"All right, listen up!" Instructor Cardin sounded just the way Keri remembered him, directing her team in wargames during her field exam. But the bullet-holes in the wall behind him, the grime marring his face, and the jumbled noises of gunfire and magic blasts that clamored in from the main hall, cast the scene in a very different light. "We're holding every entrance point and stairwell except the front, but they've got the main hall and don't seem keen on giving it up! Now they are concentrating their forces at that point, because we know if we try to flank them we're just dividing our forces. They've got reinforcements coming; we are on our own."
He looked over the group of students and SeeDs gathered in front of him. Some of them, mostly the cadets and newer graduates, had carefully formed into ranks like they always did for the exercises; but others, many with torn and bloodstained uniforms, barely bothered. "We will make a direct assault through the main hall," he said, "push them out of our Garden, and divide their forces while we secure this facility." He hesitated. "From there, perhaps the Headmaster can negotiate an end to this once we've shown our strength and resolve. Perhaps not. But none of that is your concern. Your concern begins and ends with accomplishing your mission. Is that clear?"
"Yes, sir!" the SeeDs and cadets replied in unison.
Cardin nodded. "We're doing this by the book, now, with Assault Pattern Aardvark. Green Team, you will take point; Red Team and Gold Team will provide direct support. Orange and Brown Teams, you will reinforce our teams on the 2F overlook, and provide magic support. All other teams are on standby; be ready for deployment anywhere at anytime!" His hand snapped up in a regulation salute. "Move out!"
And that was it — no reassurance or rousing speech, which Keri could really have used at the moment. The students dispersed, groups coalescing at their designated positions. She was part of Gold Team, and so fell into position behind the more seasoned SeeDs in green paratrooper's uniforms — indistinguishable from those of the Galbadians, save for the Garden logo painted on the shoulder.
"How do they think this is going to play out?" Sean demanded, as he took position next to her. "I mean, it's like last year all over again, but Martine thinks we've got a chance this time?"
"Yeah, I'll bet I know what you were doing last year," Tavin growled.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Sean spun around to face the other SeeD.
Tavin stepped up, grabbed Sean by the arm, and and twisted him back to face down the hallway toward the enemy. "It means shut up and do your job!" he snapped, as Sean squirmed himself free.
Keri shook her head, but didn't interject. More SeeDs were limping down the hallway towards them, a sign that the fighters in the main hall weren't likely to hold much longer.
She glanced to her side, where Mara was checking her gun. "This is happening because of us," she said, voice barely making it out of her throat. "Isn't it?"
Mara looked up, then back down. "Doesn't really matter now, does it?"
"All teams, forward!" yelled Instructor Cardin, cutting off the discussion, and the SeeDs started down the hallway. Surrounded by her fellow classmates and SeeDs, Keri felt an odd sense of security — odd since it came with its fair share of dread.
Orange and Brown teams hurried ahead to get up the stairs to the 2F walkway. It wasn't ideal, but they wanted to be in position when Keri and the rest launched their attack, and there was nowhere for the mass of SeeDs to wait under cover while the support teams got into position. G-Garden might offer training as good as any military base, but it had some drawbacks as a fortress. And because there were already SeeDs fighting in the hall, the attack could only be so organized.
Green Team was setting the pace, and timed it pretty well; the first bolts of magic shot down from the 2F just after they quickstepped into the hall. Keri didn't really know what to expect, and couldn't see much clearly at first; the hall was full of bodies, moving and prone, blue, red and green, and as crowded as she'd seen on the busiest assembly day. The crowd was receding, as the Galbadians fell back before the influx of new SeeDs; Keri was swept straight to the entrance without finding anyone to fight.
The SeeD captains were yelling for them to hold back and form their own ranks, and she started to work out what was happening. She saw the Galbadians disappearing into the side halls, forming new lines in front of the classroom doors. Most of them seemed to have disappeared, as she could only count perhaps a couple dozen, but she guessed more were hiding out of sight. If they chased the Galbadians out the main entrance, where most of them were headed, those in the connecting halls could cut them off from the sides. If they split their forces between the three groups of Galbadians, they probably wouldn't have the numbers to head off any reinforcements.
"Green team! Gold team!" Instructor Cardin was pointing at the west hall entrance, where the Galbadians were hurrying to re-form the Garden's own barricades, long since overrun. The team captains soon picked up the call and pushed toward the soldiers, while Red Team's SeeDs held back to hold the main entrance. Keri didn't have long to think about how lucky they were.
The checkpoint had been demolished, the security gates either snapped off or blasted with magic or grenades, but the debris still looked tough to negotiate. Bodies lay among the wreckage, too, some of them still moving. Keri ran to one, a SeeD she'd seen in the hallway once or twice and she thought had been on the basketball team. Now almost the whole right side of him was charred black, up to the shoulder. "It's okay," she said, because that's what people usually said in situations like this, but he didn't even look at her. His eyes were fixed on the entrance, or the Galbadians massing on the road beyond.
Mara knelt beside her as Keri applied a Cure stone. "Let's find a medic," she said, taking the SeeD's uninjured arm. "Come on, we'd better —"
The next thing Keri knew, she was lying on her back, ears ringing, dust and debris raining down on her. The entryway seemed nearly twice as large as it should be, and the shape didn't look right either — suddenly ragged and black.
Struggling to her feet, she caught the shape of an Iron Clad looming toward her, felt the floor vibrating as it rolled into the opening, and started to guess what had just happened. The vehicle's beam cannon still held a dying red glow, as its gatling gun flashed at the shapes running through her periphery.
She couldn't see where Mara had gone, or the SeeD she'd been trying to help. New piles of debris from the blast had changed the shape of the floor, and her visibility was limited to the ceiling and the vehicle looming in front of her. She couldn't look around without rolling over, and her mind warned her that she shouldn't do anything to attract the machine's attention.
On the other hand, she was lying exposed in the middle of the floor, and if she didn't move there was a good chance the thing would run right over her.
The nearest cover was the bottom half of what had been the security stall, about four meters off to her left. The door was hanging open, so all Keri needed to do was get herself onto her feet and across the floor before the Iron Clad could get a bearing on her. It, or the crowd of Galbadian soldiers who were charging up behind it.
Three flashes of lightning hit the Iron Clad, and the machine lurched and faltered in its advance. SeeDs were charging up to meet it, setting new battle lines and shouting commands she couldn't quite hear over the ringing in her ears. Still, Keri saw an opportunity, and twisted onto her side — or tried, but spots appeared at the edge of her vision and a wave of nausea hit her, so she couldn't follow through. Scuffing her boots against the floor to ensure her legs still worked, she began to drag herself along the floor instead, backing toward cover.
A strobed flash from the Iron Clad, and Keri felt the shudder of its gatling gun again. The light illuminated an arm off to her right, mostly covered under fallen masonry, plus a shock of hair in Mara's shade of red. That was the wrong direction for cover; she'd need to crawl right in front of the Galbadian war machine; but all the abler SeeDs were busy fighting the thing.
Keri rolled onto her front, nearly blacking out in the process, and began crawling across the battlefield. She half-heard a couple of shouts that might have been aimed at her — the ones that sounded like "Get out of there!" or "Are you crazy?" — but she might have just been projecting. She felt debris grinding between her chest and the floor, and digging into her arms, which was a relief because it meant at least some of her senses were working.
She tried not to pay too much attention to the battle raging about three meters off to her left as she edged her way across the floor. More SeeDs were falling, she could tell, and nobody else seemed to be coming to their aid. Maybe the Galbadians who'd dispersed into the halls had staged a counterattack, she supposed. Or maybe the beam cannon had taken out more of her friends than she'd thought. She didn't have time to think about it.
Mara lay amid what had been about half of the main entrance's archway. Her legs were invisible under the debris, but she didn't seem to be pinned down by the largest of it, and Keri found a pulse. She wasn't sure if just trying to pull her friend out was a particularly good idea, but the Iron Clad loomed large in her periphery and she opted to go for it.
Her first, experimental tug on Mara's arm failed to budge her. With no flashlight and Mara unconscious, Keri had no way of knowing just how stuck she was. She cast off the smaller pieces of broken ceiling, hoping to clear her view, and felt down along Mara's legs to see if she could find the source of the trouble. So she was reasonably well shielded behind the fallen arch when the Iron Clad's beam cannon fired again.
Keri's hearing had just been starting to come back when the weapon shrieked past her, and she felt the air burning against her neck. She felt the floor rumbling, twisted around to look out, and saw the machine was on the move again, with fallen SeeDs piling up against its wheelguards. Unopposed, it rolled through the gate, exhaust stacks belching smoke up to pool in the broken ceiling. Then, stopping, it began to turn, swinging its guns around toward her.
Mara's saber lay beside her, underneath a large but not unmanageable chunk of ceiling. Keri had lost her own in the initial blast and hadn't given it any thought until now. Wrenching Mara's weapon out, she forced herself to remember her training and check the magic stones set into the hilt. Then she tried to stand, but her legs wouldn't comply, and she wasn't sure if it was the concussion or simple terror. The Galbadians probably didn't care.
Just as the gatling gun had lined up on her, the whole machine shuddered. Keri caught a red-tinged glow behind it, flickering and brightening until flames erupted from the craft. A moment later, the whole thing exploded into a pillar of reddish fire, warping the Iron Clad inside it.
Keri watched, mesmerized, as the flames died down and left the tank as a half-formed mass of slag in the middle of the lobby's entrance. Her legs finally steeled enough to let her rise off the floor, tightening her grip on the saber but not thinking to bring it to the ready.
Three figures stepped out from behind the wreckage, two men and a woman. Keri only recognized one of them: The tattered grey trenchcoat, blond hair and scar across his nose were familiar to any student who had lived through Galbadia Garden's part in the last Sorceress War.
"You're—" she began, but her voice caught and her eyes drifted. There was movement within the iron Clad's wreckage; she caught the figure of a Galbadian officer rising, raising his gun.
Seifer Almasy whipped his gunblade around in a blurry arc, delivering a single shot straight into the soldier's neck without even looking back. Then he glanced at Keri as if he'd just been checking his watch.
"Yeah," he said. "You guys miss me?"
- - - — — - - -
By the time Tolmar opened her eyes to see the ceiling of East Academy's infirmary above her, she'd managed to work out that she'd survived the Sorceress' attack. She wasn't religious enough to have a clear idea what Hyne's purgatory would look like, but she guessed it wouldn't involve quite so much of a headache.
"General?" A medic was leaning over her, and Tolmar had the vague idea that he'd said her name a few times before. Judging by his blood-stained and disheveled appearance, she couldn't have been unconscious for more than a few hours.
Then she couldn't think, because the medic was shining a light into her eyes.
"Report," she croaked, reminding herself not to admonish the man for doing his job. "What's the situation?"
"I'm afraid I can't tell you much, ma'am," the medic said. "The fighting's over, but we got a lot of casualties. That's about my department." Apparently satisfied, he pocketed the flashlight again. "Seems your eyes are focusing. Can you tell me your name?"
Tolmar gave him a stern look, then swung her legs over the side of the medical bed and pushed herself upright. Doing so nearly washed away her vision and compounded the headache, but she did her best not to let on. "I need to know the status of this facility," she said. "If you could fetch your supervisor, please?" Another pointed look at the medic was enough to send him hurrying down the rows of cots.
And he hadn't been kidding about the casualties. The infirmary, which dated back to the Dollet Army garrison, had been jammed with as many mobile cots as it could fit, though most of them were now empty. Several didn't seem to have been used at all, a sure sign that the medics had over-estimated the number of wounded — or, more likely, the number of survivors.
The medics hadn't had to remove her uniform, so Tolmar presumed she hadn't needed surgery. Whatever the Sorceress had done to her, she should be able to walk it off.
"General." Tolmar saw Colonel Harridan weaving through the beds toward her. Evidently uninjured, he had traded the dress uniform he'd worn at their morning briefing for a suit of black fatigues.
"You're very prompt, Colonel," she replied, adjusting her own uniform and using the motion to disguise how unsteady she was on her feet.
"I was visiting the wounded when I heard you were awake," said Harridan. "I supposed you'd like to be brought up to date."
"I would." Tolmar started for the exit. "I'm alive, so I hope that means we managed to neutralize the Sorceress."
Harridan made a grimace. "I'm afraid not. We did secure the perimeter before the Sorceress attempted to leave, but she walked right through us. That's where most of the wounded came from; the ones she hit on the way in, didn't survive."
"She made a direct attack on a Galbadian military base," Tolmar said, "and you're telling me she's still at large?"
To his credit, Harridan didn't mention that most of the Galbadians stationed at East Academy were cadets, as their garrison had decamped along with most of their mechanized units to support Naraka's invasion plan. Instead, he grimaced and nodded. "Our GIM units pursued her into the forest, but she took them out before our troops could catch back up. No trace of her after that."
Sighing, Tolmar led him out of the infirmary's door and out onto the grounds. The sun had disappeared behind the Monterosa Plateau, and the base's floodlights covered it in stark white relief. She could still see a swath of rubble from wrecked mechs and patches of burned earth forming an arrow from the perimeter wall — where a temporary bulwark covered the hole the Sorceress had burned through it — straight to the administration building where Tolmar had been attacked.
"How many dead?" she asked.
"Fifty-nine," said Harridan. "Plus another seven critically wounded. Eighteen injured in all, including yourself, ma'am."
Tolmar turned around to look at the administration building, where a barricade had been placed in front of what remained of the main entrance. "Fifty-nine dead and eighteen wounded," she repeated. "That's quite a discrepancy."
"Came from how she fought," said Harridan. "Extreme prejudice, I'd call it. You know I saw that mess with Edea back in Deling City, but this was something else. Like watching a hurricane."
Tolmar remembered the Sorceress' attack mostly in flashes — the fire, flying bodies, then the invisible hand at her throat. "But I survived," she mused. "She had me completely at her mercy."
"We can only assume she was distracted. She attempted to leave immediately after the confrontation in the control room, so perhaps she either presumed you dead or wasn't concerned enough to make sure. Our interrogators haven't made much progress yet as to exactly what happened in there."
"Interrogators?" Tolmar frowned. "You said the Sorceress escaped, Colonel."
"Yes, ma'am. I didn't mean the Sorceress."
Tolmar frowned. In with the images of the battle — it didn't seem quite right to call it that — was one, of the Sorceress advancing, eyes empty and cold. And someone else behind her.
"Show me," she said.
The colonel led her back to the administration building, and down into the cell block used for prisoners of war. The cells were old, dating back to the Dollet days, as they were only used for temporary holding before detainees were sent off to D-District. Only one was occupied now, watched by a pair of guards.
Dressed as he was in the remains of a SeeD uniform, the prisoner would have been recognizable to Tolmar even if his face hadn't been on top of the Most Wanted list for a week, and in newsfeeds for a year before that. He was sitting on a bench, handcuffed to the wall, and looking down at his feet.
"Let me in," Tolmar said to the guard, who nodded, stepped up to the steel bars and opened the oversized padlock. She stepped into the room, resting a hand on the back of the chair bolted into the center of the room. The man still didn't look up.
"Commander Leonhart," she said. "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised."
- - - — — - - -
The afternoon sun gleamed off the watch towers that stood over the Lanker bluffs, as the sea breeze whipped at the blue-and-white Navy standards that flew above their gates. Below, the docks that had once housed Timber's meager fleet were lined with Galbadian warships. The sea gleamed beyond the shadows of the cliffs, and the gibbous moon was just rising over the horizon.
"I don't see any submarines," said Irvine.
"Maybe they're all underwater?" asked Selphie.
"The Galbadian military likes to build their facilities underground," said Nida. "That way they're harder to attack from the air. Probably most of the docks are built into the cliffs."
"'Probably?'" Jeck repeated. "Did those secret Galbadian plans not even tell us what the layout of the base would be?"
"Just a timetable," said Quistis. "And we don't have time to find out. According to their action plan, Galbadia could launch the missiles at any moment. They'll want to strike Esthar during the night, and it's already after sunset there."
"So we just run in without a plan, and hope we just figure it out?" Jeck challenged.
Quistis glanced at Selphie. "It wouldn't be the first time."
"Yeah," Selphie agreed, but she didn't put any enthusiasm behind the word. Quistis guessed that she was remembering how that mission had ended, and mainly felt obligated to keep a brave face.
Jeck didn't. "Are you all insane? We're talking about marching into a Galbadian military base right after they've mobilized for invasion, and we don't even know what to do once we're in there."
"I know it's risky," said Quistis.
"'Risky' was walking up to within sight of the place," said Jeck, motioning toward the watch towers. "Trying to fight our way in and take out the missiles, that's suicide."
"Hey!" said Zell. "We've done it before. And Selphie just had three people that time!"
"You think the Galbadians don't remember that, too?" Jeck asked. "They're rounding up SeeDs; they're already on the lookout. And if I remember right, you barely got out with your lives, and the missiles got launched anyway!"
"You actually have a suggestion, man?" Irvine asked. "Or do you just like to complain?"
Jeck didn't miss a beat. "Easy. We go to ground, observe the Galbadians' movements, find some way to sabotage the army where they're actually vulnerable. We have their whole attack plan, who says they won't put it on hold if we cause enough trouble on the homefront?"
"Weren't you the one saying we shouldn't be pickin' fights with Galbadia at all?" asked Zell.
"Yeah, well that chocobo's kind of left the forest, hasn't it? What I'm saying is we should be smart, and not do the first crazy thing that comes into Quistis' head!"
It was the first time he'd looked at her since the argument had started, and suddenly everyone else was, too. And even if Jeck hadn't exactly swayed them, there was plenty of doubt in their eyes.
They need a leader, she realized. The year after she'd lost her Instructor's license had been the happiest in her life, as she'd learned to let go of her need to be the whole Garden's big sister. Now she seemed to have taken charge of this group without even realizing what she was doing.
Jeck was a year older, but she was the senior SeeD. She'd told herself that the group had needed someone to take charge after Squall ran off, someone who understood what Squall was doing and might be able to salvage matters. Then, she'd been the one who understood why Xu had sent them the Galbadians' plans. She'd told herself it was the only way.
But she was starting to realize that leaving her past behind wasn't as simple as she'd told herself.
"I know it's going to be hard," she said. "I don't know if we'll succeed, either. I can come up with all sorts of questions. What if we fail? What if the threat isn't what we think? For all we know, the information was leaked to us by the Galbadians, trying to provoke an incident with Garden." She stopped, realizing this speech wasn't likely to reassure anyone. "…But we have to leave our doubts behind. If we choose to stay in the shadows while the Galbadians launch their attack, there will be a slaughter. And then there will be a war."
She looked at their faces, drawing herself up straighter and trying to project some sense of confidence. "We're all children of the last world war," she said. "We call them Sorceress Wars, and perhaps that's fair. But even if a Sorceress caused them, the killing was done by soldiers, and guns, and bombs. Garden was created to prevent another such tragedy, and I don't think that means defeating the Sorceress. If we can stop another war, if we can help save lives…I think it's our duty as SeeDs to try."
They stood staring at her for a moment, long enough that Quistis began to think she should have come up with a more inspirational ending.
"You still don't have a plan," Jeck said. But his tone seemed to have less fight in it.
"So they're long odds," said Irvine, shrugging. "Your chance to be the big hero. Give you a new story to impress the cadets when you get back."
After another moment, Nida took half a step forward. "We do still have those uniforms from the Galbadians who were escorting us."
"But there aren't enough for all of us," said Paige.
Nida shrugged. "I've been monitoring the Galbadians' radios. Sounds like they're rounding up all SeeDs, not just us. So we pretend we just rounded up one of the field teams, and are taking them into custody. The Galbadians will be looking out for us, but they'll be looking for eight SeeDs, not three SeeDs and five soldiers." He glanced at Quistis. "Should be enough to get us inside."
Quistis gave him a smile. "Then I guess we do have a plan."