Celestial Being Chronicles - Chapter 70
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.
Ace pilot Char Aznable continued along his ordained path of destruction through the city of Heliopolis in Orb, his highly customized, red Gelgoog rampaging through the city streets with wild abandon. He was starting to grow bored though, smashing buildings and crushing cars and people was rapidly losing its novelty after about ten minutes of doing it. Sure, it was exhilirating and empowering, walking through the city like a god, crushing whatever he wanted whenever he wanted, letting people live or die as he saw fit, but it wasn't nearly so fun when he didn't have anyone to lord it over that really understood. He needed to beat someone into the ground and leave them begging for mercy on their knees before him. That would make everything much better. The only problem was that the only other mobile suits around were allies and well outside his range regardless. In a slight fit of rage he jammed one of his hands into the side of a nearby skyscraper, spillings tons of crumbled and broken masonry onto the streets below, like a man might tear through a snow sculpture. "Something interesting better happen soon or I'm going to do something DRASTIC!" Char announced to all over his external speakers. He received no reply. He checked his sensors and scowled, noticing how all the tall buildings, made of concrete and metal, were playing havoc with his radar and other sensors. His radar barely reached farther than his cameras did while he was down on street level.
Fortunately for the thousands of innocent and terrified people within the several block immediate radius of the Gelgoog, two such interesting things as Char was looking for were rapidly approaching from the harbor area, flying just above the tops of the buildings. The Wing Gundam Zero led the Buster Gundam by perhaps a half mile, though it was the Buster that was doing the searching for the enemy, with its superior sensor suite. Not that it was extraordinarily difficult to locate the Gelgoog. They just headed towards the most recent looking plumes of dust and smoke and within minutes the massive thermal contact that could only be the Gelgoog appeared on the Buster's screen. "Well, I won't say I'm looking forward to this engagement." Dearka commented sourly, eyes sweeping the ground below, tightly packed with all sorts of large buildings, ranging from hotels to office complexes to multi-story malls and shopping plazas. "I never really trained for something like this."
"Yeah, the ZAFT training scenario planners somehow neglected to include the possibility of a mobile suit battle inside a city fully populated with civilians. I wonder why?" Lexi's holographic image retorted sarcastically from within the cockpit of the Wing Zero. "It's not like we're here because we have any other choice."
"Can't you just let me gripe in peace? That was a rhetorical complaint. It did not require an analysis." Dearka responded.
"Require or not, it received one."
Miriallia did her best to tune out their bickering, it was a distraction to her and right now she did not feel she could stand any distractions at all. The last time she'd been in combat in Orb, she'd been safe, relatively speaking, aboard the Archangel, while her friends went out and did the bulk of the fighting. Now she was going up close and personal with the enemy in her own home nation. She was just glad it wasn't her home city, since her stomach was doing flip flops as it was. And this enemy was worse than any individual whom she had formerly feared and hated. Dearka and Athrun did not exult in the killing of their enemies. They were soldiers, fighting other soldiers, and death was just part of that equation. There was only rarely personal emotion brought onto the field of battle. Quite the opposite with Char, with him, every battle was personal, every death was a victory he had to announce and display to the rest of the world. And that was why he had to die, and the sooner the better. "Coming up on the Gelgoog now. We're three miles out and closing. No sign that he has spotted us yet." She announced, swallowing an enormous dry lump that had suddenly appeared in her throat.
"So how do we want to do this?" Dearka asked, his voice turning calm and serious as he transformed himself from the loving, kind and friendly Dearka she was so much in love with, to the fierce and cold ZAFT soldier she knew from the battles with the Archangel. "The Buster isn't well equipped for close range fighting, as I only have a pair of wrist-mounted beam sabers. Even then, more than half my weapons are no goes down on the city streets. He may not care much about civilian casualties, but I can't just go spraying fire around indiscriminately."
"I'm not sure you or I have a choice in that regard. We have to decide; is it worth the risk to ourselves and the civilians to limit ourselves when we fight him? Is it better to try and defeat him over a longer period of time or quick and bloody, which will result in higher risk to the civilian population?" Lexi replied. "Like you said, he won't be holding back."
"Damn it. That fucker is using the city like a shield, even if he doesn't know it." Dearka swore. "Look at this senseless destruction. Why would anyone...no, no I won't say something so obvious. Because that's the sort of person he is, that's why."
"When there is no good option, you can only go with what you think is best at the moment." Miriallia said, her heart and voice heavy. "That machine is twenty meters of destruction and doom made tangible. We cannot hold ourselves back. It tears at me to say it, but we have to go all out and just hope we can bring him down before too much damage occurs."
Char idly thrust the barrels of his dual hyper impulse cannon into the side of a building, tearing a huge gouge along it as he swung the heavy cannon forward and out, demolishing two floors and leaving the whole fifteen story structure leaning drunkenly forward about halfway up. He turned his torso to look down a side street and fired his six beam cannons, the greenish rays of heat energy carving molten trenches through the buildings and street, annihilating the unarmored civilian cars and trucks they happened to brush over in balls of fire and greasy smoke. Perhaps a hundred people who had been fleeing down this street went up in smoke and flames with the cars, their bodies ignited by the unimaginable heat, most dying before they even had a chance to voice their agony through lungs of ash. Char rotated his torso again, almost one hundred and eighty degrees, facing another skyscraper, this one almost thirty stories tall. At least he never really had to worry about running out of new targets in a city. He smiled as he saw the horrified expressions on the faces of office workers looking out through the glass windows at the Gelgoog. Plainly they either had not heard the word to evacuate or had elected to stay inside, thinking themselves safer there. A false impression he was glad he could relieve them of. The four 20mm CIWS guns in the head of the Gelgoog spun up to speed, while the other four CIWS guns mounted on his back also activated and began to swing about. Without further ado, Char opened fire, the front CIWS raking the office building with hundreds of relatively small caliber shells, though each was more than enough to blow an armored human in half, while the back CIWS blasted away at the facades of other buildings and the street in random fire patterns, not really aimed at anything in specific.
Windows shattered in a hail of gleaming shards that fell like ice crystals to the streets far below, the deluge joined moments later by a rain of furniture, rubble, bodies and pieces of bodies as the explosive bullets hammered into the office building, walking back and forth along its entire length as the Gelgoog slowly turned its head. Hundreds and then thousands of people started flooding out of the ground level exits of the building, pointing and screaming as they tried to flee from their deaths. The paths of many of the panicked people brought them into the artifical storm falling down from the heights above, with people being crushed by desks and cabinets and cut to pieces by panes of glass that shattered like fragmentation grenades when they hit the streets. Most of the people though, ran away from the Gelgoog, filling the two lane street almost solid as they raced towards a T-junction about two hundred meters ahead. Char slowly turned, the CIWS guns silent for a moment as he adjusted his aim. Time seemed to freeze, a painting of atrocity just prior to commencement, the crowd of people, trampling their own friends and co-workers in desperation as they ran, the Gelgoog, almost gloating as its weapons spun and hummed in the morning air.
Char's fingers were just touching the triggers when a new variable entered the game. The Wing Gundam Zero, the armor of the transformable mobile suit resplendent in white and blue and red with green and yellow highlights, as the machine came charging into view from the left fork of the T-junction, skidding to a halt as it saw the Gelgoog and comprehended the situation.
"Well now..." Char breathed, pleasantly surprised. This wasn't something he'd been expecting, but come to think of it, he did have unfinished business with this person. The last time they'd met, Char had enjoyed grinding the foe into paste beneath his feet, though sadly he'd been interrupted before he could finish the job. He did not see any allies of the Wing Zero around, and thus, Char assumed that he would be able to simply destroy the enemy and continue, without further distractions. Char did not adjust the aim of his CIWS as the crowd of people slowed, unsure of which way to flee now that there was a Gundam ahead of them and a potentially Gundam-class mobile suit behind them. They continued to move forward though, since the Wing Zero was far less threatening looking than the Gelgoog. "You've come to die, Lexi Yamato." Char announced over his external speakers.
Lexi did not reply, despite being a highly advanced, incredibly intelligent AI, even she had nothing she wanted to say to Char. Even for Lexi, words could not come close to properly expressing her disgust and loathing for this particular enemy and she did not struggle to try and confine her feelings to words. Actions would be her only conduit. Without waiting for the enemy pilot to make the first move, she opened fire with her mounted ranged weapons, a pair of yellow rail gun tracers and four streams of small caliber machine gun rounds instantly filling the air. Lexi did not intend for such attacks to actually harm the Gelgoog, merely to anger her easily unbalanced foe by stealing the perceived glory of first blood. She brought up the physical buster shield on her right forearm and held it before herself, the tip aimed at the Gelgoog. The shield suddenly split down the middile to reveal a glowing green beam blade as it simultaniously ignited a pair of powerful thrusters and launched itself at the enemy mobile suit. The huge shield was now essentially a large, beam-blade tipped missile.
Char did not bother to dodge as the rail gun rounds bounced off his chest uselessly, the bullets pinging loudly off the armor, doing little but scarring paintwork and dig pinpricks into his outer layer of armor. The beam-tipped shield was a different story...that could actually cause damage. He used his CIWS in a futile attempt to shoot the shield out of the sky, but only suceeding in knocking it off course and sending it crashing to the ground in the middle of the crowd, sending up a wave of pulverized flesh as it landed, beam blade slicing into the street below. The molecular cables attached to the buster shield whined as they were rapidly retracted back into the Wing Zero's forearm, the grounded cables inflicting more injury and death as they were hauled back through the crowd. Char smirked, he was sure that such wanton violence would weigh heavily on the conscience of his enemy, who was one of those people to which casualties actually meant something besides points.
The Gelgoog planted its feet widely as it braced itself for its counterattack. The anti-armor shotgun fired first, followed by a long burst from the shoulder gatlings and finished with a massive flight of missiles from the leg launchers. Over half the munitions did not make it to the target area, their mostly unaimed paths leading them to strike the street and buildings that lined it. The sound of cracking stone and high explosives filled the street like an avalanche thundering down a rocky canyon as multiple buildings crumbled and collapsed, thousands of tons of concrete and steel dropping onto the ground and spilling into the street, inundating it and wiping the crowd of people from existence as though they had never even been there to begin with.
A deep shudder rippled through the hull and the decks of the Minerva-class battleship Katsuragi as it dropped out of its brace in the Excalibur's vast warship dock. The winged vessel stood silent for a moment, and then the engines came to life with a roar. The purple-rimmed battleship nosed out of the dock and towards the hangar opening.
Standing tall on the Katsuragi's bridge with arms crossed as the mighty ship crossed the shoal zone and edged out into open space, Hope Yamato surveyed it all with her amethyst eyes. Her first mission was quite simply to attack and destroy a space colony or a civilian convoy or whatever other innocent target presented itself; just to do it.
Of course, the real reason wasn't 'just to do it.' Hope knew that well. Such meaningless malice was not the forte of the Supreme Commander of Celestial Being. The point, of course, was to make sure that the Alliance and its citizens had something to fear. Fear was important, and without fear the rest of the plan would not work. But Hope Yamato and her soldiers could provide fear.
She glanced down at Misato, the Katsuragi's faithful captain. "First target of opportunity looks like it'll be a civilian Marseille III class freighter." Misato reported. "IFF has it as part of the Junk Guild. Are they off-limits?"
Hope looked back at the screen, and the yellow and black hexagonal logo of the Junk Guild. She knew that she would have to be strong. Strength and a heart of steel would be necessary now. On her depended the future of her people. She would have to be strong, for Celestial Being, for Kira, and for Mayu.
"No one is off-limits. Prepare to fire."
And so the war began.
"Well, well, well." Asuka Langley Soryu chuckled, floating by the railing of the Katsuragi's interior observation deck. The green shimmering beams of the Katsuragi's Tristan cannons lanced out and speared the floundering Marseille III freighter through the midsection, and the ship snapped in two amid a thundering firestorm. "First blood is ours, boys."
Standing behind her, Shinn Asuka watched without emotion on his face, and Athrun Zala witnessed it all with something akin to disdain. "If you want to call an unarmed freighter first blood." Shinn snorted. "Call me when we're attacking something that can shoot back."
Asuka nodded towards the Junk Guild ship's smoldering wreckage. "Do that a few more times and we'll have something that shoots back on our hands." She grinned. "Yeah, let 'em come at us. We can take 'em. We can take 'em all."
Arms crossed, Athrun watched the wreckage with something unpleasant stirring in his throat. A few hours back in the Earth Sphere and they were already committing war crimes. But this, he reminded himself, was the plan; to terrify and distract the Alliance with atrocities like this, while reducing their population, crippling their military and economy, and making sure that the Earth Alliance and Blue Cosmos could never threaten Celestial Being ever again.
So, as the Junk Guild ship's wreckage drifted apart and the Katsuragi arced away from the wreck in search of its next prey, why did it feel so wrong?
Talia Gladys had almost forgotten what a pain in the ass zero-gravity was, since the Minerva had never been outfitted with the gravimetric plating present throughout the Excalibur, the Enterprise-E, and the Prometheus.
She refastened the restraint on the captain's char with a sigh and glanced up through the bridge windows, at the vast inky tableau of outer space. It had taken so much blood and effort to get up here.
The Minerva was to seek out the Three Ships Alliance Fleet. That was all well and good, she supposed; the Three Ships Alliance was one of the few forces within the amalgam of shattered timelines that was as feared and respected as Celestial Being. The Three Ships Alliance had singlehandedly reshaped the scattered resistance forces in space into a respectable fighting force. Although that had also wound up shaping the Earth Alliance Space Force into an equally respectable fighting force. Funny how that worked out.
"The Three Ships Alliance Fleet says they're...Oh, goddammit." Meyrin muttered; as she turned in her chair, she nearly floated out of it, and jabbed her foot under the communications console to stop herself. "This is going to take some getting used to."
"As graceful as a seagull." Luna shot back with a little too proud a smirk. "You were saying, Meyrin?"
Meyrin scowled back. "The Three Ships Alliance is sending a ship. They'll call us, don't call them, now if you'll kindly let me buckle the fuck up."
Talia waved it off. "Shinn, keep an eye out. We're probably going to attract an Alliance patrol too, but we'll just have to let whoever comes at us take the first shot."
The broken, smoking remains of a civilian space liner drifted around the Katsuragi, and Hope stood tall and cold on the bridge, arms crossed, regarding it all with an emotionless mask of stone. A knot of terrified bodies, faces frozen in death screams, drifted by the bridge windows; Hope crushed the horror and sorrow before they could bubble up to the surface. Changing the world required sacrifice, of them, and of herself, because their blood was on her hands now.
Misato glanced up from the captain's chair. "Civilian space traffic is slowing down sooner than we expected. What are we going to do about targets?"
"The Alliance is taking its time." Hope answered. "Which is odd. They should be all over us by now."
"Does this negatively affect our plans?"
"Not in the least. If they're not going to stop us from destroying the space transit systems and bringing the economies on the colonies to a halt, then so much the better." She waved forward. "If we run out of ships to target, then we'll start going after stationary satellites."
Of course, the people living and working in the colonies would be without power, without food, without medicine, without basic necessities for life in space, and they would be the ones not killed by Celestial Being's attacks. But once again, Hope crushed the emotions that would have left her weak had she allowed them to surface. The new world that Celestial Being was building demanded strength and sacrifice, and she would sacrifice just as surely as they would.
"You people can't hope to win against us." Kira Yamato scowled within the cockpit of the Divinity Gundam, as the vision of a brightly glowing, purple seed with gold veins appeared falling through his mind, before striking some infinitely dense surface and exploding with a pure white light, as though a new universe was being brought into existence.
The Divinity Gundam broke the beam saber clash it had been in with a mass production version of the Raider Gundam, before kicking the transformable mobile suit in the chest, sending it tumbling away. The Divinity quickly backed away, putting extra distance between the two mobile suits, even as the angelic machine's MCPS armor powered down and the chest and leg flyers suddenly seperated, revealing the X-02A Wyvern superfighter, which served as the cockpit of the angel-winged Gundam. Kira smirked withiin the cockpit of the Wyvern, quickly pulling his superfighter into a sharp right turn, igniting his afterburners and pulling away from the Raider Gundam as the now seperated halves of the Divinity Gundam ignited their thrusters, charging towards the floundering Raider. The two pieces of the Divinity Gundam slammed into the Raider Gundam before exploding into a pair of massive red-orange fireballs.
A few short seconds later, the all too familiar Legend Gundam streaked in from of the surrounding blackness, heading straight towards the quickly reassembling Divinity Gundam. The snowflake-shaped machine once again bearing a pink color scheme. Kira simply sighed as his angelic machine once again came together, with a flash from its amethyst eyes, and an instant later, he fired a full-burst at the approaching mobile suit, disabling it with a single volley.
A few seconds passed, but then Kira noticed three more Gundams quickly speeding towards him; the Infinite Justice, the Destiny and the Force Impulse. The amethyst-eyed man simply snapped his fingers, utilizing his more god-like powers to cause the Infinite Justice's subflight lifter to unexpectedly explode, even as the Force Impulse seperated itself into its individual components while the Destiny raised its right hand to its face and fired the beam cannon located in its palm, obliterating its own head with a searing green beam blast.