30 Ways to Conquer Mars
#024 おやすみ
A.C. 197, August 12, 01:38:「Witching Hour」
Gundam Wing © SOTSU AGENCY - SUNRISE - ANB
This is a work of derivative Fanfiction. No claims are made towards the ownership of intellectual rights pertaining to the metaseries.
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Curfew commenced at twenty-two hundred hours, restricting all personnel to their quarters, save those security officers on patrol and a skeleton crew confined to the areas of their job responsibility.
The Expedition Commander had not seen fit to challenge his Chief of Security on such extreme measures. Paisley never meant to be a commander of anything except an army of clerks. The way he saw it, he was the expedition's whipping boy, and there may be some genuinely medieval tortures in his future if he couldn't get this murder thing quietly sorted by the time his next status report was due. At any rate, the effects were barely noticeable to the majority of the Marsprojekt's population of astroengineers and xenogeologists, whose benefits included godly and flexible work hours. Others, such as Doctor Teryl Rothery, were glad to trade off night-shift for the solitary holiday.
So far, all Terren Miller has achieved was antagonising the guiltily paranoid and pissing off Noin, which Zechs found amusing in its needlessness.
He had taken them off the roster, disguising it as an act of kindness, like he did with his insistence to personally escort her around after the attack in the gym. Noin fled into her room at eight-thirty p.m. If Terren seemed unsuspicious of Zechs' decision to follow suit and take an early night, it was because he had already received confirmation from the man sent to bug Zechs' room.
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Fifty-six.
At one thirty-eight in the morning, a man stared at the flawless ceiling in his grey, somewhat cluttered, room and counted out the time on his internal clock.
Fifty-eight.
He slipped quietly out of bed and fished out a standard issue utility belt by the sliver of light shining through his doorway. Watch the light. There, mid-way along its path, it becomes, briefly, no more than a thread, and widens again to fall across his boot.
Sixty. Time.
He pried the door open with a nail-file. The trick, as in all things, was in applying the perfect amount of leverage to cause it to roll back on its own mechanisms. That, and a piece of insulation stuck over the locking mechanism.
Zechs tore this off before moving on. He did not expect to return until curfew is lifted, better that no one discovers that he had rigged the lock.
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One thirty-six a.m., twenty-two seconds.
A door slid soundlessly open, spilling artificial light into a small, grey room. A woman laid in wait in her bed, curled up in a foetal position, appearing sound asleep to the world. Beneath the covers, her fingers flexed painfully around cold metal and regretted the rash fist-fight she had gotten into earlier. Scraped knuckles may not be a huge handicap, but she would have felt better knowing that she was in top condition, all the same.
Thirty-three.
The watch on her wrist pulsed with faint blue numerals, counting out the seconds through her thin blanket. She has not taken it off since arriving in Mars space. Her late boyfriend joked often about her obsession with time. She never told him why. Today was the hundredth day she has borne her latest name. This is significant to her, as she thinks day One-hundred-and-one may be the day she finally gets to use it.
Thirty-eight.
There were two men in her room. If she made this quick, she can still make her rendezvous. One was next to her now. She could feel his gaze burning into the exposed nape of her neck. She could feel him leaning down towards her, reaching out. She gritted her teeth and threw the covers back, shoving her trusty semi-automatic into his shadowed face. "Don't move."
"Hey, darling," the man backed away, murmuring in familiar soothing tones, "'s me."
She fumbled. Her jaw dropped. The recent days of normalcy had made her soft. It only took that one confused heartbeat for his companion to get behind her, and everything exploded in a starburst behind her eyes.
"You moron," the first man snarled, smacking her assailant across the face, "I told you not to do that!"
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One forty-two.
She was not there to greet him at the end of hallway A-25. He pressed on, as though not noticing. It would be more accurate to say that he transitioned seamlessly into Improvise Mode and took a turn that would take him to the hangers, instead of the deserted medical bay they were going to head for.
Clearly, things have not gone as planned. Two men were dead, though they had promised themselves there would be none. They had thought themselves on top of things, these hapless victims of hubris, and now all that was left to do was saving the situation they ought to have prevented. Part of him had to question if they had been deliberately shoddy in hopes of invoking these circumstances. He had not felt so alive and real since last Christmas.
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One fifty.
An explanation is in order. Roll back eighteen months, to the first days of the Earth Sphere Unified Nation. Fearing the influence Relena Peacecraft held over the world in the wake of the Eve War, the new government decided to bridle it by giving her a seat amongst them as the new Vice Foreign Minister, a paper-doll position if ever there was one, as she well knew. Her adoptive father, Victor Darlian, had held this position for most of her life. It had been the previous administration's means of keeping the ex-Sanq senator under their thumb; different verse, same song.
They should not have presumed that she had won the hearts of the world by being a pretty child or the long-lost Princess of a fairy-tale kingdom, although she was both these things too. Before they'd realised, the Mars Colony Initiative, also known unofficially as Queen Relena's Mars Terra-Formation Proposal, had won an unprecedented 84% approval rating throughout the Earth Sphere. To refuse the people on this would have been suicide. To refuse to bear ownership of the project would be giving the ex-Queen-of-the-World opportunity enough to unseat the entire parliament.
The Mars Colony Initiative encouraged the donation of weapons-grade nuclear, beam and artillery materials for the construction of thermal and atmospheric adjustment devices necessary to adapt the red planet's environment for human survival. In other words, Relena was forcing the new government to confiscate all weapons too large and dangerous to be easily disposed of and detonating them on Mars. The favourable changes they would cause in Mars' core temperature and atmosphere were merely a happy coincidence and bait for the masses.
Zechs had been proud, even with the flies in the butter. Collecting the world's supply of Weapons of Mass Destruction created a highly volatile target for any number of people from aspiring despots to black-market traffickers, though nothing, Lady Une had been sure, that he and Noin could not handle.
He could not fault her choice. There is no hope for back-up if anything should go wrong out here, eight days past the nearest Earth Sphere outpost at top speeds. Sending in her most lethal and, lets face it— disposable— agent was the right call.
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One fifty-nine.
Nothing unusual in the cockpit of the Aries Suit Donn had been found under. The Suit's exterior had been detailed for biohazard risk as soon as Security Chief Miller would allow it. Zechs dropped into the mechanic's pit to check the Aries' toes anyway.
Donn's death was still surreal. Admittedly, Zechs had not liked the bearish man, and while he regretted the mechanic's fate, he could not in good conscience say that he was sorry to be rid of him, but not like this.
He had hoped Mongolia, A.C. 194, would be the last time he's had to witness the results of being squished like an ant by a giant mechanical doll. He had to execute the pilot who did it, and Officer Bueller had welcomed the release. It would take a desperate man to do such a thing, and some sort of monster to walk away afterwards, unscathed.
Crouching over a bloody crevice between the floor plates, Zechs frowned. Something about the crime scene bothered him greatly. It was not just that someone had deliberately ground a man to a pulpy mess identifiable only by his unique ring and a chance printable finger, nor was it the silent threat that it could have easily been him or Noin laying in a jar in Med Bay A.
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Two eleven.
A grey dollhouse of deserted walkways and social areas danced across the grim man's spectacles, picking up the peculiar blue glow of refracted security footage. Terren cannot be blamed for suspecting Zechs and Noin, given the known facts. It was not beyond the realm of possibility for someone obsessed with Noin to hold a grudge against her boyfriend, Donnovan, and the first victim, Williams, the man responsible for the priority maintenance order that resulted in Noin's infamous space walk. A tenuous connection at best, still, it was the only commonality that could be discerned between him and the mutilated mechanic.
He was certain that Zechs Merquise was deeply involved. Zechs has every opportunity of fitting the criminal profile between his war record and traumatic childhood, despite everything on his Psychological Evaluation Papers. Faked psych reports have become harder to obtain with the new global emphasis on Pacifism, though not yet impossible, and certainly cannot be too difficult for someone as resourceful as OZ's Lightning Count.
Terren was concerned. The differences between the fates of the two victims seemed to indicate dramatic instabilities in Zechs' psyche, if indeed he had been the sole perpetrator. Someone who cuts a man's throat and dumps his bleeding corpse into an eighth of the ship's supply of potable water is a sociopath, whereas one who would wilfully reduce another man to mulch is indubitably a psychopath. It may be more plausible to assume that there were two killers.
The best-case scenario, in his mind, would involve the psychopath and the sociopath ridding him of each other before the night is out.
It had occurred to Terren several times, as he followed the tall blond's cat-like progress through empty halls, that Zechs may be following a conventional lone-star behavioural pattern and attempting to flush out the true culprits. He put it down to wishful thinking. The whole reason Terren was so fascinated by Zechs was because Zechs had rarely shown himself to be conventional. Why start now?
Besides, Terren Miller did not believe in best-case scenarios— or worst-, for that matter— He believed in the foreseeable fact. The fact is, Zechs Merquise had broken out of his room and was sweeping through the corridors in search of something. Whether he turns out to be the hunter or the predator appears to be seen.
Terren loaded a gun and watched.
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Two fourteen.
Jonathan Williams came into Zechs' attention nearly two months ago, and had been skilfully stalked ever since. The thing about murder, Terren had said, one is a tragedy, two begets conspiracy… He had been right, though not in the exact details.
Noin was the one who first pointed out the awkward boy, neither as young nor bright as he liked to pretend. She had been curious as to how and why a trivial noise complaint became a maintenance priority, and had hoped to harness those channels to make a few suggestions of her own. She found Engineer Williams.
More than a generic sycophant, Jonathan Williams was The Bootlicker. Every band of villains has at least one, tolerated by the head villains because most people become villains in order to be worshipped anyway. He is the man who joins up for the sake of belonging to the same wicked secret club as someone he admires or craves to become, then gives the game away by affecting the smug swagger of a man who has been permitted to share a room with a wicked, secret, club. Men like Williams can always be relied on to kiss and tell, if you knew what to listen for.
They were a hair's breadth away from discovering the ringleaders to his weapons-thieving plot when Williams was silenced. Noin feared that he had been executed and that the same men had butchered Donn either mistaking him for the proverbial Forces of Justice, or to send them a message. Although he agreed with her, Zechs could not shake the feeling that there was something else afoot.
It made little sense to bring attention to yourself with murder when you were basically trapped in a titanium alloy cage approximately eighty million kilometres away from Earth and any possibility of sustained freedom, unless you intended to seize control of the vessel. This would have made a reasonable plan, especially when you are going to need a fairly large ship to get away with the loot, except the Marsprojekt remained firmly in the hands of Terren Miller with no sign from anywhere whatsoever of a challenge.
So, if not to create mass hysteria in which to hijack the spacecraft, why dispose of a body where hundreds of people could instantly notice something was wrong by turning on a tap? For that matter, why crush a man with a Mobile Suit? There were easier, neater ways of disappearing bodies in space.
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Two thirteen.
They say that in the instant before you die, your life passes before your eyes and takes on a new clarity. It doesn't.
No, nothing so glorious as that. You remember just as much or little of yourself as you do when you're alive, avoid the same truths and invent the same lies, and that clarity isn't clarity at all, but a last ditch effort at finding some proof that you had lived and mattered. Dead men do not find deliverance, only selfishness.
When the man sitting in the dark had died, he had remembered places: Brussels, Mogadishu and Corsica, among the other backdrops that shaped his life. It had been a rather disappointing revelation, until he realised what he had to do.
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Two sixteen.
He would not leave her side, afraid, in the long silence, that she had been struck too hard and would require medical attention he and his men were not qualified to give.
"She's fine," his accomplice hissed fretfully. "Come on, anyone who leaves a fight with Greta standing on their own legs has got a thicker skull than I can crack."
The brooding man glared and threw him out of the med bay. It will be some time before he can bring himself to forgive his minion for hurting the princess.
"Make yourself useful, go find us a hidey-hole or something."
A third man, on look-out in the hall, scowled. "Wait, 'us'? You can't take her with you, if they find her missing in the morning, they'll start searching the ship."
"So you'd better find us a brilliant spot no-one'd think to look in, eh, Mason?"
Wesley did not understand what was going on with the woman in the bed. He had been assured that she would be onboard with the Cause when he'd helped the other two men slip into her room to explain the situation. He did not think exposing himself to such a risky expedition was a very clever thing to do, though considering the relationship between her and their de facto leader, Wesley could vaguely understand why he wanted to be the one to tell her.
The problem began when she apparently pulled a gun on him, frightening Mason into knocking her out. Granted this could all have been an unfortunate misunderstanding, tensions being high what with two of their own brutally murdered, Wesley was starting to suspect Sheldon of losing his marbles. He had not been right since her accident two months ago… wasn't it said that Williams had something to do with that?
Chief Miller was right, that woman was trouble.
Sheldon blamed it on Zechs Merquise, suggesting that their King had always been somewhat off-kilter, possibly due to his exposure to the ZERO system. Klein, the man who brought them all together, had decided it was time to introduce the Peacecraft to his army, and with a scoffing laugh, Prince Milliardo cut Williams down and chased Klein and Sheldon into the hanger, where they got separated and Sheldon somehow lost his ring-finger.
Everything the Lightning Count had ever done right, he said, gulping down Wesley's whiskey to drown out the agony of his missing digit, was because of his Lieutenant. She was the one with the ideals and the vision. Peacecraft would never have been able to create the world they wanted because it was Lucreza Noin's world all along, one that she had been manipulating the Peacecraft to achieve. They should have realised it from the start, but it was not too late to adapt their plans for him to her.
Come to think of it, he'd probably lost Wesley on the severed finger. Wesley's brother had been a computer scientist in the employ of the Romefeller Foundation. The ZERO system, as far as Wesley could understand, destroyed men by bombarding them with undiluted sanity, ripping apart their souls in the transformation of their minds from man to machine. There could be nothing sane about sawing off a man's finger, or stomping on someone in an eight-tonne Mobile Suit.
But Wesley followed directions and kept his mouth shut. Because if anyone had gone space-crazy, it was probably Sheldon. And when you're trapped on a quarantined ship with a man whom you suspect of having killed two men in cold blood and hacked off his own finger, you do as he tells you and pray for a clear shot at him before he blows anything up.
Two thirty-two.
Two things happened at once, three if you consider that his accomplices had been out of contact for the last six minutes or so, but the man hovering over Noin's bedside did not, so we shall count two in the order as discovered:
Firstly, she stirred with an involuntary, whimper that filled his heart with so much gladness that he thought he would burst.
It didn't, because a nickel-sized spot of cold metal against the back of his neck leeched all the warmth away.
"Raise your hands and step away," a deep voice instructed quietly.
He did neither.
"You haven't not come to rescue her, have you, Merquise."
"No," the man behind him admitted easily. "I'm just here to stop you."
Sheldon Donnovan spun around, grabbing for the gun to his head with a strangled cry. "You cold bastard! After all she's gone through with you, the least you could do is pretend to care!"
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