As soon as Duo fired the engines he opened an outgoing connection to Heero's private messaging system, setting the message request on a loop once per ten seconds and hoping beyond hope that he, Relena, and Noin had made it to the ship. With any luck at all, Howard and the others would meet up with them, and everyone would make it out with minimal action. The Peacemillion was an enormous ship, after all, and if he hadn't run into any intruders while aboard...
Meanwhile, the mobile suits had begun to swarm, moving in tight formations around the Peacemillion's intact engine to cut off Duo's path. They fired upon him with abandon, and he worked his best to dodge and suppress fire. No stranger to multitasking, Duo did so with relative ease.
"Come on," he groaned as the message request looped. "Answer the call!"
Before arriving at this point, Duo had not given much thought to how he would proceed, at least not in his engagements with the enemy. He hadn't reentered boundaries expecting a fight, and compounding the problem was the knowledge that he'd not fought properly in a while, not with a clear head anyway. In his last battles he gave little thought to destroying those who opposed him; they were casualties of war who, he assumed, had elected to fight of their own accord. In that time, believing any less would've put Duo himself in danger. Any hesitation at all would've cost him his life.
Somewhere along the line Duo had developed new insight. Empathy existed that he had not felt immediately after constructing the gundam. As he fired on the advancing mobile suits he shot not to kill but to disable, to leave the soldiers floating de-powered in space. Perhaps by doing so, Duo thought, he would be able to break the hold of the Quell system over them, to free their minds from its horrible influence and snap them back to reality.
He advanced slowly but with deliberate precision, dispatching each mobile suit one by one. He worked his way around the tail end of the Peacemillion, approached its starboard engine, sliced through the head and left shoulder of an enemy target, and then paused. The mobile suits had suddenly stopped their approach, had seemed to change target as though Duo was no longer the primary objective.
As one unit, the enemies began firing wholesale on the Peacemillion.
Duo felt his eyes go wide, felt his heart jump to his throat. There must've been ten or twelve suits firing just in his line of sight alone, and he dared not guess how many of the remaining suits were firing on its other sides. It seemed that the decision had been made for him: Duo had no time to contemplate saving every life, not if Heero and the others had not yet escaped, not if he was to save his friends and his home.
Duo yanked the throttles back, accelerating to top speed in a flash that pressed his whole body firm against the pilot's seat. He blew his breath out against the force of the acceleration and engaged the zero system in full.
His central monitors displayed an overlay of the space outside, quadrants segmented by gracefully curved blue and green lines of latitude and longitude, and atop the map flashed red crosshair-like icons. Without a beam cannon the system had nothing to lock on to, but the moment Duo's gundam came within range of his deadly dual-bladed scythe, the machine beeped its warning indicator and flashed violently. Down came the thermal blade, and another icon died away.
The enemy suits gave no indication that they had noticed Duo's sudden, reckless offense. Even as their neighbors fell, they kept on firing at the defenseless Peacemillion. Duo glanced at his leftmost monitor, its corresponding camera focused on the hull of the lifeless ship, and he could see pieces of its exterior blowing away, shuddering, and sparking as connections failed. If he did not stop them, it would certainly explode.
Duo felled another three suits in a single swing and turned about to the left, darting in toward the engine. The sheer size of it dwarfed him. He sliced as he went, another two suits exploded into dust, and just as he was going for the next in line, the lot of them ceased firing, turned tail, and fled in retreat.
For a moment, Duo was dumbfounded. A split second, he allowed himself to sit idle and watch them go, shoot a glance to the Peacemillion to make certain it had not yet failed. And then he followed in quick pursuit.
Though he had never once doubted the ability of his mobile suit, Duo felt great relief that his engines packed more power than the enemy's. He cut down two more before he rounded the tail end.
The truth startled Duo more than he imagined. As he darted into the open space beyond the Peacemillion, he could see the remaining host of mobile suit forces gathering into tight formations, separating him from the Preventer's mothership. He had grossly underestimated the number of suits. He'd guessed at some fifty independent units, and considering he'd already eliminated near ten, entirely too many remained.
Duo wondered if they had called in reinforcements.
"Max... me in... Opened frequency fo... Under fire... Copy..."
With a swear, Duo turned his attention to the radio, where Heero's frantic voice sounded through static and interruption. He fine-tuned its frequency until Heero sounded clear, his message whole. Duo could hear gunshots ricocheting in the background of the open microphone.
"We're under fire! We're waiting on Zechs, Quatre, and Hilde. The rest of us are ready, we're prepping the guns and ion cannon. Maxwell, come in! Where the hell are you?"
"Reporting," Duo said coolly, automatically, in a voice he might at one point have called command mode, though he certainly did not feel in command of the situation now. "Peacemillion is under fire from the outside; they're gunning for the remaining engine. What's your status? Do you have a video feed?"
"Our video output must be shot, but we've got you loud and clear with audio and video now. The shuttle is powered on. We never got your all-call, but Howard showed up here with Trowa and Wufei and Sally. They told me that Zechs split off to go get Quatre and Hilde. but they still haven't gotten here."
"And your shuttle is under fire from inside?"
"Yes, light fire. We're holding off engaging to avoid further damaging the ship, but we're pretty much surrounded. I can't tell if they want us alive or dead."
Duo shook his head and drew a calming breath. "Mow them down, Heero. I know it's not what you want to hear but if you've got a gun on that shuttle then you've got to clear the way for the others."
There was a long and uncomfortable pause on Heero's end, the pings of bullets the only noise that came through. And then there was a shuffle, and Heero said, "Roger."
"Get someone else on the com and you go take care of business," Duo ordered flatly. "There's not time to waste."
The words had barely cleared Duo's lips when the Peacemillion's second engine blew.
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At first, Heero didn't know how he'd gotten onto the floor, his face situated beneath the now gently rotating pilot's chair where he'd been seated not thirty seconds prior. He stared up at its bottom, watched it turning around and round, and tried to imagine how he'd gone from speaking to Maxwell to being flat on his back, his ears ringing painfully. He didn't recall losing consciousness. He didn't recall any intruders forcing their way aboard. No bullets had pierced the armored hull of the passenger shuttle. He was simply there on the floor, his holstered gun pressing uncomfortably into his hip, surrounded by an odd quiet; an eerie peacefulness made all the more uncanny by the gentle, almost ephemeral quality of Noin's voice floating about the cabin.
Heero remembered that Maggie had been crying before, wailing as babies were won't do when afraid or hungry or anything at all. She had started when Relena, Noin, and he had escaped the lower deck and had carried on all the way until shuttle boarding. But now her shrill screams had diminished to sniffles and coos, muffled behind Noin's lullaby which, in itself, was muffled by Heero's own tinnitus. She sounded as though she were stuck in a metal tube.
Trowa's very nearby swearing jerked Heero back to reality, and Heero knew that if the stoic was flustered then something must've gone catastrophically wrong. This suspicion was confirmed when Relena began pulling frantically on his arm.
"Heero, get up!" Relena cried as she wrenched him to his feet. "Are you okay?"
"Wha-" Heero reeled as he came upright, leaning heavily on Relena's shoulder. He peered out the cockpit window and felt his jaw slacken. The whole of the hangar entrance had collapsed down in a pile of twisted metal. Electrical wires snaked among the debris, sparking and twisting as they settled. Heero would have expected dust from such a collapse, but it must have been sucked into the vacuum-there must have been another hull breach-and in its absence the bodies of those soldiers who had once been standing below, shooting with abandon, lay in sharp relief. Some were pinned beneath the rubble, clinging to a thin thread of life and groping to pull themselves free before they suffocated or bled out, while others floated lifeless in the semi-gravity, caught up against jagged panels and bent girders. Noin's voice continued its ghostly melody.
"Engines offline," Heero heard Sally Poe reporting, her voice as clinical as ever. "Wufei, Trowa, get back there and get us some thrust. Howard, I need you here to help me with the control panel."
Footfalls pounded against the metal flooring as each went his separate way. And then Heero remembered: He had been speaking to Duo.
A shot of adrenaline had Heero moving quickly toward the control panel, where he gently eased Howard out of the way before staring blankly at the now static-ridden display. The image jumped and skipped, distorted in color and shape by horizontal lines and salt-and-pepper static, but the live feed somehow remained open. Maxwell's face still came through.
"Duo!" Heero cried, the madness all about him all but forgotten. "Status!"
Maxwell did not respond.
Heero listened closely, craned his neck toward the speakers embedded in the control panel, but heard no sound outside of the immediate noise of his own cockpit. Certain the speakers had blown, he pushed unkindly past Relena to retrieve the pilot's headset from its rest on the back of the pilot's chair. He jammed the input plug into its jack and situated the thick plastic cups over his ears, cranked the volume to full, and stared, waiting, at Duo's unmoving form.
If he listened carefully enough, if he held his breath tight in his chest, Heero could hear shuddering exhalations picked up by the gundam's sensitive microphones. He could hear bullets connecting with metal outside. The audio feed remained intact.
"Shit," Heero spat, and he dropped the headset's microphone as close to his mouth as he dared. "Maxwell!" He shouted. "Wake up! Damn it, Duo, wake up!"
Suddenly Heero felt a hand on his shoulder, and he rounded to find Howard standing there, peering down at the monitor with a profound sadness in his eyes, as if he knew something as yet unsaid. Heero groped for reassurance, to mention that he could hear the shallowest of breathing. He stammered over words that he could not even think to think of. He shot a glance back to the monitor where Duo hung still, his bodyweight pulling at the harness, and then looked back to Howard. All he could do was flounder. Maxwell did indeed look dead.
"Too close to the engine," Howard uttered, his voice a slow and quiet rumble. "He was too close to the engine."
For a fleeting moment that seemed a lifetime, Heero felt he might faint. The weight of Howard's words struck him with the force of the cosmos, and the implication of death closed in around him. In those heartbeats he felt small, lonely, and afraid. He felt his mortality creeping in close, wrapping about him as intimately as Relena ever had.
But the world beyond had not stopped moving. Time would not stop just because of existential dread. Over Howard's shoulder, Heero watched as Zechs, Quatre, and Hilde barreled into the hold of the passenger shuttle looking winded, dirtied, and altogether terrified, their faces masked by their emergency rebreathers.
"Let's get moving!" Zechs roared at once as he bore down upon the control panel, taking his place in the pilot's chair as if there had been no crisis at all. Or perhaps he had taken on this tone because of the crisis. He ripped the mask away from his mouth and continued to issue orders. "Get me some god damned power and let's get the hell out of here before this whole ship falls apart!"
Desperately, Heero looked back at Duo's silhouette on the monitor. He looked peaceful, at least—more peaceful than he ever had while locked in the stasis chamber.
"What's the hold up?" Zechs asked, his voice calmer now though no less straightforward. He seemed to have realized the dread that had come over the company. "What's going on?"
As Heero looked to Zechs, who looked to Howard for explanation, he felt the shuttle roar to life with engine vibration. Somehow, Trowa and Wufei had succeeded.
"Knocked out by the impact of the blast, I'd imagine," Zechs reasoned as he looked between Howard and the monitor, as much comfort as he could offer.
"Yes!" Heero shouted, suddenly invigorated by Zech's statement. "He's not dead!" And then, all at once, he ripped the headphones away from his ears and slammed his hand down on a specific, ancient button near the communication relay control panel: The morse code transmitter.
An ear-splitting, screaming tone echoed through Heero's headphones as he held his palm flat against the transmitter, and within a few tense seconds, Maxwell jolted, cried out, and woke, his hands grasping groggily about his ears.
A flood of relief filled Heero from head to foot, and he turned to face the group with renewed hope. "Sally, you're on the com with Duo. Relay instructions and coordinates. Make sure he's okay. Relena, open a secondary line of communication to whoever you can get a hold of, someone on the council, someone with some heft about them. Get us reinforcements as soon as possible, like, yesterday. When Trowa gets back from engines I want him on the ion cannon. Wufei can offer some technical specs on the Preventer ship while Sally is otherwise engaged. Anyone else needs to be on the floor in brace position and out of the god damned way." Then finally, with slight hesitation creeping back in upon him, Heero turned to Zechs. "You fly. I'll gun."
"You sure, mister eighty-five percent?" Zechs replied dryly, though there seemed no hint of good humor about him.
Heero looked contemplatively toward the cockpit's exit and nodded. "Eighty-five is going to have to be good enough."
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It took no time at all for Duo to come back to himself once awake again. He recalled immediately the blinding flash of the exploding engine, the violent shuddering of his mobile suit as the massive shockwave passed by. And then came the debris, rocketing into his hull fast enough to shake him to his very bones. Something massive must have connected, a turbine blade maybe: he remembered seeing reflective metal on the camera.
And then Heero's signal had come through the surrounding speakers and bolted him upright.
He wasted no time checking himself for injury. If he wasn't dead by now or in excruciating pain, he was well off enough. So Duo checked the mobile suit's readings for damage and read the output.
The whole left side of the suit had suffered major damages, which did not surprise him considering that that side had been faced directly at the blast. The arm had been blown away entirely. The leg had been severed at the knee. All cameras were online—again unsurprising: The major components of the suit, safety and weapons systems both, had been heavily armored in gundanium. They would last through virtually all but self-detonation, and being that Duo had not equipped the suit with such an option (not because he did not figure he'd use it, but rather because he forgot in the madness of its construction), he believed that the machine would last the fight.
Certainly with the damages already sustained the thing would fly poorly, would float unbalanced, would prove difficult if not impossible to pilot effectively, but Duo knew with absolute certainty that he would be up to the task. Not only did his life depend on it, the lives of Heero, Howard, Hilde, and the rest of the Peacemillion crew depended on it. The personnel aboard the Preventer's mothership depended on it. The end of this conflict depended on it.
"Get us out of here!" Sally cried through the still open com as he opened the throttles again, slightly tentatively, and set a course for the hangar. She sounded distressed.
"On the way," Duo replied, a noticeable quiver in his voice. Perhaps the engine's explosion had shaken him more than he thought.
As expected, the suit did not fly smoothly, but Duo still made his way toward the hangar at speed. He dodged as he could around mobile suits that had fallen still, their limbs and torsos in similar states of disrepair to Duo's own. He reckoned that they had been as close to the blast as he had, but their hulls had not been reinforced with gundanium. It was likely that the pilots were dead.
Still, that had knocked out some of the enemies, had provided a reprieve that Duo desperately needed, and he managed to make his way to the hangar door without incident. He said, "Brace yourselves," through the com, and slashed a gigantic X through the door, grasped at its panels with the intact right hand of his gundam, and throttled backward. With a screech, the metal bent, and the passenger shuttle came rocketing out.
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There was nothing for it. People would have to die. Though the configuration of the gunner's station was such that Heero never saw the real suits in real space outside the shuttle's protective hull, each time he locked onto a target icon and fired a lurch in his gut told him that he'd killed another person. Each time the antique monitor flashed and he pulled the dual-mounted triggers, the gatling action of the gun rattling his teeth, he promised himself that this was the final time.
The gun position came to him naturally, or as naturally as it could have given that he was not piloting a suit proper. Likely this dinosaur predated space travel entirely. While it lacked the complexity of a mobile suit cockpit, the targeting and firing mechanisms remained much the same, drawn from some ancient terrestrial suit system; perhaps a prototype to the gundams' own. And while most ship-bound gunning stations were mounted on semi-gyroscopic platforms, which allowed the shooter to swivel, pivot, and aim independently of the ship proper, this one remained firmly affixed to the shuttle's unyielding frame. There would be no pinpoint accuracy here, only left and right, up and down, one direction at a time and with little—if any—hydraulic assistance.
Heero wished for silence as he shot. Silence or sight. He could hear the thumps of bodies colliding with each other, with the walls of the overcrowded cockpit, and the subsequent cries of fear or discomfort that followed. He could hear Trowa, Wufei, and Zechs barking orders to each other between rooms nearby as they worked in tandem with Duo, somewhere out in the beyond, to clear a path to the Preventer's mothership. No one spoke to him. Once in a great while he caught snippets of Zech's angry cursing, which generally heralded an abrupt change in direction or speed. Without an outside reference, Heero was left to feel the dips and turns and rolls that kept them a constant inch from death. He took small comfort knowing he'd be space dust long before he knew what was coming, if it came down to that.
Another icon found its way onto the monitor, and Heero marked it. He heaved his bodyweight against the back of the chair, pressing with all the power of his legs to turn the monstrous machine leftward. He locked on. He fired another round of bullets. The icon died away.
Fifteen.
Truth be told, Heero knew he should have been thankful that the number remained so low. Back in the One Year War such a paltry body count would have been a profound disappointment, particularly when there existed so many targets. But Maxwell was carrying the heavy load, lifting no small part of the burden from Heero's aching shoulders.
Three targets appeared. Heero pushed through his thighs and calves, through the balls of his feet, and with a sick metallic scrape the module turned to the right. He adjusted for altitude. By the time he'd fired upon his single target, the two others were gone as well, and Heero knew that somehow Maxwell had darted in, dispatched two for his one, and managed to dodge Heero's blind friendly fire.
And he was doing it in a critically damaged suit with naught but thermal melee and underpowered vulcan guns.
Sixteen.
Suddenly the ship lurched in what must have been an acrobatic dodge. Heero's stomach dropped so low he imagined it would've fallen right out had he not been seated. Before he knew it, the frayed old harnesses were all that was holding him to the chair as the shuttle lurched about, bolting to and fro without regard for what manner of G-forces the occupants could withstand.
Heero's chest erupted with worry so sudden and intense that he swooned. What about the baby?
It took a minute for Heero to gather his head after the ship stopped its violent motion, a moment spent suppressing the urge to vomit outright.
"Watch the god damned throttle!" He yelled, and though he had meant the words to come out a commanding order, his voice sounded sick and weak, and broke midway through. He cursed under his breath as someone—Trowa?—yelled an incoherent something back at him. Another four icons.
Seventeen.
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The mobile suits had formed a great concave around the Preventer's mothership, coalescing into a single force that moved in synchronous form. In that moment, Duo understood that everything he'd done to this point had been futile. Each enemy he'd destroyed had been bait, a distraction sent to buy time while the main host formed rank in an impenetrable wall of titanium, bullets, and thermal weaponry. A shard of doubt pierced him through, and mid-word to Sally Poe he stopped speaking to stare in dumb disbelief.
There was no way they would be able to break through, Duo thought, not with a single prehistoric gunner, a mobile suit which at best qualified as limping, and an ion cannon that to this moment had remained essentially useless. The fanciest flying in the universe couldn't break through such a barricade, and Milliardo's piloting had been subpar at best. Too many years on Mars, too many years spent away from piloting aircraft of any kind, had eroded the grace from his maneuvering. Even if Duo led the way into the fight, Milliardo would never be able to keep up.
He wondered where Relena's reinforcements were.
"Where's the dock?" Duo cried, his terrified reprieve broken by another round of disposable troops.
"Starboard quarter," Sally replied with a grunt, "nearest the engines."
"Good. Follow my course and make sure Trowa's at the ready. On my word I'll need a fully charged pulse from the cannon, and then we're diving in. Keep Heero sharp on the gun, Sally. I'm going to need someone on my six."
"Roger that."
Duo blew a calming breath and throttled forward again, dispatching single units as they came by, allowing Heero to target and destroy those farther out. The approach would be leisurely, he knew, the calm before the storm. But once he breached the line, hell would break loose.
The space before the mothership closed quickly, and the closer Duo brought his mobile suit the more the concave shifted, its ends wrapping about in an enveloping wave. Once the lot had been in front of him. Then they had begun the flank. When they opened fire, Duo began evasive maneuvers. And then he was surrounded, the shuttle close behind.
"Keep course!" Duo yelled as he about-faced, opening heavy fire on the suits that presently crept up behind. A hail of incoming bullets pounded against his hull, and sparks began raining into the cockpit. Still, Duo kept on the throttle to propel his suit backward as he fired, keeping on course toward the starboard quarter of the mothership.
The gundam would not last much longer.
What two minutes prior had been a slick maneuver now proved sluggish and awkward, but again Duo faced forward and raced after the shuttle. He could see shots firing out its stern as Heero unloaded upon whatever enemies came within his limited range.
More artillery pinged into his hull. Duo opened fire in return, his focus now on the mobile suits ahead, those standing between him and his destination. One particularly well-placed enemy shot blew his left thruster outright, and for the tiniest moment the gundam careened off course and toward the shuttle, propelled by the still-intact right thruster. It was all Duo could do to cut the output of the vulcans and kill the remaining engine. He floundered in panic for a moment, carried forward by the momentum of the blast but knocked continually off course by the gunfire constantly connecting with his suit.
"Duo!"
For the first time in a long time Duo realized that the com link remained open, though it had gone fuzzy and warped. If anyone had been yelling at him before now, their message would never have come through without interference. But what had come through, that single shout of his name by a voice that sounded not masculine nor feminine but entirely robotic, no doubt distorted by the damage to his transmitter, had been so full of fear that Duo's breath caught fast in his throat. It had been enough to gain his attention, to center his thoughts on the mission.
Too many people depended on him. He could not fail.
"Trowa!" Duo shouted, hoping like hell that his voice would carry. "Fire! Fire!"
As he shouted, Duo unleashed the full power of his right throttle, his right hand working its pitch and yaw and roll to keep him on course while he worked with his left to continue firing on the mobile suits around. He rushed ahead of the shuttle at the same time the ion pulse radiated out from its bow. Caught in the wave, his power died completely, and Duo's gundam rocketed sightless and dark beyond the line.
Duo held his breath, pressed his eyes closed as tight as they would go, and he counted seconds that felt like eons:
Three.
Two.
One.
Without ever looking at the control panel, Duo input the commands to reboot, and the cockpit came back to life with a protesting shower of sparks. Only one monitor remained clear: Two failed to boot entirely and three others swam with undulating swells of color, indistinguishable shapes floating about their view.
No longer could he qualify the gunfire as a rain. Not even a hail. The connections sounded as one long, deafening barrage.
Some noise came into the cockpit. It could have been a voice, but not one that Duo could recognize. He could scarcely hear it over the sound of the artillery. He wondered if the com had remained open even through the power outage, but even if it had, whatever voice presently spoke to him had been too affected by the distortion.
The cockpit flickered. The power had practically gone. The thunder rolled.
I'm going to die...
His breathing quickened. His hands trembled at the controls. But still Duo bashed commands into the system, cycling the cameras, trying to display the correct input. The remaining screen flashed and a line of black cracked down its center. The color blinked erratically between gray and violent red as the connections failed. But still he could see. The door of the hangar loomed before him.
Cut power to the engine. Cut power to the cockpit. Divert to right arm. With a thunderous roar, Duo thrust the right joystick forward with all his strength, jammed every button available to every finger.
He prayed that the scythe had released.
The monitors died.
The right engine blew.
The thunder rolled.
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"Brace for impact!"
Heero had barely heard the first syllable before his body jerked ragdoll against the harness. An enormous crash had been punctuated by the poppy, static-like sound of bent girders and squealing metal. By the time Heero thought to tense his arms against the guns the bottom of the shuttle had begun to scrape. He squeezed his eyes closed and held on tight until the vehicle came to a shuddering stop and the sounds of frantic struggling took over.
With trembling hands, Heero unfastened the harnesses and scrambled to the cockpit, where he found his companions, every one of them, alive yet on the floor in a tangle of arms and legs. Heero looked out of the cracked windscreen.
They must have crashed into the hangar of the Preventers mothership. It was the only explanation that made any sense at all. They were surrounded on all sides by dark gray metal paneling, different from the Peacemillion's yet altogether similar, and four mobile suits sat dormant in the cavernous room. As he looked about, Heero saw the damage they had done to the hangar upon entry: A long line of black skid marks extended from the rear of the ship toward the door, which had been blown inward. This was the point of impact.
With the door busted open the oxygen would have escaped the hangar, if indeed it had been oxygenated to begin with. Heero made his way to the emergency supplies chest and pulled out its box of emergency breathing apparatuses. Combined with the ones they had brought on board, there seemed to be enough to go around. He distributed them, helped the lot to their feet, and was about to begin giving orders when a loud BANG issued from the side of the shuttle.
Heero wheeled on the door and reached for his gun. But his hand dropped long before he could grasp at it.
"Duo!" Hilde cried from the ground.
"Give me a gun, we're going in," Maxwell commanded, his slightly shaking voice muffled by the helmet of his astro suit. His safety visor had splintered but remained intact. He accepted Milliardo's firearm, checked it, and stuffed it into a strap on his thigh. "We don't have time to be sitting here. Company will be on the way. Trowa, Wufei, Zechs, you stay here and keep the others safe. If you've got a clear line, you can try to man those mobile suits for extra protection. Otherwise, stay on the ion cannon and the gun. They've only got one entry point and you can keep it locked down with those. Just don't hit the ship, we don't need friendly fire. Heero and I will go in covertly and make our way to the bridge. Sally, I want you with us to help navigate."
And then Hilde was on her feet, marching toward Duo with blind rage in her eyes. Heero thought to hold her back, but couldn't move in time. "You! You!" she stammered, her anger stealing away her words. "I watched your suit blow up! You collided with this ship! You bastard!" She raised her hand as if to strike—not that such a gesture would have done any good, considering the helmet—but before she could follow through Duo had gently grabbed her wrist with one hand and placed his hand on her shoulder to stop the advance. "You bastard," Hilde protested lamely.
Duo leveled his gaze at her, a cool, eerie gaze that stole all her bluster away and sent a cold shudder even through Heero. "This isn't the time," he said flatly but delicately, and Hilde deflated immediately. "There are things I need to take care of, and I need to do it right now." Then Maxwell looked back at Heero, the fire back in his eyes, and commanded, "Let's get moving."
Before Heero or Sally could protest the command Duo had jumped from the shuttle to float with some speed toward what he must have thought to be the airlock into the ship proper. With a wistful glance back to Relena, Heero followed, Sally close on his heels. And then they were through the airlock in the mothership's empty hallway, and Duo had begun to unfasten his helmet.
"Empty isn't a good sign," Duo said. "Means they're holed up." He turned to Sally and asked, "Where's the bridge?"
Sally pointed dumbly. Heero thought she looked very slightly sick.
Again, Duo carried off down the way, and as he walked he rambled. "Probably deployed the lion's share of their men to hold us off from the advance. Sent them in the suits, that would explain why there were so many of them."
"Duo, are you okay?" asked Sally timidly.
Duo waved her concern away, checked around a corner in the hall, and proceeded per her direction. "That means there's going to be a few well-armed men protecting the big wigs on the bridge. We'll have to go in firing and hope we don't hit any friendlies."
Immediately, Heero felt uncomfortable with the plan. He'd shot enough people for one day already. "And what if we're outmanned?"
"Then we die," Duo replied bluntly. "But we take as many of them down with us as we can. It's likely that Benning and O'Keefe will be on the bridge. If we can take them out, this whole shit storm will be over."
Sally continued to navigate, and the three fell into strained silence. With each step, Heero's sense of dread grew deeper. With each step, he felt the weight on his chest grow heavier. He didn't want to go in, guns blazing. He didn't want to go in and die. Something was waiting for him after all of this, something beyond Relena and beyond safety. Something beyond another round of violence. The pressure made his head spin just enough to make him dizzy.
"When this is over..." he started, his voice a whisper. It seemed neither Sally nor Duo had heard him, but he continued anyway. He needed to say the words. "When this is over, I quit," he uttered. "I quit, and I'm making a family."
Again, neither Sally nor Duo said a word, and Heero did not care if they had heard. He'd admitted the truth to himself, and in doing so a surge of adrenaline kicked through his body. Yes, he thought, a calming warmth spreading through him. A family.
At some point the trio had reached the door to the bridge, closed tight but wholly unguarded. Duo mentioned something about a fishy situation, but did not elaborate. Instead, Duo motioned Heero to one side of the door and Sally to stand behind him, drew his gun, and motioned for Heero to follow suit. Heero crouched low, his own gun at the ready.
"This goes against everything you've sworn to do," Duo said to Heero quietly. His voice was hoarse. "Killing people, I mean. And don't you think for half a second I don't know that. So we're going to do this your way, do you understand?"
Heero stared at Duo, at a momentary loss for words before a long-forgotten conversation he'd had with Relena came back to him. Any time Heero had even mentioned a gun, he'd dropped the light-hearted one liner, even to Duo. "Kneecaps?"
"Kneecaps."
Duo nodded to Sally, and she reached over Heero's head to open the hydraulic door.
It hissed open and a rush of air pushed through, but no bullets came with it. One more exchanged glance, and Duo gave Heero the signal.
They rounded the corner together, and they fired.
