Respect between Enemies – The BetanWerecat

Gundam Seed: "Descending Sword" and after. OCs with appearances by canon characters. The actions of Kira, Athrun, and the others have far reaching effects. Not all things that begin as acts of war must stay such. Rated T for language and openly acknowledged but off screen activity. (Reviews are welcomed but not required. This is written only for my own enjoyment. Flaming me will get you ignored.)

Disclaimer: I do not own Gundam Seed.

The GINN powered up instantly. Adrian reached swiftly with the right arm and snatched up the girl before she realized what he was doing. He popped his hatch. He couldn't just drag her through the air in the GINN's hand, she'd freeze to death. He was going to have to bring her inside, although he doubted she'd agree to come.

He launched as he brought the right hand firmly against his open cockpit. Now, despite the wind, he wasn't going to fall out and neither was she. He took a few seconds to set an autopilot course directly away from Josh-A before he unbuckled his harness to see about getting an uncooperative enemy into his mobile suit.

She was fighting the grip of the suit's hand all right. He had been right to tighten it down to nearly crushing pressure. She'd have been loose if he hadn't. As it was, she was going to have that left hand of hers free in a few seconds. He didn't want to have to deal with her waving a gun in his face if she could get one out as well so he slid out onto the cockpit's lower hatch and grabbed her arm just before she worked it free.

"Ah, shit!" she shrieked.

Adrian sympathized but held on with an iron grip. This was no office clerk with soft hands and softer muscles. This was a soldier with an arm that felt like solid fiber bands. She'd kill him if he gave her the chance.

He slid his right hand up the back of her neck until he found the right pressure points just below the skull. Then he squeezed as carefully as her struggling allowed. She knew what he was doing all right. She threw her head back repeatedly, trying to break his hold. But he had better leverage than she did. And he was the Coordinator; he was by far the stronger. He forced her head forward against the palm of his GINN's hand and held on until the pressure on the nerves rendered her unconscious. Then he held on another few seconds to be sure she was really out.

He reached back and loosened the machine's grip just enough to enable himself to work her body free. She was a limp, dead weight in his grasp, which was no help in doing this, but at least she wasn't either fighting or trying to kill him. He worked as fast as he could. It was cold with the cockpit open like this! Then he had her out; he slid back into his seat, fastened his harness, and dragged her onto his lap. Finally, he closed the hatch. He immediately felt much warmer.

A glance at the display showed him that he was running parallel to the legged ship, about half a kilometer off their port. No one there was shooting at him at the moment. More importantly, there was a rising wall of energy and debris coming up fast behind them. Oh, hell, there really was a Cyclops!

He grabbed the controls and demanded every scrap of speed the GINN had to give. At this instant he regretted dumping his own GUUL when he'd begun pursuit of the Zero. It would have had the extra flat line racing speed he could have used right now! The suit surged ahead, beginning to outrun the legged ship for a moment. Then they hit their engines for what was likely all they could give as well and Adrian found they were now pulling up, then ahead of him. He could see the new mobile suit a bit behind him and well to starboard of the enemy ship. It was almost engulfed by the expanding energy front of the Cyclops when he saw it catch hold of a GINN that hadn't been able to run fast enough and drag the damaged machine to safety. Wait, wasn't it an EA suit? Why had it just saved a ZAFT pilot?

Confused now, Adrian tried to keep half an eye on the enemy battleship and the strange mobile suit. The other half eye was locked firmly on the advancing energy front of the Cyclops damage zone. It was five minutes before he was sure he was really going to outrun it. It was nearly twenty before he knew he'd gone far enough to be able to stop and ride out the weakened blast front. He'd lost exact track of the legged ship sometime around minute fourteen but he had their heading; he could find them.

The shock wave from the Cyclops blast was still brutal, even at this distance. The GINN was tossed around the sky like a child's kite in a high wind. Adrian had his hands full maintaining control of the suit; he didn't have a hand to spare to hold on to the girl. She got bounced pretty badly. At least he didn't lose her altogether and dump her on the floor or let her crack her skull on any of the control panels. Still, they were both going to be sporting a fine set of bruises from this.

The air behind the shock front was still unsettled but it was not so unstable that the GINN couldn't deal with it on autopilot. A mobile suit was a massive machine with tremendous inertia after all; it took something significant in the way of atmospheric disturbance to seriously unbalance one. It also ate power and he'd been either in heavy combat or running for his life for well over half an hour now. He needed to do a thorough systems check to see what he had left, find his base carrier, and get out of this sky.

Power was the first and most pressing question. He was barely ok there. He had nothing to waste, almost no margin at all, but he should have enough to get home safely. Now he was very glad indeed that he'd been so conservative with his weapons earlier, taking only the most high probability shots to stretch his munitions and beam weapon's endurance.

Second on his list of things that mattered was finding the carrier the Thoms Team was based on. That proved a bit harder. He was forced to go up a good way to clear a couple of local islands before he picked up their rider signal.

Adrian was shocked to find his hands shaking when he heard that directional signal in his ears again. Only then did he realize how afraid he'd been that the carrier had been too close to Josh-A, that there was no place for him to land. But they were well away from the burning ruin, a good thirty kilometers due west of him right now, at least a straight liner fifty from Josh-A. He wondered just what instinct had sent Captain Ponchard so far from the battlefield and the mobile suits that could be expected to need close support during the fight.

An alert from his combat array focused his eyes on a stray speck well below his position. Magnification showed him an empty GUUL. Well, that could be useful! He didn't like the things but if it had even a few k's worth of power left if it, it would give his suit the margin of safety he so lacked right now. Besides, it would let him land and lift again without stressing the bad leg of the suit. He let the GINN drop toward it.

The girl on his lap shifted slightly. Oh, no, he didn't need her waking up now. He slowed his decent so he could manage the suit with one hand while he used the other to put her out again. This was not going to be something he should keep up too long. He could do permanent damage pressing on the nerves like this. He needed another way to keep her out of trouble. But for the moment, this was all he had time for. So he held on until she was completely limp in his arms again and a few seconds more to make sure she stayed that way for a while.

The landing on the GUUL went smoothly. The machine proved to be down to about one third power. If he was reasonable about it and didn't have to try to move at combat speeds, it should get him home with a little energy to spare. He ran a check on the wind conditions and took the machine down to less than a hundred meters above the sea. This was the calmest layer of the atmosphere right now; he would use the least energy moving here.

It was rather eerie traveling like this. He was alone in the sky at the moment. He still had his channels open and could hear other ZAFT units around him but he couldn't see them. There had been a massive force here only twenty minutes ago. Where had all their people gone?

As Adrian listened he began to grasp the size of the disaster behind him. Most of the communications he heard came from the carriers. They were calling for the mobile suits and the armored strike teams they had landed at Josh-A. They weren't getting many answers. Space based command was calling for the attack subs; silence was their only reply.

If they were lucky, they had lost at least half their attacking force. Somehow, Lt. Ito didn't think they had been very lucky. There was too much silence. There were too many ships that were not responding, too many units that were out of contact. "Operation Spit Break", this much anticipated victory, was looking more and more like a murderous defeat.

Yes, the Earth Alliance had lost a major base. But when all was said and done, they could afford it. Their population was many times that of the Plants. They could lose six to one in an exchange like this and it would be their victory. They could replace their combat troops and even re-supply with new equipment. ZAFT didn't have anything like the Earth's depth of people power or manufacturing capability. His people depended on superior equipment and their innate superior abilities to win. Neither mattered if the EA could sucker them into traps like this one.

He looked at the unconscious girl in his lap again. They were losing a generation to this war; most of one at any rate. Grandfather's plan might be barbaric but it might be the difference between survival and extinction too. God, what a horrible thought that was! Yet the Ito Plan was absolutely sound if you considered it from a standpoint of genetics alone. It only became a monster when you added ethics.

There was an island ahead of him. He brought the GUUL down to beach level and landed. He needed to secure his prisoner and it would be safer to do that if the GINN was not moving. It was unlikely there were any Earth forces left out here but it couldn't be ruled out. The legged ship and that amazing mobile suit had been headed more or less out this way when he'd lost track of them. Adrian had no delusions about being able to take on that suit with his GINN alone and the legged ship had defied every attempt to sink it. One lone GINN wasn't likely to manage that either.

The cockpit of a GINN had a singular lack of suitable materials for securing captives. Since he wasn't supposed to be taking any, this really wasn't any big surprise or anything but it was annoying. In the end, he found himself scavenging in the medical kit. This was pretty much what he'd suspected he was going to have to do all along.

The sheer quantity of bandaging he found was actually a bit disturbing. Just how banged up did the people who stocked these kits think a mobile suit pilot could get and still be able to treat his own wounds? Or did they actually anticipate someone really needing to tie up a prisoner on occasion? Whatever, they definitely packed enough material for that job and a major trauma as well.

She had long, slender hands but the bones were larger than he'd been expecting. The wrists had a definite bulge and that could be useful. When he was done, she was not going to be slipping those bindings over her hands to get free. And he'd left her a bit of movement by running the connecting strip through her belt loops. This held the hands apart so there would be no chance of her untying anything either.

Her ankles proved to be build much like her wrists; making hobbling her relatively easy even over the bulk of a flight suit. Well, easy once you got around the awkwardness of working in this cramped space with an unconscious woman in your lap that was. As extra protection, he also ran a loop and line between her elbows as well; securing it through belt loops too. Now there was no chance she would be able to get her hands or arms loose at all. He hadn't forgotten the strength in the arm she'd so nearly gotten free when he'd hauled her up to the cockpit. Yeah, she was a stunning girl all right, but that didn't mean she was a safe one to be around.

His prisoner attended to, Adrian brought the GUUL up a bit and headed around the near end of the island. His carrier was less that twenty kilometers and perhaps fifteen minutes at the most power conserving speed away now, he was getting anxious to get back to something that felt more like safety. He cleared the point only to have a half dozen alarms go off.

On his port side, less than two hundred meters away, was the legged ship. The new mobile suit was moving toward it. And a headless GINN was kneeling on a sand dune between his position and the enemy ship; a GINN with very familiar unit markings.

"Baki?" Adrian called without thinking. "Baki! Answer me!"

"If he was the pilot of the GINN," a voice said quietly, "he died. I tried; I caught the GINN at the edge of the blast front as it was breaking up and brought it here. He was alive when I got him out of the cockpit. But he died before anyone from the Archangel's medical team could get to him."

"Lon, . . . ."

"This is Captain Murrue Ramius of the Archangel. ZAFT GINN, what are your intentions?" A woman's voice, sharp with demand.

"Intentions?" Adrian muttered. "I don't think I have anything so thought out as intentions."

The Archangel apparently had very good reception equipment as there was a small pause, then her Captain spoke again, much more gently this time. "Do you plan to continue the battle here?"

"What, with one GINN against you and that insane mobile suit? I'm crazy lady, but I'm not nuts! I saw that thing fire back at Josh-A. I've never seen anything like it before and I hope never to see it again!"

The words were out before he realized he'd even spoken. It was not a truth he'd really wanted them to know. Bit late for that now. With that thought, Adrian tossed caution and diplomacy to the winds and blurted out the rest of his questions.

"What is that thing? Where did it come from? Who the hell is good enough to pilot something like that?"

"This is the X10A Freedom." The same young voice that had told him of Lon's death answered. "It was given to me by a friend, someone who wants it known that from now on she will be singing the song of peace. I'm not sure you really need my name."

The designation, especially the X number, made Adrian take a much longer, much more magnified look at this 'Freedom'. What he saw startled him. The design characteristics were unmistakable.

"That was built by ZAFT!"

"Yes." Freedom's pilot agreed. "And someone with a very strong love of Plant and an abiding hate of war gave it to me."

"To use against ZAFT? What kind of love of Plant is that?" Adrian shouted.

"What are you fighting for GINN? To destroy all Naturals as Chairman Zala orders? Revenge for Bloody Valentine? How do you decide when the war should end?"

"What?" Now he was confused. This guy was making no sense at all!

"Think about it! What are you, yourself, fighting for? What are your goals in this war? And how will you know when it should end? Because if you can't answer any of those questions, then you are nothing more than a tool for those who in power who can."

"My name is Lt. Adrian Ito, not GINN!" He snapped. "And I'm in this war because out of a family of twenty six, there are now only three left. Everyone else was home, on Junius Seven, when the nukes arrived! Why the hell do you think I'm here?"

"That's not what I asked you. You told me your motive Lt. Ito. But what do you want the war to do about that motive?"

"Make it never happen again." Adrian whispered.

"So, you do know what you're fighting for." The other said quietly. "Now, do you know if you will recognize the moment when that goal has been achieved?"

He sat silently for some minutes. The legged ship and the Freedom left him alone with his black thoughts. When he looked up again, Freedom was nowhere to be seen and Archangel was swinging out to sea. He looked at the headless GINN and realized he had one more question for these most odd enemies.

"Before you go, may I have Lon's body? So his family can bury him."

"Of course, Lt." The voice was Captain Ramius. "You will find him in a preservation body bag on the lower hatch of his GINN. We felt it best to put him out of the reach of scavengers yet somewhere his own would find him."

"Thank you, Captain."

He watched them move around the nearest point and disappear from his line of sight. He should try to track them but at the moment, he didn't have the heart for it. The GUUL glided over the sand and he found the body bag just where Captain Ramius said it would be. With a careful touch, he gently coaxed it off the hatch and into his suit's left hand. He closed the hand with great care. He had had enough of this place and this battle.

As he prepared to launch he noticed an indicator on his cockpit med-scanner. So, one battle over and another ready to start. He made what he knew could turn out to be a very stupid decision and pulled his helmet off. Some communications were easier without it. He took the GUUL up and headed for the carrier.