The war reached its final stages, with Dullindal's official announcement of the Destiny Plan.
The Joule team was dispatched to the moon shortly following rumors that Lord Djibril had escaped to the moon. While there definitely had been some alarming moves on the OMNI's part, not many troops were assembled on their Daedalus Lunar Base, which lead the ZAFT headquarters to think that any attacks would not be happening too soon.
And they probably would have stayed that way had the Joule team not found a colossal cylindrical object floating in the moon's orbit during one of their rounds.
It was one of the rare days where Yzak was out in a MS with his team. Ever since he had been assigned commander, he was usually forced to stay on the Voltaire to oversee his team rather than being out in the field. He did miss piloting a MS horribly, though, and he justified launching that day as a test drive of his newly assigned GOUF Ignited.
Yzak, Dearka, Shiho and two other pilots led the team as they flew over the moon. It had been a fairly uneventful patrol for the most part, and there was nothing that seemed threatening or unusual.
Until, of course, the mysterious object appeared from the horizon.
"Yzak, what the hell is that?"
Yzak frowned at Dearka's voice on the intercom. It did not look like any kind of facility he had seen before, military or otherwise. But of course, he was not the specialist in the field.
"Shiho?"
Her face on the monitor mirrored his frown.
"Honestly, I have no fucking idea."
Yzak sighed; if Shiho did not know, then nobody else on his team would. He started to type a message to the headquarters, when Shiho shouted over the intercom.
"Wait! That's a Geschmeidig Panzer array!"
Yzak scowled.
"English, Shiho. English."
She glared at him through the screen.
"It's a variation on the Mirage Colloid system. It's usually used to deflect energy beams…"
Her voice was cut off by a series of missiles fired on them. The team found themselves facing a fleet of OMNI ships. Yzak clenched his teeth at the intrusion; the attack was proof enough that whatever the cylinders were intended for would not benefit the PLANTS in any way, shape or form.
"Voltaire, Rousseau! We are now in condition red, prepare to engage and report to the headquarters! We are destroying this thing!"
He inhaled deeply before accelerating towards the OMNI fleet. It was one of those moments that would define his entire life, and he could not let the entire world down.
xoxox
Just as the Joule team finished off the last members of the OMNI troop, Yzak's radar started beeping in warning. He scowled at the LCD, but the only thing he could make out was a huge heat source building up on the moon's surface. He cursed at the useless screen and barked at the CIC.
"What the hell is going on?"
"I'm not sure, sir. There's an immense energy build up in the Daedalus Lunar Base, but we can't determine what exactly it is."
He glared back at his radar when Shiho's voice rang over the intercom.
"It's an energy beam! This fucking thing is part of a canon!"
A beam of green light was fired from the surface of the moon before she could finish her sentence. He almost froze as he realized what the cylinders were for and where the beam would hit –they were reflectors to bend the beam so the OMNI could aim at whatever they pleased. And there was one thing they wanted to annihilate more than anything else.
The PLANTS.
He almost started to fly towards the reflector in a desperate attempt to destroy the damned thing, but reason stopped him at the last second. There would be no point, he knew. One MS blowing up against it would not damage it enough to significantly alter the beam. He shouted through gritted teeth.
"Fall back! Everyone, fall the fuck back!"
Most of the team reacted quickly to his command, but three of his pilots were too close to the reflectors.
The light beam passed through, bending at the reflectors, and their anguished cries echoed in his cockpit as their MS were pulverized by the mass of energy. The rest of his team were struck dumb by the sudden loss of three teammates, but that was quickly overridden by utter horror at what came next.
The beam had cut through the PLANTS.
Yzak reached to his controls with trembling hands. He inhaled, trying to steady himself; he could not betray any sign of weakness, not now, when his team needed him most.
"CIC, report the damage."
He heard the sound of furious typing over the intercom followed by a feeble voice.
"The beam hit Januarius 1 through 4, which also caused December 7 and 8 to explode. Estimated casualty is well over a million, sir."
His entire team fell completely silent until a sob broke the silence. He dug his nails in his fist and slammed it against his controls. The OMNI had wiped out a million innocent lives in cold blood.
What he had been fighting for all along.
His first instinct was to lash out at everything within his reach in the cockpit, shouting profanities at the faceless enemy who had just destroyed a considerable portion of his world. It was too late. He wanted nothing more than to blow himself up, anything to escape from the sudden wave of helplessness and anger that engulfed him. Whatever he had done in the Council, all the angry words he threw at Athrun, were all just a load of bullshit. He had failed.
Then, he saw the reflector in his peripheral.
Adrenaline suddenly cleared his mind. The remainder of the PLANTS still existed in space, completely defenseless against the massacre by the OMNI. And they would fire again, as long as the PLANTS existed, because that was the one thing that stood between them and their ideal Coordinator-free world.
He needed to destroy the goddamned thing before they took everything away from him.
"Stay with me, team! Our job is still not done!"
Only Shiho and Dearka even seemed to notice his voice. He inhaled and shouted at the intercom with as much force as he could muster.
"Are you all just going to fucking watch?"
Little by little, the rest of his team also responded. Yzak gritted his teeth. This was it. If there was any reason why he had been spared through both wars when millions of lives had been wasted away, why he was spared from his death sentence at his court martial, this was why.
This was the one chance he had for atonement. To justify still breathing, existing in the world.
xoxox
The destruction of the reflectors, as well as the main cannon on the Daedalus lunar base, went so quickly that it was almost a blur. Perhaps it was the reinforcements from the Minerva, or the urgency of the situation. Or maybe, his own desperation had made it seem go much faster than it actually did.
By the time Yzak finally returned to the Voltaire, he was so exhausted that his vision was starting to blur. Everything seemed so detached, and it took him a few minutes to realize that one of his pilots who had docked earlier was heading towards him.
It was one of the younger, newer additions to his team –sixteen years old, idealistic, shipped straight from the ZAFT academy only days before the Second War broke out. The young pilot stopped about two feet away from him. His still childlike features were twisted into an expression that was all too familiar. It was the expression used to greet Yzak every morning in the bathroom mirrors of the Vesalius.
"What is wrong with you?"
The pilot's voice only reached him as an odd reverberation that he made no sense to him. It was wrong, somehow, but his frazzled mind could not seem to grasp the statement. He simply stared as a barrage of angry words spilled from the pilot's lips.
"You lose three pilots, you see a million people murdered in a flash, and it takes you all of three seconds to be barking commands at us like nothing ever happened? How are you not upset about any of this?"
A few of the crew noticed the commotion and started to gather. He saw Dearka and Shiho's faces in the crowd.
"The rumors were true. You are a cold-hearted bastard."
He felt a spur of anger, but any protests he began did not make it out of his mouth.
The pilot was shaking, glaring at him like his life depended on it. Yzak suddenly remembered that the pilot in front of him was very close friends with one of the pilots he lost to the Requiem. The two were always together, laughing, pulling jokes, acting like mindless teenagers that they were all supposed to be.
Yzak clenched his fist beside him. The young pilot was him, a little over three years ago. Just another young boy, suddenly robbed of innocence by a tragic death. And there was absolutely nothing he could have said to ease the pain.
"Stop."
A calm voice broke them from their trance-like state. Yzak looked over and saw that Shiho had made her way to the front of the crowd. She moved swiftly, gracefully, until she was standing in between him and his pilot.
"The commander was only fulfilling his duties. Your behavior is completely inappropriate and disrespectful."
The younger boy glared at her, then at him, then at Dearka who had finally made his way through the crowd.
"You're all nuts! How are you so fucking calm about all of this?"
Shiho's back stiffened and Dearka's face tensed. Calm. Yzak would have laughed at the boy's statement if it were not for the gravity of the situation. They were anything but calm. A few years ago, when they were his age, they too reacted to the pain of the battlefield like him: violence, anger, blame. Trying to find an outlet so their emotions would not destroy them from the inside.
Over the years, they had grown a little wiser, a little more mature.
"As ZAFT soldiers, our most important mission is the protection of our homeland. And we carry that out to the best of our abilities. Sometimes that means we put our emotions to the side and do what needs to be done at the moment. We do not have the luxury to mourn in the battlefield."
The boy fell silent at Shiho's words. It was the little piece of wisdom that they had managed to gather over the years. Wisdom that they never would have known in a peaceful world. The boy crumpled to the ground and let out an anguished cry.
Another child's innocence broken for a war he did not start.
And as he mourned with the rest of the crew for the losses of battle that day, Yzak prayed that whatever future they were fighting for would be free of that kind of pain.
And so I'm pulling the focus back a little bit from the Yzak/Shiho drama and trying to shed light on the situation as a whole. Yes, the story is coming to a close... a few more chapters. Thank you all so much for your support and patience. Reviews are always welcome!