———————————————————————————————————————————

"I trust you two have finished the simulator regimen already," Sven intoned with a menacing glare. Standing over the pool table with cues in hand, Shams and Mudie glanced up warily at him. "If you have time to screw around— "

"Give it a rest, Sven," Shams shot back, and returned his attention to the four ball perched near the side pocket. "I've almost got this..." He took his shot, and let loose a hurricane of epithets as the cue ball sailed wide and bounced off the rim of the table. "Oh, fuck me! Not again!"

"I don't know why you keep playing this game when you suck so hard at it," Mudie laughed.

"Shut up! I swear to God that shot should have gone in! This table is fucked up or something!"

Sven glowered at both his wingmen. "We are on the eve of a major operation. We do not have time to play your games."

"Sven," Shams said with a sigh, sparing his nominal commanding officer a tired glance, "I know human interaction and sociality is a mystery to you, but seriously, it's called stress relief. Try it."

"We don't have time for— "

"Try it." And with that, Shams returned to the game already in progress— and sent up another tornado of curses when Mudie sank the ten ball into the corner pocket.

Sven scowled at the two of them and wondered if he really did need to rely on them.

———————————————————————————————————————————

Intelligence was a wonderful thing sometimes, mused Grey Saiba as he watched the main screen in the crew lounge. The Minerva had been attacked by some of its allies among the ZAFT remnants the other day, and Orb's governor-general had had the good sense to run several reconnaissance flights by the site of the battle. They had captured the footage now playing on the screen— of the Twilight Gundam in action, eviscerating mobile suits with the talons on its fingers and spattering its armor in blood. It was gruesome to watch, but it could have been worse, and Grey did not mind too much. After all, those guys were ZAFT— and they were so low that they would shoot at the backs of their own allies. They deserved it.

At his side, Merau shivered as the Twilight put its hand through a GINN's chest. "It's changed. She's gotten better."

"Well, just don't let her get close to you," Grey answered.

"Oh, yeah, easier said than done. Look at the way that machine moves. If she wants to get close to you, she will, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it."

Grey saw his enemy's face again from that horrible battle at Volgograd. Was he really supposed to accept being so powerless to stop her?

———————————————————————————————————————————

The Morrigan Gundam's cockpit was alive with hysterical laughter. Monique du Prey sat in the cockpit seat, watching on her mobile suit's main screen the intelligence footage of the Twilight in battle against its own allies. The precision and brutality were completely new for the Resistance's little angel. It was clear as day, and just as Crayt had predicted: poor little Emily was going nuts.

"This is gonna be fun!" Monique cackled. "Silly little girl, you shouldn't be playing war like this! You're gonna get hurt!"

It was something of a shame that Project Evolution had to end this way. Emily was a phenomenal pilot, and the footage of her eviscerating her ZAFT attackers was almost a work of art in Monique's eyes. And even if she was on the opposing side, Monique felt fire race through her veins at the thought of doing battle with her. The Resistance had few pilots worth a damn, but here was one for the ages.

Monique sat back and grinned, watching the Twilight crush its foes. Such cruelty and force in the way it drove its clawed hand through an enemy machine's cockpit, and drew it out splattered in blood and guts...it was almost beautiful. The supreme expression of what a mobile suit was supposed to do. It made her wish that the Morrigan had those claws and reinforced arms, to wash itself in the blood of its vanquished enemies too. Surely she lived up to that moniker of hers.

But she was still there, and the battle was yet to begin— and Monique looked forward to it with her blood running hot.

———————————————————————————————————————————

Shinn Asuka hated to be around panicking people, because panic had a way of rubbing off on a Newtype. And Oliver Wellington, right now, was panicking.

Of course, so was everyone else. The main control room of the Carpentaria base was a mess of people screaming orders and information at each other, and Wellington, despite his stony expression, seemed to be on the verge of joining them in the frenzy. Shinn cast an awkward glance at Athrun, and neither of them looked confidently towards the commandant.

"I don't know how we could have missed this," Wellington said at last, and Shinn thought he heard a waver in the commander's gravelly voice. "A whole fleet. It's huge. Gotta be well over two hundred ships. They're crossing Arafura and Torres and they have our entire fleet pinned down in the gulf now."

Athrun studied the strategic map for a moment. "It looks like we're getting our decisive battle one way or another," he said, and glanced over at Shinn. "What do you think?"

What Shinn really thought, of course, was that there was no way in hell the Resistance would win against numbers like that. But stranger things had happened in this war and the Carpentaria inhabitants did have the advantage of defending a position instead of attacking it.

Shinn closed his eyes and felt Emily's presence near the Minerva. Judging from the knot of fear he felt pulsing in her, he figured she knew what was coming. And judging by the spreading cloud of dread, the word was getting out.

———————————————————————————————————————————

Rau Le Creuset was a student of military strategy, and for that, he had to tip his hat to Lord Djibril and his generals.

The strategic map was spread before him in the Legend's cockpit. The Alliance fleet was steaming through the Arafura Sea and the Torres Strait, and already positioned to keep the Resistance's fleet bottled up in the Gulf of Carpentaria. It was huge, judging by the wave of pressure emanating from it. Spotters estimated it to be almost three hundred warships alone, plus well over a hundred troopships and support vessels, and an unknown number of submarines. And it had a great armada of aircraft on its heels, lifting off from airbases in New Guinea and Indonesia, converging unmistakably on the Carpentaria Base. It was the largest amphibious operation since Normandy, centuries ago, and such a fleet would not set out if it was not sure that it was going to end the war.

Not only that, but Rau had to give credit to Djibril and his officers for the genius of it all. The Resistance's plan had been to secretly move a massive fleet to the doorstep of the enemy's stronghold and pummel it into submission; and yet here was the Alliance, doing exactly that, and with the geography of the Gulf on their side as well. This would all be very gory.

That, however, was good, as Rau glanced in the direction of the Twilight— and the pilot inside. Emily was coming along nicely. The manifestation of her previous training had made her unstable, and unstable minds were open to manipulation and suggestion. There was still much work to do with her, of course; he had only just implanted in her head the idea that her power was something to be cultivated and used for more than just protecting the Minerva from its foes. But Rau knew that his time was running out, and he needed a successor to carry on his work. The Cosmic Era could still be brought down. Emily would do it differently than he would, with brutality and raw power instead of quiet manipulations behind the curtains. But it would be done. She could do it. She had the power. She was the Angel of Death. Rau simply had to convince her to adopt that mantle, truly and completely, and the whole world would burn.

He idly thanked Gerhardt von Oldendorf. That ambitious Alliance bureaucrat had created the Angel of Death indeed, but he had made that fatal mistake of trying to control her. Nobody controlled the Angel of Death. Death took those whose time had come.

Emily just needed reminding, and with a wolfish grin, Rau knew he was closing in on victory.

———————————————————————————————————————————

At the flickering feeling of her sister standing in the Twilight's cockpit hatch, Emily glanced up and caught a reassuring smile from Viveka.

"So, guess our time off here is getting cut short," she started, and behind the smile, Emily could feel the nervousness. This battle would be unlike anything either of them had fought before.

"I guess."

Viveka leaned forward. "You're not still thinking about the last fight, are you?"

"How could I not?"

"Listen Em," Viveka started, reaching over the cockpit console to put a reassuring, if mechanical hand on her sister's shoulder, "you don't have to worry about it. They deserved it. And," she gestured at the Twilight's cockpit, "is this really what our father had in mind for you? Did he want you to be some superhero for the Alliance's enemies? Weren't you supposed to be his soldier, not his opponent?"

Emily glanced up tiredly. "If it were that easy I wouldn't have a problem with it." She shook her head. "It's...I'll deal with it. Don't worry about me."

"I'm going to anyways." Viveka pulled Emily closer for as much of a hug as she could manage over the Twilight's console. "Just don't forget that I'm still here for you, Em."

Emily smiled back and struggled to put her mind at peace.

———————————————————————————————————————————

"You ready for this?" asked Sting as he worked the controls of the ammo-loading arm, reloading the Chaos Gundam's CIWS for the battle ahead. He glanced over the gantry at Auel, and watched him merely shrug.

"It's another battle. Whatever."

"Yeah, but it's not the one I thought we were gonna be fighting." Sting glanced to the side, towards the north— where the Alliance's fleet was on approach. The announcement had cast a chill over all of Carpentaria, and now the base was alive with frenzied preparations for a battle that most people, deep down, knew was likely to end in defeat. That was the kind of battle Sting hated most— the kind that nobody expected to win. And Sting hated self-fulfilling prophecies...but it wasn't as though he could ignore the reality of the situation either.

"Oh, whatever, we'll kick their asses here or we'll do it at Heaven's Base," Auel said with a sigh. "What, you think we're gonna lose?"

"Of course we're gonna lose. We wound up destroying a fifth of the ZAFT remnant fleet, remember? And, well..." He shrugged. "Do you think the Resistance can fight the Alliance in a straight battle and come out on top?"

"Then we'll do it."

"We aren't that awesome."

Auel sniffed contemptuously and looked away, and Sting turned his attention back to the Chaos. Perhaps what he really hated about all this, he mused, was the unmistakable stench of failure.

———————————————————————————————————————————

It would be merely another battle, Athrun Zala struggled to remind himself. He had lived through these sorts of confrontations before. He had survived Jachin Due; he had survived Solomon's Sword; he could survive this.

Striding down the gantry with his work on the Infinite Justice complete, he stopped by the Savior, and the frustration bubbling out of its cockpit. He could survive this battle; her, on the other hand...

"So," he began, poking his head through the cockpit opening and drawing Viveka's startled attention, "need help?"

Viveka blew out a sigh and hopped out of the Savior's cockpit. "Fine, you fix it," she grumbled. "Get my settings file back for me."

Athrun cracked his knuckles and set to work. The OS of the Second Stage units had a nasty habit of resetting all of their custom settings after major software work, from things as mundane as speaker volume to things as critical as weapons control schemes, but they were easy enough to restore for a Coordinator who knew an obscene amount about software anyway. He glanced up at Viveka. "You're nervous."

Viveka shrugged. "I've never fought in a battle like this before," she said. "I don't know what to expect."

"'Everything to go wrong' is a good place to start."

"That's not encouraging." She glanced down awkwardly at him. "You don't look too concerned."

"I've done this before," replied Athrun.
"Well, then don't you die on me out— "

"Don't say it," Athrun snapped, shooting her a glare. Viveka sputtered in surprise. "Yes, I've done this before. That also means on the eve of a giant battle, I've had friends promise me that they won't die the next day. Then they went and died the next day."

Viveka blinked at him. "Don't tell me you're being superstitious."

"I'm not. I'm telling you that I don't want to think about that anymore than I have to." He let out a sigh. "I'm sorry, I'm just more stressed than I look."

Silence reigned in the Savior's cockpit for a moment, save for the tapping of keys, before Viveka bent over the mobile suit's console and captured Athrun's attention with her hand on his chin. "Okay," she said, "I'll put it like this. You aren't going to die out there. And neither am I. However the battle goes." She smirked. "That better?"

"Getting there," Athrun answered.

———————————————————————————————————————————

The air rang and the hangar floor shook as the Gaia's shield snapped back into place on the mobile suit's slender arm. Shinn watched, arms crossed and leaning against the railing, as Stella worked on her machine as diligently as she did on her fish tank. He had no worries about her in the coming battle, of course. She could always handle herself, and for as much as she wanted to be protected, he had to admit she didn't really need it.

"Are you gonna be okay, Stella?" he asked.

"Stella will be okay." She spared him a glance and a reassuring smile. "Shinn shouldn't worry."

Shinn smiled back as she returned to her work. He felt like a fool, as though he, the almighty Newtype, should have seen this coming. What use was this power to see the future when he couldn't use it when the future so desperately needed to be seen?

He turned his attention to the north. The Alliance fleet's disposition was yet unknown, and Wellington's men suspected that it was hiding itself with Mirage Colloid systems. But Mirage Colloid could not hundreds of thousands of people from the senses of a Newtype, and it was his, Athrun's, Emily's, and Rau's testimony that had convinced Wellington to throw the base on its highest possible alert. The Resistance's fleet was in the middle of its preparations to put to sea— now it would have to do battle in the Gulf of Carpentaria's confines. It was the Resistance's own plan, expertly turned against them— and still Shinn could not shake the feeling that there was something else to this scheme.

He glanced back towards Stella. He may not have been worried about her, but that did not keep him from worrying.

———————————————————————————————————————————

She will be our angel of death.

The voice entered her head in her idle moments, and whenever it did, Emily shook her head and cleared away its stabbing reminder. But that made no difference; it would return again, when she was on the verge of forgetting, that her father had made her into what she was today— and the more she fought to be free of his shadow, the deeper she was sucked in.

The pilots had been instructed to sleep in their machines' cockpits tonight, in case the Alliance's attack began early. Emily stretched out with her feet atop the Twilight's half-folded-down console. Her loyal steed's cockpit seat made a singularly uncomfortable bed, but it would have to do— and if nothing else, the seat could be folded back.

She will be our angel of death.

But she had to remember the words of her sister, of Shinn, of Rau— that she was not their angel of death. She was her own, and always would be. She was still Emily von Oldendorf, not Unit Zero-One. She used the power the Alliance had given her against them, just as she would in the coming battle. She knew whose side was right, that even with all the horrors of the Resistance the Phantom Pain was still worse. The electricity searing her body and Kyali's death searing her soul, the horrible massacres in Murmansk and Volgograd and Novorossiysk...yes, there was no doubt who was the real evil in the world.

She will be our angel of death.

She would not. She told herself, she knew her friends knew that, now she just had to believe it herself.

Emily glanced around the Twilight's cockpit. At Hormuz she had fought that woman and her white mobile suit, that had supposedly been meant for her as the apex of her father's scheming and training. But now she had a different Gundam, one with shimmering wings of light and blinding speed, one that she could use to fight the Alliance's cruelty and tyranny. She had her own life, her own friends, her own power.

So why didn't she believe it?

She will be our angel of death.

Emily closed her eyes and waited for sleep to take her.

———————————————————————————————————————————

The sun had dawned bright and malevolent in the sky. The morning fog had vanished almost as quickly as it had come, and now on the horizon were the dozens of dark shapes that could only be the battle fleet of the Earth Alliance.

In the Twilight's cockpit, staring out the Minerva's open portside catapult, Emily swallowed the knot of fear in her throat. She was surrounded by allies, both her friends from the Minerva and Resistance troops who now stared a massive Alliance fleet in the face and could not possibly be so stupid as to turn their guns on each other. Not now, not with this looming before them.

The enemy fleet's commander had begun to broadcast a message ordering Carpentaria's surrender. Carpentaria had responded with a volley of artillery fire, splashing down into the water before the approaching warships. Now the enemy's mobile suits were rising from the decks and the warships were closing in.

Roxy's face appeared on the Twilight's auxiliary screen, and she flashed a cocky grin. "Twilight, you're all clear. Kick some ass out there, will ya?"

Emily smiled back and took the Twilight's controls.

She will be our angel of death.

"Twilight Gundam, Emily, launching!"

The catapult fired, the engines roared, and the Twilight Gundam roared into the sky.

———————————————————————————————————————————

To be continued...