The Golden Age: Chaotic Cosmos

by Maderfole

Book 1 of The Golden Age trilogy. Peace is attained, but even worse chaos lurks just below the surface, waiting to consume the entire Seed cosmos in a war to dwarf all previous wars. The beginning of the epic story. FINISHED. Continued in Eden Disaster.

76. End of a Nightmare, part 2

Mary O'Brien was twenty three years old. For the past two years she had summer interned as a hospital assistant for the Orb Red Cross Hospital, before taking on a position as interim nurse to help pay her way through college. She was a vivacious woman, well liked by staff and patients alike. Tall, slim and with an almost elfin beauty, she turned heads whenever she walked through a ward. She had a friendly and outgoing personality and knew her job well, easily forming rapports with even the most grim or depressed patients, who could not help but be cheered by her constant uplifting presence. For all that, she freqently was in hot water with her immediate superiors in the Nurse Deparment for her disregard of the standard dress code. Mary had experienced the same friction with her parents, for the same reason, ever since she turned fourteen, so she was used to it. A goth will always stand out as a goth, especially a punk goth, like Mary was. Her hair was dyed bright pink and dark black and styled in wild spikes. Even in her nurses uniform she wore studded leather wristbands and a studded collar complete with skull clasp... toned down from her normal ensemble of spikes leather and rebellious emblazoned T shirts. A portable music player always rode on her left hip, two wireless earphones nearly constantly in her ears, blaring punk rock and goth metal music so loudly it was often audible to people more than ten feet away, even though the earphones. There were few things Mary liked more than loud music... the louder the better... she liked to feel the music resonating in her brain and along her skin... to experience it in ways beyond the normal. Most people who knew her would often wonder that she could hear anything at all, but she'd never had any problems with deafness.

She'd showed up to work that morning full of mixed feelings. She'd really wanted to go to the peace march parade today, but she had a punishment shift to do because she refused to change her way of dressing or styling her hair. Her supervisor had given her a choice... she could come to work in total accordance with the dress code and work normal hours, or she could dress the way she wanted and work an extra shift every three days. So it was that mary was checking data sheets and delivering medication while all her friends were marching through the streets, participating in what was probably going to be known as the greatest peace protest the world had ever known. A large part of Mary was saddened and envious of her friends, that they could go and become a part of history while Mary was stuck dealing with the drudgery of everyday life, but she couldn't stay gloomy for long... it just wasn't her way. Within an hour of getting to work, she barely even thought about how she was missing out, especially since she could watch the important events on the TV. Many patients were listening on radios as well, but Mary couldn't live without her music and so she got only visual impressions of the peace march. Thus she was probably one of maybe ten or fifteen people in the entire city that wasn't affected by Lacus's songs... she never even heard them and the constant aural assualt of a goth metal band was easily enough to disrupt any residual mental echoes from Lacus's power.

She did notice though that many of the patients were crying tears... tears of joy, because of the smiles on their faces. She briefly contemplated asking one of them what was up, but she was so busy and just then one of her favorite songs started playing... the "Wail of the Banshee" by the band Revenance. Something did catch her eye though... a familiar face, oft seen in many young life magazines and celebrity publications. Lacus Clyne was apparently in Orb, marching in the streets in support of the peace movement. Mary felt that stab of jealousy again... I mean, she'd never been a rabid Lacus Clyne fan... her songs were a little wishy washy for Mary's taste, but she still had a lot of respect for her... that girl had some seriously shitty cards dealt to her, what with her father getting killed and other things during the previous war. Mary had no idea who the cute guy with the brown hair was... the magazines never made any mention of Lacus Clyne having a boyfriend to replace Athrun Zala after their arranged marriage was inexplicably canceled late in the previous war. But whoever he was, he sure was a lucky guy... Mary knew guys who would cut off their one of their own testicles to get a french kiss from Lacus Clyne and whoever this guy was had just gotten two for free... hell, he was even carrying her in his arms, an adorable image if there ever was one. Mary was currently between boyfriends, but she knew the faces of love when she saw them, and she was seeing them then.

Mary lost herself in her work for a while, her music player cycling through some of the fifty plus hours of music she had stored on it as she continued her rounds, working her way up the twenty stories of the Residence building, delivering cups of pills to patients and removing dirty bedding and pausing to check in on a patient she knew every so often. They were uniformly glued to whatever TV screen or radio was available, their faces amazed and almost always glistening with happy tears. Mary would shake her head in puzzlement... everyone sure seemed emotional today... but her music was still turned up loud and so she remained unaffected by Lacus's songs. She missed Cagalli's first appearance, having been sorting through a storage room while looking for some new linen, but she managed to catch a glimpse of the former Representative talking on a stage of sorts about twenty minutes later. Whereas Lacus Clyne had elicted only a brief moment of recognition, Cagalli Yula Attha was an entirely different story. Mary was an Orbite, born and bred and to her, Cagalli Yula Attha was just about the coolest person in the world. Only barely seventeen years old and she was aleady a world leader, the Representative of Orb, she was THE symbol of girl power, as far as Mary was concerned. She wasn't some fairy tale princess either... Mary obviously didn't know her personally, but she'd heard about how Cagalli had fought on the front lines during the last battles of the previous war... you had to have some serious guts to do that.

As a matter of course, the crowd was going nuts... after Lord Uzumi Nara Attha, the previous Representative of Orb, had been killed in the EA invasion of Orb during the previous war, the hearts of the nation had gone out to Cagalli. She had further endeared herself to them by fighting on for the ideals of peace, putting herself in life threatening danger to bring the war to a close. Then she'd played a major role in bringing the peace talks to order, alongside Lacus Clyne and many other political and social figures. Even the revelation that she had been sleeping with Athrun Zala, son of Patrick Zala, the man who'd tried to destroy Earth, hadn't shaken her image in the eyes of most people in Orb. The rest of the world had freaked out, but Mary had personally been impressed and had cheered Cagalli on... now THAT was a rebellious statement. Screw T shirts and slogans... she'd taken a Coordinator... and one of the most unpopular ones ever at that... and had wild kinky sex with him on a nightly basis, if what she'd seen on the released video tape had been any evidence. Didn't get much more counter culture than the Natural Orb Head of State sleeping with a Coordinator soldier, the son of the PLANT Supreme Chairman, who was smoking hot, Mary had to admit. Mary personally thought Coordinators were all right people... she wasn't one herself, but she could hardly reconcile her beliefs on personal freedom with the anti-genetic enhancement progaganda of Blue Cosmos. If you wanted to make your child a Coordinator... good on you, its your choice, thats what she thought anyway. She didn't even hate Athrun Zala... she wished she had a boyfriend as loyal as him, willing to take the scorn of the entire world and remain true... people like that didn't just fall out of the sky.

She'd shrugged and gone off to sort through some more prescriptions... there was a heart bypass surgery scheduled for that afternoon that she needed to help prepare for as well. These two tasks kept her away from a TV for a good thirty minutes and her music kept the alarming news blaring over the radio blotted out as well. Thus she missed the Merciless dropping down from the sky and breaking up the peace protest, crushing the stage beneath its giant feet. She missed the appalling beginning of the massacre that was petrifying people around the world and throughout space as the giant war machine blasted thousands of tightly packed and helpless peace protestors into heat scorched atoms. She wasn't near any windows either, preventing her from seeing any of the explosions are smoke and dust clouds that blotted out much of the horizon around the city scape. In fact, the first sign Mary had that anything at all was wrong was the deep rumbling and vibration from the collapse of the three corporate headquarters buildings a half kilometer away. She paused, since the current song playing over her earphones didn't have a deep and heavy percussion line... and then she realized the vibration was affecting more than just her... medicine bottles were clattering in their cabinets and doors were shaking and swinging slightly on their hinges as the walls themselves hummed beneath her touch. "An earthquake?" she said out loud, not talking to anyone in particular. Orb was a volcanic island nation, earthquakes were not unheard of, though the Hospital was designed to be vibration proof. It must have been pretty serious to make such an impression where Mary was.

She finished filling a small paper cup with several painkiller pills and picked up her clipboard from a desk. Her clipboard was a big part of the secret to her success at the Hospital... she kept all sorts of notes on it, as well as a list of the location of every single one of her special patients, the ones she had a real strong bond with. This particular patient was one of her favorites, a fourteen year old boy named Jason Debora. Jason was... well, terminally ill wasn't the politically correct term, but... he was sick in a way that prevented him from getting any better. It was a biological imbalance of sorts, that affected his heart and lungs and brain... a genetic condition, one of those exceedingly rare conditions modern gene-therapy still remained unable to cure. Modern medicine could work wonders... but there always seemed to be a few things that nature... or God, depending on your beliefs... kept in its own realm. Jason was your average fourteen year old guy on the surface... but his heart was so weak that he had to be hooked up to a pacemaker or his blood pressure would drop to dangerously low levels and he needed another machine to help him breathe freely. Also, the parts of his brain that governed fine motor skills had started a rapid deterioration when he turned twelve... he could no long pick up and hold any item smaller than a hardback book with any degree of success, and he was getting worse by the day. An unfortunate side effect of this mental decay was agonizing pain that gripped his hands and legs much of the time, which was the reason for the painkillers. The doctors could not cure him... they could only ease his pain and pray for some sort of miracle. Their most generous estimates showed Jason's brain entirely shutting down by the time he was eighteen, rapidly followed by cessation of both voluntary and involuntary muscle control which would result in death.

Understandably, Jason wasn't the most happy go lucky of people, unable to have a normal life, confined to a hospital bed for the last two years straight, unable to even get up by himself to go to the bathroom for the last few months. The worst part was that he was entirely aware of his situation... his mental faculties had not decayed at all, just his muscle control. He was a scared boy trapped in a body he could no longer control... not a fun feeling... a waking nightmare really. He'd been extremely depressed and uncommunicative, until Mary was assigned to him anyway. It had taken her a while, but she'd managed to cheer him up, sitting and talking with him for hours and hours on end, treating him like a real person, totally ignoring his condition, acting like he was just temporarily sick and not deathly ill. Everyone else always looked at him with pity or sadness, unable to muster an uplifting comment for a boy everyone knew was really as good as dead. But Mary just skipped all that and made friends with him... her view on the whole thing was that even if he was going to die, that didn't mean he shouldn't live a full and happy life for as long as he could. Besides, there was always a chance that the war would end and the doctors could consult with someone up in the PLANTS... maybe they had a cure up there, where everyone was a Coordinator, with access to the sort of advanced medical technologies that even Orb doctors could only dream about. Not that the war seemed all that likely to end.

When Mary arrived at Jason's bed, which was in the East wing of the main hospital building, on the outermost edge of the building, floor six, a room with a wide picture window and balcony that afforded a beautiful view of the Pacific Ocean in the distance, with the three massive corporate headquarters buildings dominating the near cityscape and brightening up the night like pillars of colossal light. Right now though there were dense grey clouds covering most of the city... Mary frowned, since the weather report that morning hadn't made any mention of a storm during the evening. The cloud cover was so thick she couldn't even see the three skyscrapers barely half a kilometer away. The TV in the corner of the room was only showing static for some reason, she resolved to have that looked into as well, since Jason couldn't even change the channels by remote control any more, his fingers unable to depress individual buttons. Jason was sitting up in his bed, facing out into the city, his face an unhealthy pale shade. A picture lay on his lap, a picture of his older brother, Lain Debora, a celebrated Orb hero of the Battle of Carpentaria. Mary had never met Lain, who was one of the biggest Orb celebrities around, a multiple Mobile Suit Ace and decorated hero, but she had to admit, she was impressed by his devotion to his brother... barely a day would go by without a gift or treat or message of some sort arriving from Lain for Jason. The picture showed Lain, a moderately handsome man of about her own age with slightly wild short black hair and mismatched eyes, one green, the other blue, posing in an exaggerated fashion in front of his M-4 Guardian mobile suit with the hand written caption "It's still no replacement for you, bro".

"That's so nice of your brother." Mary commented, taking out her earphones so she could talk normally. "I brought you the stuff you gotta take today." Mary made no comment about how she hoped it would make him feel better... the last thing Jason wanted to hear was pity or worry... he knew his situation and false words did not make it easier for him.

"Mary... whats going on?" Jason asked, his voice crystal clear... he didn't stammer or stutter at all. Yet. The Doctors projected that his speech functions would start to deteriorate by this time next year, eventually ending with him unable to communicate verbally by the time he turned sixteen. Mary treasured every word he said because of that.

"Whaddya mean?" she asked, setting the cup down on a table beside the bed. "Looks pretty stormy out, doesn't it. And me without my damn umbrella too. Oops, sorry, forgot about that no cussing rule. Oh well." she said with a wink and a grin. Jason turned his head and stared at her. She noted that his expression wasn't amused... it was more incredulous.

"You have no idea what's going on?" Jason sounded surprised. "Haven't you been watching the TV?"

"Been kinda busy, man. I got a lot of stuff I gotta do on these extra shifts... damn supe-bitch always loads me down on my extra days, you know that. Oops, cussing again." Mary paused. "Oh, you mean about Lacus Clyne and Cagalli showing up on television and all? Yeah, too bad they're both taken eh? Not bad looking, are they? You a Lacus Clyne fan? I'm not really..."

"Mary... there's an Earth Alliance mobile suit rampaging through the city... it attacked the peace protestors and has killed thousands of people." Jason said slowly, cutting her off, his voice very quiet. Mary stared at him.

"What the hell are you talking about? You watching those R movies again? You're parents will kill me if they find out I loaned you those flicks."

"It just destroyed the three skyscrapers! I watched it happen. Didn't you feel that shock a little while ago?" Jason asked.

"You mean the earthquake?"

"I mean the three buildings falling to the ground. Those aren't clouds out there... thats dust and smoke."

"Bullshit. Damn it, have to work on that, sorry Jason. But really, that's crazy... the Earth Alliance is a lot of bad screwed up things... but they'd have to be totally nuts to send a mobile suit out to attack unarmed peace protestors... I mean, that wouldn't do ANYTHING good for them. The opposite really. You feeling all right, man? You look pasty... fever maybe?"

"Mary... I'm not fucking kidding around." Jason snapped. He pointed out the window with one hand, the fingers flopping about limply as he was forced to point with his wrist. "A giant mobile suit just blew the shit out of the bottoms of the three corporate headquarters not three minutes ago. They collapsed and caused that big shockwave that we felt... and raised the huge cloud of dust we're looking at!"

"Jason... goddamn it, watch your language... I can lose my job if another nurse hears you talking like that and tells your parents you learned it from me!" Mary snapped back.

"Listen to me!" Jason shouted... but then listening was a moot point, because the Merciless came jetting up the streets towards the hospital at that moment, seemingly charging directly at them, its wide shoulders and arms knocking chunks out of the buildings on either side of the street as it advanced towards them. The giant mobile suit came closer and closer and closer until Mary threw up an arm in panic, sure that it was about to crash directly into the building. At the last possible second the pilot gunned his thrusters, sending the war machine thundering upwards in a steep climb, the roar of the engines and the blasting winds cracking the glass sliding doors that led to the balcony outside and shaking the entire building. Barely had the tremors died down when a massive impact once again shook the building as the Merciless landed in the middle of the inner courtyard-garden.

"What does that fucking psycho think he's doing! This is a fucking hospital! Fucking Red Cross Hospital!" Mary shouted, outraged at the recklessness of the mobile suit pilot... who knew how many elderly patients had nearly been scared into cardiac arrest by this stunt... some might already be dying because of this son of a bitch's grandstanding. Not to mention the effect all this noise and shaking was going to have down in the maternity wards... babies had sensitive hearing... loud noises like this could easily cause deafness in the very young. "Don't move, Jason. I'll be right back... I'm going to go find out what the FUCK is going on here!" Mary called, forgetting in the heat of the moment that Jason really didn't have much choice but to sit tight... he could not walk on his own, and his wheelchair was all the way across the room. She was just about to leave the room when Jason called out again, pointing at a new arrival... a more normal sized mobile suit, painted green and tan and orange, hoisting two large weapons in its hands, with an even huger cannon slung across its back. This new mobile suit advanced slowly up the street, finally coming to a halt about fifty meters away from the hospital, its weapons pointed down at the ground. "What the HELL!?" Mary shouted... was there no end to the madness? This was a HOSPITAL!

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"Very good." Cray's amused voice echoed around the cockpit of the Grand Buster as if the words themselves could not find a place that would accept them to settle on. "Though I'm surprised... you seemed quite gung-ho about trying to kill me earlier... now you hesitate, when I'm leaving myself open. I'll never understand you Coordinators."

"Leave the hospital... I'll be more than glad to kill you then." Dearka gritted out.

"Aww, but I like it here. It's a nice box... kinda reminds me of home. I lived in a cell that was about proportionally as big as this hospital compared to the Merciless for most of my life. I'm afraid I just can't bring myself to leave just because you ask me to."

"Is there any way we can get you to leave the hospital?" Miriallia asked, deadly serious.

"Hmm... uhh... umm... no." Cray replied and laughed. "Seriously though... how can you expect me to make a deal with you two after what you did to me in Panama? Fool me once, shame on you... fool me twice, shame on me."

"You were planning on betraying the terms of that deal too." Dearka pointed out.

"Maybe so, but you broke the terms first, which puts you at fault." Cray retorted. "I'm growing tired of verbal debate... if you want to say something important to me, it had better come out of a cannon barrel." The Merciless's shoulder gatling cannon barrels continued to spin at firing speed, though no shells were shot just yet. "If you won't kick it off, I guess I'll have to."

"Wait! Damn it, wait! You want to fight me, then lets fight each other! I thought you people liked to be challenged... how is it challenging to attack your opponent while hiding behind a hostage so they can't shoot back at you?" Dearka spat.

"You misunderstand. I don't want to fight you. I want to kill you... there's a difference. I enjoy exercising my abilities to their max... but that's a side effect of killing you, not vice versa." Cray replied casually. "If you demand to be bound by a code of conduct that forbids you from defending yourself when your life is threatened just because of a stupid hospital, well, thats disappointing, but I'll get over it."

At that moment a female figure in a nurse's uniform came charging out onto one of the balcony's that extended out from some parts of the hospital building, probably where the more long term care patients rooms were, where the rooms were like hotel rooms rather than just cordened off temporary beds. The nurse had wildly styled and colored hair, which certainly made her stand out, almost as much as the agitated waving of her arms and the jumping up and down she was doing to get Dearka and Miriallia's attention. The woman was shouting something at them, which Miriallia managed to catch a piece of after turning up the gain on the external sound pickups. "... the fuck do you think you're doing!? Move the fucking battle you fuck-heads! This is a hospital! Neutral territory! Off limits! Injured people HERE... go AWAY! Fight in some fucking other place you bastards!" Dearka was about to reply when frustration apparently overcame the nurse and she raced back inside the hospital.

"Bzzt! Time's up!" Cray announced, dropping the Merciless down into a crouch on its haunches to bring the gatling cannons into line with the shorter Grand Buster. His fingers jammed the triggers tight to the joysticks.

"NO!" Dearka and Miriallia cried as one, the arms of the Grand Buster reaching out towards the hospital in vain, its weapons at last pointing towards where the Merciless was hiding.

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Mary had just made it into the hallway outside Jason's room when she heard a loud cry from outside... finally a response from the mobile suit pilot outside. She turned on her heel and skidded, slightly overbalancing as she rushed to get back outside so she could give the heartless bastards who would fight near a hospital more than just one piece of her mind. She would forever remember this moment... slightly off balance, her arms windmilling slightly as she fought to turn around without falling over, the opening sounds of "Wail of the Banshee" playing through her discarded earphones, lying on the table by Jason's bed, audible to her even through the astoundingly loud whining sound that echoed from somewhere behind her. Jason was sitting in his bed, facing the window as he watched as a helpless bystander in the most literal sense of the term. Mary loved loud music... the louder the better... nothing made her happier than a percussion single that made her bones shake, so loud you had to feel it rather than hear it. She felt she'd heard some pretty damned loud noises in her time, built up something of an immunity to them. She was wrong. When the Merciless opened up with its four 120mm gatling cannon roughly twenty five meters behind her, she got a real taste of LOUD. Each time a shell was fired a four meter flash of fire ejected from the spinning barrel, the superheated gases expanding faster than the speed of sound. Forty sonic booms per second rocked the hospital's East wing from a range of less than a hundred feet. Glass shattered into dust fine particles and the drywall covering the interior surfaces of the ceiling and walls cracked wide open under the sonic assault. This was all, of course, before the first shell struck the building and detonated.

The sound of the guns firing was loud enough to drown out thought... loud enough to leave people stunned and bleeding from the ears within a forty meter radius. The noise of the high explosive shells detonating easily surpassed the sound of the guns firing. Mary was physically picked up and thrown into a wall by the concentrated sonic shockwave of the first few shells, and repeatedly battered against the same wall by the physical shockwaves that followed nanoseconds later. The last sight she was due to see before unconsciousness claimed her was the Grand Buster, advancing on the hospital, guns aimed right at Jason's room as it filled with fire and shrapnel, the bed disappearing in an inferno as bright blood was scattered all over the floor and windows, just before they turned to gravel and blew out from the pressure wave. The very last thing she was consciously aware of doing was uttering a piercing shriek of anger and loss that scaled up and up through the aural scale until it encompassed her entire world... and then everything went silent and dark as the hospital collapsed around and below her, the building eviscerated by Cray's attack.

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"Shit!" Dearka growled, turning the Grand Buster's forward momentum into a sideways stagger as dozens of 120mm shells burst out of the hospital building and started to strike the buildings nearby and the Grand Buster itself. Watching the hospital collpase was like viewing a time lapse video of entropy at work, with all the slides except the for the one at the beginning, the one at the middle and the one at the end removed. One moment the building was fine... the next it was bulging outward, huge flaming cracks racing up and down its entire surface, glass shattering and dust rising in a rippling cloud from the facade... the moment after that there was nothing but charred stone blocks flying through the air in a whirling storm of shells and debris blasting outward from where the hospital wing had formerly stood. Dearka found his fingers closing on the triggers for his weapons before he fully realized what he was doing... it was too late to save the hospital now, so he might as well just try and see if he could bring the son of a bitch down. His conscience still dragged at him, but he ruthelessly burned it away with the fires of outrage... he could guilt trip about this after he survived it... if he survived it. "Shoulder beams and missile control to you." he announced.

"Understood." Miriallia replied, a quaver in her voice as she fought with her own feelings... it tore at her soul to unleash the destructive might of the Grand Buster where it could so easily go astray and cause innocents pain and suffering, but if they didn't shoot now the monster would only find some other hostage to hide behind and they'd never be rid of him. Target reticles appeared on her primary screen and she took hold of her joysticks like they were the only thing keeping her alive and sane. Dearka was ducking and juking the Grand Buster through an ever rising maelstrom of shells, beams and missiles as Cray continued his assault, walking his fire back and forth blindly, hoping to overwhelm them in one fell swoop apparently. She did her best to hold the target icons steady on the Merciless, which was every now and again visible through the smoke and dust, but combining her relative inexperience, the wild motion of the machine she was sitting in and the horrible visibility conditions, she couldn't maintain a target lock for more than a second or so... long enough to chance firing with the beam cannons, but never long enough to waste firing the missiles. She never saw any of her shots strike home, but the mere act of firing helped calm her down and keep herself focused.

Dearka contorted the Grand Buster through a series of maneuvers he never would have dreamed of attempting in the original Buster, but when in this new SEED mode thing he'd discovered while a prisoner at JIHAD even the most insane of stunts now not only seemed possible, but almost easy. By no means was he putting the Grand Buster through the sorts of moves he'd seen Kira or Athrun pull off during the last war, but he was no sitting target either. He spun the Grand Buster under a clutch of shotgun shells, the explosive bullets passing within a human arms length of his head before whipping harmlessly off into the distance. He used the momentum from the spin to lift his legs, rolling sideways through the air as the hyper impulse cannon beams dug a deep scar through the ground where his feet had formerly been. He landed and dropped to his knees, firing two quick blasts with his own shotgun and a hastily aimed shot from his hyper impulse cannon as well. He didn't really expect to hit anything, he just wanted to provoke a fresh assault from Cray so he could better pinpoint the actual location of the Merciless so he could know where to move. He saw his second shotgun blast strike an unyielding surface and bounce off... the Merciless was about one hundred meters away, still standing with the hospital at its back, off to Dearka's current right.

"Bracket him! Keep him right there!" Dearka ordered. Miriallia did not question his tone of voice... she thought she had some idea of what he was planning anyway. Not bothering to try and get a target lock, she fired the beam cannons as fast as she could, following the green energy lances with sixty missiles that struck the hospital building, knocking out huge chunks of masonry and steel which crashed down on the Merciless to frighteningly little effect... the mobile suit weathered the stone rain much like a man might weather a spring drizzle.

"That's what I'm talking about. That's fighting for survival right there! Now if only you'd been doing that from the beginning, you might have actually stood some chance of victory." Cray commented, sounding disgustingly calm. Miriallia heard the sound of fingers flying rapidly across a keyboard behind her, as Dearka frantically entered commands into a keyboard with one hand while he flew the mobile suit with his feet and the other hand.

"Who said anything about fighting for survival... we're fighting to win here... slight difference." Dearka whispered. "This is going to be a real near thing, Mir. We're going to bluff him again... just like in Panama but with a twist."

"I'm not exactly running away over here." She reminded him. "Do what we have to. For Ysak. For us. For everyone."

"That's right... for Ysak... for us... for everyone!" Dearka repeated, dropping his hand held weapons, seemingly carelessly but in actuality he was quite precise about his placement. Both weapons ended up lying slightly canted upwards, leaning against a building or across the decorative median in the middle of the street. Wasting no time, Dearka swung the Earthshaker cannon around and brought it into firing position. The drill tipped support struts snapped out of the Grand Buster's legs and fired themselves into the ground, digging several meters into the ashpalt and concrete of the city foundations. He slammed home one of the five remaining shells and locked the breech shut, swining the weapon around to his hastily programmed targeting coordinates. Dearka smiled a nasty grin and held up two crossed fingers. "Survive this, fucker!" he announced over the general comm line as he prepared to jam down the triggers. From dropping his hand held weapons to ready to fire the artillery cannon all of maybe three or four seconds had passed.

Cray had of course seen the artillery cannon being deployed and he was quick to activate the Citadel array, though a plume of smoke and the bluish light of the activating lightwave barrier prevented him from seeing the cannon being aimed at him. He didn't really need to see it though... there was no where else to aim the monstrous thing but at him. There was a pause, about ten seconds long... he'd just started to think Dearka wasn't going to fire at all when a monstrous explosion deformed his lightwave barrier, denting it inwards slightly again, but to similarly useless total effect as the last time they'd used it against him. They just never learned... and they called him insane? Wasn't a definition of insanity something like trying the same action over and over again and expecting a different result each time? They were the crazy ones, not him!

Of course, what Cray could not see and did not even think about in his self superior dreams was the time delay between his activation of the Citadel array and the time when he was hit by the Earthshaker. This time delay was quite significant... because as soon as Dearka had seen the vision obscuring lightwave barrier come up he'd hit his triggers... sending his first Earthshaker shot screaming almost straight up into the sky, on his hopefully precise enough trajectory. That was the cool thing about ballistic weapons... they followed the laws of mathematics and gravity much more visibly than beam weapons. Sometimes that was a disadvantage, like when you had to compensate for distance or prevailing weather conditions. Sometimes, like now, it was an advantage, because Dearka knew the speed at which he'd fired the shell, had plotted its likely course and from those two factors alone he knew exactly when it would reach the zenith of its flight and when exactly it would land on its target location.

Even as he thought these thoughts the Grand Buster was already in the process of reloading the Earthshaker, the breech snapping backwards with a tremendous clang, ejecting the ton and a half cylinder that had contained the propellant charge for the artillery shell in a burst of steam and smoke, sending it flipping lazily through the air in almost slow motion before it hit pavement with a sound like a church bell falling from the belfry. Barely had the shell casing hit the ground when a fresh shell had been slammed home into the gun and the breech closed again. A seconds aim adjustment and Dearka fired again, this time striking the Merciless's shield head on. The street cracked and buckled underneath his feet from the dual impact shocks as the reinforced legs of the Grand Buster soaked up the recoils of the Earthshaker and transferred it into the less resilient materials of the street and ground. An instant before his computer told him it was safe, Dearka disengaged the support struts and ejected his second shell casing almost nonchalantly, stepping forward and kicking the first shell case behind him, removing the evidence of any trickery from easy view. The second shell case twirled through the air, trailing its own wreath of smoke before crashing into and through the second story of a nearby office building.

"Pathetic... your weapon posses such power, but you insist on wasting it time and again. You should put that thing away before you hurt someone with it. Someone like yourself." Cray snorted, disengaging his Citadel array. "Can't you tell when you're outclassed? The Merciless possesses not only the perfect offense, but the perfect defense as well! You cannot beat me, Coordinator... you must realize this."

"The only thing I've realized is that I really have been a fool. A fool to think that I was facing an even slightly worthwhile opponent." Dearka retorted. He looked at a timer he'd started on one of his secondary panels out of the corner of his eye. The timer was counting down from forty three at that moment. "You're nothing to me... not even worth hating!"

"You should be careful who's words you steal! I should be the one saying that!" Cray said darkly. "Though I disagree...you're still worth hating. Everyone is at least worth that much."

"Dearka is right... you're not the one we hate. You're just a tool... an attack dog with a short leash." Miriallia replied. "I feel nothing for you, because you're nothing to me. You're not a human... you're not even a monster. You're just a part... a computer that looks like a human. There's no point in hating a computer... they don't have feelings."

"That's where you're wrong." Cray snarled. "Hate itself is a point in and of itself. If you're trying to insult me, you're failing. You can't hurt me with words. You can't hurt me with weapons, you can't hurt me with words... you just plain fukcing can't hurt me! Give up! Bare your throats for the killing blow!" he paused a moment. "And I'm no tool... you may not have realized it, but I enjoy this! I've always enjoyed this... my fondest memories are of the battlefield!"

"Sure of that are you?" Dearka replied calmly. "The Doc was an expert in memory manipulation. He told us all about you and Frost and Ashino. How does it feel, when I know more about you than you do? Hell, you don't even know what you remember... how can you be sure your memories are real!?"

"Because they are real! Memories are always real! I may have been mem-wiped once or twice but the Doc always left some of my memories intact!"

"How can you be certain?" Miriallia asked. "You might only remember them because he wanted you to remember."

"Shut up! The Doc wouldn't do that! He was a father to me! He always told me the truth! My memories are true!"

"Do yours agree with Frost's?" Dearka asked. "You've known him for a long time, haven't you? How long have you known Frost anyway?"

"Ever since he was a young kid! I mean, I've known him for about three years now..." Cray's voice trailed off as he caught up to what he was saying. Ever since he was a kid... three years now... mutually exclusive statements, given that Frost was... Cray frowned. He didn't know how old Frost was. But he couldn't be more than a year older or younger than Cray himself. That meant he was somewhere in the range of... Cray paused again, his frown deepening. He didn't remember how old he was. He tried to remember his last birthday... he couldn't. He didn't even know when his birthday was. There was a steady building pressure inside his skull that was really getting on his nerves. Something was wrong... something wasn't right about this. When was he born? Where was he born? Who were his parents? Something about a sister flashed through his mind but was gone before he could focus on it. Every memory trail he followed always seemed to come to a dead end about three years ago... a solid wall of blankness that concealed a room full of shadowy objects he could barely perceive. The pressure kept building until it felt like his blood was going to boil out of his skull through his eye sockets. "It doesn't fucking matter! Why do you care anyway!? You're both about to die!"

Dearka watched his timer count down to ten. He couldn't help but look up into the sky. Miriallia had already anticipated this desire though, since she'd been staring into the sky for much of the conversation they'd had with Cray. The camera's could just barely pick up a tiny speck high in the sky... a speck that grew rapidly larger with each passing second. It did not appear on their radar... dropping almost straight down from a sub-orbital trajectory, the shell was falling down from an angle above that of which most radar emissions went out from... it would eventually show up, but by that time it would hopefully be too late. And if it did not show on their radar or other non-visual sensors, then hopefully it would remain cloaked from Cray as well. The timer was at six. He dropped the Earthshaker cannon and took a step forward, facing the Merciless full on, the Grand Buster's hands empty. His weapons lay around him, the discards of an apparently beaten fighter. "You're right. We can't beat you, Cray. You're too strong for us." Dearka said, eyes fully on his timer.

"Glad you realized it. About damn time. But don't think this is going to be quick... you've seriously inconvenienced me today... you're both going to pa..." Cray's eyes flicked down to where a large red warning icon was blaring on his short ranged sensor screen. His shotgun was just coming up to aim at the Grand Buster... Cray stared at his screen in brief puzzlement... by the indications of his sensors, whatever it was, it was right on top of him almost... but he couldn't see anything to either side, the front or the back, where he nudged up against the hospital building. "Where the fuck is it!?"

Barely were the words out of his mouth when the Earthshaker shell finally reached its target. Almost. Dearka's frantic mid-maneuver calculations had been off by a few fractions of a decimal place... enough to cause the shell to deviate about six meters from his ideal impact point. Instead of dropping straight down onto the Merciless's head, the Earthshaker shell went a tiny fraction long... the multi-ton explosive warhead struck right in the middle of the roof of the twenty story residence hall that the Merciless was backed up against. The building didn't present a strong enough resistance to trigger the impact fused warhead and so it continued to plummet almost straight downward at terminal velocity, passing through the unarmored floors and ceilings of the residence hall like they were made from paper, tearing a twenty meter wide hole through the center of the building to mark it's passage, utterly pulverizing anything unfortunate enough to be in its path towards the ground. Just about the time Cray had opened his mouth the second time, the shell finally struck ground and detonated. The force of the explosion vaporized the entire foundation of the residence hall and in fact lifted the building itself a good fifteen meters straight up into the air, even as it blew the bottom eight stories outwards in a cataclysm of super-heat and shrapnel.

The blast wave struck a microsecond later with hideous force. The second Earthshaker shell had struck the Citadel array full on and much of its force had been absorbed by the lightwave barrier's energy fields. Not so of the first shell fired. It's effects were free to expand without constraint and the destruction was far more widespread than the second shot because of this. The force from the second shot had partially collapsed sections of the other hospital wings... the first shot finished the job. The North, West, and South wings swayed and then tumbled down like a sand castle struck by a baseball bat. The residence hall hung in midair for a frozen slice of time, seemingly lifted on giant thruster jets of brilliant orange and white fire before gravity reinstated its hold, causing the building to twist and fold, snapping into large sections that fell from the sky like short lived meteors. These building-meteors hammered the Merciless in a fashion suitable to its name, breaking across its back and shoulders like over-enthusiastic back slaps from a drunken friend. The repeated hammer blows along with the initial concussion wave itself proved too much for even Cray's sense of balance, especially with the already weakened legs the Merciless had. The "unstoppable" Merciless toppled forward like a puppet with it's strings cut and did a solid forward faceplant, gouging out a crater of its own, though it retained hold of its weapons.

Dearka had not stood idle while his gamble paid off... the shell hadn't landed where he wanted it too and so he had to take direct action again. He wasn't sure if a Earthshaker shell to the head and shoulders would have dropped the Merciless, but he was damned sure a near miss wasn't going to do the job. There was no time to waste... he gritted his teeth and wished he could have given Miriallia some warning as to what he was going to do, since it was a trick that was well outside the normal design range of motion of the Grand Buster. He did not waste a second or two by reaching down for his discarded shotgun and hyper impulse cannon... instead he hooked the "toe" part of each foot underneath each weapon and jumped, lifting his legs up into a somersault tuck. For a brief instant, the Grand Buster and both weapons were airborne all at the same time, none gripped by gravity. The Grand Buster started to roll backwards, its greater mass reclaimed by the hungry gravitational fields before its weapons. Dearka hastened the roll with his thruster jets, turning a quick backward somersault. Miriallia cried out as the machine flipped over backwards unexpectedly, small items tumbling around the cockpit. The Grand Buster finished it's somersault and was now facing the ground from perhaps ten meters in the air. Dearka swung his arms out and caught each weapon as it dropped through the air, seemingly in slow motion, like the air was made of clear tar or something. Now he had a choice... he could shoot the weapons or he could catch himself and avoid a faceplant in a one hundred and forty ton war machine. He chose the obvious choice.

Cray was just pushing the Merciless to its hands and knees, huge sections of building cracking and shattering as his back pushed them out of the way. His back armor had taken a beating, but he'd already lost the two missile tubes on the back and their ruined mass had taken much of the blast damage, further warping the already useless nuclear missiles. All in all, he'd been pretty damned lucky... if that shell had dropped onto his head he'd probably be lucky not to have been vaporized down to the waist, Phase Shift immunity to non-beam weapons or not. A shell of that size couldn't exactly be called a standard explosive weapon... the forces it unleashed were beyond what the Phase Shift designers had tested their armor at. Shaking off the near miss, Cray chided himself for what must have been the thousandth time... don't talk with your prey animals... it never helps. If they aren't stalling for time waiting for backup then they're laying a trap for you... it never failed. He was still on his hands and knees when Dearka's anti-armor shotgun rounds caught the Merciless on the back of the head, sending a vicious lurch through the entire machine. Shaking that trauma off as well, Cray was just opening his mouth to swear when his cockpit was illuminated by the camera depiction of the approaching blue-red energy blast. Cray didn't try to roll or evade to either side... he just swung both arms out wide and let the Merciless drop, hitting his back thrusters as he did so to hasten his emergency dodge, bashing himself face first into the ground again.. He barely made it.

The hyper-impulse cannon did not take the Merciless through the head and chest like Deark had planned... instead the beam carved a scorched ruinous scar along the Merciless's back, melting the twisted wreckage of the nuclear missiles into glowly slag, shearing off the back mounted CIWS mounts and most importantly... destroying every single back mounted thruster port, irrecoverably grounding the Merciless, at least until he got pretty much its entire back half swapped out. No more would Cray be able to take flight in his hulking war machine... all movement would have to be trusted to his already damaged legs. For the first time in a very long while, Cray started to feel his confidence recede just a little bit. Not even the sound of the Grand Buster slamming face first into the ground a little ways off was enough to cheer him up. he was taking too much damage... his legs... his missiles... his thrusters... he absolutely, positively could not let this continue. He reared up, arcing the Merciless's back to help it regain its feet. He was glad to see that his impromptu dodge still had not been enough to shake loose his rigor-mortis grip on his weapons. Secondary screens warned of the various hurts of the Merciless... he'd lost a lot of armor, several weapon systems, his thrusters and his head had been damaged as well... his long range sensors were pretty much gone. Not that it mattered... the enemy was right in front of him anyway.

Dearka and Miriallia hung in their cockpit restraints, their necks sore and their eyes bleary from the uncushioned impact and the whiplash that had followed. Dearka wasn't even sure he'd even hit his target... he'd had time to aim a little it and pull the triggers, but not enough to see if the shots hit. He'd heard several explosions, but right now it was a struggle even remembering how to think, much less bring the Grand Buster to its feet. As his mind struggled to reboot itself he seriously hoped Miriallia would forgive him for the unexpected jarring... he'd known what he was doing and had been able to brace for it a little bit. She'd just been a passenger, along for the ride with no idea what was happening. He'd imagine he'd get a reasonably stern lecture about his actions, assuming there was a time later when she could lecture him. If his shots had not been telling then that wasn't all that likely. "I'd like to meet the guy who taught you how to fly." Miriallia croaked from in front of him.

"Why's that?" Dearka asked, groaning as he tenatively reached for his controls again, his overstretched muscles screaming hopeless denials at him as he fought through the pain.

"I need to punch his lights out. Who the hell do you think you are, pulling a backflip like that? You think we're in some kinda action movie?" Miriallia complained. "Kira... sure. Athrun... certainly. Ysak... maybe. But you and the Grand Buster? No way! Backflips are officially against the rules now."

"I pulled it off, didn't I?"

"You call taking a header into the pavement "pulling it off"?" Miriallia shuddered. "I don't wanna see what you consider a bust, in that case."

"I got him. I got him good, though. I think." Dearka said defensively. He brought the Grand Buster up to its knees.

"You thought wrong." Miriallia said, her voice tiny. The Merciless stood over them, looming like a cliff, blocking out the sun. The twin barrels of its hyper impulse cannons looked big enough to crawl inside and curl up in as they hovered, rock steady, about five meters away from the head and upper chest of the Grand Buster. The tableau seemed to shift into a different timestream, where moments passed like days and seconds like years. The sun beat down brightly from on high, casting the front of the Merciless into dark shadow, liming it in golden light, with a slight heat distortion in front of the twin cannon barrels as they charged to capacity. The oceean wind blew in cold and harsh across the ruined sector of the city, pushing the smoke in raggedy grey streams past the two mobile suits, garbing them both in wisps of sooty wool scarves. Neither mobile suit's sensors picked up the sound of rubble shifting, of metal scraping against stone, of thrusters burning furiously as they strained to lift several times their design mass. Metal tore and rent with fatigue screams like dying souls and stone blocks the size of cars bounced and danced as an irresistable force slowly pushed its way upwards from beneath them. The wreckage near the edge of where the three massive skyscrapers had fallen began to bluge upwards, debris heaving and sliding in scores of small avalanches as a large object finally clawed its way back to the surface.

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Ysak took a deep breath as his screens finally picked up some light, illuminating his cockpit once more. Like a legend rising from a grave too shallow to contain its magnificence, the Duelist slowly rose from its unnatural tomb of dressed stone and poured concrete, overworked thrusters glowing pink at their edges as they vomited fat washes of white-blue fire. The photon cloak was a shadow of its former glory, but it still stubbornly clung to its mounts on the backs of the Duelist's shoulders, its fabric torn and ripped by the falling debris and the painfully convulted struggle to escape the clinging grasp of the buidings burying the Duelist. It hadn't been easy, worming the machine through tiny tolerances of the buildings around him, moving sometimes only inches at a time as he crushed and smashed his way through the rubble towards what he only hoped was the surface. He'd begun to fear he was only digging himself deeper into his prison when his arm finally broke free. From there it was much easier, though still far too slow for his current state of mind. Dearka was still out there, still fighting Cray. Or so he hoped... Dearka was damned good, one of the best soldiers Ysak knew and one of the few people he'd ever trusted to watch his back in a fight, but Dearka's mind was bound to be slightly split, with Miriallia on the battlefield as well... and against Cray the slightest weakness could be enough to be deadly, especially when Dearka was fighting the bastard alone. Every second he spent out of the fight was one second more that Dearka hung suspended between life and death.

The Duelist was in rough shape... its exterior was scarred and dented, armor plates ripped off or abraded away, the hip and shoulder mounted weapons crushed flat or scraped off, the beam rifle lost somewhere in the wreckage, likely useless with damage anyway. His CIWS was clogged, his sensors except for his cameras were off line, most of his secondary displays had shorted out or cracked and he knew he'd sustained a head injury of some sort, judging from the sticky drying blood that coated the left side of his face, glueing his eye half shut. But for all that, he'd rarely felt more empowered than he did right then. His head was clear, his vision steady, his heart calm and his mind focused. His beam saber was still gripped tightly in one hand, and he wasted no time in drawing the second sword as soon as he had the chance. He'd taken his helmet off while digging his way out... the visor was so badly cracked as to render seeing through it impossible, and he tossed his head, flipping his sweat soaked hair out of his eyes. The Duelist slowly drifted upwards through the air, like it was filled with lighter than air gas that buoyed it up without seeming effort. Vortices of wind and thruster exhaust sent spirals of smoke and dust spinning around him as he surveyed the city around him. It looked worse for the wear, worse than he remembered before the buildings dropped on him. The shame of falling for such an obvious trap heated his face... one more thing to make Cray pay for.

With his long range sensors inoperable, it took Ysak a moment to locate Dearka. It didn't help that the Grand Buster wasn't moving around, fighting the good fight. No, it was kneeling on the ground, near the remains of some sort of large building complex that looked to have been recently leveled by either a series of attacks or some unbelievably powerful blast. It was about four hundred or so meters away from his current position, but this fact was nothing more than a secondary statistic scrolling through Ysak's mind right then. He'd seen the Merciless... huge plumes of black smoke rising from its back, but standing and whole, menacing the Grand Buster from close range with its hyper impulse cannons. Plainly Dearka had put up a hell of a fight, judging from the widespread property damage and new damage to the Merciless, but it hadn't been enough. The Grand Buster was vulnerable, its weapons all disarrayed and unable to move quickly enough to target the enemy before the Grand Buster was annihilated in a furious discharge of sun-like heat. For that matter, Ysak himself was too far away to possibly intervene physically in time. Instead, he did the one thing he could do to help his friend. He hit his comm button and the external speakerphone at the same time. "CRAY!"

Cray had been savoring his total victory for a handful of precious seconds, well aware that every person present then knew who had won. Dearka had made life real interesting for a few seconds there, he'd been almost good enough to put an end to Cray... but as they say, almost only counted in horsehoes and hand grenades. Cray had chuckled when he'd thought that... it always seemed such an incomplete list to him, because almost counted with a lot of weapons. He'd been just about to hit the trigger stud when something totally unexpected happened. Someone who was already dead came back to life. When Ysak shouted over the open comm line, Cray was so shocked he actually hesitated. His head snapped up and he panned his cameras around in a panic... where was that voice coming from? Was he to have no peace in victory? Why was a dead guy... especially a dead Coordinator... talking to him? Cray had to admit he'd had hallucinations and delusions before... but they were usually self induced and they never featured the voices of defeated enemies. Finally he found the Duelist, somehow free of the thousands of tons of rubble he'd watched fall on it, hovering in midair above the small mountain of debris that marked its tomb. "That's impossible." Cray protested.

"He's alive?" Dearka whispered, at least as shocked as Cray was. He'd seen the buildings collapse on top of the Duelist... there had been hundreds of tons of steel and stone covering his friend that last time he'd seen him. A Gundam was tough... damn tough. But no mobile suit was tough enough to survive under that much debris. And even if it was, the shock of impact? How had Ysak survived that? Not that Dearka was complaining... but he just couldn't wait to hear how Ysak had managed to steal the devil's own luck to survive that disaster! "He's really alive?" a tear trickled from his eye.

"Best as I can determine and the sensors all agree... that's the Duelist." Miriallia answered. "Not that I understand how or why, mind you. I really, really, really thought he was dead." she added, very quietly.

"You and I have unfinished business!" Ysak declared. He had to take Cray's attention away from Dearka and Miriallia long enough for them to get the Grand Buster free and clear. The shock of seeing him alive again would wear off soon and Ysak knew Cray would only delight in killing Dearka in front of him. "I'm not even close to done with you yet, you bastard. Did you honestly think you could slow me down just by dropping a few puny buildings on me? Please. Don't bore me with any more childish tricks." he threw every ounce of scorn and derision he could muster into his tone.

"I killed you already! Shoo! Shoo, go away, ghost!" Cray turned the Merciless to face Ysak, though he kept the hyper impulse cannons pointed at the Grand Buster. He could not believe his eyes... he must be hallucinating again. Funny, usually he enjoyed the waking dreams. But this one didn't have any naked girls or big huge explosions in it. Just a mobile suit he'd already destroyed, and the voice of a man who was already dead at Cray's hands. He shook his head and blinked his eyes, but when he looked again, the apparaition was still there. "You are dead. Stay dead. Why won't you stay dead?" Cray demanded.

"Why don't you kill me? Maybe then I will." Ysak taunted. He flung his arms wide. "I'm waiting, Cray. Or are you afraid?" This proved to be the statement that did the trick. Ignoring the defeated Grand Buster, swearing violently as pressure started to build up in his head again, Cray swung the Merciless around to face fully toward the Duelist.

"I killed him... didn't I? I remember killing... can I trust my memories? I remember... do I? Did I? I did. Didn't I? He's dead... I killed him. I buried him! But he's here... I can't have killed... no, that doesn't make sense! It doesn't make sense. NOTHING MAKES SENSE ANYMORE! THE WORLD IS GOING CRAZY!" Cray shouted and then screamed, caught in a fit as the pressure in his head built to a point where it felt like his mind was expanding outwards through his skull while the skull itself shrunk to the size of a pinhead. He frothed and foamed at the mouth as he experienced a mental hiccup, a breakdown of sorts as his mind, already stressed by the gaps he'd found in his memories, was pushed over an edge by the reappearance of a person he'd been completely sure was dead. His eyes rolled back in his head as he twitched and spasmed so hard he snapped his own restraints and smashed several screens, gashing his hands wide open on the sharp glass. The fit only lasted a second or two, and then his instinctual overrides kicked back in and he regained a modicrum of self control. His higher mind was fighting a war with itself... it hurt. A lot. The best way to relieve the pain was to kill something. Preferrably the unaccountably annoying mobile suit hovering in midair a medium distance away.

Dearka wasted no time... the moment the Merciless pulled its weapons away from him, he pushed the Grand Buster into a backwards dive-fall, before igniting his thrusters and screaming away at barely above ground level, his feet actually trailing sparks from where they grazed the ground. He left his weapons where they lay...he could come back and retrieve them later... right now all the mattered was getting safe. "I think you said something that may have offended him." Dearka said wryly, trying to hide the relief in his voice at seeing Ysak alive again.

"Maybe just a little." Ysak allowed. "Guess that's one more you owe me. I saved your ass that time."

"One more? Don't you mean one? Hell, I'm not even sure we're even... I saved your ass a whole bunch of times recently." Dearka argued.

"That was to repay me covering you at Jachin Due. And plus, I also saved Miriallia, lest you forget. Are you going to say that that doesn't count double?"

"Let's not even drag the girls into this. This is man business." Dearka retorted.

"Thank you Ysak. We're both glad you're alive. Very glad. That's what Dearka meant to say." Miriallia sighed. She waited a moment. "But according to my tally, you still owe us one, for earlier today."

"Always have to have the last word. Why are girls like that?" Ysak groused. A low, animal growling came over the general comm line. "Hmm, might be something to what you said, Dearka. He sounds mad." The growling exploded into a wild keening shriek, the sound of a predator leaping onto its prey. The Merciless swayed backwards as Cray cut loose with all his remaining weapons again and again, not so much squeezing the triggers as just holding them all down in white knuckled fists, an action that sent fresh rivers of rapidly crusting blood pouring along the control surfaces of his cockpit. He was beyond the point of aiming... he knew where he wanted his attacks to go, and thats where they went. He wanted to see the blue and grey and white mobile suit disappear in a cloud of pleasing explosions... but he didn't get want he wanted.

Ysak swooped into a long low dive, skimming underneath the tide of munitions and beam fire washing through the sky toward him. Cray swung his weapons down lower, but by then Ysak had diverted down a side street, putting an entire city block of buildings between him and Cray. A city block that rapidly ceased to exist as Cray walked his fire into and through it, trying to keep his aim on the object of his hatred. In truth the BCPU was beyond the point of being able to even really see the buildings and any other obstacles between him and the object that was causing him so much pain. Unable to jump into the air to get a better view of the battlefield, Cray instead took slow, shaky steps forward, armor plates shrieking and buckling with every ponderous step as the strain of not only supporting the Merciless's weight but the stresses of absorbing the combined continuous recoils of all its weapons started to take their toll on the damaged leg units. Still, Cray almost seemed to will strength into his machine and it held together as he advanced, slow and sure as the grim reaper himself.

Dearka abruptly reversed his flight, arcing up into a long, slow loop, bringing the Grand Buster up and around and then back towards the fight. Cray was utterly ignoring the Grand Buster, concentrating all his considerable anger on killing Ysak, who was staying barely ahead of the sure death that was the weapons fire of the Merciless. Still, Dearka took no chances, swinging around twice and always moving as he retrieved his weapons. He holstered the hyper impulse cannon and the shotgun and cradled the Earthshaker carefully in his hands. He circled and chose his spot before settling down into a cleared area, a park about a mile away from where Cray was doing his walking-world war impression. "How about you target this time... my aim seems to be slightly off today." Dearka said with a smile.

"Uh..." Miriallia paused. "Okay. You handle the stabilization, I'll do the trajectory. And I'm pulling the trigger."

"On it." Dearka replied, pulling his keyboards down onto his lap. "See if you can't keep him in that razed city block, Ysak. You'll have artillery support here in about fifteen seconds. Think you can go that long without getting buried under a building?"

"Funny man. So funny I'm sure I'll laugh sometime. Probably once I get my hands around your throat." Ysak shot back. "Don't worry about me... I..."

"Have him right where you want him, yeah." Miriallia cut in. "Goddamn it, why do you guys always have to act so tough?"

"Who's acting?" Dearka said with a big smile. "We've had this all planned from the beginning. The whole thing. Buildings and all."

"True that."

"You're both impossible. Where's Katie when I need her to knock some sense into you two?"

"Hold on a second, he's getting creative." Ysak cut off the comm channel as Cray split his river of fire into two streams, one in front of Ysak and the other behind. Cray slowly began closing the gap, not moving fast enough for Ysak to attempt a sideslip dodge or other action that would cause him to overshoot, but not moving so slow that Ysak could just sit there and let it happen either. He had his head in the jaws of a steel trap, and those jaws were closing. He needed to do something special here in the next ten seconds or so or he was going to be in trouble again. As things turned out, he didn't even need to use the chancy aerial maneuver he was considering. With a good fifteen meters of space on both sides to spare, suddenly Cray's fire slackened and died off. "Umm... okay. What's that loopy fucker up to now?" Ysak wondered.

Miriallia's eyes darted to her secondary screens, the ones she'd set up to monitor the Merciless's weapon systems. Her link to the Duelist had been severed when the buildings had fallen on it, but she knew what she'd be seeing if she could see the giant mobile suit. Smoke and steam flooding from the cannon barrels and missile tubes, the gatling cannons still spinning at speed even though no shells spouted from the muzzles. An unaccustomed predatory grin spread across her face. "Ammunition levels read zero on the shoulder 120mm gatling cannons one through four. His shotgun is out of reloads. His missile launchers have no more missiles. His CIWS is empty. He's just bled himself dry of every munition based weapon he has. He's still got the hyper impulse cannons and the torso beam guns, but those all read in the upper red limits of heat... he's overheating them and they're close to shutdown. We've got him on the ropes. He's right where we want... him..." she trailed off, recognizing that she sounded exactly like Ysak. Damnit, he's going to be insufferable about that.

Cray did not know why the Merciless had suddenly betrayed him... it wasn't firing, even though his fingers were still pressing the triggers. The weapons weren't firing. "The world really is crazy. Nothing is what it should be." he complained. His energy weapons were still working just fine it seemed and while they didn't make the pretty boom-booms of the guns, he supposed he could make do. "Doc... please fix the world for me. It's broken."

"It's time for a reckoning." Ysak corkscrewed the Duelist through the air, changing from an evasive pattern to an attack stance, moving in towards the Merciless from an oblique angle, favoring the left side, where the shotgun was, so that Cray would have to turn the entire mobile suit to bring all his weapons to bear against him. The shotgun and two of the shoulder gatlings swung over to face him, but nothing except for wisps of smoke and hot gasses expelled from their now impotent barrels. He could see the slide on the shotgun clicking back and forth and could imagine the hissing whine of the gatlings spinning aimlessly. "Going to need more than harsh language and ill wishes to hurt me now, Cray." Ysak scolded. His left hand beam saber took the shotgun, cutting the weapon cleanly in half lengthwise, the furious red edge of the beam sword even splitting the Merciless's hand into equal parts as Ysak screamed by, his right hand sword slicing up high, severing the shoulder gatlings on that side and leaving a deep smoking notch in the Merciless's left shoulder which spat sparks and leaked flaming oil like blood. He rocketed past the Merciless, passing behind and beyond his foe before inverting his flight path, committing a barrel roll in midair almost casually, evading the hyper impulse cannon blasts which disappeared fruitlessly into the afternoon sky.

"Ware artillery!" Miriallia announced, completing her trajectory calculations. The reinforced support struts popped out again and drilled down through the soft soil of the park to anchor deep in the hard volcanic rock below. The Earthshaker barrel swung around and slightly upwards, barely a few degrees to account for the relatively short range. She couched the heavy weapon carfeully against the side of the Grand Buster and shifted position in her seat. This was her first time firing the main weapon of the Grand Buster, though she'd helped fire it many times. "This is for all the nightmares, Cray." she just gently tapped her triggers, riding out the massive recoil calmly,unaware of the tears dripping from her eyes. Dearka wasted no time in retaking control of the Grand Buster, securing the support struts and holstering the Earthshaker on its back mounts, bringing out the other two weapons once more.

"I've got it from here, Mir." he told her. She did not reply, just nodding her head once. Dearka had just lifted off in preparation for beginning his own attack run when the Earthshaker shell came down. Miriallia's aim was not really any better than Dearka's own. She too had been trying to hit the Merciless directly, but her calculations had been off as well. Not by much, but with a weapon as inherently inaccurate as the Earthshaker, even a little bit was actually a lot. Instead of striking the Merciless on its side, her shell undershot, striking short on the left side, about twenty meters short of the Merciless. Nonetheless, the staggering power of the Earthshaker compensated for the near miss, the explosion throwing up a wall of debris, dirt and compressed air that struck the Merciless like a titantic sledgehammer, actually lifting the machine slightly and shifting it about ten meters to the right before letting it slam back down hard enough to freeze the overworn joints of the right leg, causing the leg to freeze into place. The Merciless could still move, but only at an extremely slow pace as it limped around with one leg permanently straight.

Dearka came in from the left, Ysak came in from the right. Dearka held his fire until the last moment, unwilling to risk missing even a massive target like the Merciless, when a miss could mean hitting Ysak. Cray's desperate beam cannon and hyper impulse cannon shots went wild, tearing up more city scape but not even slightly dissuading the two prey turned predators bearing down on him. Dearka passed behind the Merciless while Ysak mirrored his position on the front side. Dearka's hyper impulse cannon shot carved into the left shoulder of the Merciless, severing that arm in a brilliant white flash and baring a large section of the Merciless's internal structures on that side. His anti-armor shotgun blast and missiles carved into the buckled and broken armor plates on the Merciless's left leg, shattering the ruptured Phase Shift armor, blowing whole plates off, the invulnerable sections still intact even as the bolts and connections holding it on the leg gave way. The left leg also froze up because of this attack, leaving the Merciless unable to move, tottering on the edge of balance. Almost as an afterthought, Dearka's beam cannons bored two neat red-white glowing holes through the back of the Merciless's head, exploding out the front in a shower of molten glass and electronic components as the head imploded from the heat stress.

Ysak, on the other side, used his beam sabers much like the first run, the leading hand hacking through the hyper impulse cannons, leaving the sparking larger half of the weapon gripped tightly in the Merciless's hand while the front third of the barrels clanged to the ground at the Merciless's feet, edges running liquid with heat. The trailing hand saber again took the shoulder gatling cannons and deeply wounded the right shoulder, shearing through several vital systems, including the power linkages to the Citadel array, rendering the great defensive mechanism inoperable. Greenish-white bolts of electricity discharged furiously from the severed linkages, causing internal fires and further electrical shorts throughout the right side of the Merciless. The overheated and suddenly damaged hyper impulse cannons reached a critical moment a second and a half after Ysak and Dearka completed their attack runs, the weapon glowing with blue and red light from within before its capacitors catastrophically overloaded, causing the weapon to exploded violently enough to utterly disintegrate itself along with the lower two thirds of the Merciless's right arm. Armless, legs locked, Cray had only his torso beam cannons left to him, and he could only fire them straight ahead, at nothing. He did so anyway, just because he had no idea what else to do.

In truth, Cray was already pretty far gone. His mobile suit was dying around him... and his mind was dying with it. Well, maybe not his mind, but his personality. He reverted to a more and more childlike state with each grievous wound the Merciless suffered, his damaged and oft re-written pysche unable to cope with the looming certainty of defeat and death. By the time he'd lost both arms, he was crying for his father... the Doc or his real father, he wasn't sure which. Just some grown up person... someone to make sense of the disordered world. Someone to calm the craziness and restore things to the way they were supposed to be. He smelled an animal stink permeating the cockpit and the few scraps of his higher mind and persona realized that he'd voided himself... bowel control abandoning him in fear. He stared unseeing at his blood covered and wound ravaged hands as the Duelist and the Grand Buster circled around, reversing their attack pattern so Ysak would sweep by the back while Dearka hit the front. "Help me. Help me? Help me! HELP ME!?" Cray suddenly cried, slamming his hands fruitlessly against the armored walls of his cockpit. "HELP ME! I'M GONNA DIE! I'M GONNA DIE! DOC, SAVE ME! I'M NOT SUPPOSED TO DIE!" he managed only to hit the cockpit release mechanism, lowering the armored shields that allowed access into and out of the cockpit. Unfortunately, he was beyond the point of seeing the outside world... he could see the armored walls hemming him in... burning metal fingers reaching out of the walls to hold him quivering in his seat.

Dearka noticed how the Merciless suddenly wasn't firing any more, but he did not halt his attack run. Even if Cray was trying to surrender... Dearka thought of the hospital, only a few blocks away, and the office buildings, and the cars... no, there would be no surrender here. Not to mention all the other horrible things Cray had ever done to Dearka, Miriallia, Kira, Athrun, Lacus, Cagalli and especially to Ysak and Katie. This was the end... the final end. Dearka's shotgun blast speared deep into the right side of the Merciless, the shells slipping through the gaping rent in the armor that Ysak's beam saber had inflicted seconds before. Huge sections of the Merciless bloated up and blew out in plumes of fire and wreckage as its internal structures were blasted to pieces, pieces which set everything around them on fire. Within seconds of the first explosion a gargantuan cloud of midnight black smoke burst from the wounds of the Merciless, from all the burning oils, fluids and wire insulation inside. Smoke was even pouring out of the cockpit, while hungry flames licked at various control consoles and even the pilot's chair itself. Dearka caught a brief glimpse of what might have been Cray sitting hunched up in the pilots chair, but he was moving too fast to be sure. His hyper impulse cannon struck the Merciless in the middle of its groin, disintegrating the Phase Shift armor like it was hardly there before almost cutting the Merciless in half, though it somehow remained standing even though there were no longer any major connections between its torso and legs.

It fell to Ysak, perhaps appropriately, to adminster the finish blows. Seeing the state of the Merciless, he slowed from his headlong charge, landing almost daintily directly behind the great smoke belching mass of standing wreckage that the Merciless had become. Ysak watched carefully, but Cray did not leave the cockpit, nor did he scream or rant over the comm or external speakers. This silence seemed odd at first, but then Ysak considered how badly damaged the Merciless was... most of its systems probably had already shut down or were destroyed and Cray himself was likely only slightly more healthy than his machine. He might have already died, consumed by the fire growing in the cockpit, but Ysak hoped not. Burning to death was too ordinary a death for Cray... Ysak needed to add his own special flavoring first before he could walk away satisfied. He carefully consulted the diagrams of the Merciless that Miriallia had transferred into his computer on the flight into the city. He was only ever going to get one chance at this and he wanted to do it right. The Duelist stepped up behind the Merciless, both beam sabers held down low at his sides. In a sudden, almost jerky motion, he raised his right arm and stabbed forward and upwards, the beam penetrating the Merciless's lower back and spearing upwards at an angle. The left arm saber penetrated a meter or so to the left of the right sword, at a similar angle.

Cray never knew exactly what it was that hit him. He was quivering in his seat one moment, his legs tapping out a hanged man's dance on the floor of the cockpit when suddenly there was a blazing hiss and his legs stopped tapping. He didn't even feel the burning at first... not until he looked down and saw the twin beams of pinkish plasma energy that enveloped him from the waist down. Blood forced itself out of his mouth, but he ignored it, reaching down with one curious hand, awed at how his fingers cripsed and flashed away into smoke by just touching the pink stuff. Pink stuff. He thought of Frost and smiled. Pink. Pink. He hoped Frost got to see Pink like this. Alarms blared out of his single remaining control panel, which was already aflame as well. His reactors were overloading, melting down. He reached out a hand to disengage the saftey locks that would allow the machine to blow up in a massive nuclear fireball, but he never completed the motion. "Chanel... I've made my peace." Ysak whispered, unmindful and unashamed of the tears trickling down his face as he gripped both sabers tightly... and then ripped them laterally out of the Merciless, cutting the machine in half. He didn't stop there... both beams came back around and cut into the Merciless again and again, hacking away chunks and pieces until he finally noticed the huge heat spikes his close range sensors were picking up from the Merciless.

He reluctantly left off his butchering and retreated to a safe distance, never once taking his eyes off the Merciless as he circled around to face his foe from the front. There was something sitting... no, lying in the pilots chair. It might have been Cray... it was hard to tell because of the fiery inferno that filled the cockpit. Ysak locked his gaze onto it in the assumption that it was Cray. Slowly the Merciless toppled over backwards... but before it could fully fall, or the top half seperate fully from the bottom half, both of its nuclear reactors went into meltdown, pumping tens of thousands of degrees of heat into the husk of the Merciless... hot enough to cause Phase Shift armor itself to ignite in some places. The Merciless was consumed in a colossal fireball, a fireball that did not expand but instead clung to its exposed skeletal frame like flesh made of fire before the Merciless struck the ground and exploded with the force of several Earthshaker shells, turning into a thousand burning pieces. Ysak stood and watched the fire, Dearka standing a few steps behind him, for a long time. Finally though, the flames started to die down and Ysak turned the Duelist away. "I think I need someone to hold me." Ysak announced softly. "I could really use a hug right now."

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"Are you sure about this?" The man with the dark wraparound sunglasses said, looking out at the destroyed city. The mobile suit battle had died off about a half hour ago, and he and his companion had left their temporary shelter, hiding in the basement of a parking garage, fifteen minutes prior. "This is a disaster. A terrible, reprehensible catastrophe."

"It's just a destroyed city. Kinda reminds me of JOSH-A, after the cyclops." the driver of the dark green luxury SUV replied casually. The man with the sunglasses turned his head slightly to glance at his companion. As always, he found it difficult to hook his attention on any one part of his companion. The man was just average... average average. In all respects. Not tall or short, fat or thin, brownish-blondish hair, paleish-tannish skin, medium build... he could have been a native of any one of a hundred nations. Of course, that was a major factor in how this man operated. He never stood out... because to stand out was to be recognized or seen... and to be recogonized or seen was to be dead. Traitors, cowards and mutineers did not have long life expectancies. Personally, the man in the sunglasses hated being around his companion, but because of the great mission they pursued together, he had no choice. When the boss said do something, he wasn't one to question. Not after all the boss had done for him. He could not help but look at his gloved hands, slightly clenched as always from the near constant pain of his seared skin, even though it had mostly been replaced with new flesh in the bosses's hospital. The memories would not let him be. But worse than the fire of the body was the fire that had burned his soul. She... she had betrayed him and the PLANTS. He could never forget that.

"You have no soul, Jean." the man in the sunglasses commented.

"Not unless you've got at least two fifty large to give me, yeah." Jean Dylan freely admitted. "I think I could manage something like a soul for that much."

"How is it such a mercenary bastard Natural like yourself could come to work for the Boss?"

"I know people. On both sides of the fence, you might say. Rau Le Cresuet was one of my big customers. Too bad about him... there was a man who knew how the world works." Jean sighed. "I just wish I'd spotted that MP earlier... bastard would have had a hard time reporting me from the bottom of the harbor."

"I can't believe I owe you my life." the man in the sunglasses said disgustedly.

"Don't you worry your head about it, Commander. You don't have anything I want, so I'm not likely to call in a favor soon."

"Don't call me that. I'm not in ZAFT anymore. I'm no Commander."

"Fine, whatever, Aireg. Please yourself. Sheesh, touchy Coordinator bastard." Jean turned his attention back to the road, concentrating on reaching the site his employer... and Aireg's employer, for that matter, had directed them to go to. Jean didn't know how the Boss... the big-little Boss, Noah... not the big-big Boss everyone thought Noah was... could get such precise information so quickly when his own network was still scrambling to find its ass with both hands. But he'd learned years before not to question the Boss. His info was his info and so far it had yet to be wrong. "There it is." Jean nodded his head at a section of destroyed city, almost indistinguishable from the ruins around it, except to the trained eye. "Not much left." Jean hawked and spat out the open car window as he pulled off the road onto the nearest intact sidewalk.

"I wouldn't expect there to be. I've seen the files the Boss has on those mobile suits... they don't exactly qualify for the "focus fire" awards." Aireg got out of the car, pulling a big heavy duffel bag behind him. He wasted no time in donning a heavy set of fire-fighting clothing, designed to resist high temepatures for a short period of time. Jean was doing similarly on the other side of the car. Both men put on heavy hard hat helmets with clear plasti-glass face shields. As a final touch they pulled on heavy gloves and screwed tiny radios into the sides of their helmets. "Comm check." Aireg said slowly and clearly.

"Screw off, military man." Jean replied. "Let's get this done and over with. I'm kinda persona non grata round these parts... lots of old enemies, if you know what I mean."

"I can't imagine why that would be." Aireg took a metallic pole out of the back of the SUV while Jean attached a video camera to his helmet and ran a cord from it to his cell phone. He flicked on the cell phone and turn it to speakerphone, then hit a speed dial and activated the video camera.

"Can you see alright, Boss?" Jean asked.

"Well enough." the slightly distorted voice of a forty something male replied. "You should find the wreckage you're looking for approximately fifty meters north and west of your current position." Aireg looked at Jean, who shrugged... neither of them knew how the Boss could be so precise, considering he was looking at the footage through a video link that extended back to their main base, several hundred thousand miles away. Aireg went first, probing the rubble with his pole to make it was safe, looking at a temperature instrument mounted to the top to make sure they didn't inadvertently stumble onto some superheated wreckage.

"Hard to believe these were all from one mobile suit, eh?" Jean commented about five minutes later, as they appraoched their goal, a mass of half molten metal that had fused itself to the ground. The heat was intense in this area, both men were sweating freely under their protective clothing. It had to be at least one hundred seventy degrees F in the open, and they were still ten meters away from where they would have to go.

"Not really. Blue Cosmos built this mobile suit to be the second largest mobile suit ever constructed. Thirty meters tall, three hundred tons, two nuclear reactors... which reminds me, both of you will need to undergo a rad cleansing after you get back, you're both probably getting a fairly serious dose right now... they built the thing to last. And now that it's not, well, is it really surprising that something that big left a big mess?" the Boss replied instantly.

"You're not serious about that radiation thing, are you Boss?" Jean said nervously. "Dunno about the commander here, but I'd like to have kids some day."

"Somehow I find it unlikely that that will ever occur." Aireg rumbled.

"Why the fuck do you say that?" Jean snapped.

"Relationships require trust... a traitor like you would find it hard, I think, to trust. Especially someone close to you."

"Fuck off, bastard. What would a Coordinator know about shit like that anyway... breed you guys in test tubes anyways."

"Careful, Jean... Aireg has an even temper... thats not true of all of us." The Boss said sharply. Jean gulped and shut up, remaining quiet as they poked closer. Aireg finally touched his pole to the metal side of the metal mass. The temperature was a steady seven hundred degrees F.

"Nothing could be alive in there... its hotter than an oven." Aireg said.

"Don't underestimate the resiliency of the Blue Cosmos creations." the Boss retorted. "There is a seventy four point seven percent chance the pilot survived the destruction of his mobile suit. Even now, almost three quarters of an hour later, there's still a greater than fifty percent chance the pilot is alive. He would be a perfect recruit for the project... his superiors have abandoned him... his mobile suit has been destroyed... he's nothing but malleable clay and I want him. I want to see inside." the Boss demanded. It took them about fifteen minutes more... they were really starting to feel the effects of the heat by the time they had shifted enough rubble over to provide a means to walk across the metal so they could access the remains of the cockpit. Aireg estimated they had about ten more minutes before their heat insulation started to fail... unconsciousness and death would rapidly follow in the killing heat. He was something of an expert on heat... desert heat... fire heat... heat was his thing. Still he made no mention of turning back... the Boss had saved his life and he'd sworn to repay that debt no matter the cost... especially since the Boss was also going to help him enact his revenge... eventually.

"Yeerrg!" Jean gasped, as they looked down into the fire ravaged cockpit. "Tough way to go." the object of his disgust was the thin bodied human upper torso that lay in the seat, scorched almost to the bone. The body had nothing to it below the middle of the stomach and everything above that point was completely covered in third degree or worse burns. Blackened bone was visible on the skull and facial areas, along with several ribs, revealing burn scarred internal organs inside. The interior of the cockpit had to be at least three hundred fifty degrees.

"Poke him." the Boss commanded. Jean and Aireg exchanged another glance. Aireg shrugged again and lightly jabbed the corpse with his staff, expecting it to crumble at the touch. It did not. In fact,the corpse twitched... he thought he'd touched a nerve or something that had somehow miraculously survived the heat, but when he removed the staff the body continued to twitch. Impossible as it seemed, there was still life of sort in the ruined body... even though all its features had been seared away, its skin was damaged beyond repair and it was missing its lower half. Blue Comos did build them tough. Aireg was impressed.

"It's alive?" Jean said, aghast.

"He's alive enough." the Boss replied. "All we really need is his brain... assuming we can keep that alive, then we'll have our third recruit into the project, after you two."

"Gee, hope I don't have to drive him around too... people might start saying stuff." Jean joked. "Not exactly Miss Orb, is he?"

"I wasn't all that pretty either, when you pulled me from the burning wreckage of my Grendel." Aireg noted, using his staff to roll the half-cadaver closer, to where the could reach down and grab it tenatively with his gloved hand around one arm. He expected the limb to come right off... overcooked meat came apart easily, after all. But the limb was still solid under its burn coating... it fully supported the weight of the cadaver-body as Aireg lifted the barely alive Cray Thresher out of the cockpit that should have been his tomb. Six minutes later Cray had been wrapped in several sterile bags with an oxygen mask over his entire head and given a shot to sedate him, though it had had little noticable effect on the still twitching body. They were just loading him into the back of the SUV when Jean suddenly spun, hand going to the pistol holstered at his back. Aireg turned as well looking for what had surprised his companion. He narrowed his light sensitive eyes as a stray beam of sunlight sneaked over his sunglasses... his eyes were the one part of him that had not fully recovered from the fire... in normal sunlight he was blind, thus the glasses.

A girl... young woman really, was walking towards them from up the street, where several large buildings looked to have collapsed during the fighting. Her clothes had been burned off her, and her body had been abused quite terribly by both heat and injury. She'd plainly once been a very attractive person... now her body was torn and broken, she limped forward on an obviously broken leg, her legs and arms covered in blood, her fingers scratched down to the bones, scorched black at the tips from where she'd clawed at some hot but unyielding surface for a long time. More blood trailed down her face like tears. Her eyes were empty and cold, like voids in her face. She'd once had hair, but it had gone the way of her clothes, burned off by fire. But the worst thing was the burned, fused mass that was her throat... glistening wetly with fresher blood it looked to Noah, back on the PLANTS, that her windpipe and trachea had fused from some extreme heat and she'd cut her own throat open with a scapel or other sharp instrument to clear the airway, before burning closed the wound to prevent herself from bleeding to death. She made a whistling, croaking sound when she saw the two men.

"Go away. You're not going to get help here." Jean pointed his pistol at the woman. Aireg did nothing... this poor waif would probably be best served by a bullet to the head... he could see the insanity buning in her mind just by looking into her empty eyes. Her trauma had overwhelmed her, it was easy to see. The woman did not respond as expected. She did not run... she just fell to her knees and started clawing at her face, leaving new tears of blood on her cheeks. She did that... and then she screamed. It was the most terrible, heart rending cry Aireg had ever heard... a wavering shriek of hate and pain and suffering that cut right through him and left him gasping on the ground, his ears ringing.

"Intriuging." the Boss said dryly. "We may have just found a fourth recruit. Bring her as well."

"But Boss... its going to be hard enough getting cadaver man out of the nation..." Jean started to protest.

"I don't recall a clause in your contract with me that included giving me advice." Noah retorted coldly. "Bring her to me. That is all. You have your orders."

"Yes, sir, Boss, sir." Jean said sarcastically, throwing his helmet off in disguist and turning off the cell phone. "All right, girly girl... lets do this nice and easy... you come with us, everyone goes away happy, yes?" he slowly held out his hands, palms up and nonthreatening, towards Mary O'Brien.

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Author note: I hope this satisfied those people who wished Ysak to get his revenge on Cray. Yes, Cray is not dead... but can you really say that what he is, is that much better? Personally, I'd rather be dead than just horribly mutilated, burned beyond recognition, no legs or lower body, blind, deaf, mute and insensate for the rest of my life. Like Noah said... he's alive enough... that doesn't mean he's going to come back. Even BCPU can't recover from some injuries. In any case, this last little scene is set up for the next story... so both pay attention but don't worry about it too much. For those of you who haven't realized it, replaced chapter 2, which had formerly included a list of all my Gundams and vehicles, with a less spoilerish list of all my characters. Well, most all my characters, except for the ones that would be spoilers with just their names. Should check that out, my long term readers. Hope you enjoyed this fight, it was and will be the biggest fight for a while, between the underground and aboveground sections. Much more to come and it only gets more suspenseful as it goes.