The day of the protest would go down in Orb... and indeed World... history. Orb gave the date, May 17, CE 73 and called it Purgatory Day, the day when Orb purged itself of the deceit and injustice that it had allowed to permeate its borders. The events that occured on Purgatory Day would be felt for years and years to come... the mass public outcry over the PLANTS and EA was probably the least powerful reprecussion, in the greater scheme of things, and national governments swayed and even collapsed under that tide of public anger. The death toll amongst the peace marchers was never fully confirmed, but most estimates agreed that the number was likely in the hundreds of thousands killed by the Merciless and the destruction it had caused alone, with tens of thousands more killed by panic symptoms... trampled to death, crushed by fleeing cars, drowning in the ocean, suffocating under drifts of people that built up whenever a street ended in a destroyed building or fire and flight was no longer possible in that direction. The casualties were not concentrated amongst the people of any one nation... there had been tens of thousands of people from almost every nation on Earth present at the peace march, along with of course the population of the city itself and the Orb protestors. Because of this, the sadness of grief and loss was universal as well... no country could sit back and say "whew... glad we didn't lose anybody.".
The population of the EA had shown that it could ignore the messy details of the war quite well. This was not a phenomenon peculiar to them... as a whole throughout history, the general population of any major nation at war is able to ignore the horrible acts and even atrocities that are committed in the name of winning that war, just because they only hear about them second or third hand, reading newspapers or watching TV. So far during this war the EA had already ignored the disaster at Carpentaria, which had a far higher death toll than Purgatory Day. But there was a difference... Carpentaria and the Oceania Union were the "enemy" and it was a "war" so they "deserved" what they got. It was the way of war propoganda... the enemy always "deserved" what they got. Orb was a part of the EA at the time... and it had been cruelly attacked by the EA forces stationed there, using mobile suits and soldiers to attack innocent, helpless men, women and children live on world-wide TV. It was like getting stabbed in the back by your own best friend... the pain of the wound was far less than the pain of the betrayal itself. Much as the PLANTS had experienced after the end of the previous war, when the purpose of the GENESIS space laser was made public knowledge, there was a colossal public outcry and lashback against the EA military. Nobody wanted to send their sons and daughters, husbands, wives or grandchildren off to fight for a regime that would order the massacre of hundreds of thousands of helpless and unarmed and peaceful people, merely excerising their constitutional rights to express themselves nonviolently.
Many wondered if the EA was now going to declare world wide martial law, so that it could enforce its mandates upon the people using its newly preferred tactics of strong arm intimidation and public massacre. The people wondering this were not Orbites or Coordinators... no, the people who were worried now were the general populace of the EA itself. They demanded answers from their governments. Why were they part of a system that used force against the helpless people of its own nations, excercising the principles of might makes right while preaching the ideals of enlightened democracy? Regional leaders in turn confronted National leaders with these questions, plus righteous indignation of their own. How were they supposed to deny their own populaces, especially when they felt the same way? National leadership panicked, especially those of the major nations that were active supporters of Blue Cosmos and knew that they had tacitly sanctioned the use of the Merciless, just because they had appointed Cervantes Zunnichi to oversee the war from behind the scenes. If it came out that they had allowed the massacre to happen because they set a madman in control of the EA military... well, it didn't take a political analyst to tell them that their careers would be over. Maybe their lives too, given the current public mood. The search for a scapegoat was frantic. Unfortunately for them, this was only the beginning of the problems they were to face over the coming days and weeks.
The Earth Alliance leadership had been forced to evacuate from Orb only hours after the Merciless was destroyed. The initial result of the attack by the Merciless had of course been panic, but after a few hours, when everyone had gotten the fear and panic out of their systems... something had to fill the emotional gap. That something was anger. They had been attacked... cruelly, maliciously attacked without warning or pity, by a corrupt and violent government regime none of them supported and only few of them remembered voting for. The peace march itself had been a wonder of nonviolent public protestation... the riots that followed hours afterward, when people fully began to realize what had happened to them were at the opposite end of the scale. They weren't just random acts of destruction though... the public works and buildings and shops of Orb were spared. The anger of the millions strong mobs was directed at only a few highly visible targets... mainly any place that harbored a large concentration of EA soldiers or administrators. The acts of public revenge that took place would haunt the minds and memories of many for the rest of their lives... few could later justify the way they had acted then... helpless and innocent low level administrators were hunted down and beaten to death by mobs of neighbors and friends... soldiers who'd not fired a single shot in anger were torn apart by hundreds strong gangs of people that charged their squads or companies heedless of warning shots and tear gas. To wear a uniform that didn't belong to the Orb National Military rapidly became a public death sentence.
Protest leadership struggled mightily to retain control of their protestors, but their words were dust in the wind against the mighty storm of fear and revenge that had enveloped the city. There was no way a few hundred people who had an idea of the larger picture could control millions of panicked, enraged and grieving people, hell bent on communicating their problems to the nearest symbol of EA authority in the most direct manner possible. The EA itself did what it could to protect its people and contain the riots, but with all the senior leadership fleeing like rats deserting a sinking ship, morale wasn't exactly at a fever pitch. You can watch only so many executive level directors and staff showing up to private airports in armored limosines with police escorts to board private jets that carried maybe one or two families at most at a time while your fellow soldiers were lynched in the streets of the city with orders to advance and control the crowds before you lost your desire to follow your orders very thoroughly. When the mobile suit regiments were given orders to move into the city to lay down the law, they flat out refused. They didn't cite mechanical problems, or personnel issues... they refused. Word of this "mutiny" spread rapidly through the thousands of EA soldiers recuperating in Orb after the disaster at Carpentaria. Entire divisions suddenly just stood down in their bases, stationing watches to ensure they weren't attacked by angry citizens, but other than that they sat tight, ignoring increasingly frantic orders from the senior officials fleeing the country.
World wide, the scattered forces of the Orb Military boarded their ships and stood ready at battle stations as they left their assigned battle groups and theatre bases, all heading back to Orb. It wasn't exactly a coordinated effort, but neither did a single Orb vessel or unit remain in the positions they had been ordered to station themselves at by the EA command. Few units tried to stop them from leaving... soldiers across the EA were sick at heart, just as sick at heart as their civilian counterparts at seeing the massacre. Contrary to popular belief, a soldier doesn't usually enjoy killing people... most people did not join a military to kill people. They joined to protect people... family, loved ones, friends... from being killed or threatened. It takes a thankfully rare sort of cold hearted bastard to enjoy killing the helpless... and even amongst soldiers people like that are extremely rare. Those units which did try and stop the "desertion" of the Orb forces were brushed aside in a matter of hours by the technologically superior and HIGHLY motivated Orb forces. One on one, the transformable technologic strength of the Gundam based M-4 Guardian far exceeded the much more mass produced capabilities of the Strike Dagger or even Strike Crusader. Within two days, the far scattered Orb military had almost entirely returned to their home nation, willing and able to lend their support to the new government that was being established there.
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Having escaped from the underground rail junction when the explosion of the Merciless finally collapsed the roof, which had been weakened by the shocks of the mobile suit battle on the surface, Lacus, Cagalli and everyone else found themselves almost alone in the government district. The Hellhounds, Asmodeus and Frost were nowhere to be seen... though they could not know it, their enemies had been amongst the first to evacuate the nation, called back to escort Cervantes away when the Merciless fell. He didn't particularly feel like staying around to be crucified by the howling masses, and leaving the Fury to be salvaged wasn't exactly an option either... he only had one BCPU left and without a mobile suit, he wouldn't be able to use Frost to the fullest. Cervantes left Orb quietly, with none of the bombast of his entrance to the nation, in a private shuttle escorted by the Purifier and the Fury. Cagalli was quick to lead her friends to the executive and parlimentary office buildings at the heart of the government district. It was not an easy journey for any of them... the streets were littered with the debris and deritus of Cray's attack on the area... rubble and wreckage was everywhere. But worse than the stone and steel wreckage was the human wreckage. The primary weapon systems of a mobile suit were not designed to be used against soft targets like normal infantry or civilians... shells that were designed to destroy tanks or mobile suits in one shot were extreme overkill when used against people. There was actually less blood and gore than some might have expected... just because the heat of the shell explosions or beams tended to vaporize bodies, with the only bleeding wounds and deaths being suffered by those far enough away to be killed by flying shrapnel. But even so, they passed thousands of bodies, young and old, man and woman, whole and scattered.
When they reached the government buildings they found them largely abandoned. Fires had been set in some rooms in an effort to destroy vital or confidential paperwork and documents that the EA felt could not be chanced falling into the hands of the common citizen. However, these fires were only haphazardly set, as the evacuation had hardly been the orderly and organized evolution it was designed to be. Entire rooms full of documents and data storage were untouched by the squads designated to destroy all incriminating evidence of what Blue Cosmos and the EA officials had been up to in Orb during their tenure as all but overlords. It wasn't to say that all the EA administrators were power abusing and corrupt... but most of the senior staff were close cronies and minions of Cervantes Zunnichi himself, brought in as personal favors or political currency. They weren't exactly the most... rule oriented... group of men and women. When they wanted something, they took it. If they couldn't take it, they passed laws that let them take it. There were few indeed that weren't in the pockets of various special interest groups, thus all the customs reductions, untaxed import/export agreements and waived tariffs that those companies and interests had enjoyed for the duration of the EA occupation. Worse than that though were the Blue Cosmos records, records that showed how Blue Cosmos members had been given free reign to discriminate against any Coordinators or Coordinator rights groups they found in Orb. But the major find, the find that would have world wide reprecussions, was finding one of Cervantes's personal computers, lying open and forgotten on his desk in his hurry to leave and meet up with Asmodeus and the Hellhounds.
The computer was of course encrypted and password protected, but when you had the combined intellects of Kira and Athrun working on the problem... it really wasn't that much of a problem. Blue Cosmos used some of the best security software available and Cervantes's computer had the best of the best. One re-written security program and about twenty minutes later, they had a wealth of EXTREMELY interesting information at their fingertips. Cervantes's computer was of course configured to access the main Blue Cosmos databanks at CWM headquarters and before site security noticed the recently called in lost computer looking through their system Athrun had managed to download several tens of gigabytes of information. He didn't have the time to really look for anything in specific... once he was in he just started grabbing and copying files as fast as the computer would download, starting with the files most often looked at. Unable to do anything to halt the fury of the riots outside, despite public addresses by both Lacus and Cagalli, they had nothing better to do while waiting out the storm of public revenge than look through the files. Saying they struck paydirt didn't even close to cover it.
Within the records Athrun had downloaded, plus the data already on the computer hard drive itself, was a lot of crap... CWM profit figures and personnel lists, production quotas and payroll documents. About ninety percent of all the information they had downloaded were things of that nature... items that had to do with running the massive corporate empire Cervantes was the head of. Some had to do with the daily tasks involved in managing and running Blue Cosmos, including a list of every major supporter and money contributor to the group, plus a list of all the people to whom Blue Cosmos donated money... often a lot more money than the rules of a nation allowed. Nobody was really surprised to find people in National leadership positions on both lists, but the length of both lists was shocking. Blue Cosmos was far more widespread than any of them had imagined... probably far more widespread than even most members of Blue Cosmos imagined. There wasn't a nation on Earth that didn't have someone highly placed in one or two government departments who was either a dues paying member or a bribe taking lackey of Blue Cosmos. More often than not, the presidents or rulers of the individual nations that made up the EA were on one or both of the lists, along with the corporate heads of almost every major Earth based corporation. One entire section of the list was devoted to the Generals and Admirals in the EA military forces that were active members of Blue Cosmos. Also included in the information was the location and approximate force strength of every major Blue Cosmos installation or base on Earth.
Of more immediate concern to the awed and aghast Coordinators and various others present were the records of the assassination missions against the known protest leaders that Cervantes had ordered during the days before the protest, recorded in minute detail by the Hellhound team leaders and presented in a AAR (after action report) format that was startling in its cold dryness. The Hellhounds had gone in and "removed" entire families of people in swift, completely unannounced raids that had caught the protest leaders sitting down at breakfast or dinner, or in their beds in the middle of the night or in one case helping their kids get dressed for school. There were no survivng witnesses... anyone who had been in the homes at the times of the raids were killed just as surely as the original targets were. The photos and video taken by the Hellhounds as proof of death, before they disposed of the bodies by incineration at a waste disposal facility, were enough to turn the stomachs of more than a few. Just about the only people able to look through the photos and especially the action-videos without having to avert their eyes once or twice were the members of TEMPEST, who had first hand experience in missions similar in scope to what they were looking at, though never against civilian targets. Cagalli immediately resolved to publish their find, to show the world again just what sort of men and women they were supporting by supporting the current EA leaders.
Finally came the personal bombshell, one that set Cagalli and Athrun back on their heels, stunned and unable to do more than stare. When Cervantes had learned of the circumstances of Cagalli's birth and her intimate relationship with Athrun from Sai, he'd immediately organized an operation to steal the photograph that proved she was not Uzumi's daughter. However, he'd been unable to actually get someone into the Orb National Hospital to steal some of Cagalli's blood to do a real gene test. Instead he'd had one fabricated by Blue Cosmos scientists and had that test published along with the photo in the public announcement that had caused so much trouble for Orb and the world. In the uproar caused by the photo and the video of Athrun and Cagalli having sex, no one had looked closely enough at the gene test to realize it was just a clever forgery. But now that they had this report, along with several hundred pages of recorded conversations between Cervantes and various members of Blue Cosmos, in which he elaborated in great detail about how they were going to use their data, both real and forged, to destabilize the peace process and help plunge the world into war again. Even though the accusation that she was not Uzumi's daughter was in fact true, now that they had proof that the gene test was forged... well, a photo proved nothing, because photos were forged all the time.
"I'm not sure what I should do." Cagalli admitted after everyone had perused the documents. "On one hand, what Blue Cosmos said is fundamentally true... I'm not Uzumi's biological daughter and the Constitution of Orb precludes hereditary leadership positions from being passed down to adopted children. On the other, now that we have this document, we can show the world that the gene test was false, even though if they did a real one, it would be true."
"Obviously Lord Nara Attha was aware that he wasn't your biological father." Athrun pointed out. "That's probably why it was impossible for Cervantes to get someone to steal some of your banked blood... it's probably not even in the Orb National Hospital, its probably somewhere far more secure. It seems to me that he had already taken steps to ensure that people did not find out that you weren't his daughter, because of what that would do to Orb. No offense to the Orb Government, but none of the other royal family heirs are exactly Representative material, in my opinion."
"They do have their fair share of problems. More than their fair share, to be truthful. We've kept most of it under wraps... but that would be hard to do if they were Representative and in the public eye all the time." Kisaka allowed.
"Cagalli..." Kira said slowly. "Regardless of who our biological parents are... we never knew them. My parents and yours... they're the people we grew up with. Just because my genes aren't from my parents does not make me any less their son, or you any less Uzumi's daughter. If you're worried about living a lie by telling the people of Orb that you really are Uzumi Nara Attha's daughter... don't be. That's what I think anyway. As far as I'm concerned, you are his daughter and always have been."
"I think that this might be one of those times when it's better to bend the rules to acheive a good end, rather than follow them strictly and end up who knows where." Miriallia spoke up. "I'm a citizen of Orb... I know the rules of succession just like Cagalli does. But I don't know anyone better suited to being Representative than Cagalli. Kisaka is right... all four other houses... well, they supported Cervantes Zunnichi, lets just leave it at that. They're not all bad apples, but none of them are the sort of people to sacrifice themselves for the good of the nation and the world, like the Attha family."
"Lacus? Any advice from you?" Cagalli asked. Lacus looked at her and smiled, then shrugged.
"I'd say do what your heart tells you that you should do. People look up to me because I take a public stand on moral and ethical issues and do my best to help the world solve them. I'm a political figure, but I'm not a political person. I've never studied law or politics... I don't know whats right or wrong in this situation. It's never a good thing to lie to people, to make them think you're something you are not... but like Kira said, are you really lying to them? Are you not Uzumi's daughter? Are you not Cagalli Yula Attha, the Representative of Orb who has fought and bled and hurt to help Orb become a country the world can be proud of? I think you are... do you?"
"People are who they want to be, are what they make of themselves." Alkire said, his voice jerky and labored from the injuries he'd sustained fighting Cyprus. Though Cyprus had not managed to kill him, it hadn't exactly gone Alkire's way either. He privately felt that if Cyprus hadn't been distracted by the fact that Glory had been seriously injured that he probably would not have survived. Who'd have thought the Lieutenant of EFSOU had a heart after all? But even though he'd been in a perfect position to break Alkire's neck, he had hesitated when Glory was shot and Alkire had been able to break free of the stranglehold. The entire rest of the short lived fight, before the roof caved in and Alkire helped evacuate the kids and his surviving teammates, Cyrpus had seemed almost hesitant, as if distracted by some worry. This didn't prevent him from wiping the floor with Alkire's face, but it did seem to prevent him from pulling off a finishing blow. "Personally, I'd follow a national leader like Cagalli, regardless of who the fuck her parents are. At the moment Orb doesn't have a government... should you decide to get off your ass and fix that situation, I don't think too many people are going to be all that fussy about you leading Orb again."
"Alkire makes a good point." Waltfeld added, seated across the table from the TEMPEST members. He wasn't looking at anyone, but rather was studying the item he held gripped in his hand, turning it over and over before his eyes, not sure whether he should be reverent or disgusted. When Frost had killed Vladimir, he'd torn his mechanical arms off where they connected to the flesh and bone of his shoulders. The right arm had landed almost at Kisaka's feet and the Orb bodyguard had picked it up almost as an afterthought. After they'd reached a safe location after fleeing the collapsed subway junction, Kisaka had come over to Waltfeld and explained the matter of Vlad's death. Waltfeld wasn't sure how he felt... the man had been directly responsible for the deaths of many members of Waltfeld's family. But that had been years ago... and the man Andrew Waltfeld had promised himself he'd one day find and kill was not the Vladimir he'd met on board the Archangel. He held the arm Kisaka had given him and considered what Kisaka had said. "He wouldn't have wanted this to go to waste." Kisaka had said, his eyes pointedly looking at Waltfelds own empty right sleeve. There was still blood on the wire and mechanical connections that had secured the arm to Vlad's body, Waltfeld stared at the gory end again and again. This was a relic of a great man... a man who had sacrificed his life to save a young girl from a monster, who'd bled and died so that peace could have a chance. It was also the arm of a mass murderer and Kisaka had as much as said he felt Waltfeld should be the next man to use it. "Given what people have already given up to bring you this far, Yula Attha, I don't see how you can avoid becoming Representative again."
Cagalli looked down at the table for a few long moments. When she looked up again, her face had changed from the slightly hesitant, unsure expression she'd had pretty much ever since the Merciless had dropped out of the sky. "You're all right." now her face was steely with confidence and resolve. "I'm the Representative of Orb. I'm Lord Uzumi Nara Attha's daughter and now I can prove it. Its not going to be easy, but with the support of the people in this room and all the people of Orb, I'm sure I'll be able to manage. And as my first act as Representative, I'll tell you what we're going to do. Lacus, you are going to get on the PA system and please don't stop until the riots are under control. This is now my city again, and I'm not going to tolerate rioting... use your abilities if you have to, please. Ms. Ramius, Commander Waltfeld, I need you to work with Kisaka to contact the Archangel and the Kusanagi, as well as whatever Orb military forces you can get a hold of. We may have scared the EA off, but they've shown they're more than willing to use excessive force to do their job and Orb is fragile right now. We need a solid shield to protect us. Alkire, I need you and TEMPEST to go through these buildings from top to bottom... I don't want any surprises from EA assassins or troops left behind disrupting the government. I wouldn't put it past them to have hidden bombs all over the place here. Kira, you and Dr. Simmons work with the protest leaders to restore order and start getting the word out that Orb has a government again. And Athrun, you're coming with me."
"Coming where?" Athrun asked as people got up and started moving, not arguing their assigned tasks. They had all accepted Cagalli as the person in charge at the moment, after all.
"To the nearest populated chapel. We're getting married."
"NOW!?" He exclaimed, shocked. He looked out the window, at the ravaged and still burning in spots city. He looked back to see Cagalli march over to him and grab him by the wrist. "But..."
"Shaddup! No arguments about this, Athrun. We've waited far too long... I'm not going to let any Blue Cosmos or EA propoganda campaign strike at my government again just because I'm with you and we have sex out of wedlock. We ain't stopping the sex, so I guess that leaves us with getting wedded, doesn't it? The sooner the better." She pulled at his wrist hard enough to cause him to stumble a few paces forward, his face flushing when he saw everyone was still in the room, staring at them. "Come on, Athrun, work with me, or I swear to god, I will sap you on the skull and drag you behind me."
"Go Cagalli." Raine commented as Cagalli pulled the still surprised Athrun bodily out of the room, trying to mumble some sort of protest about it not being the appropriate time. "There's a girl with her priorities straight."
"This is going to be such a fucked up government with her in charge." Alkire added. "Not that I'm complaining... the world could use a few fucked up governments, the kind that play fast and loose and shoot from the hip to solve the serious issues, without getting bogged down in procedure and politics. I think we're going to see some changes around here... some good changes."
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By the dawn of the next day, the riots had been completely stopped, both because people were exhausted, emotionally wrung dry and because of the heavenly voice which resounded from every public announcing station in the city... a voice that spoke words of peace and forgiveness and hope, that urged calm and restraint, a voice which carried such vibrant emotion in it that even the most enraged or grief stricken rioter could not help but pause and listen to. It wasn't known until later the next day who exactly had been talking to the people of the city... because of her work that day and indeed much of that night, Lacus had acquired a new title, to go along with her role as The Songstress of Peace. She was also now referred to by the people who had been present on Purgatory Day as the Angel of Purgatory, the guiding light that had brought millions of people out of the darkness they had been driven into and restored them to humanity. People looked around themselves with new eyes and wept, seeing what they had almost been reduced to, suddenly ashamed of how they had allowed themselves to act. The early part of the day had been a masterpiece of the best parts of human emotion and humanity in general. The latter part of the day was the exact opposite, and many people experienced a second crisis as they recollected the baseness and ugliness they'd displayed while in the throes of the mob mentality that prevailed during the afternoon and night.
They searched for a ray of hope to cling to in their moments of crisis and they found one. At seven thirty one AM, May 18, CE 73... only hours before she turned eighteen... Cagalli Yula Attha, newly proclaimed Chief Representative of Orb... was married to Athrun Zala in the Hameya Cathedral, on the outskirts of the Government district. The service was small, partly because it was completely unannounced and partly because the city had yet to recover to the point where people could move freely enough to attend. It had taken her longer than she thought it would for Cagalli not only to find a pastor willing to perform the service, but to get all the proper legal documents drawn up in the middle of the night when almost everyone with an ounce of common sense was hiding at home or if not that, then out rioting in the streets. But she'd perservered, and with Athrun's help she'd even managed to find a set of uniforms that fit her to replace the ones that had been destroyed by the various battles underground. There hadn't been anyone around to look at her broken nose or other minor injuries, so it wasn't the most decorous of wedding ceremonies. Both the bride and groom were battered and bloody, their clothing singed and covered in brick dust... but the light and life in their eyes... that was something special, something that made their appearances inconsequential.
The pastor doing the ceremony had been hesitant at first, being burst into in the middle of getting dressed by a fiery blond haired girl waving a gun in one hand, with the other tightly around the wrist of a slightly lost and helpless looking guy with purplish hair, but once he'd recognized Cagalli he'd been more than happy to perform the ceremony, especially when Athrun showed him that they had somehow managed to acquire all the proper documentation. He'd shot Athrun a few disapproving looks once he learned who he was, but after Cagalli shoved her gun under his nose and told him that if he had a problem with Athrun, then she was going to have a problem with him, he kept his thoughts to himself. He stared out at the wedding party and told himself that this was certainly going to be the most unique wedding he'd ever performed. The massive cathedral was unlit, having lost power sometime during the mobile suit battle that had raged throughout the city the afternoon before. Morning sunlight trickled in hazily through the stained glass windows, filtered by the clouds of smoke and dust which still clogged the air outside. The cathedral was almost empty, with less than a dozen people witnessing the ceremony, and they were a villianous and rough looking bunch.
One man had only one arm and one eye, holding what looked like a black metal skeletal limb on his lap as he smiled cheerfully at the pastor. Other men and a women hefted dangerous looking assault rifles and other firearms, not quite pointing them at the pastor, but keeping them close at hand. One man even had a sword buckled at his waist. Both the bride and the groom wore guns as well, with the rather large and unfriendly looking man who was overseeing the whole deal looming behind the pastor's shoulder with a camera in hand to record the event. Kira was Athrun's best man, and Lacus the bridesmaid. The pastor recognized them both, having seen them on TV the day before. But they were a lot more battered and even bloody now, also covered in brick dust and looking like they were running on the dregs of an adrenaline high. Dearka, Miriallia, Ysak and Katie had also been informed of the wedding plans, and had managed to show up about thirty minutes prior, while the Archangel patrolled through the skies above the city. Ysak in particular looked terrible, withdrawn and pale, though his injuries were relatively minor. He walked with a stagger and only seemed to have been upright because of Katie's arms around him... but he'd managed a smile and a triumphant thumbs up when asked about Cray and the Merciless.
"... and I do declare you to be man and wife." the pastor finished up nervously. Wedding his head of state to a Coordinator he personally didn't much care for wasn't exactly what he'd imagined he'd be doing today, but he knew his job well enough to not let his personal feelings about a marriage affect his performance of the ceremony. He'd given plenty of marriages he knew would break up within a few years... but he didn't get that feeling from these two. There was really something there... a common bond that was stronger than almost any he had ever seen... something special. "You may kiss the bride."
The home recorded video of the wedding done by Kisaka was shipped out to every major Orb news channel within the next two hours, along with photocopies of the legal documents and marriage license, with Kisaka signing his permission as Cagalli's guardian, while Alkire masqueraded as a member of Athrun's family, signing a messy scrawl with an indecipherable first name and an almost picture perfect "Zala" at the end. Athrun didn't think his family... uncles, aunts and cousins, none of them very close... would mind his subterfuge at their expense. He doubted many would even notice. Along with the marriage video was a condensed version of the Blue Cosmos documents, with the details on the assassination missions and the frame job against Cagalli highlighted. Other video files and documents were sent to EA controlled news stations, but perhaps predictably, most of these were confiscated before they could be aired. Despite this, no one doubted the truth of the documents when they were displayed on the web sites of the Orb News stations, despite the vehement denials of EA officials, which only convinced many that the documents were true, rather than the opposite.
Cheering people lined many streets as Kira boarded the Liberty and carried Athrun and Cagalli through the city in the mobile suit's hands. The accusations against Athrun by Cervantes were washed away and almost entirely forgotten in the joyousness of the moment, a phenomenon common to public opinion. The public has a notoriously short memory, they are quick to live in the moment without too much care for what was said in the past. This was not to say that Cagalli's marriage was well received by all of Orb... many people in the other four royal houses were quite disgruntled, as many of them had planned on either marrying her themselves, or having children marry her, in order to solidify their own positions of political power under the EA government. The house that could net Yula Attha and her public popularity would be assured of a strong position under Cervantes... but now that was just a dream, dead in the dust. Others were still unhappy because Cagalli was marrying a Coordinator, especially Athrun Zala, but these people suddenly found themselves in the very tiny minority, especially after some people pointed out that hadn't the Justice fought to protect Orb during the last war too? And hadn't Athrun Zala been the one to destroy the GENESIS laser? These thoughts, and many more besides, caused most people to sit back and think a bit before they made a gut decision to hate him just because of his last name.
Kira brought them back to the executive offices after a brief tour of the city and its people. Spur of the moment marriage now over, they had a lot of work to do. The Orb Government had experienced a total collapse almost overnight. Almost every senior position in the executive, legislative and judicial branches had been held by an EA appointed official... and most of those officials had fled the country within hours of the fall of the Merciless and the evacuation of Cervantes Zunnichi. Those that had stayed were lucky if they weren't already dead, victims of the outraged public lashback at all things EA. In any case, they were no longer part of the government, most content to huddle in various safe houses or prison cells, glad for their lives and completely unable to oppose the new government, led by Cagalli. Things were already chaotic, as Cagalli and the protest organizers struggled to deal with creating a government pretty much out of scratch, with less than a day's notice. None of them were even slightly prepared for the endeavor... never in the wildest dreams or nightmares of anyone present had they thought they would have ousted the EA government so soon and so completely, leaving an enormous power vacuum to fill. Cagalli was Chief Representative, but there were dozens if not hundreds of other positions that had to be filled, and you can't just dump becoming State Treasurer on someone and expect them to do a good job right off the bat. Things were so breakneck hectic that Cagalli still hadn't managed to find the time for someone to look at her broken nose.
Cagalli and her fledgling government weren't the only busy people. The other Orb cities had denuded themselves of fire fighters, police and other emergency response personnel, all flooding to the capital to help with containing and relieving the disaster. The entire city was filled with so many people that you couldn't seem to walk down a single street without being force to rub shoulders with other people, all rushing around seemingly on the most important business. The first Orb military units started arriving back at their home nation at about noon and more ships kept arriving by the hour for the rest of the day. The EA divisions encamped in the Orb military bases and countryside areas of the nation rapidly found themselves surrounded by the new arrivals. Things were tense at first, until Waltfeld and Ramius arrived on scene with the Archangel and Kira in the Liberty. Both sides instantly recognized that particular mobile suit and especially that particular warship. After Murrue and Waltfeld explained to the EA that they were going to be expelled from the nation, not killed, things calmed down. There was a brief heatup when Murrue stated that the soldiers were to be disarmed and would be forced to leave their war material behind, but Kira merely took a single step forward in the Liberty and the EA commanders got the point. They weren't exactly sitting in a position of strength, with the Archangel hovering overhead and one of the most feared mobile suit aces of modern history watching their every movement like a hawk, while their own soldiers were tired, unmotivated and ill-prepared. They didn't have to like it... but they didn't have any other choice.
There were a surprising number of soldiers who actually defected to Orb, conscripts from other world nations that had long been suspicious of the motives of their predominately Atlantic Federation and Eurasian Federation superior officers. Others were inflamed by the injustices they had observed the day before, as well as others they had either observed or even guiltily took part in during the months long EA occupation of Orb. Still others were just people who hated war and had been drafted anyway, seeing this as their chance to get out of the military they had no desire to be in, to get back to their regular lives, as much as possible. In the end, almost a division and a half of EA soldiers ended up switching sides to serve under the Orb Government, rather than return "home" to Panama and other EA bases. Orb's military forces were suddenly bolstered by an additional fourteen thousand combat trained and experienced infantry troops, as well as several hundred MBT's and assorted armored vehicles and more than one hundred mobile suits, mostly Strike Daggers but there were several squadrons of Strike Crusaders as well. All this in addition to nearly a thousand armored vehicles of all sorts and two hundred more mobile suits confiscated from the expelled forces, plus tens of thousands of tons of other military equipment. No one particularly felt like trusting them all just yet, as soldiers who would turn their backs on their own home nations, even conscripted soldiers, just because the war turned against them were hardly the sort of people you wanted to go around relying on until you were sure they weren't going to switch loyalties again.
Over the next week or so, the framework of a Government that strongly resembled the Orb under Lord Uzumi Nara Attha... strong in people and principles, with lofty goals and iron strong determination... began to assemble itself from the wreckage of the capital city and the ruins of the EA regime. During this time Cagalli found herself working almost nonstop, sleeping for an hour or two whenever exhaustion claimed her, but there was no time for real rest... as she constantly reminded herself whenever she felt like just sitting down and crying in frustration, every single moment counted, if they could get a solid and working Government established before the EA recovered enough to try and come back, then Orb's independence would once again be assured. If not, all those deaths and the suffering of her and her people would be for naught, as the EA would return, angrier and stronger than before. Blue Cosmos would return and revenge would be had... especially since Cervantes Zunnichi was still Lord of Blue Cosmos and he was not one to take humiliation lightly. It wasn't that she had to do all that much traveling around... quite the opposite, she would sometimes remain closeted in meetings in the executive buildings for so long the sun would rise and set without her seeing it. But as the reclaimed Chief Representative of Orb, nothing major seemed able to get done without her personal signature or permission.
If it wasn't for Athrun I'd prolly have keeled over dead yesterday. Cagalli thought for what must have been the dozenth time in the last two or three days. No matter how hard she worked, no matter how long she stayed up, no matter how grouchy or disagreeable she became... and she did become quite unpleasant to be around after about halfway through day six... Athrun never left her side for more than an hour. She never saw him fall asleep before her, and he was always the one who woke her up to get started on yet another suddenly critical task, though he always seemed so terribly regretful about it she never quite managed to get angry enough to shove him head first down the biggest flight of stairs she could find... probably why he was the one to wake her up, rather than other people. Whenever she felt like throwing in the towel he was always there with encouraging words or sometimes just a hand on her shoulder or around her waist. When pleading governmental supplicants seemed to close in around her like a living ocean, it was he who stepped forward and glared them away, declaring that the Representative needed both her personal space and personal time if she was to get anything meaningful done. Given that he'd taken the time to retrieve the Righteous from the Archangel and had parked it right outside the front doors of the building, he usually recieved few arguments. The one time he had, the other guy had ended up with half his teeth shattered, lying on the ground drooling blood when he'd ignored two direct warnings from Athrun that Cagalli was too tired to deal with his problem right then.
"Listen up, people." Athrun had said, voice cold and steely. "None of you have to like me. A number of you already don't. But like it or not, I am Cagalli's husband and while I have no governmental power, do not think I won't exercise my rights to defend, protect and nurture my wife, even if it means I have to put you all bleeding on the ground to do it. When I say back off, she needs some rest, it's not a idle recommendation... it's an order. Do we have an understanding?" He'd finished, glaring at the nearly one hundred stunned and shocked people crowding the room, his eyes washed of their normal bright color as muscles visibly pulsed in his jaw. There had been no further arguments.
Later on, once they'd reached a more private location, she'd tried to scold him. "You can't just go punching everyone who's rudely persistent in trying to get my attention, Athrun. It's a very sweet gesture, but I can't have my administrators scared to come see me with their problems because my big bad husband is going to mop the floor with their faces if they come at a bad time. If it comes down to the point where some heads need banging together, I'll handle it, please."
"I meant what I said. I don't have any real governmental influence... yet... since the position of consort or partner or significant other of the Chief Representative isn't actually a political office. But like I've said several times before... as long as you're the one who picked up the burden of responsibility in the first place, theres absolutely nothing wrong with me helping you carry it till the end. In fact, its a vocation I think I'll be glad to devote my life to." Athrun had replied. "And vice versa too, of course. Right now you're the one who's picking up all the burdens... but love and life like ours is not a one way street... once we whip Orb into a shape relatively resembling that of a world government, you and are going to have some issues of our own to flatten out."
"Like what?" she'd asked, her voice sharper than she'd intended as she slumped into a nearby chair, looking out a wide picture window at the mid afternoon sun glinting down on the Pacific ocean... assuming you looked past some still smoking buildings and acres and acres of rubble first. The last thing she wanted to hear about was more problems. Athrun surprised her slightly by sitting down on the floor next to the chair, leaning his head against the side of her leg as he clasped one of her hands in both of his own. He'd sighed and it was then she realized that he really was just as tired as her, if not more so, he was just usually better at hiding it. He smiled at her, refusing to be goaded by her tone of voice.
"We'll probably start with the bigger issues. Children, for one. So far we've... well, you know... been careful. But now that we're married... umm... the glove can come off, so to speak."
"Athrun!" Cagalli flushed crimson, checking the room out of reflex, afraid there had been some unfortunate witness to that rather personal comment... a witness she decided then and there would either be sworn to silence or thrown from a high balcony... but the room was empty except for them.
"What?" he'd turned his head to peek out the window himself. "You're the one who pulled me by the arm into the chapel to get married... you're going to have to deal with the consequences now. I wasn't going to bring it up for a while, but now that everything's all nice and legal... well... heh." she could almost see the sunlight reflecting off his smile. "Believe me, Cagalli, I know this is an uncomfortable topic... for me as well as you. I mean for one, we still have no way of knowing if I'm even capable of producing children, being a second generation Coordinator. And we're both going to be so busy for the forseeable future that our present day labors are going to seem restful, once the EA decides if they want to contest your rule of Orb or not. But I'm not going to let this go, either. I assume you have no problems with children?"
"Ah... uh... er... don't you think this is a little unfair, springing this on me when I'm out of my head on fatigue poisons and caffeine?" she'd protested.
"Nah... I think it's better this way, with both of us so tired neither of us has the energy for subterfuge, only total honesty. So how about it, love? Are you up for helping me try and produce some little Zala-Attha's, eventually?"
"Attha-Zala's." she'd corrected him. She'd weighed the thought long and hard in her mind... as much as she could manage in her exhausted state anyway. Maybe there was something to Athrun's theory... she was so tired she couldn't muster up any of the usual excuses or escapes that she would have otherwise used to delay or muddle her choice enough to put off for another time. At length she'd sighed heavily, just like Athrun had earlier. "I don't see how we can avoid it, given our bed time habits." She'd smiled, feeling him twitch slightly, looking around the room himself for unwanted listeners. "Hell... yes, of course we'll have kids, Athrun. You thought that was a big issue? Come on... how could we not?"
"That was an awful big blush for an issue you didn't think was very big." He'd commented. She'd slapped him lightly on the top of the head. "Hmm...I wonder if I can do it again. See, there's this other issue... now that we can safely go out in public again, I was thinking, you see, of some of the rather more... uh, how should I put this... interesting... clothing articles I saw in one of Dearka's magazines. I think they'd look really good on you. Really, really good."
"You'd better not be saying what I think you're saying." her hand had clenched itself into a fist, hanging unnoticed above his head.
Apparently Athrun was farther gone into his exhaustion throes than even he was aware, because he missed that warning flag. "No, no, no, don't get me wrong. I mean, obviously, theres a limit... I only scanned through the first few pages... okay, the first dozen... twenty, fine, whatever. There were some very complimentary items in lace and silk, and red is both our color, righ... OUCH, what the hell was that for? OUCH! Damn it! OUCH! Stop that, it hurts... OUCH!" his sentence had become jumbled with exclaimations of pain, as her fists relentlessly pummled the top of his head, with a few judiciously delievered seated kicks to his side for flavor. Even so, he could not help but smile... he'd been right, he could make her blush again... just as red as the first time too. As things ended up, both of them found themselves glad that Athrun managed to momentarily escape her furiously embarassed and outraged attack long enough to lock the doors leading into the viewing room... some things just weren't for public viewing, especially given the delicate situation at hand. But that was not to say that either of them regretted it, in the slightest. The day itself seemed to get brighter, the sun shining down on the renewed Nation of Orb with a smile that grew bigger by the moment.
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The same sun shone down on other people, people who were just as careworn and weary as the Representative of Orb and her husband, but not nearly as cheerful. It really wasn't the happiest of times for the five people gathered high up the western slope of the large central volcano, Hameya itself, that sprouted from the center of the main Orb island. In fact, while funerals were never happy events, the two farewell ceremonies being conducted that day were especially grave, given that they represented the loss of two fifths of TEMPEST, the loss of two men who'd gladly walked into harms way time and again to preserve the ideals of peace, until the reaper had finally come calling, tired of being denied his due. James was in the casket, the lid closed over his corpse, which was hardly intact enough for a final look from the mourners, none of whom wished to look upon the ruined mess that James's head had been turned into by Asmodeus's bullets. James was dressed in the full dress uniform of the AFAR (Atlantic Federation Army Rangers), in whose ranks he had been a Captain until the end of the previous war, when he'd left to join TEMPEST with Alkire. His chest would have been sparkling with medals, if any light had been able to penetrate the simple hardwood coffin to glint off them. His beloved .50 caliber machine gun and twin auto-pistols were lying in the coffin with him, the weapons of an honored warrior being sent into the lands of reverence with him. An Orb flag was folded over the foot of the coffin, while an Atlantic Federation flag covered the middle portion, with a picture of James himself resting at the head of the coffin.
Alkire, Victor and Raine had taken turns digging the grave with utility shovels appropriated from an Orb Military Engineering depot that morning. Ysak and Katie were not allowed to help out, though Alkire had promised Katie she could help with the actual burying itself. In truth, Ysak felt uncomfortable being included in the funeral ceremonies at all, he could not help but feel like a total outsider, intruding on a sacred ritual. If Katie's hand had not remained around his waist, he probably would have either sneaked off or more likely fled running, but she was holding him... holding him and quivering in such sadness and distress that he could not dream of doing anything more than stand there and support her through this time of crisis. He'd known both men not nearly as well as he'd have liked to, looking back on it. Surprisingly, he found that he'd really gotten along better with Vladimir than with the rather jocular and too open James. It was disturbing in a way, that he found himself identifying with a confessed mass murderer and terrorist over a professional soldier, but he could not deny that it was the passing of Vladimir that was tugging hardest on his heart strings.
Vladimir was not in a coffin. His will had specified that he did not feel worthy of the honor of a military burial. He'd demanded that he be cremated and the ashes buried deep in a sealed container where they could not even begin to contaminate the environment further with their touch. It had caused many a frown when that part of the will had been read out loud, as Vladimir had not spared himself even the slightest of criticisms... Ysak had been startled by the depths of self loathing and embittered hatred recorded in the dry prose of the will, obviously written sloppily by hand at least a decade ago, with more recent additions in a far more precise style, owing to the steadiness of his artificial limbs. Truly, though most Coordinators would have gladly shot him on sight if they had realized who he was, the person who hated Andre Forkav the most was himself... a man who had willingly drained away large portions of his own humanity becoming a consumate killer for an organization that ended up betraying him and leaving him with absolutely nothing... no life, no children, no future, no happiness or satisfaction. Parts of the will had read like the confessions of a fanatical self flagellant, determined to scourge his sins from his soul with the fiery whips of his own sorrow and regret. Others were more lucid and less cataclysmic, by and large these were the sections written in the precise style denoting recent additions... plainly Vladimir had come a long way towards accepting himself and his past since he'd first written his will... these sections contained explicit instructions on what to do with Vladimir's worldly possessions.
His liquor supply, ten vintage forty ounce glass bottles of vodka, distilled before George Glen had been born and easily worth thousands of dollars each, he'd given to James, of course unable to foresee that their deaths would coincide. Alkire had kept half the wish, with five bottles back at the Orb Palace and the other five sitting in a cooler nearby, waiting for their destiny to be acted out presently. His modest monetary holdings, saved up from what he'd earned working for Blue Cosmos plus some invested money, he'd turned over to Alkire, to use as additional funding for the fight against Blue Cosmos. To Victor was given a small black notebook, again handwritten. Victor had not shared what the book contained, but Ysak's sharp eyes had detected a faint etching on the front cover of the book that read "Tricks of the Trade". His silenced pistol was gifted to Raine. That left only three items... well, four technically. Two of them were weapons, one was his artificial left arm and the other was a small plain box about the size of the palm of Ysak's hand. Of the two garrotes,Vlad had wanted the one with metal handles and diamond dust coated wire... the modernized expression of the ancient assassin tool... to be buried with him, inside the small steel urn. Fitting it inside had been a chore, but eventually they'd managed to wedge the two handles and accompanying wire into the foot high by six inches wide urn.
The other garrote, the one with oiled dark hardwood handles and an oiled woven silk string, was Vladimir's gift to Ysak. Ysak felt the oddly light and small mass of the assassination weapon bump against his chest with every breath he took... the weapon folded together tightly enough to fit inside his interior coat pocket with barely a bulge. He wasn't quite sure what to make of the donation... whether he should be awed or frightened at the idea that Andre Forkav had willed him one of his favorite death dealing tools. He wasn't sure if he should be insulted or honored... after looking at Katie, who tightly held the small box that was her gift in her free hand even as tears coursed freely down her face next to him and decided that he knew the answer to that. Vladimir had been who he was... an assassin, a murderer, a terrorist and a bogeyman... and perhaps the most dedicated, gentle and self-sacrificing man Ysak had never gotten the chance to know well enough. He brought his free hand up and patted his pocket, touching the weapon again. "Time for being an assassin... time for being a soldier... time for being a man." he whispered, finding his own eyes unaccountably blurry.
Vlad's left arm was to be donated to whatever medical research hospital or group would take it, hopefully it would become the prototype for a whole new generation of useful prosthetics, though that would not likely occur for some time, as the arms were highly experimental top secret technology of Blue Cosmos... they didn't exactly come with instructions or end user certificates, which would delay their acceptance by the public authorites. His right arm had been taken by Ledonir Kisaka from the battleground and given to Andrew Waltfeld. Alkire had considered asking for it back, but had reconsidered. What Kisaka said was true... Vlad would not have wanted the arm to go to waste... donating one to medicine would be enough, the other would serve better uses elsewhere. Assuming Waltfeld had the guts to accept the responsibility and the challenge Vladimir had given him inherent to the arm. Privately, Alkire had no doubt that the Desert Tiger would be man enough to step up to the plate... it was only a matter of time.
Finally, the graves were dug... the long and deep rectangular hole for James's coffin and the equally deep but far smaller pit for Vladimir's urn. Both gravesites were well sited, with Vladimir's urn going to rest under the spreading branches of a ancient tropical tree, well hidden in the shadows from any casual passerby, while James's coffin was buried facing outwards towards the ocean that extended to the horizon like a infinite plain of silver glory in the mid afternoon sun. The coffin was gently lowered into place, again unassisted by Ysak or Katie, who'd both moved forward to help, only to be thoroughly stopped by icy stares from the three tempest members. Katie and Ysak were family, but there was family and then there was teammates. Raine took the urn by herself and slowly dropped it into the pit on a line, before letting the line drop into the pit afterwards. Finally, the three remaining members of TEMPEST took several steps back and total silence descended upon the mountainside grove. The silence stretched for five minutes... ten minutes... fifteen minutes. Ysak did his best not to fidget as the people around him made their last, silent and personal goodbyes to the adopted family members and brothers in arms they'd lost.
Alkire was the first to speak, as usual. "Today, we stand here in sorrow, staring into a storm sadly diminished before its path could be completely followed. We were five, five of the best who ever walked this Earth, this we can all say without false modesty or hubris. Now we are three, still among the best, and now we are even further empowered. We've lost two brothers... two friends... two uncles... two men, men who gave their all for the principles they believed in, fighting to the last breath to preserve their honor and accomplish the goals they set before themselves. There is no higher dream to pursue, no greater accolade to bestow upon them than the simple acknowledgement that they willingly made the sacrifice all of us secretly fear and hope we will never have to make." Alkire paused to wipe away a glimmer of moisture in the corner of his eye. "However, neither James nor Vlad would want us to spend overmuch time standing here mourning their passing, since they died doing what they believed in. The TEMPEST has quieted... but it will rage again anew, fiercer and more powerful than ever before." he stepped back and saluted both grave sites before stepping over to pick up a shovel and wait patiently.
"I'm not nearly as eloquent as Herr Major." Victor added quietly. One hand played idly with the hilt of his curved saber as he stepped forward to stand at the very edge of Jame's grave. "James was always the one who brightened my day the most, the one who kept me sane when insanity raged around me. He was my battle-partner and my trusted back up... I... I cannot praise higher than that. I will miss you, James... may you find what you arelooking for in the beyond." Victor drew his sword with the sound of slicing air and slipped it through an elegant flourish before saluting with the blade. Keeping it unsheathed, he walked over to Vlad's pit. "Vladimir was... Vladimir. Between the two of us, I know not of any more devious pair of villians you'd ever have the misfortune to trail through an ambush zone. We all had history with Vlad... history good and history bad. Sometimes he seemed like every part of me that I was missing on the field of battle, smart when I was dumb, perceptive when I was blind, calm when I was angry... for that reason, amongst many others, I will always miss him. Good bye, Vlad." Victor saluted with his sword again before sheathing it and picking up a shovel next to Alkire.
"I was never as close as I should have been to Vlad or to James." Raine admitted. "I saw one as a sort of peculiar half-relation and the other as a childishly amusing but ever constant younger sibling. Looking back at things now, there's so much more to them that I never bothered to explore and now I'll never have that chance... that's what saddens me most. I don't need to say what they meant to me as soldiers and fellow members of TEMPEST... everyone here already knows about that. My family was lost to me when I was young, and they replaced it in ways I'm only now beginning to fully appreciate. Thank you both, I'll always remember you." Raine was her typically to the point and concise self, though Ysak could easily see there was a lot being left unsaid, a lot going through her head that no one else was ever likely to hear. But that was her business, not his. Katie moved next, dragging Ysak along with her for the first few paces before his mind caught up to his body and he remembered how to walk.
"They were my uncles... my surrogate family, best friends to my older sister Raine. They were the people I looked up to, the people I trusted to protect me when I was scared, to guide me when I was lost, to cheer me when I was sad. They... they... they are... my family. They... died... died so that we all may have a chance to live in a world where deaths like theirs are the anomaly rather than the norm. I'll never forget them, never forget what they've done for me and the people I care about! Thank you... thank you both so much, Uncle James, Uncle Vlad!" Katie gasped, at times overcome by her tears. Thank You! The beepcall was so loud Ysak felt like his head was going to split. After he opened his eyes he had unknowingly shut in pain to look at Katie questioningly, he saw how tired she looked, and the very surprised and shocked expressions on the faces of Alkire, Raine and Victor, all of whom were looking at Katie. "Heh... that took more than I thought it would." she whispered, almost fully supported by his arm as she swayed, suddenly exhausted by the mental effort of beepcalling three Stumps, even Stumps whos minds she was intimately familiar with. "Worth it though."
"Katie..." Ysak trailed off, concern warring with his own surprise. Say something. Her voice appeared in his head again, this time much quieter. "What?" he asked. Say something for Vlad and James. Please. For me. "Uh, I'll give it a try... I don't have much experience in euologies though." As if any of us do. Katie reminded him. Ysak swallowed and cleared his throat. Alkire, Raine and Victor were looking at him expectantly, correctly deducing that the one sided whispered conversation between Ysak and Katie had something to do with their parting ceremony. "I... I didn't know either James or Vlad very well. I hardly knew them at all, to be truthful. I... I don't even know where they were born, where they grew up, if they have any family... all I ever saw of them was their business side, the side that carried death to their enemies and hope to their allies. Despite that, both of them... their deaths... they... they really... mean a lot to me. I feel... feel like I've lost something... something I barely knew I had until it was gone." Ysak stumbled over his own train of thought and paused for a moment. "I suppose they were... no, they were, there is no suppose. They were friends of mine... are friends of mine. We all share the same dream... a world without this stupid, senseless, destructive and needless war. Though I am a Coordinator, once one of their enemies, I feel as close to them because of our dream as I do to my own family. Huh... never would have thought..." Ysak trailed off, a contemplative look on his face. After it became apparent that he wasn't going to say any more, Alkire stepped forward again, handing a glass bottle of vodka to each person present.
"Vlad wanted to give these drinks to James. James can no longer drink them, Vlad could not have foreseen that. So instead of letting them go to waste, I have set some aside to keep for special occasions, so we can raise a special toast to comrades lost in the future. Here and now, I propose exactly that. A toast, to lost comrades." Alkire cradled his shovel in the crook of his arm as he used his hands to twist open the bottle's sealed cap. He held the bottle in front of his face for a moment, eyes staring unseeing through the cystal clear liquid inside before he tossed back his head and took a deep swig. He then turned the bottle upside down and let its contents drain out onto the flag bedraped coffin. "Drink up, my lost comrade." Alkire said, his voice slightly hoarse from the burning impact of the extremely fine aged hard liquor. Victor stepped up next and repeated the toast, also letting several thousand dollars worth of limited edition seventy three year old vodka pour into the grave, to splatter off the coffin before soaking into the thirsty earth. Raine also drank her swig, though she nearly choked on the fiery liquid, it being far stronger than what she customarily drank. Katie and Ysak looked at the bottles in their hands and then over at Alkire. "Normally, I don't encourage underage drinking." He told them. "But this is an exception. You don't have to keep it down for long... just until we cover the graves."
Whatever. Never really tried vodka before. Katie commented, her voice slightly drowsy as the continuing usage of her Newtype powers began to weary her out more and more... intentionally, Ysak suspected, so she wouldn't have to worry about her emotions keeping her awake. "I should hope not. Its not the most girlish of drinks." he replied, hopefully keeping the fact that he'd never drunk it either locked down deep in his mind out of her sight. On three then? She asked, a slight smile on her lips telling him he was unsuccessful in his subterfuge. "On three... two... one." Ysak twisted his bottle open in concert with Katie. Like the TEMPEST members before him, Ysak held the opened bottle in front of his face and contemplated the transparent, watery looking liquid. Water it may have looked like, but the fumes coming from the surface were strong enough to make his eyes burn. I know I'm going to regret this. He groused mentally before steeling himself and looking over at Katie, who was similarly a bit overwhelmed at the potency of the drink.
"To lost comrades." they said in unison, taking rather deeper swigs than they had intended. Ysak didn't know what Katie felt, but to him the aged liquor didn't have any taste at all... no flavor, just an staggeringly volcanic fiery kick to the back of his throat and a feeling like molten steel trickling down into his stomach as his admittedly virgin throat took a double shot of roughly 97 proof alcohol. He doubled over, gasping, just barely able to remember to turn the bottle over to empty its contents into the grave, Katie on her knees beside him doing similarly. They both croaked something that might have been "drink up" but probably wasn't and then wobbled away from the grave, supporting each other by the barest of margins. The sound of shovels scraping at dirt came from behind him as Alkire, Raine and Victor buried the other two members of TEMPEST, faces grim once more as they completed their impromptu funeral ceremony... a practice they were getting rather too good at for their own liking, considering this was the second such ceremony they had put together.
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Much as the sun shone down uniformly on different people, so too did the act of digging lend a similarity between the actions of two disparate and widely seperated groups of people. At the same time that Alkire, Victor and Raine were burying two lost comrades, a quarter of the way around the world to the East, a massive excavation project was just drawing to a close. Where the base formerly known as JIHAD had once stood, ensconsed within three mountain peaks and presiding over several tens of square miles of mountainous jungle territory, now there were only ruins, the mountains that concealed the workings of the base blasted and destroyed by the avenging might of the Archangel. That had been some weeks and days ago, but still parts of the mountains leaked smoke or gently collpased under their own gradually weakening structure. Three days after the base was destroyed, the first search and rescue teams had arrived on scene, though there had been precious little to search and even less to rescue... weapons designed to be fired thousands of kilometers against hardened space warships were only too effective against stone and the reinforced metals the base was constructed of. Soon after the initial teams scouted the area and determined the base to be a near total loss, a huge contingent of miners and engineers was flown in, along with several companies of mobile suits and reinforcing infantry to serve as guards as the remains of the base were searched and shifted through for technological salvage.
The residential and factory mountains had been the hardest hit by the weapons of the Archangel, and there was not much to find there... all the most top secret facilities and projects were located in the sub levels, all of which were buried under thousands of tons of collapsed base and mountain. Efforts were initially made to try and blast through the rubble and when those efforts failed, specialty tunneling lasers were brought in and used to begin boring a new tunnel into the lower levels. However, soon after the tunneling lasers were first employed, all efforts to further excavate into the depths of the residential mountain were forced to cease because the workers and guards refused to enter the mountain. Solid, dependable and couragous men shared dark glances and muted whispers... there was talk of ghosts and monsters haunting the place, ghouls which scratched with bony fingers at the stones above their heads, trying to claw their way through to the people above. Supervisors scoffed at the rumors until a special team was at length sent in with ground penetrating radar and sonic imaging equipment, as well as sound recorders to prove to the workers that there were no spaces between the walls or ghouls scratching at the stones. When the crew came back out, they were white as sheets, shivering with terror and missing one of their number.
When the data they recovered was looked at by the supervisors and called in to their supervisors, all work was immediately halted and explosives set, sealing off the tunneling lasers and whatever they were digging towards under hundreds more tons of debris. What the radar and sonic imaging equipment had revealed was a huge network of tunnels and partially collapsed passages that honeycombed the area of the mountain the base had been built into, the result of some parts of the base being built stronger than others, creating a veritable warren or labyrinth. Interesting as this discovery was, it meant nothing until you listened to the sound recordings... recordings which clearly, if faintly, recorded the sound of something... animal... human... or neither... moaning in either agony or hatred... a noise which came from nowhere, its source indirect to even the precision equipment the team carried... but undeniably not from their side of the walls. There had also been barely audible scratching noises and even visible vibrations in the walls recorded by the video camera... probably just the noise of the base ruins settling under the weight of the mountain... but the scratchings got louder the longer the team had stayed in one place... and there was always the moaning to consider.
The member of the team who did not come back had seperated himself from the group for a moment, going off to measure a wall that was vibrating more strongly than any other they had encountered thus far. The sound of scratching coming from this wall was almost to the point where you could imagine some sort of slightly yielding but still strong object being dragged along the stone over and over again in an endless monotonous repetition. The other team members had all been attending to their own readings, their helmet cameras turned away. The cleared space they were working in was brightly lit... but it didn't matter because there was the sound of splitting stone, a hideous yelp and a horrendous scream and then a cacophony of noise as part of the roof collapsed and cut the size of the room the team was in in half... forever burying one man beneath the mountain. But then they had thought about the scream... it sounded more like terror or horror then surprised or profane, as one might expect from an experienced spelunker who saw an unsafe wall about to collapse... and they also thought about the noise that had preceeded the scream... it sounded like the cry of a hunting beast, the warble a victorious predator would make when leaping upon prey. All video and audio recordings taken of the tunnel were sealed and quickly flown away from the site, never to be seen by any man who had been there ever again.
Slightly shaken and wondering what sort of cursed place they had been assigned to excavate now, the crews had turned their attention to the remains of the factory mountain. Because of the volatile nature of most industrial sites, and especially ones that produced mobile suits, there was very little left but scorch marks and blast melted wreckage. What few parts of Strike Crusaders or other, as yet unnamed or constructed prototype units as were discovered were rapidly boxed up and shipped away by teams of men monitored by tense, shifty eyed supervisors, while large groups of other rough looking men, who'd been brought in after the episode at the residential mountain as additional guard forces kept even the workers who'd discovered the materials well away, pointing assault rifles at them and yelling profanely until they retreated, shaking their heads at the foolishness of the security precautions... what good was the junk they were finding anyway? Why did it matter if they looked at it? But apparently it did matter... matter a lot. One inquisitive worker got his jaw broken and a bullet put through his shoulder for his troubles when he lifted the corner of a drapery that had been place over the severed arm of a mobile suit that he himself had discovered, desiring a better look at the lines of the uniquely formed arm. After that, the workers were almost afraid to call away discoveries, fearing they'd be harmed in the guard's zealotry to perserve whatever secrets this base harbored.
With working morale reaching a fevered... as in diseased... level, all attention was turned to the storage mountain. Of the three primary base locations, it had been least affected by the destruction visited upon it by the Archangel, largely because it was basically just a very large warhouse structure, without much in the way of internal structures besides extremely solidly reinforced floors and ceilings. Workers who were first inside the cavernous spaces inside the mountain were awed by two things... one was the relative intactness of the structure, with emergency generators still operating and even some elevators working un-impeded. The other was the nearly complete loss of anything and everything that had been stored within the mountain. Billions of dollars of raw material had gone up in smoke and ash, or else been melted into the congealed lake of mixed metals that filled the bottom two layers of the mountain. Almost predictably to the hard worker excavators, their supervisors directed them towards focusing their efforts on the lower levels of the facility. Alert for any more wall scratchers or moaners, guarded by dozens of heavily armed men, workers slowly cleared their way through the fragments and ruins that had once been huge stacks of various types of metal or finished parts. The lower into the mountain they ventured, the hotter it became, until it got to the point where huge fans had to be set up to move air around to cool the men as they worked.
Once the work parties reached the top of the congealed metal lake, absestos suits were required for any person spending more than casual time in the proximity of the work sites, and workers were only able to work two hour shifts before they had to be rotated out to rest and recuperate for eight or more hours. Progress was slow because of this, despite the increasingly frenzied directives of the supervisors, spurred on by their bosses, and them by theirs and them by Cervantes himself. There was still a chance that the prize of prizes was intact, buried whole and hopefully undamaged in its maximum security lockers at the very roots of the mountain, safe even from prolonged orbital or strategic nuclear barrages. With agonizing slowness over the course of the next several days, the congealed metal was reheated to molten temperatures and then siphoned away, ejected from the mountain to form a huge fan shaped spoil field that marked the entrance to the storage mountain like a giant arrowhead fused to the stone of the mountain. At long last, after three days of gruelling, non stop shift labor, gargantuan hardened titanium-steel blast doors were revealed, their outer surface pocked and warped slightly by the heat of the molten metals that had inundated it, but the gate was still structurally intact and inviolate. Seeing this extremely good sign, the Blue Cosmos supervisors set the EA assigned engineers to clearing away a path away from the doors to the surface, and to constructing a door on the surface big enough to fit a space warship through. They refused to explain why they wanted such a thing, but they were resolute in their demands, and they had the authority to back it up.
With the EA soldiers working in the upper levels and on the surface, it fell to specially picked and trained Blue Cosmos experts to enter the mobile suit vault. The door mechanisms still worked, with only a little repair work needed before the two three hundred ton doors slowly levered apart and receeded into the floor to allow the humans access into one of the most secret places in all of Blue Cosmos. At times in the past this hallowed ground had been used to stage and store the nuclear missile that was fired at Junius Seven, before it was smuggled into space, as well as holding the three GAT series Gundams after they were constructed but before their BCPU pilots were grown to wield them. The disk that contained the schematics of the Freedom, the Justice and most importantly the N-Jammer Canceler, was enshrined in a safe in one wall of the vault, the safe had a clear front so its prize could be viewed without having to compromise security. Other prizes included the gun that fired the bullets that killed George Glen as well as the bullets themselves and some of the first Blue Cosmos flags. A computer bank which contained the complete schematic details of every mobile suit Blue Cosmos had ever designed or constructed was shoved up against the opposite wall, along with another bank of computers which housed the Blue Cosmos main data system, next to a rack of scale models of the same mobile suits that the computer could show you how to build. The rack contained more than twenty models, only half of which had been fully built or been taken past the prototype stages. The Strike Dagger, Strike Crusader, Raider, Forbidden, Calamity, Bane, Merciless, Fury, Purifier... each lined up next to each other like dolls, all still menacing despite that. The final remaining model was unnessecary... because the mobile suit it had been built to model was contained within the vault at that very time.
This mobile suit was called the Judgement. Currently it was in its pre-final construction phase, divided into three fully constructed but as yet unincorporated parts that would be combined into the finished machine. The reason for this awkward form of construction was the sheer bulk of the mobile suit... if stood upright, each section of the Judgement would be taller than the Merciless... indeed, the machine might be better described as a single person walking battleship, not a mobile suit. Much as the three GAT-Super model mobile suits... the Bane, Fury and Merciless... had been designed to put the EA ahead of the Coordinators in both terms of technological power and piloting skill, the GAT-Ultra series, the Judgement, was designed to be a superweapon... something a bit like the GENESIS Gamma Ray laser, but less vulnerable and far more precise. And far cheaper, though that wasn't precisely the concern. Combining many of the technological advances incorporated into the GAT-super series, but all rolled into one juggernaut of annihilation, the Judgement was the crowning glory of the new Blue Cosmos vision... a walking, fighting embodiement of death and racial superiority that would lead the crusade to wipe out the Coordinators once and for all. Mounting dozens of weapons, some of such size that they were usually only found on battleships like the ill fated Dominion, the Judgement was the Natural answer to the Coordinator concept of the mobile suit... bigger, tougher and more powerful than anything the Coordinators could come up with, if somewhat lacking in terms of speed and maneuverability.
The supervisors wasted no time in calling in their discovery... just about the same time as Purgatory Day was being broadcast live to the world in all its terrible glory. Because of this unfortunate coincidence, Cervantes and Asmodeus did not get the good news until they were about to land in Panama. This tremendous stroke of good luck had them both smiling and nodding, joking together much like they had back when they were close friends, before they had started this most current war. Cervantes was quick to congratulate the excavation supervisors, and even quicker to order that the Judgement be fully uncovered and shipped piecemeal to Panama under the heaviest of security as soon as possible... the sooner the better. His second call went out into the Blue Cosmos leadership of the Panama base, which included several of the Generals and Admirals responsible for the base itself, requesting... in a demanding sort of way... the largest mobile suit hanger on the base as well as slot on the ever busy Porta Panama mass driver launch schedule.
Cervantes did not intend to waste the Judgement on Earth... he'd take it straight to the PLANTS and use it like a sledgehammer to crack them into pieces until there were no pieces left. Cervantes's uplifted spirits and good mood lasted exactly one quarter second after he entered the terminal building where he would find his ground transportation to his quarters in Panama. There was more than just his driver waiting for him... Hellhounds recently disembarked from their carrier jets stood around in small groups, talking in hushed voices. But the thing that stopped him short in his tracks and turned his smile into a frown... was the sight of Sai and Vanai, bandaged and obviously still in some pain, standing under a banner that read "Isolation is the only way to prosper", emblazoned with the Blue Cosmos logo. His face colored with fury... he knew a political banner when he saw one, but he hadn't authorized any banners like that... what was Isolation anyway? And why was his son in law and daughter standing beneath it, backed by a contingent of Hellhounds, staring at him... him of all people... with undisguised distaste and annoyance? And why did the fine print of the banner read "The new Blue Cosmos endorses a peaceful solution to problems over physical force, bringing you a bluer and purer world one word at a time."!? As far as Cervantes was concerned, there was only one Blue Cosmos, no new or old about it... HIS Blue Cosmos, which most certainly didn't seek a peaceful solution to their problem... unless you counted the stillness of the death of all Coordinators as peaceful.
"Ahh, Cervantes... we've been waiting for you." Sai said, his voice calm and quite self assured. "We have issues we need to address with you. Concerning your retirement from the stage of history. Blue Cosmos no longer needs a man like you to lead it to destruction. I'm sorry sir... but you had your chance. Now it's my turn to do it the right way."