Thanks to: All the reviewers and readers, and the War Room. ^_^
"In those days they shall say no more, The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children's teeth are set on edge. But everyone now shall die for his own iniquity."
--- Ezekiel 18:2-3
"And there was war in heaven: Micheal and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought with his angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven."
--- Revelation 12:7-9
Requiem for the Sinners Part 36
Jihad: Baptism by Fire
What in the hell...?
Septem zoomed in on the cluster of L4 colonies. As he watched, they began to blink out, one by one, like dying stars. A fleet of ships began to leave them, not flying in formation, but almost in a kind of panicked caravan. They reminded him of a show he had seen on a television once, a nature documentary of animals escaping a wildfire.
His com beeped, and he set the relay, watching his second-in-command, Verdes, come up on the screen. "Sir? The citizens of L4 are leaving? Should we shoot them down? They're sending a white flag code."
White Fang, his mind automatically corrected. He thought it over a moment, then answered. "No. Don't engage them. Hell, those ships aren't even battle capacitated. It'd be like bombing Coca-Cola trucks. Repeat...don't touch the fleet. We'll leave them to Sally." Hopefully, it won't end up like the Sweepers, he added silently. He checked his scanner, and raised an eyebrow at what he saw. He switched his frequency over, for a few moments, listening, then switched it back.
"Verdes, there's still radio activity coming from inside the colony L4-273. Winner and his crew might have evacuated with the rest of the civvies, but for some reason, I'm seriously doubting it. You, Laban, Armstrong, and Bush, split up your packs. We'll lead five squads to search the colony, find the source of radio noise. Sounds like something you'd speak in a camel country. What do you want to bet our boy Winner is waiting on us?"
"I'm not taking that bet, sir. But I wish I had a chance to win."
Septem heard static as Verdes moved to a private relay.
"Sir, with all due respect, I think we should wait on backup from General Po. We only have a hundred and five men, and if 04 is still on the colony-"
"04? What in the hell are you talking about, ‘04'?" Septem ran his hands through his bangs furiously, exhausted and exasperated. "Winner isn't a pilot anymore, Verdes. He doesn't even have any mobile suits, much less a damned Gundam. Winner is a spoiled little rich kid with an attitude problem and a streak of his daddy in him. And if I find his candy ass in that colony, I'm gonna give him the whupping his daddy should have gave him when he was still a snotnosed brat. We'll give John Q. Public half an hour to get clear of the colony, then we'll engage. No point in unnecessary bloodshed, right?"
"... Yessir."
To pass the time, Septem pulled up his search engine for Quatre's dossier. "Oxford at L4, double major in colonial management and astro-engineering, fluent in four languages. 4.0 GPA throughout...fuck, brat he might be, but a smart brat."
"From what I've heard, sir, he's a genius in military strategy, which is why I suggested-"
"Yeah, well, Verdes, I'm no slouch at it, either. Keep in mind. He's looking to lure us in, any idiot could see that, and we wouldn't want to disappoint him, would we?"
"... He's pretty young to be in charge of an entire colony cluster, isn't he? And a representative at the council, too?"
Septem snorted. "I never said he wasn't an ambitious little asshole. I just said that for all his prowess in military strategy, my dear mother could have seen through this pony trap. It's almost insulting he thinks so lowly of my intelligence. Either that, or he's playing stupid for us. I'm not sure which is more disturbing."
There was a period of near-silence across the comlinks, before Laban, the third-in-command under Verdes, spoke up, almost timidly. Laban was a genius in his own rights, as far as Septem could tell, but Laban was also the youngest man beneath him, not even old enough to drink yet.
"General? You've fought against Winner before, haven't you?"
"Yeah, I have." Septem replied in a tone of voice that left no room for embellishment.
Verdes cut him to private com again, scowling slightly.
"Grant, why are we doing this? This is a dangerous undertaking. We have no intelligence as to Winner's whereabouts or armaments at all. It could be an ambush."
"We're under orders from that idiot Noventa." Septem laughed softly, but there wasn't any humor to the sound. It was completely bitter. "You want to know why we've lost so many people in this little shindig against the colonies, Sammy?"
"... Why, sir?"
Septem shook his head, still laughing quietly.
He looked up at Verdes with a terrible, uncharacteristic solemnness, eyes full of the deaths he had seen. He was a young man that, like the Gundam pilots, had been raised in and around war his entire life. "Because we're Preventers, amigo. We're here to prevent war. I'll tell you why. Because we're not warriors, Verdes. We're peacekeepers, all of us. And no one, I mean no one, at HQ has the slightest idea of what the flying blue fuck they're doing."
Septem closed his eyes.
"... And every fucking poor son of a bitch in this fleet knows it."
~*~
"I'm sorry, Lieutenant Harper, but I simply cannot recognize your authority on behalf of L2."
"Now say there, you arrogant little bit-!!"
"Move over, Isaac, and let me handle this. Your diplomatic skills leave much to be desired."
Harper snorted as Wufei pushed him out of the way none too gently, until he was sitting face-to-face with the woman on the other side of the vidscreen. The petite, middle-aged Hispanic woman sitting in the immaculate Oval Office gazed back at him blankly, but her dark eyes widened as she recognized him for who he was.
"General Chang, is that you? I thought you'd been killed." She scowled. "In fact, I thought you'd been killed by them. Although the fact that Noventa is not keeping us up on a play-by-play is not particularly surprising to me." Her voice held a note of disapproval.
Wufei answered politely, a gentle smile on his face. His military bureaucrat's face, Harper thought. It was an ass-kissing expression. "Fortunately, President Ramirez, my luck hasn't run quite that badly. I would just like to confirm that Duo Maxwell is mobilizing troops at the moment, and Harper here does indeed speak for him."
The US president sat back in her chair, relaxing slightly. "So you've defected then, Chang?"
Wufei's smile faded a bit. "Not in the most concrete sense of the word, Mrs. President. I'm just protecting people the best way I know how."
"Hmm... I heard that about you." Ramirez smiled slightly, but when she looked back at Wufei, her expression was inscrutable again. "Why have you and your men contacted the United States, General? We have nothing to discuss with you."
"Have you ever heard of the Truman Doctrine, Mrs. President?" Wufei was almost satisfied to see the woman flinch. Never let anyone say history isn't worth anything.
"General Chang, that policy is centuries old. You can't possibly expect us to-"
"With all due respect, Mrs. President... I do." Wufei laughed softly. "‘The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want. They spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife. They reach their full growth when the hope of a people for a better life has died. We must keep that hope alive. The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms. If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world-and we shall surely endanger the welfare of our own nation.' Your country said that, Mrs. President. Your Truman. Were those words empty?"
The American president was silent. Finally, she spoke, her voice softer than it had been. "General...the people of the United States are moved by your cause. We really are. However...we have been a part of the Alliance since 2018, and the World Nation after that. We are far too globalized to take action against any enemy of the Nation. We can't do anything to help you."
"Why the fuck not!?" Harper shoved forward, standing so close his nose almost touched the vidscreen. His face was twisted into a frustrated snarl.
Wufei glared at him. "Harper!"
Harper ignored him, eyes burning into the image on the vidscreen of the US president. "We're an American colony! Hell, Wal-Mart and Nike helped put up the cash to start this fucking hellhole! We were free once, and so were you!!"
Ramirez sat in shocked silence for a moment before her expression slid back into a nearly emotionless facade. "Lieutenant, Congress has already voted on this issue. As far as the United States is concerned, the militants of L2 will remain branded as interstellar terrorists. My hands are tied."
"President Ramirez, please..." Wufei said. He didn't like pleading with a woman, but...
The president was resolute. "I'm sorry, General. The United States of America does not negotiate with terrorists, much less ally ourselves with them. Good day to you, gentlemen."
The screen cut out as the president hung up, going blank. Wufei gently clicked the vidscreen shut, then stared at the space where the president's face had been. There were a few moments of tense silence, before Wufei finally broke it, cutting his eyes in Harper's direction.
"... You ass."
~*~
"With all due respect, General, this place is as spooky as hell."
"Duly noted, Verdes." Privately, Septem agreed. The colony was almost pitch-black, except the intermittent flashes of red light from the emergency broadcast system, running on the last bit of energy left in the colony, like muscle spasms in a corpse. The sirens, which were growing fainter and fainter, had a disjointed, eerie quality to them. The street he was standing in with his Taurus was completely deserted. A discarded grocery bag blew across the middle of the sandy street, jarred by the movement of the mobile suits.
"Fucking ghost-town is what it is," Laban said, laughing nervously. "No gravity, no oxygen. We're as close to vacuum as we can get in here."
Septem ignored him, going through the frequencies on the scanner, trying to pick up the bursts of radio transmission he had caught from the inside of the colony before. There was no response on any frequency. He tried to comlink Noin and Sally as well. No response.
Nothing on command channel, no beacon from the Peacemillion II. No radio activity in the colony at all. He felt the walls of it threatening to smother him. It was one thing walking into a trap and knowing what the hell was going on. It was a completely different thing going into a trap that was different than you expected.
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.
"Commander?"
"Yeah, Verdes. 10-4, everything is fabulous. You and Laban hit the south sector, Bush and Armstrong take the north with me. Keep your ears on the perk, I know that Winner and his men are in here somewhere. Permission to fire at will. If you get a chance to kill Winner before he gets a chance to kill you...do it. Don't hesitate, or you'll be wormfood. That much I can guarantee."
Bush cursed over the comlink. "Jesus, General, these suits aren't equipped for full-pitch combat. It's darker than a carload of assholes in here."
"Yeah, well, we're stuck with what the big guns give us. Come on." Septem led the fifty-odd suits behind him down the main drag of the colony, heading towards the central command station. He was only sure about its general location, but he knew he'd recognize the building from the scorpion icon that was part of the Winner coat of arms: Nemo me impune lacessit. Let no one attack us without consequence.
The only noises were the sounds of mech footsteps, and the low, pitched groaning beneath their feet, a sound that Septem had come to identify with the death of the colony as the last of its systems finished their shutdown sequences.
For almost fifteen minutes, the streets were completely silent. Septem even began to wonder if maybe he had been wrong. Maybe the radio activity he had heard was just from the fleeing civilian ships. Maybe Winner had left with the rest of the colony, refugees from a dying star.
Suddenly, the street beneath their feet rocked beneath them from a tremendous explosion less than five hundred meters away. Before the rumbling echo could die, Septem heard Laban's terrified shouts over the comlink.
"Com... der! Bog... sector tw...!! You said there were no... bile suits!" Another explosion rocked the colony, a mushroom of fire and debris rising in an ominous cloud. Septem could see the warped form of a Taurus thrown into the side of a building, obliterating it.
"Sep...! Sniper fire... sec... Infantr..."
Verdes comlink cut off in the finality of static.
You said there were no mobile suits!
"Come on! You heard the man!" Septem snarled, pulling his Taurus into an about-face and igniting his thrusters.
Suddenly, as if an iron curtain had been lifted, the radio band was jammed with a hopeless overload of garbled voices. Frantic exchanges between Preventers, the flat commands of the enemy, inquiries from Command Channel. Sanskrit, Arabic, Esperanto, and English all competed with each other for the same airspace, until the entire channel was as discordant as static.
A split-second before the third explosion, Septem saw the enemy mobile suits. They were lined along the tops of the buildings on either side, showering Laban and Verdes troops with gatling fire. Half of the mobile suits were already down. When the explosion hit, he was throw sideways into the front of a grocery store, buried halfway through the shop front in a flurry of glass and concrete shrapnel.
"Shit!!" Septem heard as clear as day the voice of Armstrong behind him, rising in a panic. "Commander! We've been flanked!! Com-"
Another explosion rocked the colony, and Armstrong's voice was cut off neatly into static. Septem bounced around in the cockpit of his suit like a bug in a bottle, deafened by a war cry from the enemy as the streets burned.
Over all the other noise on the comlink, he heard Barton's voice, crisp and flat. "Make sure none of them lives to tell about it."
Winner's voice, almost a whisper. "I'm sorry. But you gave us no choice."
Septem suddenly realized where the explosions were coming from.
C-4 explosives. Jesus Christ, he's wired this place up.
Constant, rumbling, thundering waves of noise were punctuated by the sound of another series of C-4 bombs, blasting the concentrated Preventer troops into oblivion. In the narrow streets of the colony, there was no where for them to run, no place to fall back to and regroup.
They were surrounded.
Let no one attack us without consequence.
The motto circled in Septem's mind as he tried to right his suit; the phrase came to him over and over as he tried to get the destroyed left leg of his mech to work. It was almost severed, useless. The arm of his Taurus on that side was blown completely away.
Let no one attack us without consequence.
Explosions scoured the street behind him in a lethal back draft. Screams drowned out the channel before noise finally ceased entirely. Slowly, surely, voices came back onto the line.
They were not the voices of his men. They were gone. Every one of them, gone. He was alone.
"Is that all of them, young master?"
"I think so. All except him."
Septem closed his eyes, waiting for the blow that would destroy his suit and end his life, but it never came. He heard the sound of mobile suit footfalls behind him, two sets, and heard Winner's voice over his radio. He managed to roll his suit over onto his back, pointing his damaged gatling gun in the direction of the suits over his head. In the near-pitch darkness, they were only silhouettes.
"That is you, isn't General Septem? You are defeated."
"Fuck you, Winner!" He pulled the trigger of the gatling gun, only to hear the sweet, professional voice of his suit's computer come over the com.
"Gatling gun disabled. Please retreat for repairs."
"It's a little late for that, sweetheart," he groaned softly. He was helpless.
"I'm going to let you live, Septem. So you can remember what you saw here today. And you tell them all what happens when you attack pacifists."
"Fuck you, Winner," Septem whispered again, blinded by blood. He wearily brushed it out of his eyes.
That flat, amused voice from before came on. Trowa Barton.
"I believe you're the one who has been fucked, General."
The last thing Septem heard before passing out slumped between the side of his hatch and the seat of his cockpit was the polite, almost cheerful voice of L4's leader, Quatre R. Winner. He knew, if he lived, he would hear that voice in his nightmares.
"You have my sincerest condolences over the loss of your men, General Septem. But I'm going to have to kindly ask you to get the hell out of my Colony."
TBC...
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