Disclaimer: No, I don't own GS/GSD, but it was fun trying to mess around with it anyway.R&R&R.

Chapter 27

The next day, the PLANT embassy in ORB was a beehive of activity. In the midst of all the madness, Athrun sat still, what he had prepared to say already burned into his retina after countless rehearsals on his own part. Kira who had flown in the night before was calmly sipping a glass of water, Tori silently standing on his shoulder. He knew Kira controlled the jetlag by not saying anything at all to preserve his energy. His violet eyes were thinly concealing a very disturbing force, and Athrun knew he was desperate too.

He gazed at a cameraman wheeling in the main camera to be used for the official statement he was about to issue. Somebody was barking orders and saying something he couldn't hear. He didn't bother listening out for it anyway.

Lacus was allowing a make-up artist to brush her long hair in the corner. She had flown in with Kira too to give them both support and to step in and control the situation if it was necessary. But they all knew there wasn't much that she could do if they weren't careful enough and messed up too much. Everything depended on what they would say now, if anyone of them slipped,it would beover.PLANT would recall Athrun from ORB, and there would be more investigations until he could be proven innocent. But they weren't unprepared,desperateness made Kira and Athrun unpredicatable, and that was going to be their trump card tonight.

Then the signals went on, and he moved swiftly to the desk and sat down, adjusting the microphone dangling fro the ceiling to aid the speech he was about to make. Kira waited at the side, looking out for the signal and the cue the crew would give.

The director was giving him a cue, and held up three fingers. As he put down each one until the light in the camera winked at him, Athrun took in a deep breath, looked directly at the cameras and said, "I am Athrun Zala, Chairman of PLANT's ETERNITY."

He continued smoothly, doling whatever he was meant to say. PLANT had approved of his statement, they supported him as always, and he suspected some of it had to do with Lacus' persuasion skills, so he trotted out on everything like he was supposed to.

"On the fifth of September about two weeks ago, I trained with the ZAFT and ORB troops in the combined bilateral military exercise with Cagalli Yula Atha, Chairman of ORB's government and Supreme Commander of ORB.

At six-thirty in the evening, we went to a beach where she had offered to treat us with dinner she had brought along. As reports have said, there was nothing in the food that made it possible for me to control her will or make her drowsy. Chairman Atha has already declared she ate nothing that night.

While I stayed near the cliffs to rest, she went into the sea. I heard a sound somewhere around the area and was wary. I called to the chairman to return since I did not feel the sound belonged in the area even though I could not recognise it myself.

A few minutes later, Chairman Atha was moving out of the sea and towards me when the distance-bomb blew and injured both of us."

Staring steadily at the screen, Athrun didn't bother mentioning that he had been worse injured than Cagalli, knowing that that would only arouse suspicion since it would look like he was trying to prove he was innocent by showing he had been worse off in the accident. People always assumed the opposite,and he knew that. He would use this to his advantage as much as he could.

That was his tactic. Tell the cold hard facts and avoid trying to show overtly that he was innocent. If people saw that he wasn't trying too hard to show he was innocent, they were more likely to believe he was innocent. It was ironic, but it history had shown more than once that the tactic worked like a charm.

Then Kira stepped into the line of the screen and spoke.When he did, his voice was clear and ringing through the room, and Athrun saw Lacus sit up straighter. Although her face was calm, her eyes were presenting worry and some hesitation.

"I am Kira Yamato, Head of Science Department of Engineering Science and Computer Technology in the University of ORB, soon to be ZAFT Commander in the combined ORB and ZAFT forces."

Kira had appeared to be sworn into ZAFT as a commander in the customary white uniform, and he had been in the limelight ever since, but he still shunned it. Athrun knew he didn't like the attention much, and frankly, Athrun understood the frustration they all went through at some time or another.

"I have evidence here that proves that the chairman of ETERNITY, Athrun Zala is innocent as he says."

The screen was diverted to a series of animated graphics Kira had prepared, even though he continued speaking and his voice was transferred over the system to act as a narration while millions over the world watched how the bomb had worked.

"What you see here is a simplified graphic example of a distance-bomb used commonly in the previous two wars, or as ZAFT and many of us nickname it, a near-far bomb. It functions as shown. If a soldier were to be standing a measured distance away from his enemy in a war with no close-range weapons to defeat his enemy, he could make use of a distance bomb to effectively kill his enemy."

"For instance," continued Kira confidently while the screen showed an animation of a soldier planting a device in the ground while an enemy was shown to be lurking nearby, "the soldier could plant the bomb first and stand on the exact location he planted it on, that is, the centre of the explosion-to-be."

"Then," he added on, "the soldier would press an activation button in his hand as shown, and the enemy in the range of the loci around the bomb would be hit while the soldier standing at the epicentre would be unscathed."

The animation showed what he had just narrated, and Athrun listened, nodding in agreement. Of course, neither of them mentioned the blinding light that would follow after the explosion since nobody except the bodyguards and doctors knew what had happened to Cagalli, and they had been sworn to silence, there just wasn't a need to mess the situation up further than it already was.

Then the screen switched back to him and Kira and Kira continued on, his voice calm and controlled but hi voice laced with the sort of sharpness that would make people sit up to listen to what he had to say.

"The question now most of us have on our minds is, did the ETERNITY chairman use the bomb we have just seen to try and kill Cagalli Yula Atha?"

Kira paused for effect as what he said whizzed through the minds of those around the world. Athrun glanced around secretly and saw that the crew were unconsciously mouthing the question to themselves.

Then Kira spoke again, and his voice was strong and firm. Lacus was staring at something beyond Kira, but her eyes weren't blank, they were sharp and very wise.

"I have evidence that he is indeed innocent as PLANT has declared. The distance-bombs commonly used by the Blue Cosmos soldiers in the First and the Second Bloody Valentine Wars all have one common trait.

They are made of metal with the gunpowder hidden inside and then coated with a wooden casing which was used to smuggle it out of factories once controlled by Blue Cosmos. The bomb itself was invented by the Blue Cosmos which knew the Natural soldiers could never win against Coordinator soldiers if they ere to battle at lose range."

He paused and lifted up a fit-sized lump of dark-coloured solid and said, "We have tested the remains of the bombs itself. The inner coating is unreactive and insoluble bauxite, or aluminium ore and the outer coating which is charred from the explosion, wood, which has been only partially burnt, due to the incomplete explosion of the bomb. If this distance-bomb had completely exploded, nothing would have been left at all, to erase evidence in the war which was the Blue Cosmos' aim.

This brings us back to the point that this bomb is a faulty dud which couldn't explode properly. This faultiness could have been truly an error of the factories, but it is common knowledge that Blue Cosmos never released any weapons that were tested to be faulty, for fear that evidence would be left behind for ZAFT and ORB to trace back to. Lord Djibril personally made sure all the weapon-producing factories never issued out bombs that would leave any trace of themselves behind to hide the fact that Blue Cosmos was still in existence.

"Now the question is, how would a faulty bomb Blue Cosmos produced land up in ORB's territory anyway?" Kira asked.

"During the second war, ORB had been invaded by ZAFT troops while some of its own troops were under Blue Cosmos' influence and used the weapons Blue Cosmos had given them to fight the ZAFT troops. " Athrun said, answering to the cue that Kira had thrown at him.

"And a hypothesis ORB's university came up with," said Kira, "was that the bomb at the very beach, which records have proven was subject to heavy fighting towards the end of the second war, was not a faulty bomb at first, simply because it was highly unlikely that Blue Cosmos would allow it to be released into the open as a faulty bomb that did not do its job properly.

Logically speaking, a bomb that might have been thrown into the sea and aimed at ZAFT's navy could have been used safely without anyone standing on it either, since it was far out in the sea where only the enemy, in this case ZAFT, was, but the troops which used it may have been killed by ZAFT troops stationed in the sky before they had a chance to activate it at all.

As for the inactivated bomb, two years of being in saltwater which contains sodium ions would have allowed aluminium oxide, which is the unreactive layer, to become reactive once more. This is because being under high pressure in the sea would allow the reactive sodium ions to displace aluminium ions from its once-stable oxide, and that's where sodium oxide, a soluble layer, would have melted away and allowed the gunpowder it held to react and explode on one side as this part of the bomb suggests."

And Kira held up the shell which was burnt only on one side and tapped it slightly. Millions all over the world watched eagerly as the part which remained intact leaked out useless gunpowder which had been wet.

"This brings us back to the fact that if a person were to try and kill another person, he wouldn't sue a faulty weapon which also left traces of it behind. Furthermore, the shell which is made of wood, has undergone a series of repeated tests in ORB's laboratories which have reconfirmed the first set of results we have receiver. Commonly used carbon-tests to place close estimates of artefacts, along with multiple radioactivity tests have dated the wood of the explosive to a tree about a hundred years old.

EA has issued a statement which proves Blue Cosmos had logged trees to produce weapons in a specified portion of the Amazon Rainforest in North America with trees averaging about a hundred-years old and older across the board.

However, EA has reconfirmed that Blue Cosmos only used wood and trees from this area that EA once allowed to use, and after the war, there have been no more attempts to log trees spanning a hundred-years old and older due to reforestation and preservation schemes set up across the forests. ZAFT has no logging businesses at all, and its trees span only from ten to eighty-nine years old as the maximum, while ORB's trees are under deforestation and prevention laws that state all trees as ORB's government property. Every tree in ORB has been accounted for. So the question is, how would a person recreate a bomb with a structure the same as those used six to four years ago with a hundred-year old tree's wood if all trees are accounted for?"

It was brilliant, Athrun thought. His friend was truly a genius in his own right, and he wouldbe indebted to Kira for the rest of his life.

The people around them were wide-eyed and shaking their heads in agreement, truly believing that he was innocent a Kira's simple logic clicked in and made sense thoroughly. It was almost unbelievable how a piece of half-exploded bomb could detract all the damning clues that seemed to point to him as the instigator of an attempted assassination.

"Moreover" Kira reinforced,, sure that he had succeeded in what he had set out to do, "The near-far bomb is designed to hurt people at a distance, and the person who might have wanted to kill someone wouldn't' have put himself at the point which would serve the most damage to himself and leave him in a two-day coma, would he now? If Chairman Zala had wanted to kill Chairman Atha, he wouldn't' have called her to him after hearing something that he felt was unsafe even though he couldn't identify what it was in the first place, would he? Chairman Zala is a coordinator with more acute senses than a Natural, and it would only be logical if he could hear the bomb activating while Chairman Atha, a Natural, would not be able to."

Everyone in the room was nodding vigorously and Athrun was sure people all over the world were doing the same too. Kira had used the trump card, saving the best pie of evidence for the last, and Athrun was sure that everything was as clear as black and white now. The cameras would probably stop winking and he would go back to Cagalli and tell her everything if she wasn't already listening to the news.

Then, Kira spoke up again, his voice suddenly bright but very sincere, a drastic change from the serious tone he had adopted just a few seconds ago.

"Lastly," he said, as firm as before, "I, not as a scientist and engineer, but as a human and Cagalli Yula Atha's twin brother, believe that a man who truly loves a girl would never attempt to make her cry, let alone try and kill her with a partially functioning bomb."

Then as millions all over the world, and the very crew in the room watching Kira speak rose up, stunned as the realisation of what Kira had hinted of hit them squarely, Athrun stood up next to Kira, who looked at him and smiled. Then looking away from the camera together, they walked from the set and away from the screen while Lacus smiled radiantly from the side.

As they walked confidently forward, the noise in the room growing from a dead silence to a deafening roar, Athrun looked at Kira and said, "Thank you."

But all his friend did was to shake his head and close his eyes briefly and then he said softly, "Go."