Mobile Suit Gundam SEED ETERNITY

Phase 10 - A Moment's Rest

"I will deal with it."

Inside one of Terminal's computer rooms, Shinn stared through the dim unnatural light at the hardened face of Athrun Zala, determination burning in his eyes. Shinn glanced back at the screen, strewn with schematics for the Fujiyama Company's Raigo Gundam. A clone of Kira Yamato had been piloting that thing, and it had boiled Athrun's blood ever since to think about it, marking his presence for those with the senses to know wherever he was on the fortress.

"I mean it, Shinn," Athrun went on. "I'll leave the real one to you, but this one..." He shook his head. "It's a temptation. To try to make things the way they used to be. But they'll never be that way, and the only way I'll be able to put that temptation is to rest is to destroy that thing myself. Do you understand?"

Shinn shifted awkwardly. "Are you sure you just want to kill it?"

"It had the same distortion to its pressure that Stella has. You were able to save her because of a whole string of fortunate twists of fate. I can't count on that." A flicker of grief passed over Athrun's face. "And even if I did, it wouldn't matter. Not when this thing is only a clone, and the real Kira is out there..."

"If you say so," Shinn said. "Is this thing as good as the real one?"

"Sort of. But the Raigo has limitations, so I can deal with it." Athrun glanced back at the screen and glowered at the Raigo's menacing face. "I'll have to. One Kira being used by evil bastards has been bad enough."

Meyrin Hawke watched silently from an observation deck as the mechanics lowered the armored door down over the Minerva's freshly-replaced Tannhäuser. The repairs were proceeding at a steady clip, and with shifts of workers laboring around the clock the warship would soon be back to normal.

The same could not be said for the mobile suits. They had been able to repair the Destiny, and the Gaia and Infinite Justice had not taken major damage in the first place. But the other four were beyond repair. They would have to borrow machines from Terminal.

At least, until the new ones were finished.

That was the real problem. The Minerva's cadre of Gundams were obsolete. Terminal had spent the beginning of the year hacking together new designs in anticipation of that encroaching reality, but in the meantime there were limitations in resources. Terminal had enough materials to repair the Minerva and the Destiny, and to build Emily's new machine, but not for the development of seven more new models.

Meyrin tried to put it in perspective. They only had to travel to the Moon to acquire the parts they needed. Then, with eight new units on the cutting edge of mobile suit technology, they would be finally able to do something— about the Alliance, about ZAFT, about this horrible mess of a war.

That powerlessness ate at her heart, as she watched ZAFT blow away civilian ships, as the Phantom Pain tore open space colonies, as the Resistance teetered on the edge of disintegration. It was like she was back in that seat that Roxy now occupied, holding up the earpiece and staring helplessly as people fought and died— as Shinn rushed headlong into battle and the most she could do to help was send him new Impulse parts when he asked. There had been something particularly miserable in having a job that mainly required her to watch and wait. It had only gotten worse when he deserted, and her helplessness was compounded by her inability, then, to understand why he had left.

Now she sat in the captain's chair, and perhaps Talia Gladys would have been pleased to see how she had commanded this warship. But it was because Talia Gladys wasn't here that Meyrin Hawke was.

She shook her head and returned her sights to the recuperating battleship. Meyrin was no longer the helpless little girl watching battles unfold. As bad as the Minerva's situation was now, deprived of most of its mobile suits as the war escalated by the day, it was not hopeless.

"Yeah, they're not coming back," Vino Dupre said with as much of an air of finality as he could muster. "Say your goodbyes now, kids."

Drifting through one of Terminal's hangars, Sting and Auel looked down sadly as their ruined Gundams were torn apart by the technicians below, for their reactors and N-Jammer Cancellers and most important features. Auel heaved a sigh and looked away uncomfortably as the mechanics split open the Abyss's chest like a surgery patient.

"Well, they had a good run of it," Sting said with a sigh of resignation. "What are they doing with the cores?"

Vino pushed his tablet over to the two Extended. "Something you'll like."

Sting caught the tablet, turned his eyes down towards it, and blinked in disbelief. "Holy shit."

Spinning on the screen before him were the schematics to an entirely new mobile suit, similar in its appearance to the old Chaos— but with two wings on its back, missile launchers in its hip armor, and four gunbarrels instead of two. Sting nodded his approval.

"The bad news," Vino continued, "is that we can't build them here. We'll have to head to the Moon to pick up resources and parts, and probably stay there for a bit to use their technical facilities. Piecing together mobile suits out of prefab spare parts is one thing; manufacturing new machines with new parts is a different beast."

"So Emily just lucked out then," Auel scoffed.

"If you can call it that," added Sting. "'cuz guess who's gonna be our first line of defense until these new machines get built?"

"Well that just means more fun for her."

Sting glanced back down at the Chaos's remains. Of course it was all fun, until you ran into someone who was better.

Sven Cal Bayan bristled as he stepped into the computer room and found Yukiko there, lounging in the chair with a vast assortment of mobile suit specs on the screen before him, and feeling annoyance shoot up his spine at her casual grin.

"I've been wondering when you'd show up, Captain Bayan," she said.

"I am not here to cater to your whims, Ms. Nakajima," Sven answered.

She ignored him and went back to the screen. "So I've been going over that battle at Arnhelm," she went on, "and I've found room for improvement." She gestured at the screen. "For all the high performance you pulled off, you didn't quite manage to destroy the Destiny, and I've figured out why. He's got you beat on reflexes." She arched an eyebrow knowingly. "Newtype stuff, I'm sure."

Sven felt his blood bubble. "Newtypes are a fiction," he started—

"Oh, don't give me that, dear," Yukiko laughed, and turned back towards the screen. "You know as well as I do that there's a strong case to be made for extrasensory powers of spatial awareness, telepathic communication, superhuman empathic awareness, and reflexes so fast they border on the precognitive. The 3rd Fleet's old Mobius Zero corps had those abilities, as I'm sure you'll recall."

"What are you getting at?" Sven asked.

"What I'm getting at," Yukiko said with a wolfish grin, "is that we can make you a Newtype."

The air went tense in the Charlemagne's computer room as Sven stared at Yukiko, a mix of emotions swirling inside him. "That's impossible," he said at last. "Even assuming that Newtypes are real, no current hypothesis as to their characteristics allows for someone who is not a Newtype to be simply turned into one." He almost shuddered as the next line of thought flooded his mind with implications, and with the corrosive knowledge of possibility. "The closest our technology has is an Extended, and you are not going to turn me into an Extended."

"Don't you want to defeat the Destiny?" Yukiko asked with a smirk. "You know he has you beat on reflexes. He can see the future. Are you not willing to do whatever it takes to defeat him?"

"An Extended will not defeat him," Sven shot back. "Only a soldier undeterred by block words and conditioning can keep up with him. And I will not allow you to turn me into an Extended."

Yukiko waved a dismissive hand. "Oh, not like the usual ones, perhaps," she said, "but it's a possibility we've been studying at Althea. A mix of the biological CPUs and some other techniques— "

"You will not turn me into an Extended," Sven snarled, and with that he turned on his heel and stomped out the door.

The tapping of keys was the only sound in the Nebula Blitz's cockpit, where Travis Alterman sat with the keyboard folded out. It was probably the only place on the ship where he had enough time alone— supposedly running diagnostics on the Nebula's OS— to actually get this done. His unnervingly dramatic new teammates had a nasty way of intruding.

In the meantime, Travis felt some measure of satisfaction in the circumspection of his report. Danilov had that sentimental streak to him and the rest of the crew seemed to be loyal to him— so that made Danilov the focus of his mission. There were doubts about that man. It was bad to have doubts, especially in a war like this, and especially about a man with a command like this. If he really wanted to, Danilov could do a great deal of damage if he were to do something untoward with this warship. But did he really want to? That was Travis's job to discover.

He shuffled his report onto a flash drive and quietly removed evidence from the log of his work. The mechanics probably wouldn't check the log to make sure that he had actually been doing diagnostic work in here, but chances were not to be taken. Not in this line of work.

He had hesitated at Volgograd. Travis knew all about that. Markav had been there on the bridge, ordering him to open fire, and he had hesitated. No Phantom Pain officer could do that. Especially not one like him. He had passed up opportunities to fight the Minerva because of concerns about the impact on local civilians; he had never hatched a plot that preyed on the Minerva's biggest weakness, its unflinching moral compass. Even at Arnhelm, at the battle Travis had seen with his own eyes, it had not been the Charlemagne who had fired the lethal shot at Arnhelm that had secured victory; it had been the Lucifer. Travis remembered that, as would his superiors.

The Charlemagne. Now there was an irony. This ship was named after a man who had built an empire atop a mountain of corpses, and yet it was captained by a man too timid to do a tenth of what it had taken Charles the Great to forge the Carolingian Empire.

Timidity, at least, from the charitable point of view.

"I'll admit," Shams said with a nod as he scanned over the combat footage, "you guys did pretty good."

It was the little things like this that made Kelly Maynard's day worthwhile, and she struggled to accept the compliment with poise and dignity. "I trained them until they were ready to scream. It's as to be expected."

She quietly regarded 1st Lieutenant Shams Coza and his inscrutable companion, 1st Lieutenant Mudie Holcroft. Their commander was off somewhere else, and he was a man far too tightly wound to be completely sane. These two...well, Shams was likable enough, if rather sarcastic and cynical. But Mudie...

Well. Kelly could remember the quiet sexism vividly from Volkov Crater— never overt, not even universal, but leering under the surface all the same in some of her instructors and fellow cadets. Mudie was from the first generation of Phantom Pain soldiers. Surely it had been even worse for her, without even the unifying cause of a famous and esteemed fighting corps to soothe the sting. That was back when they were the 81st Autonomous Mobile Corps, slinking around in the shadows doing Blue Cosmos' dirty work. What wonders that did for one's sense of self-esteem.

And yet with Captain Bayan, they formed the "Devil's Sabers," one of the most successful mobile suit combat teams in the Alliance military. Their battles against the Destiny had been the basis from which she had developed the tactics that had helped take down the Twilight. It was supposed to be a moment when she met her heroes.

And yet, looking at Mudie's distant expression and Shams' forced smile, it was just sad.

"We'll be counting on you," Rau said with that characteristic grin of his as he loomed over the Gaia's open cockpit. Stella sat inside, the Gaia's OS settings file open before her, looking determined. "Terminal is repairing the Destiny, but that's it. You, Athrun, Shinn, and Emily are our defenses until our new mobile suits are completed."

Stella pursed her lips. "What will you guys do?"

"Come down with cabin fever, I suppose," Rau said with a shrug.

"Don't get sick," Stella put in, and looked up earnestly at the masked man. "Stella doesn't like it when people get sick." She paused for a moment. "Would Rau get sick?"

"I'm a Coordinator, Stella, I won't— "

"'cuz Rau has the mask."

Rau processed that for a moment and tried not to bury his face in his hand. Never would he figure out why Shinn liked her so much. "It doesn't work that way, Stella." He shook his head. "As I was saying, you're going to have to keep the Gaia in peak condition. You will be one of our few lines of defense."

Stella smiled back. "Rau shouldn't worry."

He felt Emily's presence flickering somewhere inside Terminal, strong and bright. "No, I shouldn't."

It was good to know that not everyone in ZAFT hated him, Shinn Asuka reflected as he peered into the cockpit of Riika's dark blue ZAKU Phantom. She glanced up at him from the cockpit seat.

"Yeah, Mare was still in the hospital when they packed up Armory 1," she said with a sigh. "Some of us just slipped through the cracks. But he went with them to Mars, as far as I know. They did say his gunshot wound was survivable."

Shinn frowned. "So that means he might well be running around the Earth Sphere slaughtering people."

"Yeah. He would, wouldn't he."

"So," Shinn went on awkwardly, "I saw Mikhail Coast here, and there's you. Anyone else I'd recognize?"

"Me."

He turned around at the sound of feet hitting the gantry and blinked in disbelief at the man standing before him. "Courtney?"

Courtney Hieronymus stared down Shinn with all the coldness he remembered from his days in ZAFT. "Riika was not the only test pilot to survive from Armory 1." His expression darkened. "Although we have certainly taken different paths since the raid..."

"Courtney, don't," Riika interrupted. "Shinn, maybe you should tell him about what you were doing."

"You accept his judgment?" Courtney asked with an arched eyebrow.

"Um...sort of, yeah, I guess."

Shinn looked back and forth between the two of them, not liking the storm of anger and confusion radiating from the taller pilot. "Then I'll take your word for it," Courtney said, and glanced back at Shinn. "At any rate, at least you've proven to be a capable pilot."

"Capable pilot, heck, he's a freakin' star!" Riika laughed. "Not a bad direction for your career, I guess."

At that, Shinn merely shrugged. "It's a life."

Kara Guinness grinned as she felt the invigoration of a purpose fulfilled rush through her, sitting in the cockpit of her VaROZ unit and working on the OS. Mars had been an endlessly frustrating exercise, a sideshow fought against a pathetic ersatz Alliance— but this, this was what she had been bred for. This was what burned in her veins. Revenge.

She looked around the cockpit with pride. The VaROZ was a product of ZAFT's leftover mobile suits that predated the New Millennium series. It had the lower half of a CGUE, the upper half of a GuAIZ, with donations from the GOUF Ignited and the GINN, all tuned for greater performance and responsiveness, enough to almost match the old Strike Freedom, all of it in a mobile suit designed expressly to support the new Vega Freedom in battle.

That only increased her pride, fighting in support of such a magnificent mobile suit and its heroic pilot. Kira Yamato would lead the way, burning away the Naturals and traitors who stood between them and the Coordinators' security and prosperity. They would have revenge. They would have justice. And they would have a home.

But she could deny that it was a brutal way to go. More than once she had been tempted to lower her rifle against these pitiful Naturals. She felt good about that, though— at least her capacity for her charity had not dwindled. And they were the stuff from which Blue Cosmos was born. She would kill them, as she required, and later she might feel bad about it— but not too bad.

And yet there were others who did not seem to work that way. She turned her thoughts towards Juarez, who had faltered in action far more than her. He had lost his family to the Requiem and his friends and comrades to the battle at Solomon's Sword. What did he have to hesitate for?

Kara ran a finger over the steel frame of the VaROZ's cockpit. There could be no hesitation. Not from her, not from Juarez, and not from ZAFT.

"Yeah, strangulation has its merits," Trojan Noiret said airily as he drifted down the corridors of Terminal with Emily in tow, "but it's really time-consuming, and you have to keep the force applied the whole time for it to work. If you really wanna kill a man with your bare hands, you snap the neck. Grab the chin and twist. Takes only a second and it gets the job done too."

Emily smiled ironically. "No pressure points?"

"Only in kung fu films." He smirked back. "Of course, you can still do a Death Touch if you wanted to. It's just messier."

"You're the second person who's urged me to learn how to kill people outside of a mobile suit."

"It's a remarkably useful skill."

They rounded a corner together and came to a stop at an observation deck looming over the hangar where Emily's new Gundam was taking shape. The binders were currently on the floor, disassembled, with Selene on one of the gantries shouting orders to the mechanics. The mobile suit was still swathed in cables and wires, and its dull gray armor cast only a pale, diffuse reflection of the bright hangar lights.

"So that's it, huh?" Trojan asked.

"My new Gundam. Officially they're calling it the Gabriel." She shrugged. "I guess it's some angel or something."

"Yeah. Gabriel. The one who dictated the Qur'an to Muhammad and destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. And for bonus points, in Arabic his name is Jibril." He glanced at Emily, and frowned at the incredulous look on her face. "What? You try spending three years in the jungle and not reading every book you can get your hands on."

"And you passed the whole time reading religious texts?"

"The jungle is boring." He put a hand to his chin thoughtfully. "Actually, come to think of it, Gabriel is one of the angels of death too."

Emily's smile disappeared. "Is he."

"'Angel of death over kings.'" Trojan broke into a grin. "Hey, that's pretty bitchin', huh?"

Angel of death. It followed her everywhere and gnawed at her bones, even as she put on a false smile for Trojan. "Something like that."

Athrun Zala cast a wistful glance towards the Earth as he drifted through the observation deck, where the blue Earth was visible through the dense Debris Belt. He glanced over at Viveka, surprised. Usually their roles were reversed, and he was the one brooding.

"What is it?" he asked, making her jump in surprise.

"N-Nothing," she said quickly, and turned her eyes back towards the planet. "Just...tired."

Athrun arched an eyebrow. It wasn't tiredness radiating from her and rousing his Newtype senses.

"Emily's going to be on her own," she went on, "until we get those new mobile suits built."

"She'll have the new Gundam. She can handle it."

"Against everyone? Like that ZAFT guy, Yamato?"

Athrun frowned. The new Gundam had mind-boggling performance, but perhaps that was pushing it. "Not all of us are out of commission either," he said. "They can repair the Destiny, and we've still got the Justice and Gaia too."

Viveka looked decidedly unconvinced. "She's gonna be on her own out there. Those older machines can't keep up with the new one. I saw them testing it. It's crazy." She looked over at Athrun, the mist of fear beginning to descend over her. "She's a Natural, Athrun, she's not gonna be able to handle it. Being a Newtype doesn't make you a Coordinator."

"No," Athrun agreed, "but she'll be able to handle it." He paused. "For a price."

"A price?"

"She's spent this whole time running away from her past and trying to define her powers as something of her own," Athrun answered. He looked back at the Earth. "She won't be able to now. She'll have to embrace the training she received back then, to use the new Gundam's power to the fullest."

"They're almost done, you know," Shinn Asuka said quietly on the observation deck overlooking the slumbering Minerva.

By the window, with her arms crossed, Meyrin Hawke nodded. "We won't be hear much longer, then." She leaned forward and rested her head against the glass. "I would've liked a longer rest."

Shinn landed softly by the railing. "There won't be much for us to do at the Moon, I don't think," he offered.

Meyrin smiled sadly. Of course there would be something. There was always something.

"Well, at least you're getting along with the ZAFT vets here," she said.

"It helps that they were teammates of mine," he answered. "Before the Minerva launched, Riika and Courtney were test pilots for the Gaia and Chaos."

"They understood?"

"As well as can be expected."

They both gazed out over the Minerva in its dock, past the ship, through the shoal zone, out into the black depths of space. The serene Earth was there— and through the haze, Shinn's eyes landed first on the white expanse of Antarctica. Every time he laid eyes on the southernmost continent, he remembered— and it always hurt.

Meyrin followed his gaze, landed on Antarctica, made the connection for herself. "I guess it's hard to understand how you felt about them. I thought you'd joined them because you had nowhere else to go."

"I did." Shinn shrugged sadly. "They gave me a home, and I did something stupid and fell in love." He shook his head. "There was really only one way for that whole thing to end, I guess. This is a bad business for falling in love."

"Is it," Meyrin said quietly— but not enough. Shinn blinked at her. "You're not the only one who's been thinking about those days." She straightened back up and gestured down at the ship, as the mechanics and work pods seethed around it. "You know I used to have the world's biggest crush on you. Because you went off to play the hero, and all I really did was sit around and send you Impulse parts when you asked. And you were as powerful as I was powerless." She smiled sadly. "I'm not that person anymore, am I?"

Shinn shifted uncomfortably. "I'm not the person who asks you for Impulse parts anymore, either."

The Gabriel Gundam loomed above them, dark and menacing, and Rau Le Creuset had to admit that Terminal had done a wonderful job with its sleek, thruster-studded body and glowering face. It had removed all of the weapons Emily rarely or never used in battle, like the boomerangs and anti-ship sword, and upgraded all the ones she did— like that giant shimmering beam sword.

And it had that Voiture Lumiere system. That had been Selene's handiwork.

"You've done a magnificent job, Ms. McGriff," Rau said with a grin. "It will be unstoppable."

Selene eyed him suspiciously. "You've taken quite a lot of interest in this thing's development, considering that you're not going to be piloting it."

"Of course. Am I to be blamed for wanting the Minerva to have at its disposal as effective a weapon as possible?"

Turning that over in her mind, Selene looked back up at the slumbering Gabriel. "As long as you don't try to abuse this power. It's got the potential to revolutionize mobile suit combat, and make mobile suits far more destructive than they've ever been. That's not something I want the Stargazer responsible for."

"Of course it's not," Rau chuckled. "Although I'll respectfully point out that it's already going to do that anyway. The Earth Alliance and ZAFT will not simply stand by without replicating this technology— especially not ZAFT, since they have a working prototype."

Selene frowned at the thought. "Emily will end the war," she said. "She promised me. She'll use the Stargazer's power to end this nightmare for all of us."

Rau turned away, towards the shadows, with a wicked grin on his face. "Yes, so I've heard," he said. "Trust the Angel of Death to end a war."

To be continued...