Celestial Being Chronicles - Chapter 60
Disclaimer: I don't own any of the Gundam series, nor any of the various series which are used or referenced in my fic, so please point that damned lawsuit cannon at someone else, also, don't read this if you are not of legal age to read such material. The story contains possibly disturbing content and should not be read by close-minded people (i.e., people who are easily offended.) Everything in the story is fictional. I am also not responsible for any actions taken by people who read this story and society's problems. I do, however, own my original character; Hope Yamato.
Now, less then three hours later, the Akatsuki, Chimera, Destiny, Divinity, Impulse, and Strike Freedom were streaking through the skies above the Sahara Desert. Behind the seven Gundams, protected underneath the shroud of its phase cloak, was the warship Excalibur.
"We're being hailed over the international distress channel." Lacus said, even as she patched the ZAFT commander into the communications line.
"This is Kira Yamato, Supreme Commander of Celestial Being, in the Divinity Gundam. Calling the commander of the ZAFT forces. Can you hear me? I would prefer to avoid needless bloodshed and merely wish to talk. Please respond."
"Who the hell is Kira Yamato?" Aireg Randolf asked from the cockpit of his ZAKU.
"Beats the hell out of me, sir. I don't even recognize the rank or name of the military force he gave...I wonder which side he is on."
"Not ours, if the scout team is anything to judge by. Fine, I'll humor him. It gives us more time to get a target lock. How's that going by the way?" Randolf replied.
"Difficult, sir. His sensor jamming and stealth systems are quite good...better than anything I've ever seen. The computers just about refuse to give me a solid lock for more than a quarter second. And he's not even maneuvering yet. Let's let him get closer."
"This is Commander Aireg Randolf, commanding officer of Gibraltar base and officer in charge of the North African Theater. Who are you and what do you want?" Randolf replied on the open channel. He was caught completely off guard by the reply.
"Commander Randolf?" An achingly familiar female voice answered him a moment later. "This is Lacus Clyne, speaking from the Chimera Gundam." Randolf heard one of his soldiers choke over his secondary channel.
"Siegel Clyne's daughter?" Randolf gasped, shocked. He had no idea what was going on. What was such a dedicated peacemaker like Lacus Clyne...possibly the most beloved girl in all the PLANTs...doing out here in the desert? Talking to him no less. From the cockpit of an enemy mobile suit. "How do I know it's you, 'Miss Lacus'? It seems likely to me that this is an attempt to throw us off guard."
His video communications screen blinked to life. Randolf's jaw dropped. It was Lacus Clyne, or else a clone of her...but clones did not exist...so it must have been Lacus. "Miss Lacus...Lacus...Lacus...Miss Clyne." The voices of his command echoed tinnily along his other communication lines. Everyone knew who Lacus Clyne was...she'd helped stop the last war at Jachin Due and had played a major part in brokering peace between the PLANTs and the Earth afterwards. And even before that she had been one of the most wildly popular pop singers in all the PLANTs...and...to the younger generation...the most eligible and desirable girl around. There likely wasn't a Coordinator over the age of two that did not know of Lacus Clyne and all the things she had endured and done for the PLANTs. "Miss Lacus...what are you doing here?" Randolf replied, fingering his prized white moustache in surprise.
Lacus Clyne, dressed in her custom pink Celestial Being flight suit, looked back at the ZAFT commander through the video communications screen. He was an older man...perhaps in his late fifties or early sixties, but still quite vigorous by even a casual estimation. Coordinators did live longer than Naturals so he was only in middle age. A sun browned face lined with worry; he had short white hair and a magnificent white bushy moustache like the one her father used to have. Pale green eyes studied her intently, looking for some deception. "I'm here to stop this situation from escalating out of control." She replied.
"You certainly have some explaining to do!" Randolf cried. "Why did you attack and destroy one of my patrols? You hate the idea of war and fighting, Miss Lacus. I know you do."
"You are right, I do. And so does the pilot of the Divinity Gundam, Kira. He hates war just as much as I do." Lacus replied.
"That would be the Kira Yamato who contacted us initially? He's with you?" Randolf asked. Lacus nodded as the Chimera Gundam gently landed, the machine holstering both beam rifles on its hips. Randolf walked his ZAKU closer until the two machines were standing within easy voice talking range, if either of them had wanted to open their cockpits to the merciless sun.
"Yes, but right now we need to be focusing on the situation which confronts us. Kira destroyed your patrol, though he did leave the pilots unharmed. He only did so because they were killing fleeing soldiers. We aren't here to fight the PLANTs, commander. We also aren't here to fight the Earth Alliance. We plan to fight the aggressors. The people who try to spread the war. Who created it."
"So you are fighting the Alliance then?" One soldier cut in, confused, even as the angel-winged Divinity Gundam settled to the ground nearby.
"No. We are fighting the war itself. The tendency for wars to escalate. The people who would bring death to the helpless and suffering to the undeserving. The people who would use nukes...or any weapon of mass destruction." Lacus refuted.
"That still sounds a lot like the Alliance to me." Randolf replied. "But if you aren't with the Alliance and you aren't with us...which side are you on, Miss Lacus?"
"I am currently on the side of peace...where I have always tried to be."
"That is a very good answer...for the diplomat's table. Out here on what may soon be a battlefield, I find those words less than sufficient. You have admitted to attacking and destroying ZAFT troops, Miss Lacus. Or at least condoning the actions of one who did. I find it quite odd that a person such as yourself would be way out here in the middle of the desert for no reason at all. Don't you think you are acting a little suspicious?" Randolf told her. Lacus looked a bit taken aback.
"You don't believe me? Do you think I'm a fake or an imposter?"
"No...I know you are the real Lacus Clyne. I was a very casual acquaintance of your father's...I went to your house once, you probably don't remember, you were very young...but you are unmistakably that same girl. But you've been out of view for quite a while, Miss Lacus. Long enough that I cannot help but worry that your thinking may have been influenced. Maybe even coerced."
"Coerced? By who?" Lacus demanded indignantly. Randolf frowned. She was getting very defensive...a trait unknown to the Lacus Clyne of his experience, who was quite open and frank at all times.
"By whoever is in those other mobile suits out of sight beyond the dunes there. Maybe even by that man in the cockpit of the machine you call the Divinity Gundam. I don't know. I know you were accused of treason in the last war, Miss Lacus and I did not believe it when I heard it. I was glad when the charges were proven to be unfounded. But I cannot deny that the seed of the possibility was planted in my mind. And this situation is nurturing that seed something fierce." Randolf replied, his voice cooling. He hit a macro key on his keyboard, sending a text only message to his command, telling them to remain alert. This was beginning to smell like a bait and lure trap. He and his wingman were very exposed out on the dune top.
"Commander Randolf. I assure you that my words and my thinking are entirely my own. How can I prove that to you?" Lacus answered, staring at him so sincerely that he couldn't help but give her a chance. "I only want to prevent violence and bloodshed as much as possible. Talking can resolve this problem and the war...if only people would give it a chance." Lacus continued.
"Fine...exit the cockpit of your Gundam and come over to us. Tell Mr. Yamato to power down his Gundam as well. And tell your friends back in the dunes to come forward as well, with weapons powered down as well. Then we can talk and I'm sure we can get this whole thing straightened out good and proper." Randolf ordered. Lacus thought for a moment and nodded.
"Very well." Lacus said. Randolf watched on the screen as she shifted position. His keen eyes noted every detail, including what could have been the accidental brush of a hand against a macro switch as she struggled with the tight cockpit confines. Could have been. Would have been, maybe, if a slurry of high caliber shells hadn't screamed out of the sky behind his position and ploughed into his wingman's ZAKU, chewing through the back armor and blowing his friend of twenty years into blood and scraps of meat right there on the secondary screen before detonating the ZAKU in a thunderous flash of light and sound which threw Randolf's own ZAKU down like a rag doll. Unable to get the image of that almost casual brush of a hand against a switch out of his mind. The signal switch which could send any one of a hundred signals. Including an attack signal to waiting forces around the trap he was now convinced he had allowed himself to be lured into. The bait had been perfect. She was, after all, not a fake. She was after all...a traitor! The hardest kind of foe to face...because you never wanted to admit they could exist.
"Ambush!" Kira yelled, only now noticing a blood red mobile suit with demonic wings and a glowing green orb in its chest as it stood on the dunes nearly ten miles away. "All Celestial Being forces, level one battle stations!"
"All teams...it's a TRAP! IT'S A TRAP! Fight for your lives! DAMN YOU LACUS CLYNE!" Randolf shouted, clawing his way back to full consciousness and rolling the ZAKU to its feet.
Lacus instantly lashed out at the accusation, igniting a beam saber, and severing the head and arms from Randolf's ZAKU with a single impossibly fast slash, leaving the ZAFT mobile suit to crumble to the ground in four separate pieces.
"If I wanted to kill you." Lacus sighed, tears welling up in her eyes. "I would have impaled your cockpit, instead of severing your arms and head. Now, please retreat."
"So." Randolf scowled, as one of the surviving ZAKUs picked up the remains of his machine and began to fall back. "You're a traitor, but you're letting me live...I'll make sure to kill you when next we meet."
"No! I didn't betray the PLANTs! I don't even know who attacked us!" Lacus shrieked, frightened, angered and totally flat footed by the sudden attack, which had come from nowhere.
"I don't believe you!" Randolf retorted, out of weapons but not communications range. "You sold us out to the Earth Forces. Lured us out of Gibraltar and into this heinous trap."
"No! This is a mistake! I didn't set you up. I did not want this to happen! I want there to be peace." Lacus protested, her anger slowly rising. Randolf spit back at her, not caring that he was only streaking his own screen.
"The peace of death is all you desire! I can see that plainly now! I swear, Lacus Clyne...I swear I will pay you back in full for this treachery! If need be I will haunt you to your dying day! I WILL HAUNT YOU LACUS CLYN...!" Randolf was suddenly cut off in a blizzard of static. The blood red mobile suit seemed to appear out of nowhere, drawing a beam sword, cutting the ZAFT suit in half and then kicking in the chest as it fell, sending the now mangled torso tumbling through the sand for a few hundred yards.
"No..." Lacus trailed off with a sob, even as Lexi, the Excalibur's advanced AI, took control of the Chimera Gundam, quickly guiding it back to the ship.
Wasting no time, everyone quickly boarded the Excalibur, before more enemies...either ZAFT, Earth Forces, or someone else, could show up to prolong a fight which had already gone on for far too long, in everyone's opinion. They did pause long enough to check the shattered remains of the ZAFT force for survivors, but it was an unfortunately vain hope. The monstrously demonic mobile suit that Kira had noticed just before all hell broke loose brought almost total destruction upon the ZAFT forces. There were few mobile suits that still existed in pieces larger than the hood of a small car, each blasted apart by hundreds of rounds of high explosive shells and missiles, or melted by the unimaginable heat of multiple beam cannons and even hyper impulse beam cannons. The few mobile suits that were still mostly whole, such as Commander Randolf's destroyed ZAKU, which had only been cut in half and partially crushed, had then been set alight by incendiary weapons and were slowly melting into pools of molten metal. The heat was too intense to approach any closer than ten meters.
The scale of the damage was totally unnecessary. Mobile suits that were plainly destroyed had been shot up like tin cans apparently just for the fun of it. It reminded everyone of the attack on Panama during the First Bloody Valentine War.
"I don't think any of us is happy about how this war has already gone. However, such statements are rapidly becoming so obvious they almost feel banal. None of us want this war yet here it is, so we're going to have to deal with it as best we can. I personally think the battles at Pearl Harbor, Gibraltar and elsewhere up to now have been nothing but preludes to the real war. We're still in the very first stages of the war...all sides involved are still finding their footing and re-establishing their strengths in order for the serious fighting later on. I know that is a bit heartless...to count the horrendous fights at Pearl Harbor and Gibraltar as nothing but preliminaries, but I don't see how else we can look at them. So far there have only been small scale battles involving perhaps a hundred mobile suits all told in any one battle."
"The Earth Forces aren't the only ones who are gearing up for a different sort of war...most of the rumors I've been hearing up here are obviously panic stirred gossip but some things I feel we have to take more seriously. ZAFT is buying up lots of new mobile suit designs...opening up the defense market to civilian contractors was really a good move for them...competitiveness amongst the companies has led to quite a few advanced designs...a few of which I'm sure you already encountered in the desert. I hear ZAFT is working on a few more nasty surprises like the Gugnirs and a really super secret project of some sort going on in one factory...I don't know what it is but anything soaking up nearly forty percent of the defense budget can't be something friendly." Andrew Waltfeld replied through the communications screen, he was currently up in the PLANTs, acting as an undercover agent. Everyone paused a moment at that last revelation.
"Forty percent of the entire defense budget?" Athrun exclaimed, shocked. "Do you have any idea how much funding that is?"
"I don't have the exact figures...the funding is top secret as well, goes through all kinds of dead drops and random transfers as I'm sure you can appreciate...but I'd say this single project, whatever it may be, is soaking up around twelve billion dollars a month. And costs for it have been going up every month since we got wind of it...whatever it is must be one hell of a package...but there is no evidence of a GENESIS level construction project anywhere within the PLANTs either. So as to what it is...that's anyone's guess." Waltfeld responded, looking more than a little nervous. It was never a good thing to know a potential enemy was whipping up one hell of a big bad something and you didn't even have the slightest clue as to what it was. That kind of lack of knowledge could lead to things getting very messy to say the least.
The ZAFT patrol was picking it's way lightly through the forest...well as lightly as a pair of BuCUE's could anyway, which was surprisingly stealthily, the big four legged machines managed to move through the thinly spaced trees with a minimal amount of damage, crushing only the occasional bush and knocking only a few limbs from their trunks. Of course it helped that the undergrowth down in the valley was much lighter than the near jungle that carpeted the slopes, which did a much better job of hiding the stationary and in some cases prone Strike Daggers and Windams that made up the 15th detached mobile division of the Earth Forces armed forces special operations unit. Painted in forest camouflage colors and outfitted with the latest in stealth systems, the twenty-five mobile suit unit was one of the most elite the Earth Alliance could field, equivalent to the Moebius Zero squadrons of the First Bloody Valentine War. Each and every pilot in the 15th had at least two confirmed ZAFT kills, most of which had been made with mobile armors.
The unit as a whole had never participated in a losing engagement, though they had been out of rotation during the battle of GENESIS. After the lunar fleet was mostly wiped out by GENESIS they were one of the most veteran units in the entirety of the Earth Alliance Military. They were set up in ambush positions on both sides of the mountain valley, deep within the mountains of Northeastern Eurasia. However, for this mission they would not be ambushing a mere patrol...they were the advance unit for a major offensive that was due to be launched on the ZAFT prefabricated base that had been dropped from low orbit during the first few days of the war. The base had been sited, for unknown reasons, within a sheltered and isolated valley near the center of the range, near an abandoned and dug out mining facility. Tacticians had initially designated the base a supply depot, but an unusual amount of activity was noticed by observers. Far more troops and much more material was going into the base than was going out. Finally, an infiltration team had penetrated the base's security and learned the truth.
ZAFT had long possessed scale technology...a technology which utilized the vibration and motion of tiny scale like flanges on the bottom and sides of vehicles to propel them through water or soft sand or mud or the like. The technology was most famous in its utilization by the Lesseps-class land battleships, but ZAFT submarine carriers and lesser land ships also used the same system. However, until recently vehicles equipped with the technology had been limited to water or regions of very loose sediment...more firm terrain stymied the scale vibrations and slowed the vehicles considerably, even stopping them altogether in locations with lots of stone. But the team discovered that ZAFT scientists had managed to come up with an improved new scale system that worked on solid rock, even hard igneous rock like granite and basalt, much like the old system worked on water. Combined with massive drills and laser boring machines, massive transports had been built that could carry five mobile suits each comfortably under the ground to target points before bursting from the ground like deadly moles to unleash their deadly cargo. The Earth Alliance had no counter...the very idea of giant burrowing war machines was somewhat ludicrous even after their existence was verified...and so it was determined that the machines needed to be destroyed and the project halted before it could go any further before ZAFT could utilize either.
And of course it would significantly reduce ZAFT's forces in the area as well, making the diversionary assaults planned to coincide with the Australian Maneuver due to take place in two weeks time. The Australian Maneuver was the talk of the unit, like it was for pretty much the entire military. An offensive of the scale that the operation was rumored to be had not been seen for hundreds of years. Rumors said that entire divisions and fleets were being consolidated into one giant hammer to smash ZAFT right off their main base, Carpentaria. After this mission, the 15th was due to muster in India for that assault. They were going in at the head of the wave and they were looking forward to it. But first they had to provide yet another distraction...they would attack the base while another unit slipped in from the other side of the mountains and broke into the mines, stealing any data possible and leaving behind a man portable thermonuclear bomb. Once the bomb was in place the 15th would withdraw and let the ZAFT base and its tunneling machines go up in a huge atomic fireball.
The 15th's commander looked at his watch and compared it to the mission chronometer display of his Strike Crusader. Both were perfectly synchronized and both were indicating the same thing. Mission Go. He looked down at the valley...the ZAFT patrol was a good two kilometers away and receding...far enough away that they would not be able to immediately flank his unit. "All units...Go code. We want this loud and flashy. Keep their eyes on us...then we can watch the big time loud and flashy from the transports." He then opened a channel to the team across the base. "The raven flies at midnight." He radioed the code words that would start the team on its infiltration.
"The raven flies at midnight?" Athrun said, incredulous. "Who the hell makes up that sort of crap? Their dispatcher must be watching too many cheap spy thrillers." He was wearing the headset rig that had formerly belonged to the leader of the team he had intercepted two hours previously. The Excalibur was lying in wait, about half a day's hard hike away, though only five minutes flight time, hidden as well as a seventeen mile long, four mile wide, and one mile high warship could be in the mountains, underneath the veil of its phase cloak. Celestial Being had heard reports through Andrew Waltfeld that ZAFT was conducting a major buildup at this seemingly isolated base and so they had decided to drop by and see what was up.
'Well, Captain Ramius decided...with a great deal of advice from Kira and Lacus.' Athrun thought with a mental sigh and shake of his head. He respected the good captain...her survival record was impeccable, something he always found reassuring in a commander, but she had her faults too. One of which was a humanitarian streak wider than her ship which synched perfectly with the ideals of Kira and their shared lovers. She was a crusading idealist in Athrun's opinion, always spouting off about trust and working together and a bunch of other bullshit that would have been real nice to listen to before the war broke out, when it might have actually made a difference.