Mobile Suit Gundam SEED TWILIGHT

Note: I should add here that I altered Phase 47 of my DESTINY rewrite in a way that should evince itself by the end of this chapter. For some reason, every time I did, the website I was updating refused to display it. Alas, even in the future nothing works.

Phase 39 - Ghost Army

Falling into position with a bone-jarring crash, the Chaos Gundam went silent as the final addition was made. Mechanics scurried around the slumbering titan as a crane lowered an armor plate over the Chaos's left hand.

"Two 'Solidus Fulgor' beam shields," the lead mechanic said, glancing back at Sting, Auel, and Stella on the gantry, "just like on the Destiny. You can still carry the RG30 if you want, but you don't really need to and it would slow you down a bit anyway."

"It will do," Sting said with a wave. "Thanks for everything, Conner. We appreciate it."

Conner merely shrugged. "Yeah, well, next up on the docket is the Gaia. What does Spacey over there want?"

Auel snickered as Stella stared back with a blank face. "We're just looking to get these two fitted for underwater combat," Sting answered for her, waving at the Chaos and Gaia, "so Auel doesn't have to bitch about always being alone."

"Fuck you!" Auel shot back.

"We'll do what we can," Conner said, consulting a laptop, "but, uh, they didn't really design the Chaos and Gaia for amphibious combat, so there's not much we can do besides, like, waterproofing."

"I understand," answered Sting, "but we need amphibious capability. Auel pretty much had to defend the ship from the entire Alliance aquatic squadron at Hormuz, and we can't really afford that again."

"What, you lack faith in my godlike abilities?" Auel scoffed.

"Think of it as hedging your bets," Conner said absently. "Look, Sting. I can't promise you a whole lot. We can't really make the Chaos and Gaia good at amphibious combat. We can only make them adequate at it. The rest you'll have to make up for with skill and luck. And since we don't believe in luck, well..."

"Do what you can," instructed Sting. "We came too close to losing everything last time, and I'm not letting that happen again."

To the untrained eye, it looked like a giant mess of red and green dots and tangled arrows on a green wire-grid map. And to the generally untrained eye of Meyrin Hawke, that was more or less what the Minerva's map screen looked like; but with concentration, it turned into something else.

"Something else" being a disaster.

"So," she started, with Rau standing silent next to her, "let me get this straight. We're supposed to take this entire fleet, make it invisible with Mirage Colloid, take it out through the south Pacific, around the Cape of Magellan, up the Atlantic, and straight into Iceland, with no problems whatsoever?"

"That would be the gist of it, yes," agreed Rau.

Meyrin rubbed her throbbing temples. "Okay. So what would you do?"

Rau suppressed the urge to grin, instead offering the sober military assessment born from experience. "I would do what the Resistance is doing now and wage a sustained guerrilla war," he answered. "The only two ways to counter it are to either win the support of the populace through which the guerrillas must move, or kill everyone so that the guerrillas have no populace through which to move. It is difficult to win the support of the populace when you are a foreign invader occupying their homes, and even the Phantom Pain would be hard-pressed to kill everyone."

"But that's why we're doing all this," Meyrin said, sweeping her arm over the map. "A long guerrilla war winds up killing civilians for every combatant."

Rau merely shrugged. "Civilians die either way. If Chiao Xu was not willing to tolerate that, he should not have fought this war in the first place."

Meyrin hated it when the people with bad news were right.

Stella Loussier moved with stunning efficiency.

It was one of the many things Shinn noticed about her as she diligently cleaned out her pet fish's tank. Every move she made was tailored to use as few muscles as possible, to expend as little energy as possible. It explained her slow, quiet, passive nature— and those bursts of unfathomable energy and coordination when she was angry or scared. Her training as an Extended had taught her how to conserve every calorie for those times when she would need to fight with the strength of dozens of men. And so, when she was not on the battlefield, every moment was budgeted and measured in terms of energy spent.

Shinn Asuka found that profoundly disturbing.

He had occasionally wondered whether or not Stella was really "retarded," as Auel had so artfully put it. His limited knowledge of the Extended tended to indicate otherwise— that a Class III like Stella would have been the most profoundly altered, the most extensively trained, the most deeply militarized. Perhaps it was the case that instead of being "retarded," she was actually as intelligent as anyone else— but so much of her mental faculties were devoted to budgeting and measuring and estimating her energy that she seemed almost catatonic to everyone else. It explained, at least, how she could seem so normal when she was fighting— when she was using all that stored-up energy.

And that was even more profoundly disturbing.

The tragedy of Stella Loussier was that if that was true, then even though she was free from the Alliance, even though she was where she wanted to be, she was still living life as an energy-measuring machine, constantly saving strength for spasms of battle.

That might let her take down ten Alliance Marines in hand-to-hand combat, but it was no way to live.

Standing on the gantry overlooking the Minerva as it entered the last phase of its repairs, Athrun Zala kept his back to the rest of Carpentaria. He had enough memories locked up here, and even though memories were all that remained of Yzak and Dearka and the others, he had no desire to be haunted. After all, that was the point that she had made.

He glanced to the right, where Viveka was leaning over the railing, peering down at the recuperating warship. "I still find it kinda hard to believe."

Athrun arched an eyebrow. "That we use giant robots to fight our wars?"

"No no, that I've spent the past month or so hanging out on the Minerva with my sister. I thought I would never see her again." She smiled grimly. "I guess there are still happy endings to be found in the world."

"I guess."

Viveka cast a sidelong glance towards her dour companion. "And what does your happy ending look like?"

"I don't think about happy endings," answered Athrun.

"Oh come on, you have to think of that." She nudged him in the side with her elbow— the mechanical one, as Athrun winced.

"I don't really want to tell my life story again— "

"It's not about your life story," she interrupted. "That's all the past. I'm talking about the future. Maybe it'll be as shitty as the past was, but maybe it'll be better. Isn't that worth fighting for?"

Athrun glanced down bitterly at the Minerva— the flagship of ZAFT, the pride of the Resistance. "This war isn't about securing a better future," he said. "It's about securing a future, period. We can worry about what the future holds when we get there."

"Isn't that enough of a reason to fight even harder for a better future?" Viveka asked.

Athrun was silent for a moment, studying her battle-scarred face. "As a Coordinator, I don't have a future," he said, "but as a person..." He shrugged. "We'll see."

Sven Cal Bayan did not understand women.

He had come to this conclusion after meeting the dreaded Transylvania Viper, Monique du Prey, who was now sprawled across a bench in the Charlemagne's crew lounge, wearily watching as Mudie once again humiliated Shams on the pool table. She was one of those Phantom Pain soldiers who had joined only for the thrill of the battle and the even greater thrill of killing. And for that, Sven realized, he found her disgusting.

It was not the killing itself that disgusted him. That was only a necessary part of the battle; soldiers couldn't get up and shoot you in the back if they were dead. But too much attachment to the thrill of the hunt and the rush of the fight led to mistakes, to losing sight of objectives, to doing stupid things like giving the enemy a sporting chance. This was not sport, this was war, and the important thing was not to have a good time but to achieve one's objectives.

That seemed to be an ongoing problem with the Phantom Pain, though. The Phantom Pain had two informal criteria for its recruits: that they were either bloodthirsty enough to kill lots of people, or skilled enough to dominate the battlefield. It was a happy day when those two traits combined in one person, and clearly the Phantom Pain preferred to err on the side of skill and not bloodlust— but people like Monique du Prey always found their way in anyway.

Well, he reminded himself, there was no sense worrying about it. She did her job, and if she happened to really like it, so much the better. All that mattered was achieving the objectives.

"What the hell are those things?"

Standing on the Charlemagne's deck with Merau, Grey pointed across the Dubai base's dry-dock towards a pair of mobile suits standing tall beside a hangar, one with a huge backpack and the other with a tall crest on its head. Merau squinted at them for a moment.

"Oh, those. The Nero Blitz and Rosso Aegis. I hear they're going to be part of Typhoon."

Grey frowned at the two mobile suits. "I don't suppose they're for us," he said.

"'course not. We're the newbies, we always get the leftovers."

The wind kicked up a cloud of sand across the base, and the yellow dust rose up like a blanket over the hangar. Grey tried not to sigh.

"I can't be the only one wondering what the point of this all is. I mean, we have the Minerva trapped in Hormuz, they're on the ropes, their Gundams are all damaged, and they still got away. Are they gods or what?"

Merau shrugged. "Their luck will run out sooner or later. We just have to be persistent."

"Persistently sacrificing human beings?"

"Everyone's luck runs out eventually."

Grey crossed his arms with a scowl. "Do we have to wait for the Angel of Death to make a mistake?"

"Are you still thinking about her?"

"I wish she'd never opened that comm channel." He glared up at the sky. "I didn't want to see her face. And now I know that whenever I fight that thing, I know the face of the person who's piloting it. It's a lot easier to destroy mobile suits when you only have to see the mobile suit's face and not the pilot."

Merau sighed. "You're going to have a much easier time in this war if you learn to stop thinking about it."

Soldiers at drill were a bizarre sight to watch.

Bizarre, at least, to Emily von Oldendorf, who had no experience of military discipline and had, much to her surprise, survived a few battles with disciplined soldiers without the benefit of the same discipline. In truth, she was not entirely sure what marching in nice neat straight lines had to do with fighting wars. Marching in nice neat straight lines was only a way to get quickly and horrifically killed on the battlefield— which, she guessed, was why nobody actually did it on the battlefield.

"Why are they doing that?" she asked, glancing over at her side, where Isaac was watching the drilling soldiers with a mixture of amusement and sympathy.

"They're infantry," he explained. "So when they're not actually training, they're doing stuff like that. For discipline."

"Discipline?"

"It's how they get you to run across a field and get yourself shot at, because nobody in their right mind would do that on their own."

Emily considered the soldiers, as the entire block of them abruptly turned at their commander's order, swerving bodily to the left and tramping off in a new direction. "I've never gotten discipline like that before..."

"It sucks," declared Isaac, with what Emily took to be the pain of experience.

"I must not be a soldier, then," Emily said with a smile.

"Well, not in our way," Isaac admitted. "Doesn't seem to have slowed you down or anything, though."

Idly, she wondered if her way into battle was the cheater's way— only to remember that instead of having to do push-ups in the mud, she had to ponder whether or not her father had killed her mother to turn her into a military project. So in that sense, she had gone through that discipline— enough discipline to turn her into something better.

If only she could remember it.

Onigashima. Island of demons.

Meyrin Hawke had heard of this island before, as the location of an Orb military base. The base had been slated for closing shortly before the Valentine War, and the two subsequent invasions of Orb had interrupted any plans to reopen it; but now, with the Junius War three years past, the ruling Government-General of Orb had decided to reopen the base after all, now stocking it with Alliance units.

And what a difference that made.

"These guys," explained Oliver Wellington in his spacious office, to Meyrin, Abbey, and Rau before him, "are causing us all kinds of grief. They run air raids on the whole eastern seaboard of Australia from this base, and we're going to have to neutralize them if we're going to get any fleets out of here into the open ocean."

"Yes," Abbey agreed, "but a whole base, on our own...?"

"We can send a combat group with you," Wellington offered. "But we can't afford to spare too much, because we need to keep enough defensive forces here to deter any preemptive strike by the Alliance. I'm sure you understand."

"It wouldn't be the first time we've taken on a whole base ourselves," answered Meyrin.

"The island itself is not very big," Wellington went on, "but the whole thing is honeycombed with caverns and a lot of it is underground. That positron cannon of yours might help here. We need it at least incapable of launching air strikes on us."

"They have the advantage of fortification," warned Rau. "If your intelligence is accurate, we would have to effectively wipe the island off the map."

Wellington shrugged. "If that's what it takes."

Meyrin turned her eyes towards the map before her. A tiny island, two kilometers along its longest axis, studded with gun emplacements and missile launchers and secret hangars and an underground submarine dock, it was the perfect platform for launching a merciless series of air strikes. It would have to be cracked open with the Tannhäuser, likely more than once, before any real damage could be done.

"Like I said, we can send a detachment with you," Wellington went on. "Our intelligence is sketchy, however, so you may need to confirm it yourselves before you do anything."

Meyrin glanced over at Rau; he merely shrugged.

"If you can keep them hanging off to the side, out of range," she said, "then that should be sufficient." She turned her gaze towards Abbey next, who nodded approvingly. "I want to scout the area out first for myself and see what we're up against. Maybe we can use this detachment to draw some of their forces away."

"And take on the base yourself?"

Meyrin shrugged herself. "It's what we do."

It was a mystery to Sting Oakley why so many people on this base were so angry.

He knew that there were reasons, of course; many of the personnel on this base were ZAFT veterans of the Junius War, and they had watched the Alliance blow their homeland out of the sky with the Requiem cannon. He too had watched that terrible spectacle and knew that something tragic had happened. But how could he really sympathize? His home for as long as he could remember had been Lodonia...and that was a place he did not mind seeing demolished.

He winced at the memories. The block word no longer controlled him, but it still reminded him of its presence. The Alliance and Neo Roanoke left a cruel legacy. But, he reminded himself, they had also given him power, with the expectation that none of their leashes would ever break. They had broken, and now Sting Oakley was a free man.

And that had been his home. He had no country, nor any memories of his days before Lodonia. He was not even sure if there were days before Lodonia for him.

He stood in the hangar outside the Minerva, watching the technicians at work. They were upgrading the Gundams, in anticipation of more ferocious battles later— in space.

The memories of outer space were mostly those of Althea Crater and the Girty Lue, punctuated by the Minerva's occasional sojourn into the starry sky. But they were better memories than could be found at Lodonia or Althea, because he was able to put his power to use— for a cause of his choosing, with comrades of his choosing, in service to a commander of his choosing. The power to choose one's own fate was compelling enough to even make him grind his teeth and fight down the fear that rose in his heart on hearing that damned block word.

He glanced back up at the Chaos. They did not have much planned in the way of upgrades— only a pair of beam shields, a modification to the beam rifle, a pair of combat knives, and enhanced maneuverability— but it would be enough. He needed only that much to offer his strength to the Minerva— to his friends, to his home.

Anything less, after all, would be failure.

The Twilight Gundam had new armaments. That was always a boon, Emily decided, because she had long ago discovered that it was the combination of old tricks in new ways that kept her alive at the end of the day. Sitting in the Twilight's cool cockpit with Viveka leaning against the cockpit's door jamb, she watched half in boredom as the mechanics closed the panel on her jet-black war steed's right forearm. They had hidden two claw-tipped "heat rods" in there, which they told her could be extended for hundreds of meters and had the power to deliver a punishing electric shock— complemented by a pair of beam sabers on the rear skirt armor and razor-tipped combat claws on the fingertips. And to differentiate the Twilight from the Destiny in visual scans, its beam wings now manifested themselves in a chilling, icy blue.

So, her Gundam evolved. Did she as well?

"I haven't seen your fanboy around these parts," remarked Viveka, grinning down at her sister. "Did you finally get bored with him?"

"Isaac said he had work to do," Emily answered, steeling herself for the coming heckles.

"So, what, you're just gonna leave the little runt hanging?"

"It's not like that," started Emily, already knowing it was futile.

Viveka waved her natural hand dismissively. "Poor little sister, doesn't know how to break a heart properly."

"If it's anything like breaking bones, you could probably teach me."

"If only," Viveka said with a wistful sigh. "No, breaking a heart is a much more delicate procedure. I got pretty good at it after I ran away. Now, do you want this to be a clean break or what?"

Emily squeezed her eyes shut. "Can't we do this without breaking anything?"

"Not with the looks he's been giving you."

As she heaved a sigh, Emily turned her thoughts toward her trusty companion for her stay at Carpentaria. His infatuation was painfully easy to read even without any Newtype senses, but he meant well and Emily wanted nothing to do with the business of breaking hearts. So perhaps that was what was different about her now— she was someone to be loved, to be wanted, to be cherished.

Which, as she thought about it, was a little embarrassing.

"Well, if it makes you feel better," Viveka went on, "the problem's going to resolve itself in a couple days. We're leaving soon."

"I should at least say goodbye to him," answered Emily. "He's been nice to me."

"Sister dearest," laughed Viveka, "you're gonna have to get used to this if you want to ever leave the ship. Having a reputation has its drawbacks."

Emily turned that thought over in her mind bitterly. Another way she had changed.

The air was tense as Sven caught sight of none other than Monique du Prey sauntering onto the Charlemagne's outer observation deck. She shot the taciturn Alliance officer a wicked grin, coming to a stop on the railing next to him.

"Fancy seeing you out here," she chuckled. "Did the mechanics kick you out for some fresh air or what?"

Sven crossed his arms. "My tasks for the day are complete."

"Great! Wanna go hit the bar?"

"No."

Monique's lips curled into an exaggerated pout. "You're no fun. What's up with you, anyway? War's supposed to be fun!"

Sven cast a sidelong glance at the Transylvania Viper. "We must be as prepared as possible to face pilots like those on the Minerva."

Monique's eyes lit up. "Oh, speaking of them," she started with a grin, "you wanna hear a little secret about that Angel of Death of theirs?"

"I already know about Project Evolution," Sven cut her off. Monique blinked in surprise.

"What? How?"

"Intelligence assignment. Lieutenant Ramos does her work well."

Monique smirked back. "Tsk tsk, Captain Bayan! You're not supposed to be ordering intelligence missions as an MS team leader. One might take that to be a breach of protocol!"

Sven held in check the urge to snap back with a caustic retort. "It was for the greater good of the Phantom Pain. The more we know about our enemies, the easier it will be to fight them and identify weaknesses."

"Ah, I see, always have to be one step ahead, huh," laughed Monique. "So I don't suppose you'd be interested in the Crusader project, then..."

Despite the entreaties of his better judgment, Sven cast a wary glance towards the cackling pilot.

"They're building you a new unit at Daedalus, dear," she drawled, draping herself around Sven's shoulders to purr enticingly in his ear. "A new Gundam, in fact. With beam wings. The fruit of years of Alliance research on the Destiny. And I'm so jealous."

Sven bristled at her touch. "I was not informed of this."

"Well, you can't know everything, dear captain," Monique giggled. "But that's why you've got to survive this coming battle. So I can see it in action."

To be continued...