Mobile Suit Gundam SEED ETERNITY

Phase 41 - Abominations

"How the fuck did this happen?!" screamed Shams Coza as the Vanguard Gundam backpedaled out of its hangar, under a wave of beam fire. Up ahead, a squad of Windams in the white and blue standard colors of the Earth Alliance Space Force gave chase. One of them charged forward; Shams backed away with a beam cannon barrage, but the Artemis Gundam slid in with a raised beam saber to chop it in two.

"So many traitors," Mudie grunted, "we can't beat them like this..."

"Jesus, no fucking warning at all," added Shams. "Mudie, we have to get out of here. The Ahura Mazda is leaving."

The two Gundams turned upward, where the afterimages and explosions betrayed the Crusader Gundam at work, chopping its way through a squadron of Windams. Sven angled towards a Drake-class destroyer and plowed clear through its furious Vulcan fire, to plunge the anti-ship sword into the ship's hull and rip it open. The Crusader backed away and pumped a long-range cannon blast into the opening, and then watched as the ship exploded.

"Sven, come on! We're gonna get left behind!" Shams yelled.

In the Crusader, Sven cast one last baneful look at Daedalus Crater, in flames as the Atlantic Federation brought down the hammer, before he turned the Gundam towards the fleeing Ahura Mazda to make his escape.

"They've been quiet so far, but they haven't been willing to take the plunge yet and offer their services to us," the hulking mountain of a man explained as he stalked through Althea Crater's halls with an assault rifle hanging from his shoulder. A cadre of armed men surrounded him— and by his side were Emily and Trojan, both glancing nervously between each other. "To be honest, I'm not sure what your meeting them is gonna do, but who knows."

"I know this is an inconvenience," Emily said. "I appreciate it."

The doors slid open and they stepped through into the cellblock where the Resistance had decided to stash its Alliance prisoners. The parties were screeching to a halt as word came back of just what the infantry teams were finding in the lowest levels of the base, and the base detention center was already full to overflowing with Alliance personnel— as much for their own safety as anyone else's, as the gunmen worked their way through the base and found horrors at every turn.

Emily came to a stop in front of one cell, with only three people inside, all in the standard black and gray flight suit of the Phantom Pain. But one of them she knew by sight, and when he caught sight of her, his eyes went wide in disbelief.

"Y-You..."

"You remember me, huh?"

The boy sprang to his feet, anger flashing through his blue eyes. "What do you want? Here to gloat?"

"No, I just wanted to meet you." She paused as he seemed taken aback. "Since the last time we met was...different."

Trojan frowned. "You two have a history?"

"Sort of," she answered. "We...fought each other at Volgograd."

The boy balled his fists. A blonde-haired girl got to her feet and put a hand on his shoulder, "Grey, don't," she said. "It's not going to change anything. And besides..." She trailed off as she gestured to the third companion on the floor— the one that Emily noted was seething with all kinds of emotions.

Grey looked back at Emily for a moment and finally sighed. "So what did you want from me, huh?"

"I just wanted to meet you under...better circumstances."

"Well, consider me met." He slumped back down next to the black-haired girl.

Emily was silent for a moment and glanced awkwardly at Trojan. "So what are you going to do?"

"Rot in this cell, it looks like," he snapped.

"You don't have to." Grey blinked in surprise and looked up. "Your captain joined us. You could too." She took a step closer to the bars. "We...don't have to be enemies." Trojan squirmed, but she ignored it. He could play jealous boyfriend later.

Grey turned away with a scowl. "We'll see."

Whatever cheerfulness Viveka von Oldendorf had felt at winning a major battle and personally wiping out the evil bastard in charge of this place was gone when she got to see just what that evil bastard had been in charge of down here.

The stench was the first thing that hit her. The stenches of blood and death were familiar ones to her nose, but here they were almost overpowering. It wasn't all from the fighting, as the gunmen had reported— and judging by the way so many of them had emerged from Althea's lower levels with ashen looks on their faces, she believed them. But curiosity drove her on as she wandered through the bloodstained hallways and passed by the occasional corpse of a Phantom Pain foot soldier. She found door with a pair of horrified Resistance fighters huddled by it, steeled herself, and walked through—

"Oh my God."

It was an impromptu triage where Mikhail Coast was in a blood-spattered lab coat giving orders to a small army of medics, but the bodies on the cots were almost all children. Children with horrible injuries. And the room was scattered with the remains of what Viveka could only assume were the ones who didn't make it. Human remains everywhere, and as she looked at the walls, she felt her stomach turn at the sight of row upon row of human brains.

"What...what the hell is this place?"

She found Athrun kneeling near one of the cots, over a little girl swathed in bloody bandages. He glanced up at her.

"This is where the Alliance makes its Extended," he said. "You...probably shouldn't have come down here."

"What are you doing here?"

He waved a hand. "I'm needed."

Viveka looked down at the girl in front of her. She couldn't have been older than nine years old, and already a long and intricate pattern of surgical scars were etched into her chest. And not all of them were surgical, either; some of them had the haphazard course of battle wounds.

Her stomach turned again. Battle wounds on a nine year old child.

"Who is she...?"

"One of the subjects," Athrun explained. "She got off with light injuries in the battle, but they sedated her all the same so they could work on the others." A scream of agony pierced the din and all eyes turned towards one corner of the room, where a doctor was extracting a bullet from a thrashing boy. "As...you can see."

Viveka fought to keep the tears from her eye. "What...what did they do to these kids?"

Athrun got to his feet with a grim look. "Lots of things. Surgical implants, brainwashing, mental rewiring, conditioning...I wouldn't ask Sting and Auel about it, though. It's pretty traumatic."

"And...they do this to children?"

Athrun shrugged. "If you ever doubted the Phantom Pain was evil..."

"I don't care!" the boy shrieked, fists clenched, barely restrained by three burly Resistance gunmen. "I want my mother back!"

Auel Neider winced at the word and silently thanked Ian Lee that he was at least beyond that. "Look, kid, there's nothing we can do," he said, and awkwardly put his hands on the boy's shoulders. "We can't even look for her if you don't know her name."

"She's my mother! She can't be gone! She wouldn't leave me here!" the boy screamed, and struggled against his captors. The fighters glanced between each other.

"I don't think we're gonna get anywhere, Neider," one of them grunted.

"Yeah," Auel sighed, "go get him his shots."

"Damn you, bring her back!" cried the boy, as a fourth fighter swept in to help back him off. Auel sighed and decided not to tell him that she was probably dead. Otherwise they'd never get him settled down.

It dredged up an awful lot of miserable memories that Auel had to take special care to crush. The Extended program's trainees had always had two people groomed in their minds as their parents: an officer in the military, who would be their supervisor upon completion, and an instructor in the program. That was where they'd gotten his block word from, after all. 2nd Lieutenant Rachel Parker, combat instructor for the Extended program, had been the one for him. And every second in this damned place brought back his warming memories of her.

It also reminded him that she had been killed in the purging at Lodonia. He shook his head.

He saw way too much of himself in all these shrieking, terrified, mutilated children. And this was only on the upper levels where the uninjured subjects had been brought. He dared not venture down into the lower levels, where the testing labs were, and where the injured children were being kept. He'd heard all kinds of rumors about weapons testing and Frankenstein abominations down there, and he'd have nightmares enough just seeing his brethren like this.

But this was why he was here. This was why Ian Lee had gone to such trouble and risk to break his conditioning. To free him. The Alliance had given him power and Lee had given him the freedom to use it as he chose.

He slumped against a wall and let out a sigh, and then blinked in surprise as he felt an arm around his shoulder. Roxy smiled encouragingly at him.

"Hangin' in there?"

Auel squeezed his eyes shut. "This is so incredibly fucked up I can't find words to describe it."

She frowned. "Memories?"

"So many goddamn memories."

"But you're doing it anyway," she said, giving his shoulder a reassuring squeeze, "and that's what makes you a good person."

Auel smiled. "At least I got that."

Althea Crater's computers were simply rich with information, and Rau Le Creuset did enjoy information. Unfortunately, this was in such vast quantities that analyzing it would have to wait until he was less busy.

Instead, the base's logs had divulged to him a particularly juicy secret. During the battle, a warship had departed carrying one Gerhardt von Oldendorf. From there, it was child's play to extrapolate headings based on the last reports of its IFF code location, and they led straight to...well, that was simply the hand of destiny at work.

He turned in the small computer room as the door slid open and Emily slipped inside. Of course she would find him when he called.

"I found something here that I thought you might want to know," he said, and gestured to the screen. Emily came to a stop and a tornado of emotions whipped up within her.

"My...father?"

"He was here during the battle, and he escaped," Rau explained. "The logs suggest that he was heading for Lagrange Point 4, and in particular..." He trailed off. "Are you familiar with a place called the Mendel colony?"

"N-No..."

"I thought so." He stepped forward and assumed a professorial pose. Destiny at work indeed. "It was a space colony where genetic research was conducted. You remember Kira Yamato, I'm sure? He was the result of one of its shadier projects, a program designed to create a Coordinator that perfectly manifested the traits it was intended to have by removing the variable of the mother's womb. Quite a few failures were made along the way, and over the course of the research they learned quite a bit about altering the human body in enhancing ways."

Emily frowned. "Why are you telling me about this?"

"Because, Emily, he's your father— and he's escaping out of your grip." He put a hand on her shoulder. "I know how you feel about him, but I think we can both agree that he does not have long to live. Someone will track him down and kill him. All this chaos is the perfect opportunity to pick off a meddlesome bureaucrat. So if you wanted to get answers from him, your window of opportunity is rapidly closing."

The emotions whipped up again. "Answers...?"

"After all that's transpired between you, you don't want to know the truth about what he had done to you? About your purpose to him? About your mother?"

The tornado surged and Rau suppressed a smile. "But we're staying here. We can't just get up and leave."

"Well, the Minerva can't," Rau said with a shrug. "But nobody said anything about you."

"Me?"

"Of course. With the Eclipse's Voiture Lumiere system, you could easily make it on your own to L4."

Emily looked unconvinced. "But...I can't just get up and leave everyone here. What if they need me?"

"I will deal with that," Rau said. "As for you, I think you have a more pressing concern."

The emotions began to stabilize.

Perfect.

"So then..." Emily trailed off. "What should I do?"

Rau smiled. "We'll wait a couple of days and keep our eyes on L4, to see if he materializes there. And if he does...you can do what you must."

Kira Yamato was a man with burdens. Everyone in ZAFT knew that. He could not be their champion without feeling the weight of a people's expectations on his shoulders. But what always struck Kayla Segar was the way he took on so much without complaint.

That was at least how his history had worked. Everyone knew he had fought for the Earth Alliance in the Valentine War, but everyone equally knew that his spell in the Alliance had been less than voluntary in nature. And it had not taken him too long to see the Alliance for what it was and escape its clutches. And while he had done it with stolen ZAFT equipment and stymied their progress in the war, no one could forget that it was Kira Yamato and the Freedom Gundam that had stepped in to save the PLANTs from nuclear annihilation at the end of the Valentine War.

But what burdens he'd taken on. From fighting against his own people for the sake of his friends while press-ganged by the Alliance to leading the Coordinators back from exile, he bore on his shoulders the weights and expectations of so many. Kayla had no idea how he did it.

And however he did it was starting to fail. She could see in his eyes the toll this war was taking on him. Lost sleep, lower appetite, the telltale dimming of a man with far too much to worry about. The war was going poorly, and this reprieve with the Alliance's disintegration was a godsend to ZAFT. Their fleet was being chipped away, they were losing valuable resources to the invincible Minerva, and the Earth Alliance had proven to be a more formidable foe than anyone had expected before its fracture.

But now there was a chance. Kayla knew it, ZAFT knew it...and by the struggling flicker in his eyes, Kira Yamato seemed to know it too.

"I should have known MacIntyre had set this up," sighed Ivan Danilov, slumped in a conference room chair. "But what I didn't know was that you, sir, were in on this too."

At the other side of the table sat Joseph Copland with a sheepish smile on his face. "We all have our secrets, captain."

"Some more than others, it seems."

"In any event, we have business," Copland said, and folded his hands on the table. "We are willing to offer you a place in our fleet. You'll be watched, of course, and we will replace any of your personnel who do not share your new political persuasion with people of our choosing. James would probably be howling if he were here, but we have losses to replace and if we're going to go intruding on the Alliance's civil war, we're going to need all the help we can get. We will be stricter on you than on anyone else in observance of our rules and pursuit of our objectives. I'm sure you'll understand."

"Of course," Danilov said as he shifted awkwardly in his seat.

"As for your pilots..."

"I understand they haven't all come around."

"No, they haven't."

Danilov sighed. That would be awkward too. "They'll have to do that on their own. But in any case, I do have a request."

"Oh?"

"In some engagement, if it's at all possible, I want to go into battle with the Minerva."

Copland arched an eyebrow. "Wasn't it your assignment to destroy them in the first place?"

"Yes," Danilov said, "and I'd like to...clear the air, as it were."

Copland smirked back. "We'll see."

It had taken Erin quite a while to stop crying, and Grey couldn't entirely blame her. There was a lot to cry over. He hadn't felt that much at Kelly's demise, but it didn't exactly lift his heart. Merau had handled it better by simply resigning herself to fate, and at the news of the Atlantic Federation and East Asia's withdrawal from the Earth Alliance, most of the captives had simply lost the will to resist what the Resistance had in store for them. Why should they care, after all, if the Alliance for which they had fought was crumbling away anyways?

But there was still that offer on the table, and it had gnawed on Grey ever since he'd finally met his haunting foe. He had expected sanctimony and gloating from the Angel of Death, but what he'd gotten was an offer to finally do something about that wriggling feeling of doubt that had tormented him ever since Volgograd. The evil in this place made it clear. It was an offer he couldn't pass up.

But nor could he pass up them. Merau didn't appear to care one way or another anymore, but Erin...

He sat down next to her and nudged her with his elbow. "Hey."

She stared up at him through teary eyes for a moment. Grey frowned. So maybe the crying wasn't totally over. "What...?"

"Just wondering how you're doing."

"Not any better," she sighed.

Grey swallowed hard. Now or never. "You know that offer the Angel made to us?"

Erin blanched. "You...you're not seriously thinking of taking her up on it, are you?"

"Well, why not?" He waved a hand at their surroundings. "You saw what they do in this place. How can I sit here and say that the Resistance is worse than that? That's not something I should be defending. Volgograd isn't something I should have been doing. I've been on the wrong side all this time. And now I've got a chance to change that." He looked over at her. "So...what about you?"

Merau glanced at them both with her hands behind her head, leaning back comfortably against the wall. "Are you serious about that, Grey?"

"Dead serious."

She arched an eyebrow. "Aren't you the same guy who was all gung-ho patriotic about kicking these guys' asses?"

"That was before I knew about all of this," he said, with another wave of his hand. "But, look, both of you. I'm willing to take her up on that offer, but I don't want to just bail out on the two of you. You're my friends and I don't want to just let you two rot in a cell while I go free. So I want you two to come with me."

"C-Come with you?" Erin squeaked.

"Okay," said Merau with a shrug.

Grey blinked. "Okay? That's it?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"Well, uh," he scratched the side of his head, "I just thought it would take more convincing, is all..."

"I don't wanna rot in this cell either," Merau answered with another shrug.

"Then...what about all those speeches you gave me about not thinking about the stuff I had to do in the Phantom Pain?"

"Eh. Who cares?"

Grey decided that he would just take that for what it was worth and turned back towards Erin. "What about you?"

She stared back in disbelief. "Y-You want me to defect?" She shook her head. "I, I can't do that, Grey, what about my father— "

"They're not gonna do anything about that," Merau scoffed. "Not with all the chaos going down on Earth."

"No," Erin protested, "it's...he sent me here so that I could learn discipline, and if I jump ship— "

"Then you'll have proven you learned something else," Grey said. "Doing the right thing." He knelt down next to her and put his hands on her shoulders. "You saw what they were doing in those labs. You saw those kids. I know you didn't believe me about Volgograd before, but maybe now you do. If you jump ship now, you're not a traitor or a coward, you're just doing the right thing. Your father will have to understand that. And if he's as good a man as you say he is, he'll be proud of you for that."

"And if he's not," Merau added, "then you never needed his approval anyway."

"Just...think about it," Grey said, and sat back with a sigh as she buried her face in her arms again.

"They're probably awaiting reinforcements," explained Rau Le Creuset on the gantry over the hangar where the Gundam Eclipse was waiting. "Gerhardt von Oldendorf is a person of relative importance in the Alliance's bureaucracy. If nothing else, he has knowledge that makes him dangerous and connections that make him valuable. Djibril probably wants him close at hand."

Emily shifted the weight of her helmet in the crook of her arm and looked down anxiously at the waiting Eclipse. "So I'll have to work quickly."

"Yes. But one battleship and sixteen mobile suits should pose little challenge to you."

Emily frowned. "How do I know he'll even be willing to talk...?"

"You'll just have to make that happen yourself." He gestured to the hangar. "They'll be opening the door soon. It's time to go."

With a resigned sigh, Emily hopped over the guardrail and pushed off towards the Eclipse's open cockpit. Rau watched her go with a smile. It was always good to see loose ends get tied up.

"What do you mean the Eclipse just took off?" sputtered Shinn. Athrun stood in front of him in the corridor, breathless, and gestured over his shoulder.

"In one of the Althea's loading bays. They saw Emily head out."

"The hell's she doing, going off on her own?" Shinn grumbled as he turned around. "Come on, let's go find Meyrin. We'll have to go after her."

"I heard them say she was on course for L4," Athrun added. "And the base logs showed that a warship carrying some kind of VIP had gone off towards L4 at the end of the battle here. So..."

They put two and two together, and Shinn cringed.

"Well, now we really have to find Meyrin."

To be continued...