Once More, With Feeling
“Brooke, did you finish the numbers for July? If we don't have them ready by the first we're going to get audited again. I refuse to do hand inventory again so it's going to be on you if it comes to that!” I yelled up the stairs.
In the five years we'd been on Colony 30 she'd aged but I refused to believe she'd grown up. Still impulsive and disorganized... but I supposed she had a good role model to help her manifest that behavior.
Without about eighteen hours to go until the first of August we didn't exactly have the luxury of procrastination. Part of taking the job was monthly consumption reports. We were trying to grow corn efficiently in space and part of that was trying to do more with less.
She'd triggered an audit in January and I would rather slam my leg in an airlock hatch than go through it again. “Brooke, I'm not yelling for my own health here!”
And with that, I had turned completely into my father.
I rubbed my forehead and decided that the best course of action was to stomp my way up the stairs and give her a chance to answer before I unleashed parent voice. There was still a hitch in my step as I stomped one stair after the other, but I'd gotten so used to it that I only really noticed it when it crossed my mind.
I crossed the top stair and opened the door to the upstairs office. She still hadn't answered, but she was where I expected her to be. She was not wearing the expression I expected her to be wearing. I'm not sure which one I was looking for but 'afraid' wasn't it.
“Brooke?”
“Have you seen the news?” she answered in a shaky, fearful tone that I hadn't heard from her in years. Not since--
I turned to the display hanging from the office wall and saw the protest that had been going on, but now it looked violent. The video showed riot police firing tear gas into crowds while a group of Hizacks landed behind them.
“The hell are they thinking, using mobile suits against civilians?!” I yelled at the display. Same shit, different day. Like this was any better than Zeon? Damn them all!
Was a little peace too much to ask for?
I clenched a fist and turned around on my heel, yelling over my shoulder as I stomped back down the stairs. “Brooke, try to get in touch with the Rio Grande. Let them know what's going on. Tell them I could use backup.”
I shook my head as I shouldered my way through the front door of the administration building and out into the agricultural district. There'd been rumblings for weeks, months even, a protest was inevitable. It would burn out in a few days and then we could all get back to our normal lives.
Or it would have.
Earth Federation won the war and now they were back to treating spacenoids like subhumans and I really shouldn't have been surprised, but it wasn't like these civilians were Zeon troops. They didn't pose a threat to the military, so why the hell did they bring mobile suits into it? This was no different than five years ago. The bullies had come to town to show their might.
This time, I was a little more prepared for it.
I ran as fast as my bad leg would let me towards the grain elevators in the middle of the district, not too far from the office, while I typed codes into my hand-console. There were a lot of things I could operate remotely, and a lot of things were automated, and even though I could purge the grain from the other side of the property there were some things I had to do in person.
The shutters on the number three elevator opened up when I finished entering my codes and thousands of pounds of grain started to pour out onto the ground. Normally the emergency shutters would be used in the case of a worker falling into the storage tank. A person could drown in the grain if they couldn't be rescued in time so a quick solution was necessary.
And while that wasn't what I was using it for, the expediency of the method still served my purposes. The recovery grids had already begun drawing off the spilled grains to other storage tanks by the time I made it to the shutters and it wasn't much of an effort to squeeze my way in through the gap.
It stood to reason that if a grain silo could contain thousand and thousand of pounds of grain, well, there's no reason something couldn't be hidden in the middle of all of it, right? It threw threw the yields off but nothing that couldn't be covered up with a little fudging of the numbers.
I finally squirmed may way into the interior of the silo and was met with a blue foot attached to a white leg, attached to a white and blue mobile suit. At some point it had been a commander-type Zaku II, though the similarity to what it used to be was... superficial.
If any of the original parts even remained I couldn't have pointed them out, but it was still mine. The Anaheim technicians had officially registered its systems to refer to it as the YMS-06BZ.
The hatched opened, as if it was inviting me in. The winch lowered a cable lift to bring me up to the cockpit. I stuck my bad leg in the stirrup and gave it a tug and a few moments later I was... back in the saddle.
The hatch slid shut as I buckled myself in and the new panoramic display illuminated around me. It was like the Gundam, yet just different enough to be distinct. The controls were light in my hands and the fingers on the mobile suit's arms responded perfectly, despite the long nap.
The status panel along the left side of the command seat lit up in full green. Reactor output stable, data links online. YMS-06BZ was fully operational. But I'd always been more partial to the unofficial name that the Anaheim engineers had used for it: Boxer Blitz
There were a million reasons why I shouldn't, but I'd never been one to listen to the voices telling me 'no.' The right thing wasn't always the smart thing and there was nothing those people could do against mobile suits. But I was a different story.
I pushed the thrusters up to half power and blew the rest of the grain out through the shutters at my feet and smoke followed. The leg thrusters made the balance of thrust a little different, but nothing that I couldn't manage.
Three quarters power and I lifted off the ground. A half second later the golden commander's fin on the suit's head punched through the tin roof of the silo and the rest of the suit followed. Last time I'd been in a fight I'd almost died. Here was to hoping I did better in my custom Zaku.
Even from only a hundred feet up the curvature of the inside of the colony was apparent and I had to make course corrections to keep up with the spin. Still, it was much easier to fly in a space colony than it was on Earth. Once the spin was negated you were essentially weightless, just flying sideways at the same speed as the ground rotation.
Maybe not actually so simple after all, but I'd chosen to live in space and dammit I was going to justify that decision!
Minovsky particle density shot up and my targeting system started seeking silhouettes to match against, not that it had an easy time with all of the ground clutter. Not that it would give me much in the way of identification. The Hizack didn't even exist yet the last time this thing had been powered up so the best I could hope for was an 'unknown' or a mis-match as a Zaku II.
Wouldn't really surprise me either, apparently the Anaheim IFF computers would call a Zaku wearing red and white paint an RGM-79 if you rounded off the edges a little. At least that's what the scuttlebutt had been among the veterans.
I saw muzzle flashes and the IFF triggered on it, sure enough marking the contacts as 'Zaku II (?)' as if it wasn't entirely sure of the identification. It was good enough for me. Anyone firing weapons into a crowd was fair game. These guys were Federation pilots though, Titans, by the livery of their mobile suits. They deserved my best.
I cut thrust and went into a ballistic trajectory towards the unit furthest from the protesters and called up the control subsystems menu. I highlighted 'B.O.X.E.R.' and selected confirm. The process was the same as the last time, five years ago.
The suit started to respond again once the system was fully active and I reoriented myself into a feet-first orientation. No retro braking, the shock absorbers could handle it, I crashed down on the Hizack's shoulders and drove the suit down into the pavement.
A quick jump and a pivot around my left leg had me facing the rest of his squad and standing behind him. The Hizack wasn't going anywhere fast; the suit's shins were telescoped up into its thighs and the shoulder assembly on the right side had been torn half-away from the torso. It wasn't a trick that would work twice, but the once I got was spectacular.
I pulled the heat hawk off the suit's hip and activated it, the blade warmed to a nice red glow the Hizacks turned to face me. If they were facing me, they weren't shooting into the crowd. If they were facing me, I could fight them. I could win.
I toggled the external speakers and waved my left hand in a 'come here' gesture. “So, is this what the heroes in the EFSF are doing now? Shooting civilians? Such brave heroes you must be. Well all right then, it seems like you heroes wanna dance, so let's dance!”
I reached up to my right shoulder and pulled the shield free to hold it against my forearm, and banged the side of the heat hawk against it. “Come on, are you cowards?!”
The Hizack closest to me dropped its machine gun and drew a beam saber. Going for the decisive win and I couldn't blame him. Mobile suit combat favored the bold. His boosters were lit and he planned to kill the Zaku in front of him in one blow.
He wouldn't be fast enough.
I dropped into a crouch and fired a full powered quarter second pulse from my thrusters, just enough to get me moving. Just enough to get up under him. Half way down to my left knee, I kicked off and up to launch myself under his attack and block his right arm with my shield.
A quick twist of my right wrist, I let go of the handle of my heat hawk before closing my hand again, then drew the blade straight up with all the speed and force I could muster. The feedback was harsh, it was resisting me but not enough to stop me.
I kicked the thrusters again as the resistance on my arm let up, and the Hizack's left arm fell to the ground. I kicked off the ground to keep him off balance as I shifted my grip on the heat hawk to put my knuckles behind the blade and delivered a punch to the Hizack's cockpit.
The blade of the heat hawk melted the hatch armor and then the resistance intensified as I pushed it deeper. A few more feet and—the Hizack went slack and tipped over onto its back from the force of my push. As it hit the ground the beam saber it was holding fell from its hand and went out.
I dropped my shield to the ground and picked up the discarded saber, then shifted the grip of my right hand down to the end of my heat hawk's handle. A sharp tug freed the end of the handle from the rest of the shaft and I took a step away from the dead mobile suit.
Three Hizacks stood in front of me, waiting for something, or perhaps just stunned from the abrupt death of their fellow pilot. I turned my head, and so the Zaku's head as well, towards them and spoke on the externals. “Was he the only one who wasn't a coward? I'm here for all of you, so come on! All at once, I don't care!”
I held both hands to my sides and with a twitch of my fingers, beam sabers extended from both of them. I took a step towards them, and then another, and another. They wore the colors of Zeon and behaved just the same. I had been wrong, these scum were not Federation pilots at all.
But they still deserved my be--
An alert chime in my cockpit was all the warning I got before a dark blue mobile suit hit the ground in front of me and lunged in for the kill with a lit beam saber. I crossed my blades and braced not a moment before his blade came crashing down.
From my point of view as the Zaku's head, I was face to face with... With... No, it wasn't. Couldn't be. I'd seen that face before, but not in those colors. For a few moments, five years ago.
Full power to the thrusters, I pushed up off the ground, against the downward force the other suit was still using to hold me down, to kill me. A sharp pain through my bad leg cased a stumble and I dropped back down to a knee as my suit's thrusters ran wide open.
No, I could fight through it. I screamed as I kicked off of the ground and spun my way out of the blade lock, rocketing up into the air before coming down a moment later, a half dozen or so meters away from him. It was what I thought I had seen.
The colors were wrong, but the face was unmistakeable. Gundam.
“You would dare!? A Gundam stands for hope! For peace! A Gundam is a hero! You haven't the right to that machine!” I screamed at him through the externals. I swung the beam saber in my right hand up to point at the V-fin on his forehead.
“You take that off! Trash like you does not deserve that, you are no Amuro Ray! You will take it off or I will do it for you!”
There was a moment of hesitation from the faux-Gundam before the voice of it's pilot echoed through the streets. “You will try.”
I rolled back on my heels and kicked the thrusters at full power and slammed myself down into the control rig as my mobile suit leapt into the sky and kicked up a cloud of dust. Power off, I rolled forward and then kicked the thrusters again and halted my inertia. For a moment I hung in the air, just for a second--
I rocked backwards in the harness as if on reflex, the suit tipped with me as a Hizack burst upwards through the smoke cloud I'd produced, right where I'd just been floating. I twisted around and kicked the thrusters, boosting my rotation speed as I planted a kick to the Hizack's lower leg. The enemy suit spun around its axis as its thrust was misdirected by the impact.
Letting my momentum carry me through the kick, I stepped on the thrusters once I was re-oriented towards the off balance Hizack and closed the distance in half a second. It was a bad angle but I took a wild swing with my right arm just in case—and connected with the top half of the backpack, and followed through the back of the suit's head.
It wasn't a total kill, but it was going to hit the ground without thrusters so the pilot would definitely be out of the fight, if it didn't outright kill him. No less than he deserved.
Three on one. I'd taken out two. Not bad numbers, but I could do better.
The faux-Gundam came up to meet me with its saber lit, hovering a few dozen meters in front of me as we were both carried up spin. I cracked my neck and the suit mimicked my movements. It gave off a smug look and, while that wasn't my intention, I didn't mind the imagery.
“So then, guess it's time for me to try.”