05: bleak gears of flesh.

Zechs grasped the Tallgeese's controls, curling his iron fingers around the ribbed rubber grips a few times to find the most comfortable position. Over his regiment communicator and hovering in formation behind him, 500 soldiers in Leos awaited his command.

He was waiting to command them, waiting for the first sight of the enemy fleet, the most well-funded rebel army on this colony, that would be guarding the otherwise-helpless carrier vessel that would be stocked with weapons and other supplies that would be en illegal route to the nearest colony satellite. He was waiting for the rain to fall, somewhere, in Moscow, in alien countries, waiting for a flood to break the barriers of sound and crash into him, waiting for an earthquake.

It never came, but the barest glinting tip of metal rounded over the meniscus of the satellite's structure, far off in the distance. Without that strange curvature of a planet, horizons were a difficult proposal out here in the void; there were only the slightest traces of mankind's long development on a world with surfaces, and ends.

"Hold," Zechs warned the more twitchy of his regiment, a large group of five squadrons bringing up the left wing of attack, the wing closest to the oncoming fleet. The limited-range radar of his Tallgeese had not even picked up the presence of battlecraft; only the giant carrier vessel, deceptively lumbering its frictionless way through the vacuum.

"Hold," Zechs warned as the enemy mobile suits became fully visible, strange deformed bodies of frozen men, lost men. Just a bit longer...

"Attack!" he finally screamed, when the first radar blip of approaching battlecraft meant the enemy equipment had a good chance of sensing their presence, "B Company, wing formation delta! I want C company running beta!" Zechs amended their previous formations when he got a good look at the preparations this fleet had made for an OZ attack- extensive. Too extensive, the paranoiac residency in his brain whispered. This is a huge mission right in front of OZ's eyes with no real stealth precautions and serious battle-ready troops of spacecraft, even some commandeered OZ technology... Zechs' cold, concentrated visage as he gunned through another two, three enemy spacecraft did not morph to express his thoughts, though they began running as wildly as the soldiers under his command.

"B company, back" -they aren't prepared- "in formation! Your" -they aren't expecting us- "second corner is slipping" -they wanted us to be here- "down! Too far down! FUCK!" Zechs was bellowing orders as he wove through lines and lines of enemy suits, dodging peacefully-swirling debris of the exploded fallen, gouged and misshapen exoskeletons of metal ripped from the rivets, ice-iron shards eager to rend his machine apart and peel it from around him, the sickly distended humanoid shells just before their explosions and the flapping tongues of fire they vomited just after with muffled popping, silent in the abyss, bones crackling, shrieking soldiers clutching their spacehelmets as the void seeped in through tiny cracks and slowly sucked off their skin, eyes boiling, tongues swelling, split corpses drifting lazily away from the rest of their bodyparts, the blood that poured from their gaping holes freeze-drying into parcels of dust that splattered Zechs' suit as he evaded enemy fire true to his lightning reputation. Space makes such a mockery of our matter, he wondered idly, blowing first the leg and then the cockpit off an enemy and ducking away from the resulting tiny firework of a bomb, dust to dust is an earthly cycle. Out here-

BOOM. Zechs' teeth rattled with the impact of two enemy mecha colliding with- no, ramming his, their gear-conquered arms wrapping around the waist of his Tallgeese and locking hands on either side, their pilots expelling themselves through escape vents and scrambling their boosters towards the carrier, unprotected. Imbeciles. "Captains Grecko and Rashbaum," he demanded over the com, and instantly the mentioned pilots flew towards him, "cover me."

With more booster effort than he preferred, Zechs spun Tallgeese and riddled the two kamikazes with bullets before firing his encumbered suit to the nearest large debris, the hip-joints and leg of a destroyed mecha. Grasping it with Tallgeese's hand like a crowbar, he wedged it under the arms of the suits attached to him and then whipped out his beam sabre, slashing through the offending mech-arms as close to his own suit as he could without damaging himself, cursing avidly when prying them from his machine took more time than he was comfortable donating to two large, shrapnel-coated bombs ticking down to self-destruct. "Grecko!" he snapped at the Captain currently firing on a small flight of four spacecraft barrelling towards them, "fuck that, get these goddamn things off me!" After another two or three levers, the mobile suit hands latched together at his front groaned and split, one losing its hold at the wrist where he had burned through the metal. Grecko yanked from the back while Zechs pushed his Tallgeese free of their grasp and, shouting to the Captain to clear the trajectory fast, hurled the conjoined bombs directly into the path of the four spacecraft, which did not scatter fast enough to escape the explosion and resulting oxygen-flux that spat droplets of molten metal through their shields and laced them all in a web of fire. "Back to squadron fronts!" and the summoned Captains dove into their respective frays.

Another mecha flew at him, gun-arms pounding out round after round, with no intention of evasive action even as he sliced it in twain with the sabre; and then another, weaponless, pilotless, that he simply batted into the floating graveyard of machines to explode. What the hell is going on? Zechs' mind hissed, Suicide missions are usually the last of accepted tactics... unless...

Unless they just wanted him dead, and Tallgeese destroyed.

Zechs ducked under a persistent flight of spacecraft, expertly weaving his way through a hail of fire between enemy troops as the five pilots doggedly pursued him, launching small ballistic missiles to which he sacrificed several of their Leos for cover, occasionally flipping over the lost soldiers to fire on the flight. When only two remained and had exhausted their supply of warheads, he spun Tallgeese in a complicated manoeuvre that left him light-headed in the wake of his suit's forces and stabbed through one of the craft's cockpits, slinging the husk of the plane into its single remaining partner, which sent them both careening away from him to continue the pyrotechnic display in that black perpetual sky. "Destroy them all," he growled to his regiment, annoyed with the hubris of this latest rebel plan, their sore error in believing even these copious amendments to their forces were enough to defeat him. "I want annihilation. Quarter only to those who surrender absolutely."

"Sir!" One of Zechs' Lieutenants shouted, "What about the vessel?"

"It's only a carrier- take out possible cannons and we'll deal with it after we've completely eliminated their battlecraft. We can't afford to waste any soldiers with these numbers."

Had Zechs not given that order, those copious amendments to the rebel forces would have killed him.

Violently they battled, and though the rebel spacecraft outnumbered his faction nearly 3 to 1, the Leos under his command quickly approached victory, mowing through the remaining mobile suits and fewer remaining battlecraft with minimal losses; less than 20 by his count, and almost certainly thanks to his skill. The vessel showed no signs of discharging space cannons, and it wasn't until the first few nodes on his warhead-weapons detector lit that Zechs noticed anything unusual.

"Lieutenant Otto, are you getting this reading?" he wondered if it were not just a mechanical malfunction.

"Yes, sir, but I can't see-"

And then there was static.

And then there was black.