Celestial Being Chronicles - Chapter 74
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.
"Athrun, I understand what you're saying." Kira Yamato sighed as he sat in the cockpit of the Divinty Gundam, even as the angelic machine chased after the Infinite Justice Gundam, which was currently streaking through space towards an Earth Alliance prision where his fiancée; Meyrin Hawke, was being held. "But we don't want you fighting against us even with things the way they are now...because Athrun, what is lost in battle is gone and never returned."
"I've had enough of your sanctimonious talk!" Athrun roared, as the Infinite Justice whirled around and fired its beam rifle, the searing green beam blast harmlessly bouncing off the Divinity's MCPS armor. "You think you've got all the answers! Or have you forgotten all the lives you've personally taken!"
"Yes, I know." Kira nodded. "And that's why I'm so sick and tired of all of it."
"Kira..." Athrun trailed off, tears slipping from his eyes. "I only want to save Meyrin, I'm not deserting Celestial Being."
"I know, Athrun. I don't want to kill any more, and I will not let others kill." Kira calmly replied. "I also know that you feel the same way I do when it comes to killing." The amethyst-eyed man said, moving directly in front of the Infinite Justice Gundam and opening his arms wide. A halo abruptly appeared above the angelic machine's head and the thrusters on its back flickered rapidly on and off. A wave of air seemed to materalize within the blackness and spread out from the front of the Divinity. Athrun gasped in surprise when lightning suddenly coursed across the control screens and they went to pure static, even as his thrusters died. He couldn't see it, but his twin beam sword winked out like a snuffed candle. Unpowered, the Infinite Justice Gundam began to silently float through the void.
Part of Meyrin Hawke's special 'trustee' status was the freedom to mingle with certain other groups of prisioners, in a controlled and carefully monitored environment, of course. Usually these groups were younger, generally children, often those that were fresh off the shuttles from Earth and who were still adapating to the harsh realities of their new existences in space as lab animals. It had been determined that the risks of allowing Meyrin to socialize with these waifs was offset by the calming influence of an older female mother figure that the tykes could latch onto for an hour or two every couple of days. It kept them calmer without having to resort to drugging them whenever they started calling for their mommies and daddies, or siblings or whatever. It saved time and saved cost in having to use fewer specialty drugs, and it provided them with a 'privilege' to take away from children that misbehaved too often, in essence confining them to solitary imprisonment without their new mother figure until they shaped up.
A spare, empty storeroom was provided as a sort of playpen for the children, with basic toys like blocks and crayons, though each item was carefully inventoried after each session so that the kids couldn't try and sneak out any writing implements or potential weapons or suicide choking hazards. There was no furniture, and nothing to hide behind, multiple cameras keeping watch on each sector of the room; the conversations, such as they were, carefully recorded and screened for any evidence of collaborations, a team of guards armed with stun batons, tranquilizer darts and tear gas grenades waited on duty outside at all times while there were children at play.
Meyrin resented the way the scientists used her to manipulate good behavior out of the children by giving them time with her and then taking that time away if the child ever did anything out of line, which could even be as simple as not providing the test results the scientist was looking for, as if that was the child's fault! But there was no reasoning with the type of scientists that worked in this sector of the Earth Alliance's labs, the Coordinators were no different from cloned albino lab mice to them, and with the war on, there was a steady stream of new subjects arriving all the time, so it wasn't like they were totally irreplacable or anything. And providing any hope and comfort at all to the terrified and sometimes injured children was better than doing nothing! Plus it allowed her to feel indignation for others, rather than sinking into a pit of constant self pity over her own circumstances. And sometimes she was even able to carry short messages back and forth, in secret, between children and their families that were in other parts of the labs, little squiggles of colored crayon on her skin that looked meaningless to the guards, but still proved to the parents that their child was alive and functioning.
Meyrin's head jolted up when the door to the playpen hissed open, well ahead of the usual scheduled change out of children, and in stepped a squadron of guards, dressed in heavier full body flak vests and mirror lensed gas masks. They looked around the room, either uneasily or dangerously, perhaps a combination of both, as children scattered like mice and hugged the walls, turning their faces away from the scary looking men.
Meyrin simply stared at them challengingly, carefully setting aside the young boy nestled in her lap, who scampered away hastily as she stood up and took a step towards the guard squad, who had heavy truncheons and some form of projectile taser or stun guns in their hands. Judging by the flab on one of them, she knew the identity of at least one guard, and her lip curled in utmost disdain and disgust as she turned her eyes away from Harry Mcnabb, the underwear stealing pervert. Meyrin folded her arms across her chest imperiously, and opened her mouth to demand what the guards wanted, assuming it was something more productive than simply terrorizing a room full of pre-adolescent children. "She's one!" Meyrin heard Mcnabb say, his voice muffled and tinny from inside his gas mask. "Stun 'er!" He added, and a second later, before Meyrin could even think of dodging, one of the tasers spat its little dart at her, striking her in one folded arm, the channeled jolt of electricity making her hair stand up on end as she dropped to the ground like a wet sack, gurgling and convulsing painfully.
"Where's the others? I can't tell these little monsters apart." One of the guards complained, barely audible to Meyrin as she lay twitching on the cold floor by their feet.
"Screw it." One of the others commented. "Gas them all, we'll sort out the grain from the chaff after."
"Wait...!" Meyrin gritted, mastering the spasms from the nerve overloading jolt, propping herself up on one elbow and reaching out to grab the ankle of the leading guard. "Please don't...they're just kids...there's no need for force..." A moment later he jerked his ankle out of her grip, kicking her hand away and then stepping on it, making her cry out in pain as a finger crunched loudly.
"Holy shit, it grabbed me! Stun it again!" The guard swore loudly.
Before the other gaurd could reply, the entire station violently shook, and a voice boomed from the PA system. "All hands, level two battlestations! Multiple mobile suits and a single warship are approaching the station!"
Kira Yamato felt a pair of high caliber bullets ping harmlessly off his shoulder and cheek and he snarled in irritation as the holoshroud flickered for a few milliseconds. Even with the Divinity Gundam's advanced sensors at his disposal, it was fast becoming impossible for him to keep track of everything that was happening around him, with at least fourty soldiers firing at him almost constantly, plus the added confusion of the smoke. He snapped both of his blades up into a guarding position in front of himself, feeling the quantum crystal blades shudder as they deflected several more stray bullets in showers of blue and white sparks. His snarl deepened...the damn soldiers were making everything so difficult, with their stupid gunfights. All he wanted to do was kill the annoying bastard who'd tossed a grenade in his face and then rescue Athrun's fiancée. But he couldn't do that while he was dancing for his life in the middle of a crossfire. As he saw it, there were two solutions...he could kill the soldiers, which would be satisfying, but counterproductive in the short term; or he could bring the fight to the soldiers, who were no doubt feeling secure in their fortifications. Tiresome, but it was better than what he was doing. Thought became action with such a smooth transition that one might as well have been the other and he raced for where he remembered the stairway to be.
The soldiers in the stairway landing fortification had no time to react. They were busy maintaining a steady stream of fire into the smoke filled room below and in front of them, with always at least one of them firing while the others reloaded. Without warning a haze of blue and white sparks arrowed towards them through the smoke and then a nightmare hurtled out of the smoke, drawing bits of it after him in his haste like a shroud as he charged directly through their lane of fire, bullets whining and shattering as they struck the durable metal of the shrieking blades he grasped within his fists. The female sergeant was just opening her mouth to call a warning while clawing at her harness for a concussion grenade to stop the monster's advance when Kira struck the somewhat shotworn table the soldiers were covering behind. The table was made from dense, heavy metal, probably stainless steel, and must have weighed at least three or four hundred pounds. The quantum crystal blades chewed through the table as easily as they had the doors less then five minutes earlier, weakening the structure of the steel so that when Kira hit it a millisecond later, the table broke in half at the midpoint, barely slowing his advance at all. The soldiers tumbled backwards, but by then it was too late.
Kira took the female sergeant first, one quantum crystal blade, now posessing a beam edge, spearing forward to impale her through the lower abdomen, kicking out a wash of blood that sprayed all over the area, while his second sword chopped off her reaching arm at mid-forearm before continuing on to pare off a slice of flesh from her side and hip. Her scream thrummed along Kira's nerves in a wave of euphoria as he lifted the impaling sword up through her body while hacking out twice with the other, decapitating the soldier to the right and splitting the one on the left from shoulder to groin. With a contemptuous twist and heave, Kira tossed the flopping corpse of the female sergeant from the end of his blad back over his head to roll disjointedly down the stairway behind him. He was just turning to continue his way up the stairs when he caught sight of a pair of small metallic objects flying his way from the direction of the second floor landing. He reacted on instinct, and before he even fully realized what he was doing, he'd tossed himself back down the stairs, landing in a shoulder roll, keeping his blades out wide to avoid injuring himself. Tough luck for a couple of soldiers, who went down with severed limbs and gashed torsos, but such was life. Behind him, the stairway landing disappeared in twin explosions of fire and red hot shrapnel, which did a good job of vaporizing the bodies lying there, and made a hash from the fortitifications, but not much else.
As Kira rolled to his feet, his blade took another soldier behind her left knee, slicing her lower leg off cleanly. She began to mewl in terror, like humans did when they got badly hurt and Kira absentmindably crushed the side of her skull in with the hilt of his right blade. She dropped like a sack of potatos, not yet dead but fast getting there. He regretted not being able to take the time to do things right and give her a send off everyone else would be sure yo remember, but with a monstrous effort of will he choked back his bloodlust.
"I just want to end this!" Kira roared, as his rail guns and plasma cannons clicked into their firing positions. The sudden appearance of the additional weapons surprising the soldiers, whom had only seen Kira's human image which was being projected by the Divinity Gundam's holoshroud.
"All things are born into this world and eventually they die." Kira calmly sighed, ignoring the hail of bullets which were still pelting him and calmly began to move forward, his plasma cannons and rail guns still in their firing positions. "That is the pure and simple truth."
Even as the holoshroud continued to conceal the Divinity's true form, ten of the DRAGOON units suddenly dropped from the angelic machine's wings and flew through the soldiers closest to Kira, which emerged from the cloud of blood moments later. The Divinity's remaining DRAGOON units swung to the end of its wings, and a field of rainbow colored energy spanned between each wing. Kira smirked, his eyes flashing, before then turning multicolor at the edges, as he ignited the beam saber on the his left wrist and flew straight through the closest group of soldiers, moving so fast that it appeared he had teleported himself from one end of the room to the other.
"W-wh-what the hell are you?" One of the few surviving soldiers asked in terror, as the field of energy slowly faded, the ten feathers on the young man's back assumed their normal configuration, and finally, the rail guns and plasma cannons assumed their standby positions.
"I am what you would call God." Kira calmly answered, even as the remaining DRAGOON units once more docked on his back and the holoshroud once again concealed the remote weapons. "Now, where is Meyrin Hawke?"
"If you're God, you should know where we're keeping that damn coordinator girl." The soldier spat, only to regret his words an instant later, when he found himself staring down the barrels of Kira's twin buster rifle, both muzzles sparking with barely contained electricity.
"How dare you speak of my fiancée like that?" Athrun Zala's voice roared, as the Infinite Justice Gundam suddenly streaked from the same corridor which Kira stood in. Athrun was also utilizing the holoshroud to project his own image over the armor of his Gundam. The two Gundams were less than a foot apart when Kira side-stepped to his left, allowing Athrun to continue forward and to deliver a punishing kick to the soldier's stomach and sending him flying through the air. Athrun had been tempted to utilize one of his leg blades to simply slice the foolish soldier in half from crotch to crown, but he also knew that the man might know where Meyrin was being held. "You stupid fuck!" Athrun snarled, grabbing the soldier out of the air with his right hand, igniting his machine's thrusters before then slamming the soldier roughly against the far wall, the impact nearly knocking the man unconscious. "Tell me where Meyrin Hawke is being held!"
"Go fuck yourself, space monster." The soldier weakly replied.
"Care to repeat that remark, asshole?" Athrun sadisticly grinned, even as he ignited the glowing pink beam saber on his left wrist and brought it to the solider's neck, the flesh slowly cooking due to the intense heat from the beam blade.
"Athrun, you need to calm down." Kira spoke, his voice urgent but calm. "Let me take care of this douchebag."
"You're right, Kira." Athrun said, deactivating his beam saber and letting go of the terrified soldier, before then turning to face his long time friend as his military training once again took over. "I apologize for my ruthless actions."
"Not a problem." Kira smiled. "To be honest, I would have done the exact same thing if someone I loved was captured by an enemy."
Athrun nodded in thanks as he ignited his thrusters and once again took off, speeding further down the corridor, towards the prision block.
'Hang on, Meyrin, I'm on my way!' Meyrin Hawke gasped in surprise when she suddenly heard Athrun's voice in her mind. Meyrin knew that her sister; Lunamaria, and her husband; Shinn, along with Kira and his lovers were all telepathic, but she wasn't aware that she and Athrun were as well.
"Hey, asshole." Kira calmly spoke as a single soldier ran past himself and Hope. Kira and Hope were both concealed beneath their Mirage Colloid, and the soldier's head swiveled rapidly to the side when he heard Kira speak. The man tried to stop, his boots skidding on the metal floor of the passage.
Hope wasted no time in kicking his legs out from under him, falling on him as he lay stunned and caving in his windpipe with a thrust of her hand. She vaporized his sub machine gun with her palm beam cannon, doing the same to the knife and the sphereical grenade on his belt. Kira dove out of the niche and hit the floor next to Hope as she fired her beam rifle, taking down the primary electrical grid on the entire section of this level of the facility. Hope opened up with her rail guns in the dark, aiming down the corridor. It was pitch black, but she didn't really need to see. She just targeted the yellow and red blobs that represented the bodies of the soldiers to her thermal vision.
Emergency red lighting came on within seconds, but it was too late for the inital force of guards, who were all down, wounded or dead. Kira freed and ignited a glowing pink beam saber from his right hip, holding the weapon in his right hand and charged the remains of the force, severing the heads of those who looked like they might have been able to put up a fight. A single soldier tried to edge around a turn about five meters away, crouched down low on the floor. Kira spotted him almost instantly, and took him out by freeing a beam dagger from his left leg and throwing the glowing green energy blade. He threw harder than he meant to, as the knife embedded itself to the hilt in the eye of the soldier.
Athrun scowled as he sped down the corridor. Most of the doors were open and empty, but finally he came to one which was securely locked. Without any hesitation, Athrun delivered a punishing kick to the heavy metal door, the impact forming a huge dent, sending it spiraling into the cell and bouncing off the far wall before finally coming to rest at his feet.
"Athrun!" Meyrin cried out in joy, instantly bounding off the cot on which she sat, running to her fiancé and tightly embracing him.