07: ghosts in a graveyard.
"C Quadrant clear, six of ours dead, twenty-three mobile suits by my count destroyed."
"E Quadrant clear, two corpses, sixteen Leos, and I think I found some chunks from at least three other bodies."
"I'm not particularly interested in that detail of information, thank you Captain Reginoff," Une commented dryly, eliciting a subaudible murmuring chuckle over the com.
"I've got something in G Quadrant."
"What is it, Lieutenant Freimann?"
"White metallic fragments that register as the same quality alloy in the Tallgeese."
A slight frown creased Une's brow. "What size fragments?"
"Large enough to be detected, but they appear to be splintered outer shell, not necessarily indicating critical damage to the Tallgeese."
"All cleared units move to G Quadrant for further inspection." Une shifted to manual control of her retrieval vessel, piloting it out of its peaceful orbit around the full explosion site and towards that hot zone, silently calculating the ramifications of a dead Zechs Merquise and developing loose contingency plans, the idle chatter of a strategic mind. After a few moments too many of com silence, she groused, "Report?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing here, Colonel."
"Nothing."
The chorus of negation did little for Une's growing trepidation, and the crease in her brow twisted with severity. "Other assigned quadrants, report?"
"A Quadrant, fifty-four mobile suits and counting, thirty-seven OZ dead and fifteen rebels, and so much debris I can't even see those beautiful stars. No sign of Tallgeese."
"B Quadrant clear," another officer stated as she followed Une's secondary order and made her way towards G, "Twenty mobile suits, thirteen OZ, seventy-one rebels, no Tallgeese."
"Damn," Une hissed under her breath.
"D Quadrant, fourty-six mobile suits, only one OZ, thank the heavens, and nineteen rebels. I'm still searching, but no Tallgeese yet."
"F Quadrant-"
"Anything indicating the presence of Tallgeese?" Une interrupted the full report, weary of unnecessary information and anxious for something certain.
"No, ma'am."
Une cursed again.
"H Quadrant clear, moving to G."
"Don't bother," the first officer of G declared, "G Quadrant clear."
"Where the hell is he?"
"I Quadrant, we've heard nothing from you. Report."
"I'm clear," a voice finally responded, "But this doesn't cover the whole remains of the satellite skeleton. Do you want-"
"All cleared units flank to I Quadrant and spread across the satellite," Une immediately ordered before the officer could finish his suggestion, "Alpha unit members take exterior structure, Beta unit through interior."
Six mobile suits began drifting into formation and slowly dropping into the satellite, only two remaining visible as they meandered around the twisted ironwork of its rended shell, and silence flooded all cockpits as the pilots searched.
"D Quadrant clear, moving to satellite exterior."
"F Quadrant clear, but ma'am..."
"What is it?" Une snapped, her eyes narrowing behind their glowing lenses.
"Tallgeese's left arm. Torn right off at the shoulder. May indicate critical damage."
In her heart of hearts, Une trembled, a sickened dread spreading through her abdomen like cold poison. Outwardly her eyes became slits, but that was all. Her voice was steady, and dangerous. "Nothing else?"
"No, ma'am."
"Bring it to me."
The officer obeyed, collecting the detached mechanical limb in her own extended hands and slowly gliding into Une's visibility, Tallgeese's lost appendage glinting in front of her suit like the offering of some maddened ritual sacrifice to an oblivious deity, clinical and forlorn. When it was within reach of Une's retrieval arms she snatched it up, cradling it as she passed it inside the womb of her spacecraft as though delicacy could preserve a hope that the missing pilot remained untouched, hidden himself somewhere to be discovered only by careful manoeuvring and gentle persuasion, the broken body of a child grown too strong to submit to his own mortal needs, this lost soldier who proved so precious to her General. Une realised with some self-disgust that she harboured almost maternal feelings for the faceless Lightning of a blonde man, only a man, who understood intimately the understated malice of this abyss that was so threatening in Une's peripheral thoughts to digest him.
Suddenly, amidst the chatter over her com that screeched to a stark, garbled hymn of assumed loss, Lady Une heard the first whisper of her second self, isolated as this she was. She heard her temples splitting and the frost she incubated around her heart creaking, groaning against the weight of the real desolation of Space, of humankind's frail reach, the seeping agony in Treize's face when she admitted they could not recover the body, when she completed the ritual to this constantly-aware deity of suffering.
There is only one true form of sacrifice; the voluntary, the strength of desire for an ideal that motivates a willingness to suffer. There is no form of sacrifice greater than the self-made villain, for even tragic heroes retain the legend of their names, the sympathy of their refugees. Even tragic heroes go to heaven.
Right then, in the gaping maw of that star-flecked blackness, Une prayed not to the choirs of that relished dimension of peace for which all dutiful soldiers wished- she prayed to the demons and the hell-gods, to the fallen rebels cast out for their sacrifice, to the greatest star of mourning in any of man's mythology. She prayed that Lucifer would take kindly to the brilliant man with the blighted fate he'd chosen, and that when his ritual was finally complete, the world he'd saved from itself would weep his tragedy, renown his heroism, and would not condemn him to the bleak destiny of villainy. Une was proud to be the secretary of the devil. If a nebula had formed before her eyes and spilled the highest leaders of the heavenly host right into her cockpit, she would have shuffled the devil's paperwork and asked them to come back later.
She saw Zechs' face, saw it bruised and mangled, saw it singed, saw the gleaming orb of earth inside his ribs and blood seeping through his fingers; she saw him grand, stretching onwards past their little mime of human trials, cradling the world and carrying it through a time with no need for devils or villains, the last great heroes wept and dried; she saw what was eternal in him, beyond his immortality, if he survived. She and the General were mutable figures, full-fledged members of the world, roles to be filled inevitably, but Zechs was a rogue complex in the story of the age. He was not the hero; too confused about his own purposes and working for the wrong man. He was not the prince; he had abandoned that title too long ago to recover it. He was not the knight, for his armour was now scattered across a wide section of the abyss, and he was not slated to die like this. He was here somewhere, still breathing, still static in the radar. Zechs was unique, and because of that Une was immediately certain that he would outlive his General, would remain Treize's only measure of comfort and support through these last days and would then be the one to attend her dark prayers of remembrance, as he unshackled the world from such strict fairytales.
Une saw it all through the quantum scope of this perspective way out in the black, and let that kind whisper of her duality take hold.
Removing her glasses and setting them atop the controls, Une entreated her command with an uncharacteristically gentle voice, "Keep searching."