Elliott DeSchepper had been waiting for this moment for a long time. Since childhood she had watched the colonies struggle in the wake of Earth imperialism, witnessed tiny and underequipped rebel forces working to take down high priority targets all over the United Earth Sphere Nation only to be turned away by damnable peacekeeping Preventers units. With thanks to them and their ilk the colonies had grown powerless and weak, incapable of realizing the extent of their oppression.
Now she stood on the bridge of her own warship, monitoring quietly the operation that was underway. She had been planning for years to set the Earth Sphere against itself by manipulating pawns and strategically planting doubts, and the fruition of her tactical genius was finally at hand.
Millions of dollars had gone into the development of the bullet-ridden mobile suit that was now—or had been—faced off against her salvage vessel. Of course the money had been stolen, laundered, hidden under the guise of a well-reputed but hopelessly corrupt asteroid mining company, but even if the cash had come from Elliott's own pocket the investment would have been more than worth the payout: an easily remilitarized and masterfully engineered mobile suit, plus one of the most highly skilled pilots in all of the colonies or on Earth to fly it for her.
Today was a good day.
"Ma'am, the mobile suit is unresponsive," came a call from the salvage vessel. "We believe the pilot has lost consciousness."
The one setback so far was that Elliott's precious pilot had been shot. A careless error made by undertrained rookies, especially considering the lack of medical staff and equipment at her disposal. No matter, though, not really: even novice physicians could easily fix bullet wounds—how hard could it be?
"Salvage the suit and the pilot," commanded the woman. "Assess damages and—" she paused and stared hard at the live feed of the suit being broadcast over the main screen. "Stop. Is that a Preventer's ship?"
"It looks to be, ma'am."
"Maneuver around. Get a positive ID and blow the thing to hell."
"Yes, ma'am."
Very slowly the salvage craft rotated around the inert mobile suit and little by little the tiny white transport vessel came into view. The Preventer logo was emblazoned on its wing and hull, and the craft was idling dangerously close to the suit.
Thirty seconds later the ship was a bright glowing fireball, and then it was nothing.
"Salvage the suit," Elliott ordered again, and she smiled.
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Noin clung precariously to the exterior of Duo's eerily quiet mobile suit with one eye on her target and the other firmly fixed on the strange salvage vessel floating nearby. She had seen the enemy ship from a fair distance out and reckoned it would be a good idea to abandon her own easily identifiable ship as soon as possible, especially since there had been open and unprovoked hostility.
She was glad for her decision when she watched her vessel explode into dust.
With haste Noin worked her way to the front of the suit, thankful at the very least that her ship had distracted the salvage vessel enough for it to move out of view of the cockpit, and she began a speedy but methodical search for the manual release lever to the cockpit door. She found it quickly, in the same place is had been located on every standard issue Aries and Leo of the One Year War, and with substantial effort managed it open with the bulky gloves of her space suit.
Noin was certain that if it had been anyone else in the cockpit at that very moment she would have closed the suit up and high-tailed it away, regardless of whether or not her own transport vessel was destroyed. It was not that she hadn't expected the sight of Duo Maxwell dead or very near to it—she had been fully warned of that by Sally Poe—but the reality of the matter was more jarring and disturbing than the seasoned war veteran could ever have imagined.
The sheer volume of blood was astounding, hanging like a thick mist in the tiny space. Behind the red curtain Duo slumped unmoving and obscured, his hands floating idly above the throttle. The only apparent evidence of effort toward self-preservation was that the helmet had been firmly reattached to Duo's mangled flight suit, and his emergency oxygen reserve was online.
The cockpit itself was in shambles. Three monitors were cracked or shattered entirely, the left keyboard had almost completely detached from its casing and held on only by a thin blue wire, and the right keyboard, apparently still online, was so caked with blood that the light it emitted was eerie and red. The blood was everywhere, clinging to every surface like rain.
Noin closed the cockpit door behind her, regretting the destruction of her own ship, and set about addressing the damage to both person and property. There was no way to check Maxwell's vitals, not with the mobile suit's computer system offline, and no way to contact the Peacemillion without power. Despite her best efforts the suit's engines would not fire, and even if they had she doubted very much that it would be capable of flight.
She turned her attention back to the wounded pilot and stared. He looked dead. Regardless, there was nothing she could do for him without oxygen and pressurization in the cockpit, and there was nothing she could do for the mobile suit without tools. So she slumped against the broken console and waited for inevitable capture.
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Many times in many years Duo Maxwell had strived to imagine what would come at death, but his own personal hell ended up a mockery of all he cherished in life. The only reason he knew he was dreaming was because in reality blood floated weightlessly in space, but now what surrounded him was anchored firmly to the ground, running from crater to crater, and dripping from where it had splattered on high.
Much of his surrounding was comprised of a rich gray stone tilled up from the foundation like garden soil, but dark wooden shards poked here and there from the ground and the shattered remains of a great mahogany cross kept vigil from the boulder upon which it had fallen. The dais was surrounded by glass, broken into a million tiny mirrors that reflected the yellow-orange light of the mobile suit standing overhead.
He had known ever since the fateful day his childhood died that he would see her at the end, but he had always believed she would be bloodied and mangled beyond recognition. But now she stood far away, detached from the horrific scene around him and cloaked in shadows thicker than the blood on the floor.
She stared at him, and though he could not see her face he could tell that she was judging him with whatever remained of her stark and sometimes icy gaze. She did not move and did not speak. The silence stretched until Duo became afraid that his postmortem eternity would be spent in a staring contest with a woman whom he may at one point have loved more than any one or any thing that had since entered his life, and he wished that he could trade hells with Sisyphus.
There came a sudden and violent jolt, earthquake-like in both its onset and duration. Rubble fell from the ceiling, kicked a cloud of dust that obscured even the harsh mobile suit light.
When the dust settled, she was gone.
Before Duo had the chance to panic there came another quake, longer and more intense than the first, and as the rocks fell he could make out voices—frantic voices calling obscure commands that he could not understand and about which he did not care. All he wanted to know was where Helen had gone.
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Elliott DeSchepper watched with disgust as her crew worked to revive the wounded pilot they had dumped out of the salvaged mobile suit's cockpit. Even with their rudimentary medical training they had done a poor job of things, and even now a stream of blood was collecting on the floor of her cargo hull.
The pilot looked near dead, and Elliott did not know how he had not crossed that threshold yet. The amount of blood in the cockpit had been overwhelming caused in part by the initial bullet penetration and spread by the flight immediately afterward, and by now the possibility of the man bleeding out was very real.
All the while she kept her eyes on her other prize, the captain of the Preventers ship that had entered her airspace. The woman would not shut up after the medics began handling the pilot; she fought them away from him so fiercely that she'd had to be restrained, and even after that she continued barking orders from across the room. She called medical advice, sounding as desperate as she did angry, and as a result she had been gagged unceremoniously with a dirty towel.
Elliott had not expected a second hostage, much less one who was so outspoken. The cell block in her warship was undersized with only four cells and no immediate access to medical facilities. It was made for the healthy and docile, not those near death or in hysterics. But it would have to do.
At once a voice came over the intercom, calmer than it had been the last time she'd been called.
"We've got the pilot stabilized," said the voice, "and the Preventer has calmed down. What are your orders?"
"Have you closed the wound?" she asked.
"Cauterized, ma'am."
"Then transport the prisoners to the detention hall. I'll need information on the officer. Could be that we get a healthy ransom for her. I'll also need a background check on our pilot; I don't believe he's the one we intended to catch. Monitor them both closely."
"Aye-aye, ma'am."
The communication cut off.
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Duo could not count of the number of times he had lost and subsequently regained consciousness. Many times as a child he had fainted from hunger; as a young adult countless blows to the hull of the Deathscythe had knocked him out cold, two concussed him entirely; and both Heero and Trowa had struck him hard enough to lay him out flat. Even in his military career he had spent some considerable time in the void, having walked once into a steel beam during mobile suit construction. In all of these cases reality had returned to him quickly once he came to, but now was a wholly different story. He opened his eyes but could not gain his bearings. He was groggy, felt weak, and his head swam. Only the mild discomfort in his gut alerted him to the fact that something might have been amiss, but it felt more like hunger than actual pain.
Initially he had no recollection of what had happened to him to get him into this predicament. He remembered the night prior—the briefing, dinner afterward, his short talk with Noin. He could recall everything of the test flight up until the throttle jammed, but everything after that was a blur.
Again he opened his eyes, blinked to dull the intensity of the light, and with much resolve propped himself onto his elbows. When his eyes adjusted he gleaned that he was in some kind of cell, utterly featureless except for a small toilet in one corner, and the walls were made of polished white metal that was glossy and reflective. A barred sliding door was located in the corner opposite where he woke, and through it he could see a small group of people that he did not recognize.
Normally Duo would have felt somewhat nervous at the prospect of capture, at knowing that he had no idea what was happening around him, but remarkably he felt no emotion at all. An eerie calm had come over him that he could not explain away.
"It seems you've been off grid for a while, miss," came one voice from outside, and Duo pulled himself toward the door for a listen. "It would do you some good to give us the information you have on yourself and the pilot."
"I'm not interested in giving information."
Noin? Duo thought. The voice was familiar, unmistakably so, but he had left her with Heero on the Peacemillion. Still, he could not be there—no one on that ship would ever address her as miss.
"It would be in your best interest to talk to us. Miss DeSchepper doesn't take kindly to hostile prisoners, much less unidentified Preventer officers."
"I'm the hostile one?" asked Noin with incredulity. "Aren't you lunatics the ones that blew up my ship? Aren't you the ones that opened fire on a civilian test flight and shot an unarmed man?" She laughed sarcastically. "And I'm the hostile. Good one."
"If you provide us with information we will consider setting you free."
"No. Just kill me and be done with it," Noin snapped. "But make it clean, for God's sake. I saw how you handled that bullet wound."
"So be it."
Still Duo felt nothing except a slight compulsion to intercede, an instinctive understanding that something was not right. He pulled himself closer to the barred door and watched as the group, led by a small man in a white coat, made for the door.
"Wait a minute," Duo called, and suddenly was the center of attention. This was surprising, as his call had come out more croak than command.
"You're awake!" Noin called, surprised and elated from the cell opposite his own. She looked no worse for the wear, but Duo noted that she had been bound at the wrists.
"Find Miss DeSchepper," said the white coat to another in his group. "Let her know that the pilot has regained consciousness." Then he turned to Duo, who by this time was mustering the strength to stand. "Oh you'll want to keep off your feet for a while, sir. You were—regrettably—injured during the course of your capture."
Maxwell resigned himself to sitting cross legged in the middle of the doorway, and as if on instinct he touched gingerly the scabbed and tender wound on his stomach. He was neither surprised nor alarmed by it, though the strange feeling he'd had in his gut when he woke now made sense. He felt about the wound as he spoke, gauging its severity.
"You can't kill her," he said flatly, ignoring the man's address.
At that moment the door to the cell block swung open.
"Guests," said the white coat, "this is Miss Elliott DeSchepper. She is the person to whom you need to direct your concerns."
Elliott stepped into the room and was met by utter silence. If Noin's reaction was any indication Duo knew he should have been startled by her appearance, but again there was nothing. Objectively the girl was pretty enough, of average height and weight, brown of hair and eyes, and dressed in formal attire. But the most surprising thing was her age—there was no way she could have been even twenty, but the way the man in the coat had spoken of her she seemed to be the one in command of the whole operation.
"You can't kill her," Duo said again, this time to DeSchepper, and he pointed emphatically at Noin. "Your guy here made it sound like that was your plan."
"I'm glad you're well," replied the girl coolly. "I was keeping the officer alive out of need for information, but she wouldn't cooperate. I've got no need for her now that you're awake and apparently willing to speak with me. Why should I keep her alive?"
Across the way Noin grimaced, then looked to Duo with worry, but he sat with an iron face. DeSchepper had said the wrong thing.
"The AC199 United Earth Sphere Nation Military Tribunal signed into intergalactic law a decree forbidding, in no uncertain terms, the killing of civilians for any reason without proper governmental trial."
"I know the laws," said DeSchepper. "But the officer is not a civilian."
"No, she isn't," replied Duo, "but she's pregnant, and the baby certainly has no military credentials. You could check the records but judging by your lack of information I'm guessing your database hasn't been updated in a while."
Elliott laughed. "Surely no court would put me to trial for that! I can dispose of a body easily enough—no one will know."
"You really have no idea who she is, do you?"
Elliott's face turned to stone.
"The woman in that cell is Lucrezia Noin-Peacecraft, and she is a decorated lieutenant of the United Earth Sphere Military," Duo explained coldly.
"Duo," Noin plead, but he did not listen.
"She is married to Milliardo Peacecraft, known formerly as Zechs Marquise—the Lightning Count—and she is pregnant with his child. She is sister-in-law to both Heero Yuy, who I'm sure even your embarrassing database mentions as the single most lethal mobile suit pilot of the revolution, and Relena Peacecraft, the current Secretary General of the whole ESUN."
"Duo!"
The look he shot Noin then quieted her immediately.
"To say you have no idea who you are threatening to kill is understatement. If she were to die the full force of all five branches of the Earth Sphere military would crash down on top of you. The scale of your annihilation would be immeasurable. You, your ship, whatever aspirations you have—it will all be utterly obliterated."
There was only silence as Elliott took in the monologue, as Duo read her reaction to his words, and as Noin stared with awe and revulsion and terror at the emotionless expression that Maxwell somehow maintained. The words he had uttered were truth, but the cold intensity with which he had spoken was unsettling. There had been nothing there but objectivity, logic, and blunt fact.
DeSchepper looked to the man in the coat, then between her two prisoners, then back to her man. "Prepare a pod immediately. I want her off this ship and floating in remote space before morning."
