Heero woke next morning feeling exhausted and unprepared to announce Duo's departure. He'd been up half the night wondering: Where would Duo go? Would he be capable of finishing the mobile suit by himself? What would happen if he was attacked, or involved in an attack, before the suit had been made ready?
Despite his worries, Heero knew that Duo was more than capable. As a soldier and a pilot, Duo had far exceeded anyone's expectations for success. Heero had lost count of the number of test flights they had run together, the number of mechanical projects Duo had undertaken, the sheer dedication to craft that he maintained even while Heero himself was working his way toward other, more domestic goals. Duo had seemed concerned during his visit, but Heero knew that such fear was misplaced, as was usual.
Heero took his breakfast slowly, eating around the knot in his stomach. He decided over his meal that he would call a meeting in the conference room and lay the news bare, answer what questions he could, and continue on from there. After all, Maxwell had left to bolster the front lines, to seek vengeance against those who wronged him in the most visceral, physical way. Heero knew that there were bigger targets out there that needed to be brought down. Benning. O'Keefe. The rogue operatives. Even if Duo fought successfully against the ground troops, the command chain needed to be broken. Heero felt that he was the best man for that job. But he lacked a plan.
As Heero gathered the interested parties to the conference room, he felt slightly bolstered by the knowledge that each of these people would be more than capable of helping him bring down Benning and his men. But still, as he watched them find their seats, settle in, and eventually cast their concerned and slightly confused gazes to him, Heero's confidence waned. Howard's expression in particular cut into him. The old man had clearly noticed Duo's absence, and Heero could only assume that Howard had been hurt by the fact that Duo had not said goodbye.
"Well," Heero said once the lot had settled in, "he's gone."
All around the room, the people nodded their understanding.
"Any idea where he went exactly?" Noin asked from the back of the room, her voice small. "Any idea at all?"
Heero shook his head. "No. But I did tell him that I'd send correspondence to him weekly. I figure that'll be the best way for us to keep track of him...Make sure he's still alive."
Again came the nods.
"When did he go?" Quatre asked.
Heero shrugged. "He came to my bunk around eleven thirty last night. He stayed and talked a half hour or so. I couldn't tell you what else he did before he went."
It caught Heero by surprise when Howard spoke, his low voice choked and thick. "So he spoke to you before he left?"
"Yeah." Heero rubbed at the back of his neck. "He wanted you all to know that he's thankful for the help you gave. For helping build the suit, and otherwise."
Duo had never said any of that to Heero, he knew, but Heero felt that the sentiment was there all the same. Duo had always been the kind of guy to make everyone feel better, especially when the hurt was his fault.
"Beyond Maxwell," Heero continued, and he hoped his transition was not callous, "we've got to worry about this coup. We've got to worry about Charles Benning. We've got to find him and stop him from corrupting the ESUN Military any more than he's already done," he paused for a breath and looked to the floor. "As much as I hate to admit, we need that organization. We need the military to be strong and have credibility in order to keep order between Earth and the colonies. Even if colonial independence is achieved—I don't know that it will be—but even if it is, we need to maintain the order."
"How do you suggest we do that?" Milliardo asked. When Heero looked toward him, Milliardo had reclined just slightly, an interested look about his face, and he draped his arm casually over Noin's shoulder. "This maintenance you're talking about, I mean. What's your plan?"
Heero shrugged and sagged into a nearby chair. "Seems I'm earning a reputation for being unable to plan things," he lamented. "Call me out of practice, but I'm a guy who had all of his missions handed to him from above. I just carried them out using information I was given."
"Well," Trowa said somberly, "as someone who was in the same position, I think we'll be okay. If you think about it, we've got all the information we'd have been given for a mission briefing. We've got a target; we've got an objective. Only difference now is that we don't know where the target is."
Heero shook his head to the contrary, though. "But we don't. Yeah, we know we're after a guy named Charles Benning. We know we can access him—or attempt to access him—through O'Keefe, the rat bastard. But we don't know what to do with him once we find him. I mean...What do you do? Once you've got this guy in custody, that is... What do you do?"
Wufei spoke now, pragmatic as always and without much in the way of inflection. "Three basic things. You force him to retract his orders to his men, force him to make a broadcast to the colonies detailing the extent of the corruption, and after that you either kill him or put him on trial for war crimes."
It made sense, Heero thought. But it couldn't be so cut and dry.
"What about the operatives?" Quatre interjected. "The black and blue and green or purple or whatever ops? Even if we have the guy in charge issue an order, there'll still be a bunch of corrupt soldiers sitting among the ranks. How do you weed them out?"
"If you're being optimistic," said Noin from the back of the room, "if you cut off the head the body dies. If we get rid of the command, the soldiers will lose heart."
Heero nodded. He couldn't have said it better himself. "What we're going to have to do is get a group of people together," he continued, "and we're going to have to create a plan that will distract the grunts so that a smaller group-one or two people, maybe-can get at Benning or O'Keefe. So, we're going to have to make a few calls and see who's willing to put their livelihoods on the line to support us..."
"I can call Une at Preventer's headquarters," Sally said at once. "No guarantees of additional manpower, but since we're technically a civilian offshoot of the military we should be able to find support or intelligence through those means. It won't be anything like what you got through their own systems, but it's a place to start."
Heero looked to Quatre then, but Quatre shook his head. "Many of the people I know have settled in to peaceful life," Quatre explained. "I could call on Rashid and his people and they'd come running to help-they're probably wondering where I'm at already—but I don't want to draw anyone else into this conflict if I can help it."
Heero had to respect the decision. It had always been Quatre's nature to avoid conflicts if at all possible.
At length, everyone had proposed a person here or there to contact, someone that could help in one way or another, no matter how small.
"Well," said Heero once all avenues had been explored, "we'll start there, and I'll see if I can get O'Keefe to bite on something. Idiot that the man is, he'll look at something I send him and I might be able to triangulate a location. I guarantee he'll need to be our first stop."
With not much else in the way of conversation, the crowd dispersed slowly but surely. A few, Trowa and Wufei key among them, reassured Heero that they would do what they could to assist, but Quatre's posture indicated more hesitation. But in the end everyone would pull through. Heero knew this as fact, with evidence from a hundred and more problems of the past. And as he left the conference room to begin formulating his own plans, he recognized for perhaps the first time how much he'd come to rely on the help of others.
ф
Not for the first time, Duo stared out into the openness of space as his mobile suit drifted along an unplanned trajectory, out of sight of colonies and ships alike. Presently he remained thoughtless, though he'd spent many hours using the starry canvas to contemplate about himself, about the suit, and about his plans. At first the transition to solitude had been difficult: Duo had found himself in panic many times in the beginning, overwhelmed by just how alone he truly was. But with no one to talk him through the anxiety he'd had to learn to work through it on his own, and he'd had to learn quickly. There wasn't enough time for such nonsense any more, not now he'd set off. The colonists were waiting on him, and Duo knew that if he didn't make an appearance soon, then everything he'd said and done to bolster their resistance would be completely futile, and his credibility would be lost.
So Duo had spent just more than a week in space, alternating between working on the suit's mechanical components, programming its controls, fine-tuning the instruments, and staring out into the void while he rested. And now that there remained no more physical labor to contend with, Duo knew he would have to begin the difficult task of preparing himself.
Fighting had come so naturally to him in the days of his youth, and even recently he'd found that once he was neck deep in battle a kind of instinct kicked in to carry him through. But he had yet to initiate a fight. He'd not been the instigator in many long years, and even in the days of the One Year War he'd attacked his targets under the cover of night, with anonymity and surprise on his side. Now, everyone knew who he was, whether because of the Maxwell Church massacre, the destruction of M-204, his brief but widely televised trial, or the subsequent broadcast he'd made to the colonies. If what Howard had said was true, if the colonists had listened to him and put their faith in his words, his appearance on the battlefield would have been long foreseen. He only hoped that his initial presentation of the gundam—if he could call it a gundam properly—would crush the morale of the rogue military agents.
Of the nine nights he'd spent alone, Duo had written in the journal six, making mundane entries about changes to the suit that seemed more as patch notes than anything substantive. Occasionally he thought to pen his deeper thoughts, to entertain the cowardly part of his subconscious that nagged at the back of his mind any time a matter of true urgency came about, but he kept the journal closed and pushed those thoughts away. Or almost away.
He dreamed at night-or what he reckoned was night-about Hilde and Helen, about M-204, about Elliott DeSchepper. What once started as many very distinct nightmares had coalesced into one or two long dreams with overlapping characters and storylines that as often as not made no sense, and usually had very little to do with the very recent past. These seemed now more as dreams of a youthful mind, an imaginative mind capable of fathoming the most outrageous scenarios, a stark change from the pointed recollections of events Duo's dreams had become in adulthood.
But now as he stared, he weighed his doubts, the negativity of his dreams, and he deemed them invalid. He knew full in his heart that supporters of his cause remained, even if they remained solely aboard the Peacemillion. And the tiniest shred of optimism bled through when he thought, just for a moment, that perhaps more supporters would emerge after his first battle.
Next day, Duo ran the mobile suit through a series of tests as he might've done to other prototypes in the past, testing its mobility and maneuverability, checking its weapon systems, firing the gigantic two-bladed scythe he'd insisted be included with the build. At two o'clock in the afternoon Heero's first transmission came in with a subtle beep and the flashing of a red key on his right keyboard panel that Duo didn't initially notice. The timestamp read 1342 9/23/205.
All is well here. Hope things are well for you. Hilde is stable. Peacecraft baby is on the way soon, or so I'm told (but like hell I'm going to ask). More news later. Updates on our end: Attempted once to contact James O'Keefe to triangulate positions, but no bites. We think that whoever is in charge is keeping things locked down. Will continue attempting to locate chief staffers of the Rainbow Operatives...That's what Relena started calling them on account of the colors, and it's a fairly easy label... She said it's 'press friendly.' We're hoping if we can get at O'Keefe or this Benning guy we'll be able to get intelligence or shut down the operation entirely.
Mission Details for Pilot 02: 9/28/205, L-237. Military rally with press conference to follow. Scheduled 1700 hours. Civilian attendance disallowed. Target: Blue Operative Leader.
Respond with intent. Best of luck from the crew. We'll look for you in the papers. HY.
Duo read the letter twice. The first time he'd finished it he'd been mildly confused. The second time granted him understanding, and when he read Heero's brief signature again Duo smiled and shook his head. Heero had provided him with a mission and a target, with all the same details and verbiage he might've received during the One Year War. It was a callback for the both of them, and Duo understood at once Heero's unspoken intent: He would serve as the operation planner, and Duo would serve as the executor. It was the same relationship the five of them had shared with the five old engineers so long ago, and the arrangement was both comfortable and familiar.
Duo opened a message of reply and typed simply: Mission accepted.
The mission had given Duo new focus, and as a result the days between his reception of Heero's message and the military rally passed by quickly. Duo moved with an urgency he'd not felt in a long time, with full understanding that the success of his mission—the success of the gundam—depended entirely upon his execution.
He'd generated a complicated plan that would gain him entry into L-237 airspace on the morning of July seventeenth, exploiting poor colony surveillance on days when traffic was high. He'd managed to find schematics for the colony's construction, plotted a path through its exterior and into the colony proper. With any luck he'd be able to use the evening prior to the rally to pinpoint its location, to finalize his plans for a grand entrance and neutralize any threats to the colony as a whole.
Duo knew that civilians would be present despite the ban on their attendance. There would almost certainly be a protest, and Duo knew that showing up there, right before their eyes, would make his intent concrete in their minds. He'd said in the news conference that he was going to help them. He meant to make good on that promise.
On the morning of September twenty-seventh, Duo fired the hyper-jammers and radar scramblers and made his way tentatively toward L-237 airspace, taking careful note of the incoming military vessels. Approaching from the colony's "dark side," the side opposite the docking bays and reception centers, he managed to maneuver his suit to the outer chassis of the colony, where he sat, watched, and waited for his opportunity.
While each space colony was designed independently from the rest, their layouts remained largely the same and therefore predictable, and many shared the same basic structural elements as a matter of purpose. Common amongst all the colonies was a ventilation system which pumped oxygen from generators in the outer chassis into the living spaces, and disposed of the air through rotating airlocks into space. Duo reckoned he'd be able to enter the colony through one of these shafts, as the colony blueprints suggested that they were enormous, more than capable of housing three or four mobile suits, and if traversed correctly would gain him entry without anyone being any the wiser.
Duo knew that the ports would open for ten seconds every two minutes to allow spent air to escape. He ran over the facts while he waited, and though it took many minutes for the colony to rotate appropriately, he felt ready to move to action when the exhaust came into view. With a quick fire of his throttle, he set his mobile suit into motion, matching the rotational velocity of the colony. He waited. And then, when the port's doors slid open, he opened the throttle full and darted inside.
He could hear the wind roaring past the suit in the moments before the exhaust port closed again. It rushed by so fiercely that he'd had to leave the throttles at full blast just to maintain ground. But then the doors closed, the air flow ceased, and after only the slightest jump forward Duo relaxed the engines.
The inside of the colony chassis was just as he'd imagined. It was just as the schematics had indicated. The exhaust port was divided into three sections: the first, which connected directly to the colony's living space, pulled spent air into a ventilation shaft at a constant volume. When the maximum volume of gas had been collected into the first shaft, it opened to feed into a second staging area, and once that staging area was full it would feed into the third shaft for release into space. This third shaft was where Duo found himself presently. All he'd need to do would be to time the rotations and force his way through against the current of air.
The task was not difficult. Duo maneuvered his suit into the first shaft, the one connected directly to the colony, within minutes, and was able to look down upon the colony's interior through a wide, finely meshed metal grate. This particular outlet was situated in what would've been the colony's sky-or what appeared as the sky to the residents-and so he would be able to exit inconspicuously, attach his suit nearby, and carry on to do reconnaissance on foot. After all, inspections of the colony's uninhabited areas were few and far between, and with a fancy military rally scheduled, Duo figured that all resources would be allocated to help prepare.
Once on foot he searched around for a while, gaining his bearings in a colony he'd never visited in a cluster he'd stayed away from since his youth. Comparatively speaking, the colony was quiet. Few pedestrians wandered the streets, even in the business districts, and most of the windows were lightless. Only a few restaurants remained open, and when Duo dared to inquire about the state of affairs, he was met with myriad answers.
Late the evening of the seventeenth, with arrangements made, Duo found himself sitting for the first time since he'd left Peacemillion at a proper table, hot drink in hand, staring out the window of his hotel lobby at the streets beyond. These were the kinds of comforts he'd been missing, he thought. Such things were always lost in times of trouble: A bed to sleep in with clean pillows and thick blankets; three hot meals a day that had not been dehydrated and reconstituted with poorly filtered water; a proper shower with soap and hot water.
For a while Duo thought how the only thing he was missing now was company, but when a plump, gray old man suddenly took a seat at the table beside him, Duo regretted his wishful thinking.
"Fine night here, isn't it, son?" said the man wistfully before Duo could think to turn him away. "Nice and quiet out there."
Duo grunted a noncommittal reply and took a long drink from his cup.
"Plotting something big?"
"Just a relaxing vacation," Duo lied in reply.
But the old man laughed, scoffed even, and Duo watched him with curiosity. "I see how it is," said the man. "But don't think for half a second you've got me fooled. You're that young man from the other day-or the other week, I suppose-the one who hijacked all our televisions and..."
"I get it," Duo interrupted, rather more coldly than he'd meant, and the man stopped. Then he repeated, softer this time, "I get it."
"I work across the street, saw you prowling around all day. At first I didn't believe my eyes, but then put two and two together. You know, what all you said and then there's this big high fallutin' rally tomorrow. Figured you had something going on so I wanted to track you down."
"For what?"
The man reclined thoughtfully and watched out the window. "Suppose I figured I'd buy you a drink, but you already seemed to have that covered by the time I got in here."
"I appreciate the sentiment." Duo tipped his mug at the old man listlessly and took another drink.
"You're awfully dry, you know that? Didn't figure you'd be so deadpan from the way you looked on TV."
"It's been a long day."
The old man sighed and stood up. "Well, I just thought I'd come over here to let you know we're all rooting for you, for you and whoever you're working with anyway. Take down them idiots who tried to do in our Secretary General-god bless that lady, she's done more for us up here in the colonies than any military bastard ever could... Present company notwithstanding."
Duo looked up at the man quizzically, his brow cocked, his chin resting atop his mug. He couldn't figure out what to make of this character, though there was nothing about him that seemed particularly threatening, nothing that caused Duo any discomfort. And then the man stretched out his hand, and with only slight hesitation Duo grasped it in reply.
"Jeff Thompson, at your service."
"Duo Maxwell."
Jeff Thompson grinned broadly and released Duo's hand with one final squeeze. "The guys at the bakery won't believe I met a regular celebrity," he said joyfully. "But I'll leave you to yourself. Give 'em hell for us, young man, we'll all be watching."
As the man walked toward the exit Duo thought of how serendipitous the meeting had been, of how awkward and coincidental, and for a while he kept his guard up. But the longer he sat, the more thoughts of what Howard had said crept into the back of his mind, about how the colonists had heard him, about how popular his message must have been, and eventually the niggling pessimism that weighed at Duo's subconscious gave way to a shred of optimism.
He took to bed that evening allowing himself to entertain the notion that Howard may very well have been right.
