An old man in a white lab coat looked through the plate glass of the observation station at the mobile suit in the test hangar. He pressed the com button on the control board. Any questions or comments?
“Begin start-up sequence for the Time Cutter.”
A slightly garbled return transmission replied. “Roger. Beginning preliminary test run for the Alpha-class Time Cutter in five minutes.”
Another man appeared behind the man in the white lab coat. “Doctor, is something of this scale absolutely necessary?”
“Yes it is, Khans, if things go wrong, this could be our last chance.”
“You’d go as far as risking destroying the time-space continuum in order to achieve our goals?”
“They don’t call me slightly unstable for nothing.” He smiled. He would have winked too, but the optical enhancers grafted to his face prevented that.
“Are the other five suits complete?” Khans asked.
“Yes, all but these two.”
Khans sighed. “You don’t need to finish the other one.”
The Doctor turned in his seat. “What?”
Khans sighed again. “Ms. Shpiker did not develop her ability soon enough, she is unfit for piloting one of the Gundams. We wiped her memory, she’s been returned to her family.”
The com buzzed again. “Doctor J, the Time Cutter is ready, ready for ignition on your mark.”
“Alright Deven, 3,… 2,… 1,… Mark!”
On that command Deven initiated the Time Cutter.
“Plotting destination to one minute from now. Initiating search for breach in the time-space continuum. Searching…”
Doctor J leaned foreword slightly in his seat. “Alright Deven, if this works, you’ll have something to brag to Heero about.”
“Sure thing, Doctor J. Breach detected, preparing to enter continuum.”
From inside the observation station, Doctor J and Khans watched as a barely noticeable sphere of energy surrounded the Gundam. The suit began to dematerialize when suddenly a circuit on the power core blew.
Doctor J slammed the com button. “Deven, back out, there’s a problem.!”
“Its okay, I’ve got it!”
“No Deven, its too dangerous!”
Three things happened at once. First, the main hydraulic gear on the left arm blew and the arm fell to the ground, second, the Time-Cutter device exploded, and third the Gundam entered the time-space continuum with no specific destination and no way to get back.
Year: After Colony 197
Location: Deep Space
Lieutenant Hilde Shpiker carefully guided her mobile suit through the black void of space. Five others followed close behind. Hilde smiled at their precise formation, the soldiers were well trained, even if none of them had seen any actual combat experience, she was sure they’d be ready if the situation arose.
Witch it probably never would. After the Dekim Barton incident, all mobile suits, even the Gundams, had been destroyed. Well, not all. As long as Lucrezia Noin and Hilde were part of Preventer there would be some mobile suits, not that Relina would ever know. Or anyone else in the Earth Sphere United Nation. As far as the ESUN was concerned, there wasn’t a single weapon left in the solar system.
And it was Preventer’s job to keep it that way.
Formed after the Libra battle by Lady Une, Preventer was the guardian of pacifism. If a problem arose, it was Preventer’s job to nip it in the bud before another war could break out. Preventer was a small unit, but it contained the best. Hilde, Noin, Sally Poe, and Zechs Merquise, who now went by the name of “Preventer Wind”, were the top officers of Preventer’s military division, and their few troops were trained by them personally.
And of course, there were the advanced suits.
Pride swelled in Hilde thinking of the suits they were piloting. The new Mark III Virgos existed because of an ingenuity she never new she had. Since the Dekim Barton incident Noin and Zechs had been pouring over ideas for a new suit, using the Virgo and Virgo II as base models. They had to reduce the sheer amount of weaponry so the average soldier could pilot it. The beam cannon had been scrapped in favor of better mobility and they were trying to get a laser cannon to replace the beam riffle. A laser cannon on a mobile suit was a ludicrous idea. In a battle during the Colony Wars someone tried to equip Taurus mobile dolls with laser cannons. The energy feedback destroyed each suit after the second or third shot.
But when Hilde was looking over the design schematics for the laser cannons, she suddenly realized she new all of it already, in fact, she knew it better then the schematics portrayed it. There was no way she could have known this; she was a soldier, not a weapon developer. But she found the solution. She proposed an idea to Noin of creating an energy feedback loop between the laser cannon and the planet defensors shield system. This not only allowed the suit to contain the energy feedback of the laser, but also gave extra power to the shield system at the same time. When Noin asked her how she came up with this, Hilde explained it as a lucky guess.
Weather or not Noin had believed her, it resulted in the limited manufacture of a very potent mobile suit, which her small squad now flew.
A voice buzzed over the com, snapping her out of her memories. “Lieutenant, approaching final checkpoint.”
“Thank you, Nikolai.”
“Managing to stay awake, Lieutenant?”
Hilde laughed, “Yes, I’m fine, but I think I’m going to get a nice, hot cup of coffee back at base, watching star fields for hours is about as boring as it gets.”
Nikolai was bound to respond with one of his snappy retorts, but an alarm on his heads-up display prevented it. “Lieutenant, some sort of energy anomaly ahead, about a half-parsec.”
Hilde instantly dropped into her military training. “Can you get me a visual?”
“Negative Lieutenant, were too far, we should be able to pick it up in a minute or two.”
“Alright, keep monitoring it, if its signature changes by half a micron, tell me.”
“Aye.”
They cruised for a minute, and then she could see it. While the energy reading was enormous, the anomaly didn’t look like much. A pitch-dark hole in space with a faint white outline, almost like a miniature black hole.
“What the hell is it, Lieutenant?”
“I don’t know, Nikolai, but whatever it is, it’s going away.” The energy signal on her heads-up was decreasing rapidly. The anomaly slowly disappeared, and all that was left was empty space, well, what should have been empty space. What looked like an exact duplicate of her suit floated there, but it was distorted, as if it were reflecting off…. glass.
She scanned it.
It was a suit, but it was powered down, what’s more….
“Gundanium.” She whispered.
“What, Lieutenant?”
“Nikolai, there’s a suit there, it’s reflective, like glass. It’s powered down and it’s made of Gundanium.”
Nikolai sounded nervous. “I… I thought the Gundams were destroyed.”
“They were.”
There was something else. The way this suit was built. It was beautiful. Mobile suits were blocky and hard-edged, like a human wearing armor. This suit was smooth and rounded, its joints more articulate, it still had the basic design of a Gundam, but it seemed more… human.
Then, quite suddenly, it turned on.
Year: After Colony 197
Location: ESUN Summit, Brussels
Note from the Webmaster: The section below is not yet been converted correctly into html. I will finish fixing it up later when I find the time.
“The Summit recognizes Mariemaia Kushrenada.”
The room was silent as a small figure ascended the steps toward the dais and took her place behind it. Of course, she had to use a block to stand on, it was not intended for the use of eight-year-old girls apologizing for an attempt at taking over the world. While she may have been a figurehead, Dekim was dead and responsibility for his actions rested on her shoulders.
And people said Relina had it tough.
“Members of the Earth Sphere United Nation, I am here today to formally apologize for the actions of the Mariemaia Army and Dekim Barton, head of the Barton Foundation. While I was a figurehead in this incident, I do not deny the fact that my own ambitions had a hand in it, and I extend a personal apology to Relina Dorlan for the inconveniences brought upon her.”
Inconveniences was a gross understatement.
“Now that that is out of the way, I would like to discuss something else.”
As she expected, guards immediately started approaching the dais. Also, as she expected, Relina, sitting in the front row, held out a hand. The guards halted, Mariemaia continued.
“I can think of only three reasons I am alive today to apologize to you instead of having been executed for my crimes months ago. My age, my father’s esteemed service to this planet, or you see me as a potential resource. I’m betting on the third.”
That was a low blow and Relina gave Mariemaia a look, but the guards did not move.
“As a resource, I am going to provide you with some very important information. I will start by telling you why I became involved with Dekim Barton’s plot and why I think this world and the colonies need military armament.” She lifted a small recording device out of her pocket and placed it on the dais. “This message was intercepted by an OZ outbound flight project two years ago, it is only 13% complete and was just translated a year ago. It was in a language impossible to create with human vocal capabilities.” She hit the play button.
For several minutes there was static, then: “….desired……. your people…… war….”
A hush fell over the room, and the silence was almost palpable.
“What I’m suggesting,” Mariemaia said quietly, “is that there may be an extraterrestrial threat to the human race.”
Silence continued. This was a subject humanity had managed to forget after colonizing space, and people didn’t feel like remembering it.
“It is something we must prepare for.” Mariemaia said.
Vicente Fox Quesada XIII, representative for the Mexico region, stood from his seat. “Mariemaia, are you not aware of the incident in the year A.D. 2073 when the United States had these same fears and put so much funding into a useless program it brought the country into a thirteen-year depression?”
“We have evidence, they did not.”
Quesada laughed. “As intriguing as your little recording is, it is not enough for our whole society to become armed again, you’re asking to sacrifice the peace so many have died for on a hunch.”
Mariemaia erupted; she slammed her fist on the dais. “A lot of good peace will do us if our whole damned race is wiped out! What will those peoples sacrifices be good for then?”
Relina leaped from her seat. “Mariemaia, I think that is enough, we’ll consider what you have said, please step down.”
Mariemaia took in a deep breath, and let it out as a sigh. No point in arguing further, best to wait for a more appropriate time. Except we may not have that much time. She thought. She stepped down and descended the steps in the same dignified fashion she had gone up them. As she walked down the aisle to the exit, Relina fell into step behind her.
“That was stupid, letting your emotion show like that.”
“A year ago you would have done the same thing.”
Year: After Colony 197
Location: Deep Space
The last thing Hilde expected one of her soldiers to do was panic, but the unexpected has a habit of coming along more often than the expected.
“Mazie, no!” Hilde screamed into her com.
But Mazie was gripped by panic, and if she heard, she didn’t acknowledge the order. The laser cannon on Mazie’s Virgo hummed to life and a thin red beam lanced from it towards the mystery Gundam.
The suit fired its thrusters and jetted left soon enough to only be nicked by the beam. From the Gundam’s two knee joints cylinders ejected. The Gundam caught them and a beam of brilliant red light emitted from them. The Gundam held one of the sabers downward, like a knife-fighter.
Mazie screamed and fired several more times. The Gundam activated its primary thrusters and shot past Hilde toward Mazie’s suit. Hilde was awestruck, not even Duo’s DeathScythe moved that fast. With two swift strokes the Gundam removed both arms from Mazie’s suit, but did not destroy it.
Hilde saw her other troops start to move in. “Halt! Move and I’ll shoot you myself.”
“But Lieutenant,” Nikolai pleaded, “that thing attacked Mazie!”
“But he didn’t kill her, and she fired first.”
“Then what do we do?”
“Hold on, I’m going to try to com him.” She searched until her com located his frequency.
“Pilot, we mean you no harm, identify yourself.”
To her surprise, the pilot pulled up a video feed between there suits. The inside of the Gundam’s cockpit appeared on a small screen on her heads-up display, but the pilots face was shadowed.
The pilot spoke. “Heh, figures it would be you.”
Before she had time to realize the enigmatic nature of the pilot’s words, a memory came unbidden to her mind. She was crying, a hand rested on her shoulder, a warm, friendly hand….
As quickly as it came, the flash was gone. Hilde shook her head, trying to shake the strange feeling. “What do you want?”
“Where is Heero?”
“Who?”
“Heero, don’t play dumb, I know you know him.”
“What do you want with Heero.”
“I have a very important message for him, very important.”
“No one knows where he is.”
“Typical, I’ll have to find him myself then. By the way, it was good to see you again.” He said it in the same cryptic tone he used when he first spoke.
Hilde was getting upset. “What do you mean…”
But the Gundam had already taken off, she was still awed by its speed.
“…again.” She finished her sentence uselessly.
Year: After Colony 197
Location: New Marriott Resort Hotel, Brussels
Relina entered her fourteenth story suite thoroughly exhausted. Summit meetings were always tiring, so went politics, but all this stuff Mariemaia had brought up about a possible extraterrestrial threat was going to take a long, long time to smooth over. She was right though; I would have done the same thing a year ago.
She sighed and flopped down on the bed. She groped for the remote and flipped the television on. “…claims to have caught sight of the Gundam pilot, Heero Yuy at a gas station in San Francisco…” She clicked the TV off. So much for that.
Memories of Heero going through her head, she got up to get a glass of water, halfway to the bathroom, pain shot through her head, like a migraine, but infinitely worse. She collapsed to the floor. This had been happening for the past week and while at first she considered seeing a doctor, it was probably just stress, she diddn’t have time in her schedule for an appointment. Asprin didn’t help but the pain passed after a few minutes, it always did.
She lifter herself up and felt something wet on her upper lip. She put her hand up and it came away bloody. She looked in the mirror, her nose was bleeding. Maybe I should see a doctor, she thought, after the summit meeting. Forgetting the glass of water, she washed her face of and went to bed.
END
E-mail Wedge1400