Kira's threat board lit up... there was a good sized projectile headed straight at him as he poured on the thrust to reach the Merciless, which was looming ahead like some ancient totem of destruction. His computer system couldn't quite figure out what the projectile was... it wasn't hot like a beam blast, but it wasn't metallic like a cannon shell... it wasn't moving fast enough to be a railgun shot... in fact, it really wasn't moving very fast at all... no faster than a touch over a hundred kilometers per hour. It wasn't until he mangaged to lock his camera's onto the projectile and zoom in that Kira recognized it for what it was... a compressed ball of human flesh and bone... a horror of mangled limbs and pressed torsos and bulging faces... the ball looked to have been made from at least a dozen people. He couldn't help himself... he'd seen some pretty terrible things... during the last war and especially during this one... but this completely turned his stomach. He was glad he hadn't eaten very much before deploying... as things were he was dry heaving and gasping for breath as he twisted the Liberty out of the way of the formerly living projectile. recovering with more than a couple deep breaths, Kira's eyes blazed as he stared through his displays at the Merciless, now only a few kilometers away. Cray was just bending down to retrieve his discarded weapons.
Kira was a very even tempered individual... everyone who'd ever met him had told him so at one point or another. Some called it naivete... some called it good heartedness or a sympathetic nature. Kira just called it being the way he was... he saw no reason to go around getting upset over every little thing... especially the things he couldn't control. When growing up he'd always been the quiet sort... never really got into fights at school, never really got picked on. He wasn't an outcast, he had his friends, many of whom were quite popular... like Athrun or Sai or Flay. It took a lot to get Kira worked up. The older he got the more it seemed to take... maybe because he was becoming innured to terrible things happening to himself and the people around him. When he'd just started flying the Strike his emotions had been all over the place... that had changed once he descended to the desert, except for when Tolle died. Things had heated him back up during the fights up in space after the Mendel colony... after that he'd mellowed out again. It had taken the scene in the desert with his parents and Alkire killing the soldiers to really set him off. Of course fighting Frost at Vanai's mansion had gotten a rise out of him... but that had been fear and adrenaline and shock, not just anger. In the desert he'd just been pissed off. In the Doc's lab it had been more like Frost in the forest... he wasn't just mad, he was scared and worried and many other things... now... now he was just plain raging... no worry... no fear... just plain fucking mad. He was so mad he was currently beyond words... beyond vocal sounds of any sort.
He didn't shout any challenges or make any threats... he didn't even ask Cray to withdraw peacefully. No... not this enemy... this was one enemy that really, totally deserved justice of the most permanent sort... just like Rau Le Cruesete. Kira drew a beam saber in each hand as the Liberty blitzed towards the slowly rising Merciless like a star shot from the bow of a god. Cray had just brought the Merciless fully upright and was settling his posture to brace his weapons... he was annoyed at how Kira had dodged the peopleball... what was the point of making the damned things unless they hit stuff and went "plop" all over the place? "Wait-a-minute... where did he go?" Cray muttured, his eyes searching his empty display screens. A sudden bad premonition fell over him. "Ahh... shit."
The premonition turned out to be correct. The Liberty was hovering right behind him... how it had gotten there so fast and without him noticing Cray could not figure... but it had. As the Merciless slowly turned to face the Liberty, it became fully obvious to all the ZAFT machines watching in a sort of stunned awe just how massive the Merciless really was. The Liberty was based strongly off the Freedom, which was not by any means a small mobile suit, as mobile suits went... and the Liberty was several meters bigger all around than the Freedom. But it's feet were still a good ten meters off the ground and it was at head height with the Merciless. An image of a slim gymnast standing in close proximity to a hulking world class weight lifter came to mind for many. The Liberty was extremely well armed... it had just demonstarted its ability to continuous dominate many, many times its number of mobile suits. But again, compared to the giant Merciless it was a bit like bringing a pair of BB guns to a shooting war. But for all its size and obvious firepower and even accounting for the blood stained legs and hands... it was the Liberty that made every heart quail slightly with fear. The Merciless was an atavistic throwback, a primitive avatar of death and destruction. The Liberty was ultramodern and refined, pleasing to the eye and possessed of almost human poise as it floated in midair, HiMAT wings spread wide, one foot dangling slightly behind the other, arms at its sides, twin fiery red beam sabers projecting off to either side; the entire machine was glowing with a faint golden light, like an angel descending from heaven. But there was just something about the Liberty... something not quite visible to the eye... something that didn't show up on any sensor screens or data readouts... but was definitely there. Even Cray could feel it... a ball of cold dread sifting around in his stomach that hadn't been there in a very long time. The ZAFT soldiers found themselves holding their breath, wincing in anticipation as a feeling of a calm before a storm spread out to cover the area. For almost five seconds the two mobile suits... the looming, dark Merciless and the shining, bright Liberty... were face to face, unmoving. Cray's nerve broke first.
"Fuck this shit... I ain't scared of you! I've beaten you before... you're not so hot, KIRA YAMATO!" Cray snarled over the speakers. He swung his target icons over the Liberty and growled as they shied away like frightened mice... no matter how steady his hands were the damn computer icon remained jittery. "Fine... he's like sixty feet away... who needs to aim?" Cray asked himself. He swung up the Merciless's right arm... now hefting the dual 350mm hyper impulse beam cannon. "Suck this dick, bitch." Cray smirked and pulled the trigger. Twin blasts of energy comparable to that of a warship's main guns exploded from the muzzles of the weapon and raced towards the Liberty faster than the eye could follow. Or rather, it shot towards the space where the Liberty had been, because the moment Kira saw the pre-firing energy build up inside the gun barrels, he had jammed his foot down on the thruster pedal and flipped the Liberty up and over the line of fire. Maintaining his pose exactly, he gently touched his foot down on the still smoking barrels of the twin hyper impulse beam cannons... the Liberty was actually held up by its thrusters, not the Merciless's arm, but the illusion was quite convincing. The wasted shot roared off into the distance, clipping the top of an empty ZAFT hanger on the base proper, demolishing the building entirely.
"Equating your previous experience fighting me in unarmed combat outside of a mobile suit will not serve you well against me now." Kira said calmly, his voice bulging with constrained anger. He twitched his controls and both beam swords sliced down in a converging X, bisecting the twin barrels of the gun in two different places, utterly ruining the weapon. Cursing, Cray discarded it to the side before its capacitors could discharge and possibly damage his arm.
"You little bastard... I'll get you for that!" Cray promised, his eyes swelling with temper and his vision going just a little red as his artificial heart slipped into high speed as it sensed his emotional state. He tapped the triggers for the six torso mounted 57mm beam cannons. Six identical beams of green heat energy speared out, momentarily connecting the Merciless and the Liberty.
Kira sideslipped the top two beams by hunching his shoulders down a few feet and dodged the two lower beams by turning slightly to the side, narrowing his profile. He didn't bother to dodge the middle beams... with twin flicks of his swords he neatly intercepted the beam energy and deflected it away in twin splatters of beam stuff. "More to the case in point... last time we fought, it was on your terms and in your modus operandi. Now the tables have turned... we're on my terms and in my speciality when we're in mobile suits." Kira informed his enemy, still holding himself back.
"You're just a Coordinator..." Cray spat. "I can beat any Coordinator ever born."
"You're wrong. I'm not just a Coordinator. I'm just a human being... like any other born on Earth or in the PLANTS. I'm something you cannot understand, even though you once were one... that's the tragic thing about you and Frost and Ashino... the only thing I pity you for." Kira replied.
"Pity me!? PITY ME!?" Cray shouted, insulted beyond words. "WHO asked YOU to PITY ME!? WHAT THE FUCK DO I CARE FOR YOUR PITY!?"
"You don't... but the thing about pity is it is almost never asked for... even when it is strongly... maybe unconsciously... desired."
"You're fucking crazier than Frost in a bedlam moment if you think I have any subconscious desire for your pity!" Cray laughed... it was ludicrous... wasn't it? I mean... so what if he didn't have any memory... so what if he was an unwitting tool... what did he care? Why should he care? It was his lot in life... he couldn't change it. He didn't want to change it. Because it couldn't be changed anyway, no matter what he did. That was right... wasn't it? Cray found his laughter dying away... something wasn't right... those words were getting to him. He tried to rationalize around them... but with no memory it was hard to do properly... maybe he had changed his life... and then got memwiped again.. he'd never know... he'd never be able to tell. His head started to ache abomidably... and the damned flashing message light didn't help at all. The thing had been on for several minutes now... ever since the fighting in the defense lines behind him had started dying down for some reason. He shook his head back and forth, though that did nothing to clear his thoughts. There was only one option. To go totally fucking off the wall. "AHHHHHHHGG!" Cray screamed, throwing his head back, his eyes bloodshot and staring wildly at the cockpit ceiling.
Kira was unprepared for the counterattack. Well, maybe unprepared wasn't the right choice of words... he'd been expecting a counterblow of some sort, even though he knew his words had hit home somewhere in the coldest, darkest recessess of Cray's psyche. He just hadn't expected it to come so fast... he barely had time to notice the telltale shifting of weight on the Merciless's legs. He was just starting to pull up and away when the Merciless grabbed him with its right arm, grasping the Liberty's left ankle securely. Cray chuckled victoriously. He wasted no time in whipping the smaller mobile suit around and around through the air like a pro wrestler of unimaginable strength, before finally slamming the Liberty into the ground right in front of the Merciless... indenting the ground around the Orb built mobile suit. Before the stunned Kira could react, Cray had dropped one foot of the Merciless squarely upon the lower torso of the Liberty, pinning it in place. "You ain't talking so smarty mouth now, are ya, you little Coordinator bastard!? What now? What NOW, eh? Who's tough now, Mr. I Don't Kill People!?"
"Cray... you and especially Frost should bear this in mind. You're not people any more... by your own admission." Kira retorted, his vision unblurring as his head recovered from the whipcracking he'd received when the Merciless slammed him into the ground... a few structure frames had bent, but otherwise the Liberty was unharmed... a testament to Orb engineering and the designs of Erica Simmons. "I don't kill people. You're not a person. That means I can kill you just fine."
"Wait... what?" Cray asked, caught off guard. One of the Liberty's arms speared upwards, towards where the groin on a human would be. The beam sword sank in more than a meter before Cray threw the Merciless backwards in an awkward stagger... no sirens alarmed, but he was lucky he'd moved as fast as he did... a few meters more and he'd have had a holed reactor. "Tricksy bastard. You think you're all that... don't you? I got news for you, Keee-rya Yaamaatooeee... you ain't the big boy on the block no more. You may be hot shit... but I'm fucking molten... and Frost is damned near plasmatic. You're kidding yourself if you think you're getting out of this alive."
"We'll see, won't we?" Kira replied casually, picking the Liberty up to its feet slowly and deliberately.
"Yeah... we'll see all right... and after I see you off to hell, I'll go see your girl... Lacus Clyne. I know... Frost called dibs... but he's unconscious right now... what he don't know won't hurt me. I can promise you... I won't leave her in any position to complain to him about it." Cray licked his lips loudly. "And after I see to her, I'll move on to your sister... that fiery bitch Yula Attha. Mr. Zala's not in shape to be the man around the house right now... he may have beaten Ashino but he wouldn't have beaten me. And after I'm done using her up... I'll keep going down the line until I've done em all... every last little wench you formerly knew."
"You really should know something about me. You should have read it in the reports I'm sure your superiors have on me. Threaten me and I'll fight you back. Threaten the people I care about and I'll take you down. Threaten Lacus Clyne or my sister... and I'll go to hell... but only to watch you twist in the fires of my own creation." Kira let himself go... for real, for the first time since Jachin Due and Rau Le Creusete. The Liberty covered the distance to the Merciless in an eyeblink, one sword sweeping up, one sweeping down... to hack off the Merciless's right arm at the shoulder. The huge sparking limb almost seemed to jump out of it's socket, trailing clots of machine oil like polluted blood. Cray screamed just as if it had been his own arm that was severed, not the Merciless's. Kira spun the Liberty around like a ballet dancer, inside the reach of the Merciless, so close to his enemy he actually brushed against him. The left arm of the Merciless started to come down like part of the sky falling, but Kira jumped up, flipping the Liberty into a cartwheel in midair and slammed both thruster driven legs into the arm, knocking it back with a screech of protesting servomotors. Still rising on his upwards jumping momentum, the Liberty's arms came level with the upper chest of the Merciless. Kira did not hesitate... he'd meant what he'd said, with every fibre of his being. Both beam sabers stabbed forward, piercing the Merciless through and through in the rough section of torso he guessed the cockpit was. If the Merciless had been a normal sized mobile suit, he would have guessed right.
As things were, the beams stabbed through the overhead portion of the cockpit to either side of Cray's head... one beam actually close enough to singe his shoulder through his flight suit. Upward momentum dragged the blades away from him, dripping molten pieces of Merciless onto his arms and chest... the plastic-metal mixture quickly charred through his flight suit and went to work on the flesh underneath. Shrieking and twisting in horrible agony, Cray convulsed in his restraining straps, jerking at the controls and tossing the Merciless backwards in a long stumble that ended up with it flat on its back. Smoke, sparks and superheated lubricants flowed freely out of the twin beam saber wounds... fires started and flames puffed out of the twin punctures in stuttering explosions as internal ciruits cooked off and detonated. Kira completed the Liberty's cartwheel and landed lightly on bent legs. "I'm sorry I had to do that... but you gave me no choice." Kira said apologetically. "May your soul find peace in the afterlife somewhere..."
"Don't need no... fucking... afterlife." Cray croaked back through seared lips and parched throat. Kira started... he'd been sure he'd killed Cray with that attack... he'd hit right at the center of the mobile suit... where the cockpit always was... he should have skewered the BCPU with at least one sword... and one sword was all it would have taken. After many months and many more battles of shooting to avoid the cockpit, Kira had gotten very good at figuring out where that cockpit was... he couldn't believe he'd missed hitting it the one time he was trying to. "Peace... huh... who needs it? When... I... DIE... I WANT... FIRE. AT WILL" Cray gasped a smile through the pain. The Merciless's torso cranked up from the ground like some smoking revenant, its left arm and 400mm anti armor shotgun coming up as well to aim at the surprised Liberty, standing not more than fifty feet away. Cray was still smiling as he jammed down all the triggers his twitching fingers could find.
The anti armor shotgun shells... practically just large metal balls filled with shaped armor piercing explosive charges, didn't have time to spread out before striking the Liberty full in the chest, dumping more than twenty four hundred pounds of armor-piercing explosive ordnance onto the torso of the flat footed mobile suit. Phase shift armor rendered the armor piercing warheads ineffective... but there was no counteracting the force of impact. The Liberty was physically picked up and thrown backwards like a rag doll, Kira rattling around inside like a piece of gravel in a kicked can... if it hadn't been for his restraining straps he would have probably snapped his neck... as it was, the bruising was incredible... and he knew it would only get worse later. The Liberty landed half on its back and half on its head and skidded for more than twenty meters before its legs came down and helped stop the slide. Kira was just starting to get hold of his controls again when he was bonuced around his cockpit by impacts again... hundreds and hundreds of impacts. Cray's fingers had also found the triggers for his four shoulder mounted 120mm gatling cannons and he was holding them down without a care in the world for Phase Shift immunity to projectiles or his rapidly decreasing ammo counters. Each gatling cannon pumped out more than six hundred projectiles a minute, each shell was almost five inches in diameter (4.72 inches)... for a total of twenty four hundred high explosive shells per minute... each powerful enough to utterly destroy a main battle tank in one hit. The grounded Liberty was not a tough target to orient on... the gatlings were not so much aimed as just pointed and swept back and forth... with their high fire rates more than eighty percent of the munitions landed on target.
Kira could literally not regain control of his mobile suit... every time he grabbed hold of a control with one hand he lost his grip on another due to the constant pounding... none of the shells were harming the mobile suit much at all... though the continual shocks were messing with his computers a little. But the main problem was the force of the impacts... each one was like a padded sledgehammer blow directly to some part of his body... more often, several dozen points all at once. The shocks weren't enough to break bones by themselves, but he was bound to get a bad bounce sooner or later if he kept getting thrown around by the impacts. He was thankful for his restraining straps even as he swore at how they cut into his shoulders and chest like steel bands... without them he'd have been battered into unconsciousness at the very least against the control surfaces of his own cockpit long ago. Kira didn't know how long he fought to regain his mobile suit's balance... it felt like hours. In reality it was only two minutes and twenty six seconds... the exact amount of time it took the Merciless to exhaust its ammo hoppers. Cray kept the triggers held down for several seconds after the guns stopped firing, a maniac grin on his face. "Hahahahaha... who's laughing now?" Cray taunted.
"You are." Kira grabbed hold of his controls and sat the Liberty upright, mimicking the Merciless. "Why... I don't know." He aimed the triple 300mm sniper cannon at the Merciless. "Laugh at this." Kira pulled the trigger harder than he meant to... his finger twinged.
"HAHAHAHAHA!" Cray continued to laugh, dropping his anti armor shot gun and reaching for his severed right arm in one motion. He brought the severed limb up like a shield... it took all three blasts and disintegrated into a thousand fragments. The blast wave knocked the Merciless flat on its back again. "HAHAHAHAHAHA! I'm still laughing!" Cray called triumphantly.
"I'm still shooting... imagine that." Kira replied. Cray's mouth remained open but no laughter came out. The Liberty hovered overhead... all weapons out. Sniper cannon... dual 57mm beam cannon, hyper impulse cannons... railguns... gugnir cannon. Everything. Kira hit the triggers for everything. Cray's left arm had been scrabbling at the dirt for several seconds by this point... finally coming up with the anti-armor shotgun. Just as Kira pulled his triggers, Cray re-aimed his weapons and fired all of his remaining weapons as well. From a distance of perhaps fifty meters the two mobile suits traded volleys of firepower equivalent to that of possessed by entire teams of ZAFT suits. Speaking of ZAFT, now that the EA had fled for unknown reasons, they were diverting all their attention to this final threat... or pair of threats, depending on which Coordinator you asked... in their midst.
The Merciless shrugged off the railgun rounds like spitballs... the dual 57mm beams were likewise deflected in a shower of sparks... penetrating the first two layers of phase shift but reflecting from the final third layer. The two hyper impulse shots cleanly pierced the Merciless at the left elbow and right knee... amputating both limbs at those joints, but not before the weapons on both had fired. The three sniper cannon rounds gouged huge craters in the Merciless's torso armor...actually exposing the cockpit and one nuclear reactor, though not damaging them. The EMP wave from the gugnir washed through the Merciless like an invisible tide... dozens of secondary systems shorted out at once, but due to the extensive upgrades all the BCPU gundams had receievd in their EMP shielding after Orb, the Merciless did not falter or die from the special weapon. Left with mostly munitions based weaponry, the Merciless's counterattack had less devastating outward effects upon the Liberty. The anti-armor shells hit dead center again, tossing the Liberty back through the air like a limp noodle... Kira's head was ringing and he could taste blood from where he'd bitten his tongue. The five beam cannons still working on the Merciless's chest mostly missed wide... by the time they reached the target point the Liberty had already been struck by the shotgun, though one beam did burn a neat hole through the Liberty's left foot. Of the one hundred sixty radar guided missiles launched from the Merciless's shin and thigh missile launchers, more than one hundred forty were struck by the Gugnir wave and had their tracking systems disabled... they went straight up and came back down in long ballistic trajectories... causing widespread devastation in the mostly empty harbor areas of Carpentaria. The remainder homed in on the Liberty and battered it into the ground like punches thrown by giants. Kira whiplashed back and forth so violently he actually snapped a restraining strap and whammed his arm hard into his control chair... if he hadn't been wearing a protective suit he probably would have broken the arm... it went completely numb for the moment... he was glad because he was sure he wasn't going to like how it was going to feel later. Kira slowly started to pick the Liberty back up to its feet... as long as his foe kept using munitions, he'd keep coming back for more... he couldn't be stopped by explosives.
Battered... beaten... bruised and even a bit bloody... but still standing, Kira slowly stepped the Liberty over to stand next to the fallen Merciless. The giant mobile suit lay like the half empty shell of some colossal knight after losing a fight with an even greater dragon... arms and legs ripped off, chest torn open, fluids all over the place, heavy scorching, surrounded by the shattered remains of its weapons... the Merciless currently had more in common with a junkyard than any sort of terrible mobile suit. Kira looked down at his enemy through fuzzy cameras... sometime during the battery he'd lost a few external sensors... a Gundam was phase shift armored, but that didn't protect camera lenses or other sensor mounts of that nature... he had lots of backups, but he'd also taken a hell of a lot of shots too. And the constant beating had likely shaken a few wires loose in his computer system as well... given that some of his teeth still felt loose Kira was surprised his mechanical systems were working as well as they were. Cray was just barely visible in the half shadowed recesses of the Merciless's cockpit, revealed by one of the three sniper cannon shots. Cray was singed, charred and still smoking visibly in some spots, but was relatively still and quiet. Kira could hear him breathing over his external speakers... he could almost imagine he could see the face of the BCPU 5, though the camera resolution was a bit fuzzy for that to be really true... he was just superimposing his memories onto the head of the figure in the black, silver and purple flight suit. With a unhurried and quite deliberate twitch of a control, Kira pointed his dual 57mm beam rifle directly at Cray. The instinctual level of Kira's mind noted that ZAFT forces were slowly approaching from all sides... more than thirty his sensors could detect, plus at least five anomalous dust clouds that likely represented Efreet. He ignored them for the moment... they currently had their weapons powered down or pointed away and had yet to make any attempts at communication, hostile or otherwise.
"You... think you're... so cool." Cray cackled wearily. His cockpit was a mess and so was he... his weapon systems were not responding and the Merciless quite literally only had one leg to stand on. The Merciless still had flight capability... but maneuverability and speed were going to be negligible... there would be no way for him to flee unaided. And since his own forces were either already flown away or boarding ships that were about to leave, and on the other side of an entire ZAFT defense line... he was out of luck when it came to backup. And if the messed up state of the Merciless wasn't bad enough, he'd sustained some serious third degree burns on his shoulders, chest and upper legs... nothing life threatening, but they were nothing to laugh about either...a normal human would have probably died from shock already. A blob of molten metal and plastic had congealed on his restraining harness release clip... he wasn't able to operate it and he just couldn't seem to muster up the energy to just break out... what was the point when even if he ejected he'd still get shot by Yamato... better to die with his best buddy, the Merciless. His hand caressed the self detonate switch... if he was gonna go, it wouldn't be alone. The self destruct sequence on the Merciless was easily enough to reduce everything within three hundred meters to ashes in an instant. He kept his hand on the control, but didn't operate it just yet... he had a feeling Yamato would feel obliged to answer back... he'd have time to choose his moment.
"No... I'm the opposite of cool. I hate this... every last bit of it. War is not cool... killing is not cool... genocide is very not cool. But as much as I loathe this war and every reason it is being fought for... I loathe just standing by and watching it happen even more. I don't want to do the things I'm doing... but doing them is preferrable to me than standing on the sidelines and letting ZAFT and the Earth Alliance annihilate each other... as a Citizen of the Earth, I cannot allow it... as a Coordinator I cannot allow it... as a human being, I cannot allow it." Kira replied, almost equally wearily. He dropped out of SEED mode and only then noticed just how much the relatively brief fight had taken out of him.
"You make such... pretty speeches. But in the end... you're still going to be the one pulling that trigger." Cray replied with a smirk. "You say you don't want this war to continue... I say... if that's really how you feel... why are you... interefering and prolonging it? This war would... have been over hours... ago... if your damn ships... hadn't shot down... half the fucking nukes."
"You expect to hurt me with your words?" Kira asked, not surprised. "People have been trying to twist my words, actions and reasons around to mean what they want them to mean ever since I first got trapped in the cockpit of the Strike on Heliopolis. It was first really bad at Artemis, but it was prevalent throughout the last war... always there were those who called me traitor or coward or fool or puppet... or even murderer. I've grown so used to defending my actions in the eyes of people who have no idea what sort of choices I've had to make that I've almost got a few arguements down by rote. Personally... that upsets and bothers me greatly. To think I would grow so used to explaining why I acted that I actually planned ahead to think of what I would say if I did act, before I even acted? It's so stupid and pointless. Actions are the results of choices... choices are the results of actions... its a never ending cycle that no one can ever escape from... I'm acting now, to kill you, because of a choice Lacus and I and everyone we know and trust jointly made... that you and those like you present a real and deadly threat to the safety of the peace of the world. Maybe we aren't legal judges... we have no actual right to judge your actions, in the legal sense. But this is the battlefield, not the courtroom... and we have to live with the consequences of our choices, good or ill."
"You don't have to justify... yourself to me. You want to kill... you do so... reasons are for those who are afraid to act like they really want to." Cray spat out. The only piece of his damn cockpit that was still working perfectly fine seemed to be his comm board, which was still blinking with that annoying call light... damn thing had been on for nearly thirty minutes now. "In truth... you'd be a fool not to kill me now... because if you don't... I will make absolutely sure... somehow... someway... that you regret it. So stop spouting your ridiculous reasons... I'm a mass murdering psychopath to whom remorse isn't even a concept... and I'm damned proud of that. It makes me free... so much more free than you... huh... Liberty... you're so bound by... the chains of your reasons... you should... call that monster you pilot... the Shackles..." Cray trailed off into a coughing chuckle. "Far more fitting... from my point of view."
A flashing icon on Kira's display board caught his eye for a moment... an update from the Archangel. The Archangel and Kusanagi had broken through the enemy line and destroyed three enemy carriers... but had been unable to disable the command ship. The enemy mobile suit forces had been defeated as well, with heavy losses to the Earth Forces, due in part to Alkire's participation in the battle... apparently he'd pulled a few moves even Mu might have thought twice about, but it had been enough to put large groups of enemies directly in the fire lanes of the Kusanagi's main guns. It wasn't all good news though... before retreating the enemy command ship had deployed a final unit of mobile suits... nine Strike Crusaders and the Freedom model they'd seen in Orb, probably piloted by none other than Asmodeus Sark himself. They had headed south, towards Kira, at flank speed about thirty minutes ago... given their current speed the Freedom would be arriving any minute, with the Crusaders a few minutes behind that. The ZAFT submarine force had turned about when the EA fleets stared their retreat, the ZAFT forces were coming back in directly along the path the merchant ships of the EA would be taking in their retreat once they finished on loading the recalled soldiers. That confrontation would bear careful watching... the battle was technically over, with ZAFT apparently victorious... but tempers and passions were running near to bursting right now. But that was some time off... right now Kira had more pressing concerns. "I don't have to justify myself... that is true. But all the same... despite all you've done... to me... my friends and family... and to innumerable other people during your life... including your own family...you still deserved more epitaph than just an execution shot. You were once a human being...even if you don't remember, I know this to be true... you had a mother and father, just like everyone else. This is the end for you, Cray... to paraphrase something someone once said... may God have mercy on your soul... because I have none left to spare for you." Kira started to squeeze the trigger.
It had been a reasonably good battle for Shinn. After the debacle with Commander Randolf at Gibralter, Shinn had been in a hospital for about a month recovering from the severe dehydration he'd suffered during his hours trapped in his disabled Efreet's cockpit out in the desert. In truth he'd recovered from the dehydration quickly enough... it was the emotional shock of having his teammates and commanding officer mostly killed off during his first mission with ZAFT that had really floored him. He'd lost so much on Onogoro during the last war... his entire family, gone in the blink of an eye due to the arrogance of the Attha family and the carelessness of the pilot of the Freedom. He'd left on the refugee ships and come to the PLANTS as an orphan... he wasn't technically old enough to take care of himself yet, at only fourteen, going on fifteen. But he was a Coordinator and even in a society of Coordinators, there were some things he was just better at than some people... like hacking into the citizenry database and "adjusting" his age forward a few years so he could join ZAFT to strike back at the people who had taken everything important from his life. He was far from the only Orb Coordinator to choose to go into ZAFT... and far from the only underage one to do it as well. He'd have been shocked if half of his basic training division had been old enough to need to shave... but given the emergency state of affairs at the time and indeed now as well, ZAFT hadn't looked too closely at the actual ages of it's soldiers... Coordinators usually matured faster than Naturals... a fourteen year old with the right motivation was perfectly capable of being a disciplined soldier if they were a Coordinator. And Shinn definitely had the right motivation... he hadn't made it into the Elite program on his first application... he suspected because their age requirements were actually enforced... but he knew he was on the fast track for advancement as soon as he turned fifteen. His whole life revolved around ZAFT and being the best soldier he could possibly be right now. His abilities and zeal had gotten him assigned to the competent unit of Commander Aireg Randolf and gotten him assigned one of the then brand new Efreet mobile suits... a definite mark of status for a newbie right out of basic.
But then had come the confrontation with the Liberty out in the desert... everything had gone terribly wrong... he'd been on the cusp of defeating his foe, he was sure of it... but he just hadn't been able to... the other pilot was just that little bit tougher than him. And then he'd been out of commission while the rest of the unit except for his team got slaughtered in an ambush set up by Lacus Clyne. Shinn still had trouble believing that... like every other young Coordinator male currently unattached, he had a special place in his heart for the heartbreakingly kind and beautiful Lacus Clyne... he refused to believe she could betray a fellow Coordinator. She was Lacus Clyne, for crying out loud! But in any case, Randolf's unit had been wiped out almost to the last man, and the only salvagable survivors had been Shinn and his Efreet scout unit. He'd received a commendation for his service in the desert and then been assigned to garrison duty at Carpentaria while the higher ups tried to figure out what to do after Gibralter. He'd ended up getting forgotten and stuck in Carpentaria... not a bad posting for most soldiers, but Shinn always wanted to be where the action was... every time people started talking about a raid on Orb, he was always there, listening intently. But nothing ever ended up happening... ZAFT mostly stayed on the defensive, digging in and fortifying their assests. It was intensely frustrating for him, but he managed to work through it... largely by working the simulators half to death... his skills had taken visible steps in the months since his fight in the desert... there were few people at Carpentaria... non-elites that is... who'd dare step into the simulator against him. The Elites were a different case... he could beat some of them some of the time, but none of them all the time, and his wins were infrequent and usually had some factor of luck incorporated into them. But he was getting better every time... marginally closer with every fight.
And then had come this big push by the EA to take over or destroy Carpentaria. He'd initially thought it was a land grab sort of thing... but after seeing the nukes raining down, he was much more of the view that the EA was just trying to stamp them out like bugs. Then the mobile suits and jets had started coming, in seemingly endless waves. He'd taken out two fighter-bombers in the first wave, and been fortunate enough to have a low flying wing of skygraspers fly directly over his head close enough to allow him to shoot down one of them with barely any trouble at all. During the first hours of fighting he'd assisted in taking out four Strike Daggers and two Strike Crusaders, and had accounted for two Strike Daggers by himself... it wasn't really fair... compared to his invisible Efreet the Strike Daggers were barely more than large clockwork toys, and the Crusaders just bigger and louder toys. During the second wave of pure Strike Crusader's he'd led one of the flanking charges and taken down three more Crusaders. His unit had been one of the lucky ones not deployed to delay the Orb forces... he'd champed at the bit initially, but had been glad afterwards, upon hearing how the Orb forces had massacred the Efreet's sent against them... they had some system that could sense Mirage Colloid units somehow. He'd pulled back to recharge both his mobile suit and himself and then plunged back into the grinding, swaying fight for the first defense line... by the time the huge enemy machine had shown up, he'd taken down three more Strike Daggers, one more jet fighter and one more Strike Crusader... more than enough during the battle as a whole to qualify him as an ace. But by that point he really didn't care... he was exhausted and emotionally wrung dry... he may have been doing well but far too many of his friends and colleauges were not... the death toll was horrifying... especially for the Low Orbit Forces... only one Nazca remained in orbit, and it was heavily damaged. ZAFT had suffered fifty to sixty percent losses to total troop strength... a staggering amount and those just the initial estimates, which would doubtless be raised afterwards as the full scope of the battle became clear.
He'd just been pulling back for a small breather when the Merciless... that was how the enemy identified himself... had obliterated a huge section of the second defense line with a tactical nuke and then landed in the created gap and begun to sow havoc like a god of destruction. Shinn had seen and greatly respected the live fire exercises the Grendel's went through... but this giant Merciless put them to shame with ease... wiping out entire teams at a time with a single unstoppable stream of firepower so concentrated not even Efreet could close the distance... the fire was just too thick to pass through alive. And even worse... when finally flanked, the Merciless had demonstarted a defensive system advanced enough as to render ineffective the combined might of five Grendels... no little feat. Shinn had been forced to watch, horrified beyond measure, as the Merciless proved its name by falling upon three civilian shelters like a bloodthirsty berserker... scooping people up with its hands, crushing them into balls or just tossing them around like confetti... bathing in the blood of innocents, taunting the ZAFT forces all around, afraid to fire for fear of hitting the civilians. Then the beast had actually started rolling around in one of the shelters, crushing hundreds and painting itself with the gore... Shinn had had a flashback of his family's death... his father, crushed by a tree... his mother, pulped by boulders... his sister Maru, her arm torn off and her body split like a rotten log... by the time he'd recovered from the terrible memories the Liberty had arrived... the very suit that had attacked and disabled him in the desert those months ago. Shinn had forced himself to admit he was impressed... the Liberty single handedly managed to do what all the gathered ZAFT forces had been unable to accomplish... the humbling of the terrible Merciless. The Liberty hadn't exactly made the fight look easy... indeed there had been one part when Shinn had been sure the Liberty defeated, phase shift armor or no phase shift armor. But once again the pilot had showed his stamina and had battled through the beating to fully disable the Merciless. But then, instead of doing the reasonable thing, the pilot of the Liberty had launched into this tirade on reasons and justice and other bullshit that had no place on a nuclear battlefield... it had disgusted Shinn. To think that such a skilled pilot was such a wishy-washy liberal softy... it was obscene. Shinn couldn't take it any more... he disabled his Mirage Colloid and stepped forward. The Liberty ignored him, its pilot still intent on his conversation with the enemy pilot. Shinn had been dreaming of a moment like this for months... he didn't hesitate. His back mounted beam cannon turret swung up onto his shoulders and took aim with both cannons, he flicked his Mirage Colloid on and off to disrupt his sensor signal for a vital moment.
"Wait a minute... we don't have orders to engage..." one of the other ZAFT mobile suits radioed. It wasn't anyone he knew, so he ignored it... could always say he had comm difficulties... happened all the time with all the N-Jammers around on Earth.
Kira was just pulling the trigger when Shinn's beam blasts took him from behind. He was lucky he had re-engaged the Angel Halo system after downing Cray for good... he'd had to disengage it before firing the Gugnir cannon and he didn't always remember to re-engage afterwards. Because the Angel Halo was active the blasts that Shinn thought were aimed squarely at the center back of the Liberty instead struck one at each shoulder joint and had their energy dissipated by a good thirty percent. If the beams had hit where they intended Kira would have been vaporized, likely without ever knowing what hit him... Shinn's brief flick of the Mirage Colloid had erased him from Kira's threat board for a nearly fatal second... combined with all the other things on his mind, he'd lost track of the single mobile suit which blinked off and on on the threat display. Of course, lucky was always such a relative term... instead of exploding in a fiery explosion, the Liberty just sagged, both arms disabled from the shoulders down, with a large smoking crater blown in the back of each shoulder joint. Each hand went slack as power and control was lost to each arm, dropping the dual 57mm rifle and the triple sniper cannon to the ground with loud CLANG-LANG noises. Kira was thrown forward from the impact, half slipping out of his partially disabled restraints and slamming his head into his primary display, cracking the screen. If he hadn't been wearing his helmet... but he had been, so all he suffered was dizziness that slowly faded over the next few seconds. The Liberty tottered forward a few steps, tripping headlong over the remaining left leg of the Merciless and crashing face first to the ground in yet another impact that set Kira to bouncing around his cockpit... something he was getting heartily sick of. It was quite a trick getting to his feet again without the use of his arms... he was still on his knees when even more bad news showed up.
Asmodeus was not in a good mood. For one, the battle was a total failure on both fronts... neither Carpentaria nor the PLANTS had been destroyed... sure, maybe a good portion of ZAFT's terrestrial strength had been decimated, but so had a good deal of the Alliance's... this battle had done nothing but knock each side back, bloody and dizzy. And everyone knew, Coordinators recovered faster than Naturals. For another, he'd been forced to call Cervantes and tell him that... in more diplomatic terms of course, but Cervantes knew failure when he heard it. Asmodeus had been cringing slightly, given how his boss had responded to the other phone calls, but Cervantes had remained calm and focused... which was actually worse. Asmodeus knew Cervantes as well as anyone, if not better than anyone... and when Cervantes suffered a setback and was calm about it, that was a very, very bad sign. It meant his boss had seen something that made him believe that he could use the setback to his own advantage... and while that was often the case... all such recovery plans were far, far riskier than his boss usually operated. Asmodeus did not like risk... it was his personal nemesis that he did all he could to eliminate from every facet of life he could... and when Cervantes took risks... Blue Cosmos took risks... and with risks came the possibility of a catastrophe. And Blue Cosmos might not be strong enough to cope with a catastrophe the size of whatever plan Cervantes had that was keeping him calm through the failure of his one shot win the war strategy AND the loss of JIHAD. Finally, Asmodeus was not in a good mood because he was currently flying past the first ZAFT defense line his troops had tried so hard to crack with backup some minutes behind him, and laughably few in number anyway, on his way to probably face the premier mobile suit pilot currently living in combat, in order to rescue a precious Blue Cosmos asset that Asmodeus would personally rather just throw into an airlock... without a spacesuit. However, the situation was more... complicated... than he had thought, when he arrived.
Cray had indeed been defeated by Kira Yamato... the Liberty was looking battered and beaten... but almost pristine in comparison to the ravaged hulk of the Merciless, which was missing its right arm at the shoulder, the left arm at the elbow and the right leg below the knee. The chest of the Merciless looked like someone had been playing a giant blowtorch over it for several minutes, after tearing out three disc shaped holes each more than three meters in diameter and about one and a half meters deep. It was hard to believe that Cray could still be alive... if he hadn't seen the limb stumps of the Merciless twitching and the blackened and seared head turn to look at him as he approached, Asmodeus might have written the mission off as a loss. He was tempted to do so anyway... now that he was within line of sight, he could detonate the Merciless... and Cray... whenever he chose, in order to deny the precious Blue Cosmos technology and assets to ZAFT... no one but him would everknow that Cray had been still kicking when Asmodeus blew him up... Asmodeus shook his head... Blue Cosmos had suffered enough today. The Earth alliance would need its now precious stock of BCPU's to even the odds against the PLANTS in the future... especially with the troubling reports of the new ZAFT models up in space. Asmodeus hit the comm board override for the Merciless, forcing his call through. "Cray... I know you're alive. And that means you can hear me. The order is to retreat. Do you understand? Retreat to Panama right now."
"Can you see what this bastard did to me? What he's done to my Merciless!?" Cray protested.
"I don't care what he's done to you or your mobile suit... in truth, you had this coming to you when you ignored the withdraw order... maybe you'll be more disciplined in the future." Asmodeus brought the Purifier to a hover overhead, looking down at the situation. The Liberty had been about to blast Cray into nothingness... an action Asmodeus almost wished he'd been too late to stop. But then ZAFT had intervened... for reasons unknown, a single Efreet had stepped up behind the Liberty and shot it in the back, clearly with the intent to kill. The Liberty's defense mechanisms diverted the killing blows, instead disabling the arms of the mobile suit and sending it crashing down to the ground on its face. The Liberty was only just regaining it's feet when Asmodeus carefully brought the Purifier to the ground on the other side of the Merciless. Asmodeus kept his weapons powered up but carefully pointed in a nonthreatening direction... he was surrounded by more than thirty ZAFT mobile suits... starting a fight was the last thing he wanted. "This is Captain Asmodeus Sark... speaking to the commander of the ZAFT mobile suits surrounding me." Asmodeus said carefully over a unencrypted channel. He didn't have to wait long... within ten seconds the image of a man in the white flight suit of a ZAFT Ace-Commander appeared on his comm screen. Asmodeus couldn't see the man's face through his polarized face shield, but his voice was somewhat familiar... there weren't too many white suits in the ZAFT mobile suit forces and Asmodeus had studied them all... the elimination of people like them had been one of his priorities while he was in EFSOU.
"I ddn't know the Hellhound flew a mobile suit... especially not a Freedom." the Ace-Commander commented sourly.
"Ah... but there are many things you don't know about me, Ace-Commander Timothy Doone. I see you've traded in your old LaGowe for something a little more... appropriately simian." Asmodeus said, his lips curling up in a slightly scornful smile. Commander Doone was a relatively famous ZAFT commander who'd mostly done his fighting in Eurasia. Not nearly the tactician or strategist like Andrew Waltfeld or Aireg Randolf, Timothy Doone fought his battles from one point of view only... the trooper at the striking edge of the blade. He always led from the front... admirable in some aspects, but career limiting... Doone would never rise above his current station if he didn't start showing some restraint... the man apparently thought he could win the war all by his lonesome, on the power of his brawny arms and itchy trigger fingers alone. Of the possible people to be negotiating with, Doone wasn't Asmodeus's first choice... it'd be better to have someone who could see sense without having to be led to it first... but better Doone than someone really competent and dangerous, like Borander. "One of which is the reason I am here."
"You mean you aren't here to rescue that giant killing machine at your feet?" Doone asked sarcastically, training his Grendel's weapon studded arms on the Purifier. "You've come to defect have you? I'm so glad."
"You misunderstand. I am here to retrieve this machine and its pilot... for punishment. The pilot is a mutineer... he ignored direct orders to cease fighting and withdraw. I'm here to take him back for a court martial and probable execution." Asmodeus replied, staring at Doone with his icy eyes.
"If he's to die anyway, why not just kill him now? I can do it for you, if it bothers your concience." Doone countered. "God knows, that bastard has it coming for what he did to those civilians."
"More acts for which he will be duly punished... at court martial." Asmodeus said firmly. "If you wish, ZAFT can request to extradite him for war crimes after we court martial him... this is a war, but some things cannot be countenaced by either side."
"Like the nuking of civilian cities?" Doone snarled. "Or your cowardly sneak attack on the PLANTS, again armed with nuclear weapons?"
"I'm just a Captain... I don't make the orders, I just follow them to the best of my ability. For what it's worth, I wish those missiles had never been fired... that this entire operation had never taken place." Asmodeus replied, sincerely. He'd told Cervantes before that this battle was a mistake... ZAFT had turned Carpentaria into a shattering point for the Alliance to break itself on... and it very nearly had.
"Yeah... sure, whatever." Doone retorted contemptuously. "You expect me to believe that?"
"If you think ZAFT got the raw end of the deal... you need to unpolarize that helmet and take a look around, Doone. Yes... our forces inflicted heavy damage with the nukes and our invading forces... but you threw us back... we lost the entire twelth lunar fleet, with only a few hundred survivors. Your submarine forces are currently having a turkey shoot with our retreating troop transports... your casualties may run into the thousands... but ours will be ten times as high at least. Your defenses held against the strongest attack we could muster...do you think I would be here, negotiating with you, if the Alliance had the upper hand? No... you'd be dead already if my side was currently the stronger." Asmodeus pointed out wearily. Doone leaned back in his cockpit and considered what Sark had told him... it made sense of a sort... if the Alliance had the upper hand, they always pressed it... always. That they currently weren't attacking meant that Sark was probably telling the truth... the Alliance had beaten itself mostly senseless on the rock of Carpentaria and was reeling back in disarray. Still... given what he'd seen happen, Doone couldn't let the bastard in the Merciless leave alive... his honor and decency as a human being cried out for revenge.
"I didn't realize we were negotiating... I thought that required two parties of equal strength... or at least holding items of equal value. What can you offer ZAFT that would convince us to let you take this mutinous pilot and his terrible machine back to your bases... when we'll all too likely see them again at some point in the future?" Doone asked. Asmodeus frowned inwardly... Doone was sharper than he thought... he'd either guessed or figured out that Cray would stand no trial... anybody who could pilot something like the Merciless wasn't going to get executed for taking the fight to the enemy a little too liberally.
"Your life and the lives of all those around us. Did you honestly think that I, the Hellhound of EFSOU... would come to you like this if I didn't have a trump card?" Asmodeus said with a smirk. "All it takes is a single press of a button and the two hundred megaton thermonuclear self destruct device hooked up to the Merciless's twin reactors will detonate... the blast should easily destroy all life within three quarters of a mile... the radioactive fallout would blow down onto Carpentaria and render it uninhabitable for decades to come. It's a modern version of what used to be called a dirty nuke... trust me, you don't want it going off near anything thats important to you."
Doone rocked back, shocked. "But... you'd die too?" he stammered.
"Doone... let me tell you something personal. My son was killed several months ago, before the start of this war. He was murdered by a Coordinator... by Ysak Jule, son of Esaria Jule of the former PLANT supreme council. Ever since that day, I have woken up every day and asked myself a single question. Do you know what that question is?" Asmodeus's ice blue eyes bored into Doone's concealed face like twin frosty blue laser beams. "It was... "Why are you still alive when your son is not?"... do you know what my answer to that question is, Doone?" If anything, his gaze became sharper and more piercing still, until Doone felt like his eyes were being slowly frozen solid by the unwavering gaze of the Hellhound. "My answer, Ace-Commander Timothy Doone... is that... "I don't know."... Maybe today I'll end it, hmm? That wouldn't be so bad, in my opinion... no pain...leaving a big mark... who wouldn't want to go out like that?"
"You're insane!" Doone accused, jerking his gaze away from Asmodeus's.
"No... I'm just filled to the brim with grief and emptiness. It has consumed me like it has some Coordinators after Junius Seven... with my family dead I have so very little to live for any more." Asmodeus countered.
"I think murdered might be taking it a bit too far." Kira cut into the conversation, having brought the Liberty back to its feet. He'd turned back to face the ZAFT Efreet which had shot him in the back. The ZAFT machine had not retreated and indeed still had it's weapons aimed directly at Kira. "Your son was killed, yes... but only after he tried to assassinate Lacus Clyne and Cagalli Yula Attha, not to mention myself, Ysak and several others. It was a matter of self defense... and in my opinion you've already taken far too much of your personal vendetta out on undeserving people to go around using your son's death as an excuse for committing atrocities."
"And who are you?" Doone snapped. "You're not in my IFF log... not a friendly, nor an enemy. Who's side are you on?"
"My name is Kira Yamato. I'm not part of ZAFT. I'm no longer part of the Earth Alliance... haven't been for more than a year now. I fight on the side of peace... on the side of people who want to end this war as quickly and bloodlessly as possible. Preferrably without firing one single more shot. However, given the unfortunate realities of human nature, I don't believe ZAFT or the Alliance will just sit down and listen merely because we ask them to." Kira replied calmly.
"Not part of the Alliance... HAH!" Shinn spat. "Then why did you help them destroy Commander Randolf at Gibralter... don't tell me you don't know what I'm talking about... I nearly roasted you alive there, but you managed to take me out at the last second."
"I fought to perserve Commander Randolf's life at the behest of Lacus... it was Cray here and his comrades, who ambushed and killed your Commander during his peace negotiations with Lacus." Kira replied, off guard at the blatant hostility in the other's voice.
"You can say whatever you want... Kira Yamato. I know you... though we've never met face to face... you... you and your damn sister, the bitch queen of orb... you took my family from me at Onogoro. I'll never forgive you for that. Never. You also took Commander Randolf from me... he was my friend... they were all my friends... and you either killed them or let them die at the hands of the Alliance... don't tell me otherwise... I saw how good you are, both then and now... theres no way you couldn't have stopped the Alliance... unless you didn't want to." Shinn snarled hoarsely.
"Wow... someone's got animosity problems. Take it from me, Coordinator... you have to embrace those feelings and let them empower you, before they destroy you. I know all about channeling hatred." Cray said cheerily.
"This is getting out of hand. I don't care what problems you Coordinators have with each other... I'm taking my soldier and his machine back to Panama for court martial and punishment. If any of you so much as twitch a finger to stop me, I'll blow us all into atomic dust." Asmodeus broke into the conversation, voice almost pained.
"Hey hey hey... not so loud with the atomic detonation stuff... I'm still in here, you know." Cray protested.
"Since you know that matters to me so much, I can see why you might think I care." Asmodeus replied with bitter sarcasm. "Now lift off and get moving... there's an escort of nine Strike Crusaders inbound to assist you if you need it."
"Yeesh, yes sir!" Cray grumbled, wincing as his wounds contorted as he worked the controls, slowly levitating the mauled Merciless into a sort of flight... he wasn't going much faster than a toy airplane, but at least he was up and moving.
"Now hold on a moment here... we never agreed to let you go." Doone's Grendel took two steps forward, weapon laden forearms pointing at the Merciless and Purifier.
"Unless you want to die, you really don't have a choice." Asmodeus replied with a grim chuckle.
"I'm a soldier and I'm on a battlefield... dying is a risk we all take. Letting the enemy escape to return another day would be to besmirch the honor of all of those heroes that have fallen today beneath your foul weaponry." Doone shot back. "That giant... thing... is obviously an important asset to the Alliance... why else send you in person and an escort to recover it from us? Why else equip it with a dirty nuke self detonation device? I cannot in good faith with my oaths as a ZAFT soldier let you recover it in even such a damaged state as it is. Even if it costs me... and every other soldier here... our lives. Isn't that right, people?" A loud chorus of frosty agreement answered that question. Shinn voiced his assent as well... not only could he not let the Alliance have their mobile suit back... he couldn't let the Liberty escape either... his first shots had been slightly deflected by that glow... he'd compensate better this time. He carefully forced his aiming reticule to remain steady over the middle section of the Liberty's torso... right where the cockpit should be.
Kira's comm board lit up... messages from both the Kusanagi and the Archangel, probably wondering where the hell he was. He couldn't afford to distract himself by answering them though... this situation was poised on a hair trigger... a blink at the wrong time could be disastrous for the entire population of Carpentaria, assuming Asmodeus really was feeling suicidal... which Kira didn't put beyond the man at all. And if the bomb didn't get him, the ZAFT pilot in the Efreet sure sounded like he wanted to make a good second go at his life... Kira could hardly believe the pent up rage and grief in the other's voice... plainly the ZAFT pilot blamed him for some extremely traumtic event Kira had no idea had happened. and not only blamed him, but blamed Cagalli too... there had been little but loathing in the pilot's voice when he spoke of Kira's sister. Another light blinked into existence on the comm board... a short range message light. Kira tapped the line open, muting the common line he had been speaking on. "Hello?"
"Ah, god damn, Kira, I was getting worried! Where the hell are you? Everyone back on the warships have been going batshit for the past twenty minutes, ever since they disengaged from the fight and you didn't return. You're going to have some very fancy explaining to do to more than one incensed female when you get your ass in gear and head back." Alkire's voice exploded over the link. Kira winced... Alkire had his volume up far too loud.
"I've got bigger problems..." Kira replied, trying to maintain calm. "Asmodeus is here... he's retrieving Cray... and I don't think ZAFT is going to let them leave."
"I'd imagine not... I wouldn't, if I were they."Alkire responded. "I'm about two minutes away... think you can prevent fireworks until I can arrive to back you up?"
"I'll do my best... my arms have been crippled by a sneak attack from a ZAFT soldier who seems to hold me in great personal contempt... I still have my shoulder, hip and chest weapons, but I'm going to be hurting in a sustained fight. And as for fireworks... if you see a big nuclear fireball... that means the fireworks went off despite my best efforts... Asmodeus is feeling a bit suicidal, or so he claims, due to the death of his son." Kira said with a slight smile of irritation.
"Jesus bloody fucking Christ..." Alkire's cursing faded out for a moment before he came back on the line, once more in control. "Allright... I read you. Situation is tense in the extreme. I'll communicate that to the warships. And don't doubt Asmodeus... if he say's he's going to bloody well disassemble your mobile suit with a crab fork... he's gonna bloody well do it, somehow. The fucking bastard has balls of pure steel... he wouldn't even think twice about pushing the button, now that he's laid the threat on the table."
"I think the ZAFT commander knows that too... he's made a lot of verbal threats, but he's yet to follow anything up with actions." Kira answered.
"Just stay the fuck alive, kid. If you make me explain to Lacus why you didn't come back from this one, I'll never forgive you... and you can bet I'll be seeing you up in heaven shortly afterwards, cause she'll strangle me with her bare hands, don't you doubt it." Alkire said grimly. "Alkire out... ETA one minute ten seconds. I'm coming in hot and loaded for bear."
"Understood." Kira replied. He flipped off the channel and unmuted the common line again. The dialouge had not improved during his chat with Alkire... Doone was still threatening Asmodeus, Asmodeus was still threatening Doone and neither side was backing down. The nine crusaders had arrived and were helping the Merciless fly away, increasing its speed and altitude to a more normal if still achingly slow level. The Freedom was retreating behind them, facing back towards the ZAFT forces who were following closely on foot... the Merciless not yet even close to flying faster than they could walk or run. Almost all the ZAFT forces were in pursuit of the Alliance mobile suits... except for the one Efreet that was facing him down from less than twenty meters away, beam cannons pointed unwaveringly at his chest, beam sabers unlit in each hand. "What's your name?" Kira asked the pilot.
"Shinn. Shinn Asuka. Formerly of Orb... now of ZAFT." Shinn replied coldly. Kira was surprised at how young the other pilot sounded... he couldn't have been more than fifteen... still, that was hardly unusual for the ZAFT forces, being pressed for troops like they were... and with the generally lower age of maturity of Coordinator children.
"I don't want to fight you, Shinn. This battle is over... by most accounts, ZAFT has won. Your losses have been severe,,, but you're not the only ones that have suffered... the Earth Alliance losses are at least equal to your own..."
"Don't talk to me about losses... not when they nuked those poor helpless civilians! We may have won the battle... but victory isn't what it used to be. Not with nukes around." Shinn retorted. "You may not want to fight me... you seem to have some sort of oath of not killing most people... I'd advise you to forget such a thing... it has no place on a real battlefield."
"If I had a dime for every time someone has told me that..." Kira said wearily. "You fight your way... and if you force me too, I'll fight mine. I really just want to leave... to go back to my friends and family, who are worried about me." Upon reflection, mentioning family might not have been the most diplomatic of moves.
"Family? FAMILY!? You bastard! You stole my family from me... you and Yula Attha's precious fight for IDEALS of PEACE. You dare speak to me of seeing your FAMILY!?" Shinn screamed, his voice so raw with still fresh pain that Kira actually flinched slightly. He was forced to gun his thrusters and dodge aside as Shinn opened fire... Kira had to grant the other guy this much... he may have been emotionally unstable, but he didn't let it interfere with his shooting... Kira was actually having to work a bit to dodge the blasts.
"Stop it, Shinn... I don't want to fight you!" Kira insisted.
"Then stand still and let me kill you, you son of a bitch!" Shinn rasped, activating his beam swords. "I'll cut you into a hundred steaming little pieces."
"I can't let you do that either." Kira said sadly. Shinn laughed.
"I don't see how you're going to stop me... you can't keep away from me forever... especially when..." the Efreet disappeared from view. "... I use the Mirage Colloid. And you can't use your arms... you can barely even fight back at all!"
"I wouldn't be so confident in that asessment." Kira said coldly, slipping back into SEED mode. It was very faint... but in atmosphere Mirage Colloid was slightly less effective than in space... there was the tiniest of blurs in the air around the outline of the Efreet... barely noticable to the unaided eye... most pilots would have ignored it as heat haze or an optical illusion. Kira was not most pilots. Shinn charged forward, beam sabers both going high for a pair of downward slashes. Kira abrupdtly reversed thrust and charged forward himself, planting one foot down and lifting his right knee squarely into the chest of the Efreet, deeply denting the armor and tossing the machine backwards to land on its back, mangling the beam turret. Shinn started to roll to his feet, but Kira gave him no chance... in a blur of movement the Liberty's right leg came back down and stomped on the right wrist of the Efreet, crushing the connection to the hand and severing the digit with a CRUNCH! Kira's railguns pivoted out and downward and blew the Efreet's legs off at mid thigh, shorting out the Mirage Colloid. Shinn made a desperate prone swing with his last beam saber, but Kira flipped the Liberty completely over the wild swing and kicked the beam saber out of his hand as it righted itself like an acrobat. "Please... you've lost... don't force me to disable you completely." Kira pleaded, aiming his hyper impulse cannons at the Efreet's head.
"Damn you to hell!" Shinn swore as his controls shorted out in bursts of flame and sparks. Alkire's jet came thundering overhead at right that instant, streaking by at greater than Mach 5 at less than ten meters above the ground. The shockwave tossed mobile suits around like chaff... if Kira hadn't been in SEED mode he probably would have joined them... as things were he turned the fall into a roll and the roll into a kip up... not an easy thing to do in an eighteen meter war machine, but doable if you knew what you were doing. Shinn's crippled Efreet went rolling across the ground like an enormous metal tumbleweed, finally coming to rest on its face, leg stumps facing back at Kira.
"GODDAMN I LIKE THIS JET!" Alkire cried over his comm channel as he slowed and banked into a long turn, about ten miles away. Low fuel and airframe stress alarms were blaring at him, but he ignored them... he had enough juice to make it back... barely... and if the airframe had held up to that little stunt, it wasn't going to fall apart from just normal flying. "Get a move on, kid! I only surprised them the first time... if I come around again they'll shoot me out of the sky like I was stuck to flypaper!"
Kira took off and headed towards the indicated meeting point with the Archangel and Kusanagi. "I'm sorry we had to fight, Shinn... I hope that if we meet again, you'll have found closure with your grief."
"Closure! I'll give you closure!" Shinn dragged his Efreet across the ground with its good arm, scraping his way over to where the weapons the Liberty had dropped had tumbled to a stop at. He grabbed the universal grip of the dual 57mm beam rifle and took unsteady aim. "Closure this, you bastard!" Shinn opened fire erratically, spraying green energy hypens at the Liberty's rapidly retreating back. Kira didn't even look back... his mind was on other things... more important things. He rolled and flipped and looped the Liberty around the energy blasts almost without thinking... his sensors were barely necessary, when he was in SEED mode it was like he could feel where his foes were aiming... and then all he had to do was go around. Shinn kept firing long after the Liberty was out of range... kept firing until he'd completely drained his batteries... and then he started weeping and found he couldn't stop.