Celestial Being Chronicles - Chapter 82
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.
"Commander." Came a muffled voice. It sounded urgent. Kira sighed heavily and rose from his bed. Clad only in a pair of black boxers, he moved swiftly across the room and opened up the door while Murrue remained asleep.
"Yeah?" He asked. A young solider, whom Kira quickly recognized as Allister, the son of Cagalli and Lacus, stood there with a very pale, very upset look on his face.
"Uh...sir...you and Murrue are needed on the bridge." He said quietly.
"What is it? What's wrong?" Kira asked. He was beginning to get worried.
"Just...go to the bridge. Lacus wants...needs to see you both. Immediately." Allister replied, and then wandered off. Kira immediately shut the door and began getting dressed. Something was seriously wrong, the crew only acted like that when they either had battle fatigue, were in shock, or had just seen their entire platoon slaughtered. He roused Murrue with a gentle hand. She came awake quickly and tense, but relaxed when she saw Kira.
"What is it?" She asked sleepily.
"Something's really wrong. Get dressed, we're needed on the bridge." Kira replied. Murrue was up in an instant. She had gone to bed nearly naked save for a pair of black panties. Soon they were both dressed in combat uniforms and heading together through the corridors.
Nearly three weeks had passed since the invasion had ended, and since then, there hadn't been any more invasion attempts or attacks. But even so, everyone onboard the Excalibur was still on edge, prepared for another attack or invasion. Little did they know that the next invasion attempt would come from the Earth.
They arrived on the bridge moments later, and Kira's stomach began doing flips as his greatest fear was confirmed. Down below, on Earth, a huger war was occurring. He watched in horror and numbness as a mushroom cloud appeared somewhere over Europe, followed by another right in the heart of America, and finally, another pair over Australia.
"God, no..." Murrue whispered.
"We didn't stop it. Christ, we didn't stop it at all!" Kira cried. They both simply stared for a long while with the others in numb silence. Cagalli suddenly roused herself. She moved over to the helm controls and began working them. With a jerk, the ship started again.
Kira stared around at the sullen, stricken faces of the crew members. The bridge of the Excalibur was bathed in crimson light, giving the room an ominous, surreal atmosphere. He could sense Murrue's presence next to him, just as tense and apprehensive as himself. They were currently making their way down through the atmosphere, reentering somewhere over North America. Meyrin, face taught with tension, gripped the handheld communications unit. She was speaking quietly and rapidly into it.
"I repeat, this is the warship Excalibur, transmitting on all channels, to anyone. Is anyone left down there?" She cried, her voice rising in desperation.
"Another one just blew, sir." Lacus grimly informed Kira. The amethyst-eyed man whipped his head towards the pink-haired beauty.
"Where?" He replied.
"South America. Brazil, it looks like. Wait, another one just went off in Italy."
"My God..."
"Why are they dropping so many nukes?" Cagalli murmured softly.
"They're panicking." Meyrin replied darkly. The bridge fell silent yet again save for the soft rumbling of the ship's hull as it entered the atmosphere. In the quietude, they broke through the low cloud cover and continued their descent towards the surface, near the east coast of North America. Meyrin brought the radio to her mouth again.
"I repeat, this is the Excalibur, somebody answer me, dammit!" She snapped. Again, a static answer. Meyrin slowly put down the radio on the console, replacing it to its place of origin.
"Maybe they're just too busy to answer." Kira murmured.
"Sure. Maybe they're all dead." Meyrin replied glumly. Before Kira had a chance to answer, a sharp beeping suddenly filled the bridge.
"We've got incoming!" Lacus cried out.
"What the hell is it?" Meyrin snapped. Kira's eyes hunted through the front windows. He could imagine an army of flying demons rising up to meet them. Instead, he saw a pair of bright lights streaking for them.
"Missiles. We've got auto-targeting missiles. They've locked onto us. I'm transmitting our code, but they don't seem to care..."
"This is a warship, dammit. Shoot them down!" Kira demanded. Instantly the Excalibur's anti-air defenses opened up, destroying the missiles with a hail of weapons fire, both physical and beam based.
On deck, the night was unnaturally clear and cold, and the bright of the stars burned in the frosty air. Around the crew in every direction, just a few hundred yards away, fog and clouds whirled, as if they were held at bay by the Excalibur's presence. Kira was at the railing leaning over along with the men on watch. Hope slowly approached him, suddenly desperate and panicked to know what was happening, when she saw it, the light flooding up from beneath the massive, dagger-shaped warship.
The sea was flat, like the surface of a mirror. The water was black, reflecting the pale pinpricks of the stars, but beneath the surface, something glowed with a cold light. Pulsating shapes of violet, green, and deep cobalt blue shone from beneath. The lights flowed and merged and shimmered silently, deep below the glassy sea.
The assembled crew stared, two dozen men and women, struck dumb and horrified by the sight. There was a sense of scale that emerged from the fluid movement of the lights; they seemed to be many fathoms beneath the ship, which would make them terribly large and impossibly fast. There were no solid shapes, and no disturbance of the water, just a deep field of liquid flowing light.
They watched for what seemed like hours, entranced by the mesmerizing ballet of cold light, a mirror reflection of the northern lights. When it ended, abruptly, there were three almost simultaneous events. First, the lights seemed to quickly contract, each one freezing in place and collapsing like the iris of an eye in bright sunlight. Secondly, there was a tremor in the air that raised the hair on the back of Kira's neck. As the ghostly lights winked out of existence, it rose in intensity, until he thought his eyeballs might shake their way out of his head. Through the fog of sudden pain, the amethyst-eyed man heard a noise; a humming vibration from the Excalibur itself, that matched the electric shuddering in his skull.
It was as if every lightbulb aboard the Excalibur were suddenly flushed with power, flaring bright and buzzing noisily in their housings, and when the whine had finally reached a fever pitch, they began to pop and shatter among a shower of sparks. From start to finish, it lasted less than two seconds, and the crew was left floating silently in the dark waters, beneath the starry sky, on a dead and crippled warship.
The damage was invisible, without any obvious cause, and total. Nothing aboard the Excalibur worked, each carefully crafted system of multiple redundancies had crumbled. Every light was shattered, even the replacement bulbs, and the small flashlights, which every single crewmember carried with them at all times, held fused and useless filaments. Satellite phones, shortwave radios, all means of communication were useless bricks of plastic and wire. Every battery was dead, every stereo system was silent. They were adrift, without engines, isolated from the world by a hundred miles of black and silent sea.
The crew moved through the massive ship that night like moles, fumbling through dark corridors with only a few pale green chemical lights to check each system. They relayed each disheartening message like a fire brigade through the darkness, to where Kira stood on the deck, trying to make sense of the senseless.
At last, when nothing else could be done, Kira fumbled his way back to his cabin, and tried to sleep, the darkness feeling like an oppressive many fingered hand, slowly gripping his chest.
The next morning, Kira again took stock of the situation, hoping for some fragment of hope which the crew could have unknowingly passed by in the night. The damage was total. They would have to find a way to send a distress call, and hope that they had not drifted too far from their last known coordinates. The men may not have known the full details, but it was clear from their haunted visages that they knew how dire the situation was.
As Kira stood there on the deck, Shinn walked up to him. "Why don't we rig a sail of some sort?" The crimson-eyed man suggested.
"And where exactly do you suggest that we get all the fabric necessary to make such a sail, Shinn?" Mayu asked, her eyes narrowing slightly.
Before Shinn could answer, however, Hope walked over to Mayu. "I think I know where we could get more than enough fabric to make a sail." Hope smiled, her amethyst eyes sparkling as she gently ran her fingers through Mayu's silken, ankle-length tresses. "I never did like doing things the easy way."
Before Hope could even begin to lengthen Mayu's soft, brunette tresses, however, Cagalli and Lacus had already figured out her plan and had begun to rapidly lengthen their own hair. Everyone watched in silent awe as the two women began to wrap their beautiful hair, which had reached a length of nearly three miles in only ten seconds, and was still steadily becoming longer, around the pair of large fore-masts, the soft strands quickly taking the shape of a trio of huge sails; the sail on the right consisting of Lacus's pink tresses, and the sail on the left consisting of Cagalli's blonde tresses, while the central sail was an equal mix of hair from both women, the color alternating in the center, steadily changing from golden blonde on the left-side, to bright pink on the right-side.
After the three sails had taken shape, the two women utilized their more divine abilities to instantly sever the hair that now formed the shape of the three sails from the main mass of their sliken tresses, while simultaniously weaving the individual strands of now severed hair into a single sheet, finally forming the trio of massive sails.
"W-what the hell was that?" Shinn asked, unable to believe what he had just seen.
"That is one of the abilities which we don't usually display in public, Shinn." Mayu answered, even as Cagalli and Lacus began to form the main sail. "Cagalli, Hope, Lacus, Murrue and I can lengthen our hair at will, and even control it as though it were a limb."
Less than thirty seconds later, the Excalibur sported a total of twelve huge sails. The three sails on the fore-mast were ballon-like spinnaker sails, the six sails on the pair of massive main-masts were square sails, while the three mizzen-masts were triangular bermuda sails. The four sails on the Excalibur's right-side were bright pink, the four sails on the left-side were golden blonde, while the four central sails swapped colors at their midpoint, steadily changing from bright pink on the right-side, to golden blonde on the left-side.
A few hours later, Murrue Ramius found Kira Yamato waiting in the hanger, the Strike Freedom Gundam was outside, along with the other Gundams, the machines having been moved outside the hanger for a faster launch since most of the Excalibur's systems were still being repaired. Kira had his arms crossed laconically across his chest and had an indolent smirk on his face. Murrue could not help but feel her breathing hitch a bit as Kira had walked over to her, still smiling in a way that made her wonder if he was going to kiss her or kill her. In retrospect, she rather wished he had just killed her.
"Strip." Kira commanded, not in a whisper, not in a conversational voice, but in a tone carefully modulated so that it would be heard throughout the entire hanger. Work on all the mobile suits came to a sudden stop as various mechanics, pilots and support staff perked up and peered at them, wondering if they hadn't misheard somehow, or wondering if Supreme Commander Yamato had just signed his own death warrant, and commanded Murrue to strip naked in the hanger! Not that many of them hadn't entertained a fancy now and then of getting Murrue to strip for them, but no one was brave enough to pursue such a dream, Murrue was way too powerful to risk that, she was the second most powerful of the six Supreme Commanders, after Kira himself!
She stared at him in disbelief, but there was no hint of jesting in his eyes or on his face. "Damn it, Kira, there's no need for..." She'd started to protest, before his finger on her lips stilled her mouth and speeded her heart.
"Strip, or stay behind." He said, for her ears alone. "I like you better in your natural state. Don't forget who owns whom, Murrue. So strip, now, here, and then we can be on our way." His finger moved away from her lips and stroked her chin and the side of her jaw, tickling her neckline a bit before he moved his hand back and gently combed his fingers through her ankle-length brunette hair, which she had unceremoniously shoved into the collar of her flight suit on her way down to the hanger. It might have looked cute to an outside observer, hell, it did have her heart thumping pretty hard, but it was nothing more than Kira displaying his dominance over her, his ownership of her, that he could touch her and play with her whenever he wanted.
"I hate you." She replied in a caustic whisper, as she began to remove her flight suit, hindered a bit by Kira continuing to pet and caress her as she did so, shifting his hands to each new piece of flesh as first the flight suit, and then the uniform underneath, fell away and exposed it. What had been highly erotic down in the Inner Sanctum was just about the most humiliating experience of her entire life, here in the brightly lit and somewhat crowded main hanger, with at least fifty people of both sexes looking on with stupefied expressions on their faces, their emotions radiating shock and a disturbing degree of disbelieving excitement, as they watched Supreme Commander Yamato humble the one woman no man of Celestial Being had ever been able to tame. What made it worse was the fact that she knew that she could easily just say no, and Kira would let her go with no hard feelings. But this opportunity to go with him on this self-appointed mission might be a once in a lifetime chance, and she didn't dare throw it away for the sake of her own pride. Damn him, but he was a master of giving her a choice of options of which she could only ever take the one which they both wanted.
"Do you?" Kira had replied, his smile stretching across his face in a way that let her know he didn't believe her in the slightest. But then he'd surprised her, yet again. "I'm glad to hear that, Murrue. Hate is an important emotion. You should learn to embrace it more often, it can be quite empowering in the right circumstances." He whispered into her ear as he slipped his hand down the front of her panties, right there in front of everyone, and Murrue felt her face turn cherry red, her arms trembling, caught between hugging him closer and pushing him angrily away, even as she began to wonder if he intended to fuck her, right there in front of everyone, in which case she knew that she would never be able to show her face onboard the Excalibur ever again, especially if he made her gasp and cry out in passion like he had so many times before. However, once she was naked, Kira made no moves to escalate things further. "Just remember who owns whom, Murrue." He told her again, and then instructed her to board her Gundam and follow him.
Moments later, the Divinity Gundam and the Strike Freedom Gundam ignited their thrusters and took off, both machines transforming into their mobile armor modes. The Divinity Gundam took the form of a white, red and black shuttle with glowing white delta wings, while the Strike Freedom Gundam took a similar form, but instead of glowing white delta wings, the Strike Freedom sported a pair of blue, forward swept wings. As they sped away from the Excalibur, both machines left three trails of glowing green GN particles in their wake.
Murrue had the entire three hour long flight to stew over the humiliation, her flight suit and uniform piled around her in the cockpit of the Strike Freedom Gundam, along with the shredded scraps of her dignity, and as a result she had paid much more attention to her brooding thoughts, her shame and her revenge fanatasies than she did to where exactly Kira was leading her.