

Both Pilot and Magic Knight were quiet for a minute, Hikaru staring off into space, Kira staring at the ceiling.

"I saw the remnants of the Harvest in that ship," Kira said. Hikaru could feel his unconscious shudder through her leg. "Mostly skeletons, thousands of them piled against the outside hull in certain places. A couple that had been killed but not properly stripped, just a few organs removed." Kira shuddered again when he remembered the visage of an obviously pregnant lady that had been harvested for her heart and liver, and the remainder of her body simply discarded until it could be processed to strip it down to the skeleton. The depressurization had not been kind to her remains, either, which made things even worse. "And the bones, they were being fed into some kind of grinder, I don't know why," he shuddered again. "I've seen some horrible shit, done some shady things, but this is a whole new level of sick."

Hikaru took Kira's left hand and held it to her chest between her two hands. Neither had to say anything, they simply rested there, trying to calm down and clear the ghosts. One minute stretched into two minutes, into five minutes, ten minutes, and slowly Hikaru could feel the tension fading from his being. More to the point, Hikaru could tell that Kira was letting loose the ghosts of his past with each minute past.

"I need to go to bed," Kira said. "Thanks, Hikaru."

The Magic Knight stood up and helped her Squire stand up. "Come on."

There were a couple Engineering and Sailor personnel in the Star Lounge that saw the two, Magic Knight and Gundam Pilot, but none thought a bit about it.

-x-

(5 minutes later, Pilot's Quarters)

Their stroll to quarters was leisurely, neither lost their hold on the other, and neither wanted to give up holding onto each other. Alas, the arrival at the quarters meant they had to release each other, and they still found themselves reluctant.

After a moment's hesitation, Kira raised their clasped hands and kissed Hikaru's fingers. "Thank yo — " he was brought silent by Hikaru's finger to his lips. Without a word, she thumbed her way into her room and pulled Kira in with her. "Wait — " he protested halfheartedly before the door closed.

"You're cold-sleeping with me tonight," Hikaru said quietly.

"What?" Kira asked in half-shock.

"I alternate sleeping cold, clothes and no covers, and hot-sleeping, covers but no clothes," Hikaru explained.

"Why?" Kira asked, not entirely sure what he was asking 'why' about but he figured any answer would work here.

"You're still not relaxed. Remember our time in the Hot Springs?"

That recollection took only a second. "Oh."

Hikaru pulled Kira toward the bed. She climbed in and moved all the way toward the back edge of the bed. "Lay down and face the forward wall," she said. After he did, Hikaru hugged him from behind. "Just listen, as we did in the springs."

Both Pilot and Magic Knight were asleep in five minutes.

-x-x-x-

(Day 39, 0930 Hours Shipboard Time)
(Archangel Mess Hall)

Hikaru and Kira were the last two of the pilots to enter the mess deck for breakfast prior to the beginning of the repair work. They found out about it quickly enough: "Holy crap, they are still alive," Yzak said from the table occupied by the pilots and some of the technical personnel from the Nirvana.

"Slept way past my alarm," Kira said by way of cover. He wasn't sure if it would work, but…

"You look it, but then again we saw some pretty stiff shit on the ship," Yzak said. "Can't blame you havin' trouble getting to sleep. I did. Conked at about 2330 or so, and twitchy a couple times overnight. You?"

"2245 was the last clock check I remember, bad dreams all night," Kira semi-lied. He had had dreams about it, but they hadn't really disturbed him all that much because of the presence of another, and after a fashion he realized that Rayearth had helped as well.

"Well, grab some chow and get ready for round two," Athrun said. "Once we get started, it's MREs and spartan restroom breaks until we're done."

"Just so long as it's not the third floor port-side restroom, I'm good," Hikaru said. "That place, ugh."

"I know, the mechanics like to see who can stink it up more," Murdoch said after he sat down a tray for himself and Gascogne. "It's a competition between them, and good God is it a race with no winners or losers, only casualties."

"Yeah, no shit, my lunch was casualty to that restroom a week or two ago," Yzak said. "I swear, if the worst Lovecraftian horror crawled into that room and died, you'd be hard pressed to notice it."

"I've reserved the first floor starboard can for our use during this task," Murdoch assured them. "I figure reassembly should only take about 30 minutes, then we need to interface it, I don't know how long that will take."

"Jacking in would be about five minutes, the cables aren't standard but we can find the necessary volts, amps, and hertz fast enough," Athrun said between bites of biscuit and gravy. "The challenge is getting into their network without giving the bastards a sniff of ours."

"That's going to be the hard one," Kira admitted. "Between horror spasms last night, I was thinking about the security aspects. As soon as we fire the commo node up they're going to know it is active, and they're not going to see telemetry from their Flagship as expected. Question becomes, how will they react to that development?"

"If we're lucky, they'll just boot us if things go sour. If we're not lucky, we could be looking at a cyberattack in response." Athrun finished his last bite of the sausage casserole. "I'm going to get started on the assembly, see you guys down there."

"Take your time," Yzak waved his fork at Athrun. "We'll be a while still."

-x-

(2 hours later)
(Hangar deck)

"Okay, who's got the smallest hands here?" Murdoch asked after he tried to get the last plug in place and failed miserably.

"I'm out," Yzak said.

"Ditto, tried already," Athrun waved it off.

"Nope, my hands are almost as big as Murdoch's," Gascogne pointed out.

"I'd guess it's between Parfait and Umi," Mu suggested.

"Umi?" Parfait held her left hand up towards the Magic Knight. Umi obliged the check, and her hands came out just a hint larger than Parfait's, even discounting gloves. "Guess I'm it."

"Your weapon, milady," Murdoch held the end of the last interface cable up for her to take possession. Parfait took charge of the cable and ducked into the welded steel frame the team had built for the quantum communications core since the decision had been made to not reassemble the outer armor shell around the core.

It was the work of a couple seconds as the Nirvana Engineer wormed her way up into the connection interface in three directions, her left hand leading the way until it was in position. "I'm there, give me a second," Parfait announced.

"Damn good thing the Captain ordered us to take a night before we began, these cable harnesses for the Strike Freedom are perfect," Athrun pointed out.

"Worth the wait, every second of it," Nicol admitted even past his reservations about waiting. There was still the possibility that the commo node would have been invalidated by the capture, but it was a gamble worth the risk in their opinion. Understanding the OpFor was critical to defeating them, and Murrue was on a bit of a vengeance bender for the repeated attacks against the ship and her crew.

The click of the last locking lug was audible to the personnel in the bay. "It's done! We're in!" Parfait wormed her way back out of the frame and back to standing. "Are we online?"

"Strike Freedom's negotiating with the host now," Kira reported from the cockpit of said Gundam. After a few seconds, he clapped loudly. "Boom! We're in! Unidirectional data pull, the AI is mimicking a destroyed data core for the ship so the network feeds it what information it is 'missing'."

"How much and how fast?" Mu asked.

"An exabyte (1) a minute, looks like," Kira reported after he got a throttle count.

"How much is an exabyte?" Parfait asked, since the name was unfamiliar to her.

"A lot, like more than every book written in the history of humanity," Nicol said.

"Okay, that's a lot," BC said in mild shock.

"This is insane! We're up to three Exabytes a minute now! The Strike Freedom damn near can't keep pace with it!" Kira half-complained.

"We've filled one data core, going for two," Yzak said as he was keeping an eye on the data core storage indicators. Alongside the cable harnesses, the Strike Freedom had also prepared a dozen Crystalline data core storage units (4 exabytes per core) just to make sure that when they hauled down the network, they had storage aplenty.

"Holy shit and a circuit board, if we could claim this one back home, this would be the hack of the Cosmic Era," Athrun said as he watched the second data storage unit visibly fill up with data.

"I know, all the crazy shit we've done on this adventure and nobody's gonna believe it. What a travesty," the Duel pilot complained as the second unit filled up and throughput switched to the third storage unit.

"I'm beginning to wonder if we should just keep going after we return home," Nicol said. "There's gotta be a market out there for people willing to do good deeds."

"Well, we've found a few of those jobs over the years," Mu pointed out, watching over Nicol's shoulder as the third unit finished filling. "Three. Son of a bitch, that's a huge amount of data to process."

"Three going on four, and it's not slowing down," Nicol breathed.

"Anyone taking bets?" Yzak asked Murdoch.

"Not yet," Murodch looked toward the largest portion of the group. "Bet pool! How many cores we gonna fill?"

"Solid seven," Athrun waved a Doma Gil in his direction.

"Nine," Yzak fronted the same coin.

"Six," Gascogne held up four meal tickets for the Nirvana.

"Twelve with overflow," Mu went for the outside bet with a Figaro Gil.

"Just passed five cores, going on six," Yzak announced.

"Eight," Parfait held up four meal tickets of her own.

"Eight," Hikaru chipped in a Vector gil.

"Not betting," Umi ducked out.

"I don't know where to begin on this one," Fuu took herself out of the pool.

"I'll go nine," BC said with her own stack of meal tickets.

"And I'll go in as ten," Murdoch had quickly written down the bets on a whiteboard and collected the bet stash for distribution. His bet was a Figaro gil for the pool.

"Coming up on six, now!" The visual indicator on the fifth storage unit topped out and the data started flowing into the next unit in the array.

"Six, this is just insane," Kira said from the hatch of his Gundam.

"And still going!" Yzak retorted with a smile.

Hikaru broke open a bag of potato chips that the galley staff had cooked and packaged a couple weeks ago. "Here, try these," Hikaru waved the bag at BC.

"What are those?" BC asked, not sure what she was looking at.

"Potato chips. Galley staff makes and pre-packages them as a snack food. They're slices of potato fried in cooking oil to crispiness and salted or flavored," Hikaru explained.

"Huh," BC half-grunted. "What flavor?"

"French Onion and Chives. They're really good," Hikaru assured her.

BC figured it was good for a try, so she grabbed a chip and sampled it. BC didn't count herself as much of an onion fan (certainly not a straight onion, or even as garnish), but this 'french onion' and the chives were an excellent combination.

"That's not bad. Bit greasy, but not bad at all," Buson said. "Who would we talk to about maybe ordering some for the Nirvana's galley?"

"Seven! Into the seventh unit!" Yzak interrupted the impromptu 'cultural exchange' between the Magic Knight and the Pirate Commander.

"My bet is toast," Gascogne said. "Guess my next couple meals come out of my salary."

"You could grab a meal or two over here if needed," Murdoch pointed out the obvious way around the meal ticket shortfall.

Hikaru waited a moment for some quiet before she answered BC's outstanding question. "I'd think we could get you some of the chips or the french onion powder?" she said. "I'm not really sure if its a premade mix or if it's something they make in batches, to be honest."

"Huh. If we take a break here, I'll have to talk to the cooks about it." BC took another proffered chip and chomped it.

"Almost to eight, slowing down a bit," Yzak said. "Almost there, almost…"

'Bingo, that's eight," Athrun said after the indicator on the eighth storage unit changed color to indicate full. "My bet is toast, but I can't say I'm unhappy in this case. The more data, the better."

"We're dropping hosts quickly, throughput is down to less than two Exabytes," Kira reported.

"Did they discover us?" Yzak asked.

"No, looks like the dropped hosts reported transfer complete, they have nothing left to give." He looked back into the cockpit. "Okay, yeah, we're down below an Exabyte a minute, only a couple hosts left. How are we doing on storage?"

"Eight and about a third," Mu guesstimated the fill level on the last unit.

"One host left, 250 petabytes throughput," Kira announced. "Okay, last host dropped off, we've got everything the network can feed us."

"Eight and about 40 percent of a ninth," BC gaped.

"What do you think, Commander? Split the difference?" Murdoch asked.

Mu eyed the bet pile. "Yeah, I'd split it out. Fairly won, fairly distributed."

"Aye aye, sir. Yzak, Parfait, Hikaru, BC, over here," Murdoch summoned in the winners of this most dreadfully fascinating bet pool.

-x-

(3 hours later)

34.2 Exabytes of encrypted data had taken the Strike Freedom some 3 hours to decrypt, even given that the Strike Freedom had started with the encryption keys courtesy of the last data breach they had exploited. The problem wasn't so much complexity of the task, it was more of a question of the sheer volume of the data to be broke down and translated. Leveraging the Quantum Mainframes in the Archangel only improved the throughput from five hours to three, but even that much of an improvement was a relief.

The decryption time had not itself been an idle time, though. The raw data was still available for perusal, and the crew had been at it for those three hours nonstop to try to garner what they could from the enemy's massive network. The pilots, the Magic Knights, and the Engineers had been working on the data, with BC and Mu compiling the information on whiteboards for high-level analysis.

"So far, we've got figures on harvest and locations, we've got force dispositions and timetables, but we're still missing the golden key," BC covered the major points so far as seen by the crew.

"And a lot of photos and video we really didn't need to see." Mu shuddered unconsciously. "I keep wanting to believe this is some kind of sick joke, but we've seen enough evidence that it's not."

"And now we've got the paperwork," Kira grumped. "So much paperwork that if it was all printed out, it would gross mass higher than the mass of some planets."

"Sadly true," Athrun said. "The more depressing part of this is that these 'harvest' logs are really kill counts with a fancy name on it. Every number here represents a life sacrificed for whatever hellish reason they're doing this for."

"Guys, I think I've got something here," Nicol piped up. "Historical briefing paper for the first Harvester Ship launched, according to this some 32 years ago. Okay, looks like this is a command-section briefing and after-action report, a mutiny on the ship when it became apparent the crew wasn't going to be in the 'Continuing Life' program. According to this, it is officers only, and the 400-strong crew had to be put down and Harvested themselves when they rebelled."

"What the hell does that mean, 'Continuing Life'?" Yzak asked while leaning back in his chair to look at Nicol's monitors from over his shoulder.

"Strike Freedom, can you do a directed document search for this Continuing Life Program?" Kira requested of his Gundam.

"There is a document in an earlier briefing folder that answers the question, pilot," the AI answered immediately. "I am printing the relevant pages on printer two."

There were always some printer units around the area for the crew to use for hard-copies where electronics were not feasible. One of those printers had been shanghaied for this detail, and it processed four pages of material in legal briefing formatted text.

Nicol was the first to put hands on it, and was quick to read through the first two pages, stopped, returned to the first, and slowly reread it.

"This is insane," Nicol handed the document off to Yzak and put his head down on the computer table. "Gods almighty, why?"

" 'Due to the increasing inhospitality of the environment and life on Terra, it has been determined that populations capable of maintaining the continuance of Terran Humanity shall be moved to the Exoframe and supported by any means necessary.' " Yzak read off the overarching thesis of the document.

"Okay, that's not so bad," Athrun said. "Could be a bit brutal in action, but…" Zala trailed his sentence off when quelled by a look from Yzak.

" 'Procedure 4: Terran Naval Yard Io is to begin deployment of a fleet of ships suitable to track down the remnants of Humanity before the Environmental Cataclysm. These ships are to be designed suitable in capability to track, pursue, confront, capture, and harvest persons found for necessary biological components to support the Terran Humanity Remnant. Biological material harvested is to be used to prolong the lifespans of authorized persons by way of continuous biological component replacement.' "

"Oh that's disgusting," Umi said.

" 'Procedure 1: Colony Groups were launched in prior operational directives with the explicit orders to accentuate chosen biological features for later harvest. Each colony group was dispatched with appropriate personnel and resources to make best use of worlds whereby those intended natural strengths would be refined over the course of several generations to be exploited by the Harvest.' "

"The colonies, they were nothing but a setup for the Harvest," BC said in clear shock. "We're farm animals to be chopped up for slaughter at the whim of the Terran government."

"That is just flat fucking wrong," Tolle said bluntly.

"There's more to this document, but that's the gist of it," Yzak slammed the page down on the table they were using for research terminals. "We're in the middle of a fucking horror movie played out among the stars."

"And the only way to put and end to this is to go to Terra and bury everyone involved in the project. Every mother's sons of them," Murdoch completed the thought that Yzak had started.

"Shame we don't have the capability of cleaning up Terra, it'd be worth it," Mu said. "Save the colonies and the cradle of humanity."

"I will settle for saving the Colonies," Gascogne said. "Now, if the worlds are supposed to accentuate a body part they want, what's supposed to be the take-away from Meijere or Tarak?"

BC looked at Gascogne, then Umi, then Murdoch, then Yzak, and back along the group. "They're after our reproductive organs."

"What?" Parfait asked.

"Our reproductive organs. That's the difference between Tarak and Meijere, the sexes. That's what they are after, the reproductive organs. But, that brings the question, are Lord Grandpa and Lord Grandma in on it, subject to it, or just casual victims the same as the rest of us? And if that's what they want, why separate the groups onto two worlds?"

They would know the answer to those questions in less than a week, but not by any amount of data analysis from captured enemy files.

---

Author's Chapter Afterword:

Back once more unto the fire!

And, courtesy of DeathZealot pointing it out to me, this story is now over 10 years old and has its own TvTropes page, which are two things I NEVER expected to see out of it. You'll see why when you get towards the end of my Afterword.

My writing has been uneven of late, mainly because I am in the middle of the eponymous construction and home maintenance season which eats time. Just as a reference, over the past weekend I did some 14 combined hours of maintenance work at home, after doing a full work week with two days of swing shift. So yeah.

This is where Vandread could have done a bit more of a gritty show, but Vandread was originally billed as a boy-meets-world-coming-of-age story so I can understand why they glossed over a lot of potential. Of course, this being me, I'm here to make use of the missed opportunity and hammer on both the shortcomings of the original show and expand on them. And that is why this is a bit messier than the series. And why, in Yzak's words, this is a horror show in space.

And you can probably guess that I have quite a bit more horror to come.

That said, now that the game is afoot, the real battle begins. First, clearing the Harvesters becomes a big thing — leaving them out and about will be hazardous to the other colonies and will create an ongoing conflict point for the Nirvana and Archangel. But, as in the series, the destruction of a Harvester Flagship will trigger a nasty response for Tarak and Meijere, so that battlefront is going to get heated fast.

The next point of contention is going to be the societies of Tarak and Meijere. Neither society is going to like the Archangel — a mixed peerage ship of technology and magic, commanded by a woman with a male husband, sits properly on no side of the gender gap. That said, the pissed-off antics of Paiway, railing against a future she is not going to be able to avoid, is going to cause some serious trouble for both ships in the coming chapter. And from that trouble will come an answer that nobody will like, but everybody will understand in context of the Harvest.

And then there shall be Terra. On that note, I shall give not even a hint of what is to come, because I intend a couple curve-balls over the course.

Such is the end of my extrapolation on the chapter, now for a random thought on my writing.

It's funny as hell when I stop to think about it, that AAA was a slapdash concept to begin with, damn near a gag story formed of a plot bunny that was haunting me at the time I gamed it out. The irony abounds in that AAA has ballooned into my longest work hands down, my most read story by a factor of three, my most reviewed story by a factor of five, and most favorited by a factor of four. Not at all bad for a story I had no discernible expectations for or a cogent operation plan when I began writing it out.

At the end, either of my mainline stories may be longer than this one — each section of the Multimage Chronicles or the Jokers Wild will be 400K plus words, with eight sections each that amounts to 3.2 million words minimum. Counting side stories that are inevitable, 4 million or more is not an unreasonable end. But, in one continuous story, Archangel's Amazing Adventures will outstrip them by a long shot. Even my newer Sigma works will balloon, but not have the continuous length of this superbeast formed of a random plot bunny because a friend of mine allowed me to borrow Magic Knight Rayearth at the same time I was watching Gundam SEED. Oops.

Stats at this time:
-804,407 Words (to Chapter 48)
-788 reviews (average 16.4 reviews per chapter)
-194,388 views (Almost 200K! For reference, all my other stories combined have a grand total of 124,906 views as of this publishing.)
-AAA is listed in 13 C2 collections
-297 story favorites
-251 story alerts

Stats like this are humbling to me, especially given that SEED is a rather dormant fandom in the here and now, and never was a super-high traffic fandom to begin with. That makes it even more stunning to someone who expected not much from his own writing, and was running a long-ball unexpected pairing in MKR and Seed.

Next chapter is in the works for Jokers Wild 2, I want to try to hammer that story out before the end of the year. Sigma's on close-hold for the time being, I'm trying to teach myself the art of Visual Basic 2016, which is a wildly different animal from the Visual Basic 6 I trained on in high school and college. If I can create my own tracking program for my staff of thousands, things become a shit-ton easier for me. Transcribing the thousands of records I have though, that is going to be SEVERELY labor-intensive. Stay tuned for further.

That's it for me for today. NEXT UP: Tempers will flare on both ships shortly, but for very different reasons. And things will get nasty heated when they do flare.

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Review Replies: Almost 2 full pages of reviews from the last chapter. Almost! Keep the feedback coming people! I do read all my reviews, and try to reply to them as best as possible!

DSGundam00: Star Wars would be a fun one, but Star Wars is an impossible challenge for the Archangel. The level of destruction inherent to the Star Wars universe is several orders of magnitude above Gundam SEED or even VanDread. More Gundam options are on the table, though! Stay tuned for further!

Infinite Freedom: You thought that was their true goal? Pffftttt, this is AAA we're talking about. Things go from bad to worse in due time, amigo!

Now that the cross-training is in play, you see some serious results.

As to the HeavyArms, it is the TV version, which was also a ballistic weapon despite the name. The damage it caused was always more of a ballistic characteristic, but then again the series was on this matter always a bit flagellating.

Jura's still up in the air, so if you have any votes, I'd like to hear them!

Drakensis: Long time no hear! And much thanks for the compliment, the way it was handled in the show always struck me as something of a forced ass-pull, so I used more available resources to come to a smarter conclusion :)

Rydan Fall: Hot damn you got a selection of suggestions, and thanks for pointing out the KF Boom issue, forgot about that when I was writing the Battletech section.

Redacted 20168: You are quite welcome for the (REDACTED REDACTED). Stay tuned for further (REDACTED)! (Sorry, had to play on your name :)

AznPuffyHair: WH40K is a series I really haven't dabbled in, but a lot of the artwork and memes have me looking in that direction. Someday I'll take the dive, but you can rest assured I can think of a lot more places to go where gratuitous amounts of whoopass will be needed.

DeathZealot: Yeppers, Flay got her update, and now I have some more maneuver room on both sides.

The initial letter from Natarle was before the outbreak of hostilities between Vector and Baron, so no such troubles were listed. The chat with the Seraphim that included Flay's exploits is actually in an operational gap between phases of the war, and the next chapter of RoV will flesh out the end of that little brush-fire conflict.

Took me a while to rotate around to AAA again, but here it is :)

KnightWolf 1875: Who's Hunk? And good cooking is its own inspiration, all things being equal.

Finnzo: Oh, don't worry, cyberwarfare is still on the table. But you were right about this one, so…

Sabanu No Yokho: Chrome isn't the worst browser about oddball form submits, but not the best.

Your suggestions are mostly in line with other requests, but Murrue Versus Janeway is considered a null set for my writing. Star Trek is no dice in my combined milieu, ST is on my personal of materials that just ain't happening.

NHO: Lol, the foreshadowing comes and goes in my writing, but as always, there are haunting elements that never quite go away.

On Kira, that 'Ghost' problem is mostly gone as of this chapter, but not completely. Flay's actual progression is covered in the Regent of Vector side-story, it's a good side-read that follows the end of the war and leads out into the future for Flay and Natarle.

Oh ye of little faith, there's plenty of pr0n around the Archangel, but nobody is claiming it...

Not sure if the AI is going to create sub-units yet, but it is possible.

There's a lot more VanDread potential in place, you can check out the episodes on YouTube (they have the subbed eps available) and I'm out to make it a helluva lot grittier.

On your suggestions pertaining to SEED Destiny, I already have a plan for that. Also, keep in mind that the beginning of Sigma (pertaining to the Minerva versus Slavers battle) predates AAA in relative terms by hundreds of years. That history is already played out, but by the vagaries of interdimensional travel, somewhere else in Existence is another instance of Destiny that is not yet at the point of Armory One. So there are possibilities, and I intend on playing them fully.

Thank you for the standing suggestions, and stay tuned for further!

Gulping: To properly answer your question, the Strike Freedom's internal data core has access to all machine designs from the UC era, including Crossbone, Zanscare, and the Sentinel units. The organization that originally employed the SF-MP has been around for quite a while, and had the pleasure to both face and employ just about everything in the UC, AC, and CE eras. To what degree that knowledge will be made available is yet to be seen.

PTL: Muv-Luv is a name I've heard, but not looked into in any major degree. Thanks for the heads up!

Kittenekomaid: I will admit it was not an immediate update to the Lady of the Airships, but that was my next chapter before this one.

On revealing BC, I think I will probably stick with the anime release. As to how I'm going to go about doing the reveal itself, I did not give spoilers. Stay tuned for further!

Gundam Kaiser: I have heard of the Ideon universe, but I have not actually seen a material from it. I may have to look into this.

Shin 5700: Holy shit, now that is a wall of text. Easily worthy of inclusion in a chapter!

Actually, as this chapter proves, I inverted the order between Jura and Meia. As I let the dice decide how these things rollout, it turned out that Jura was the victim of an almost collision that caused them to combine during the heat of combat. All else being equal, it is possible that Meia may or may not combine in this story series, or she may in the next chapter. Who knows?

One supposition that your thesis on nuclear reactors in Gundam SEED overlooks is that the later Gundams from the Gundam SEED Destiny production did not have true nuclear reactors, they use superpowerful energy storage units that are well in excess of normal mobile suit technology. In absolute terms, the only machines that have actual proper nuclear reactors are Freedom, Justice, Providence, and Dreadnought. That said, as Archangel's Amazing Adventures has access to Clan fusion reactor technology, and the Strike Freedom Mass Production unit has access to even better reactors, the necessities of energy storage are less than an issue for the team.

Another thing to consider about having Mirage Colloid and phase shift armor active at the same time is that Mirage Colloid is a visual and radar impediment, it is not an electronic warfare impediment. Phase shift armor uses a lot of voltage as a defense mechanism, effectively trading electrons for kinetic energy. The necessity of having such amperage running through all your armor plates will throw up one hell of an electromagnetic signature, which would render the Mirage Colloid useless in most circumstances if the unit that it is facing has electromagnetic sensor systems. As Gundam is hit and miss as to what types of sensors are used, it is safe to assume that the old Black Crow system from the Vietnam era war or similar technologies may still be in use, even if in a limited spectrum.

A good point on that special cockpit system from Iron Blooded Orphans, and you are correct about the strike freedom having better systems available. As you pointed out, this Psycommu or Psychoframe systems are usable, with necessary upgrades, and a healthy dose of training for the pilots. And in all reality I have not even begun to scratch the surface of the technology available through the Strike Freedom, as the database of weapon systems and support units is significant. The Crusaders from which that unit initially hailed suffered a lot of nasty battles in their past.

I rather like your theories about how to interact with the Halo verse, and if I do decide to go in that direction, or the dice decide for me, I will take some of those suggestions to heart. Certainly about dealing with idiotic controlling entities. You can rest assured that Captain Ramius will not be falling prey to stupid shenanigans in that fashion, after several years as a mercenary she is far less trusting than most people give her credit.

All in all, I consider it an honor to have such a review on my story. Much obliged!

Sabaku No Yokho (Repeat strike): That's a helluva thing you've got going there. Shame if I'd have to use it, no? :)

On your first point, there's no guarantee that the ship is packable by that safety measure built into the pod. Or it might work, only the dice can tell at this point.

Upgrades to machines are classified at this time, but rest assured since the trouble with Terra is getting nastier, upgrades are a very high possibility.

As I've said another review replies, Star Wars is a bit too hot for anything in the Gundam universe. There is just way too much weapon power in the Star Wars universe for it to be survivable, even with this heavily upgraded Archangel.

As far as in jokes go during the writing, one of my favorite jokes for my betas is the Macross Missile Massacre. You can rest assured that the old Macross series is on my random selection list.

You may always propose custom units, but there is no guarantee I will use them in this story. If anything, they are more likely to be used in my other stories, where engineering abilities are a little bit more widespread.

Dragoon 725: I believe what we have here is dueling wall of text reviews! Much obliged for the courtesy and the honor!

On your second point, if I remember correctly the series Babylon Five had a trouble in one of the later seasons with a ship design that had enough power to run normal functions or use the main gun, not both at the same time. I could easily see this being the same problem here in the Halo verse.

It is good to see somebody has understanding of engineering principles, as is demonstrated by your third point. Simply slapping new technology on older designs is not always a good idea. And usually it is sure as hell not fast. Hell, even retrofitting an existing design with off-the-shelf parts can take weeks or months.

I have been considering the possibility of mobile suits in the Halo verse, and you're right on your list of points. The big one is going to be asymmetrical warfare, enemy ground armor is currently very limited compared to most mobile suit technologies, even older UC era designs would have a severe advantage over most covenant ground armor. All else being equal, I did not consider such an asymmetrical disadvantage a bad thing, real life is not so forgiving as a balanced fight.

Personally I never really considered the possibility that the Paxis Harvester units were designed inferior due to a inability to copy proper design schematics from the Nirvana. After fashion, that makes perfect sense. It also means that if one of the enemy Harvester units tries to make copies of the Archangel units, they will be very low test facsimiles.

You raise a good point about Final Fantasy VII. Then again, Final Fantasy VII is not my favorite Final Fantasy series by a long shot, and of the original PlayStation series, Final Fantasy VII is pretty much the bottom tier of the Final Fantasies in my opinion. Yes, it is loved wide and far, but the story just does not grip me in the same fashion that the story of Final Fantasy IX or Final Fantasy Tactics does. I do believe, if the dice decide that I shall go there, this is going be one of those instances where the Archangel Team goes against both major players.

On your last point, you're quite correct that the Archangel Team has been very lucky on that note. And, there are multiple scenarios in the random selection pool that could lead to a battle that would be otherwise unwinnable by the team. On the other hand, luck, intelligence, and a healthy dose of mass destruction abilities go a long way to solving asymmetric problems. And, I think I should also make mention of the fact that I have not really cracked the power of the Rune Gods, so there is that.

All in all, I thank you for the excellent review and wonderful ideas!

Blahto: This has been hashed out before, the mixed threat environment the Archangel operates in would be very destructive to armor plating that could be punched with an unarmored fist and have a decent hope of damaging. If a Light Machine Gun can cause significant damage to it, such armor is not rated for Archangel Team abuse.

NHO: Much obliged for the resource, amigo!

Sabaku No Yohko: Rumors of the death of this story are greatly exaggerated.

NHO: Actually, just cracked Battletech, haven't gotten too far into it yet. Still beating my head on Modded Minecraft and Fallout 4.

Hellhound DOW: Thank you for the review and thank you for pointing out the plot issue, I don't always keep proper track of who is injured and whose machine is properly damaged. I need to figure out a way to do better tracking on that.

I think I'm going to take Jura a different direction than the series did, in the series she was more of a naïve pervert than anything else, here I think I'm going to have her wise up a little bit faster but still show that intention and aggression as the story goes long. Whether or not she gets anywhere on her great goal of making a baby is another story entirely. The dice will have plenty to say about that, I have rest assured.

On your point about her asking, you're being a little bit unfair to the mechanics. Some of the mechanics are reasonably stable and rational people. Some, mind you. Okay, not very many of them.

There are upgrade options available for pretty much everyone mobile suits, but as I said in an earlier review, there will be no spoilers on that note. Something will happen, I'm just not sure when or to what degree.

Thank you for the error check and the review!

As always, thank you all for the reviews! I read each review, and even though I do not reply individually, I try to make sure I replied to everybody in the chapters to make sure you know you're being heard! And I always love the fuel for this ongoing inferno! Keep them coming!

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The Gripe Sheet:

Only one issue found by Hellhound, which I will need to review. Much thanks to Takeshi, Sieben, and Necroblade for straightening out my writing!

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Footnotes:

(1): An Exabyte is, technically, 1024 Petabytes, where a Petabyte is 1024 Terabytes and where a Terabyte is 1024 Gigabytes. In hard numbers, an Exabyte comes out to 1 152 921 504 606 846 976 bytes, or 1.15 Quintillion bytes in standard counting numbers if you truncate at two decimal places.

For reference: if you consider that a standard form factor computer hard drives holds 4 terabytes (which isn't even the biggest on the market at this time of writing), an Exabyte would require roughly 288,231 drives to hold that amount of data. Assuming each drive weighs 1.6 pounds (US), that would come out to a gross weight of 230 tons of hard drives. So yeah, you could easily get away with calling this one fuck-ton of data.