Mobile Suit Zaku
Rio Grande
Rio Grande
Six days. It had been six days since they rolled into town, and nobody had done anything about it. Six days to make themselves at home and act like they owned the place. Border towns like ours didn't get any more attention from the government today then they did once upon a time when there actually was a border.
For what good one world government did for us. Our great grandparents could have told us it was the same now as it was then. We were out of sight and out of mind. We weren't as important to the Federation as New York would have been, and so we were on our own while five Zeke mobile suits made our home into theirs.
And I was tired of it.
I shook my head and bumped the throttle lever up and the engine in the tractor gave a rumble as it spun up to full power. Zeke's might have moved in, but life still went on. I slipped the clutch as I adjusted the hydraulics and as had happened probably a hundred thousand times before, the forks slid into the hay bale.
I carefully eased the control stick backwards and the hydraulics chugged, but the bale lifted up off the trailer deck. Tractor wasn't really big enough for the job but with a big enough counterweight on the three point it could pull it off. Border towns weren't exactly wealthy places.
The stick popped smoothly into reverse and I was getting ready to let the clutch out when a flash of movement off to my right caught my eye. A green Zeke suit was running past my house, right through my pasture. Every step tore a huge furrow through the grain that I'd spent my time, but more importantly most of my money cultivating.
I slapped the control stick forward and dumped the hay bale and side-stepped the clutch at the same time. The tractor lurched backwards and if I hadn't been strapped in I'd have gone right over the steering wheel. I was done.
I cut the wheel to the side and spun the front end around, then switched to high gear and tore off across the pasture towards the quonset hut. I might not have a mobile suit of my own but I had a few hundred pounds of stump remover that I could introduce that Zeke to.
My anger built with every step the Zeke took, the tractor couldn't go fast enough to satisfy me, but once I got to that quonset hut, oh there would be a reckoning, of that I had no doubt. If the Federation wasn't going to stand up to them, I sure as hell--
A pink beam of light struck the shoulder of the Zeke suit and the cylinders stored there flashed over immediately and a large explosion send the suit flying from its feet and in a lazy tumble through the air before it came back down again and dug a trench through the pasture that ended in the living room of my house.
I cut the wheel so hard the tractor almost flipped, luck more than anything kept it from going all the way over, and pointed it straight for the downed suit. I'd pry that hatch open and beat my satisfaction out of the pilot if I had to.
I cut the ignition and jumped out of my seat before the engine had stopped turning. My feet were on the ground before the wheels quit rolling. I shouldered my way through the front door and stomped my way up the stairs, tilted as they were.
There wouldn't be any fixing it, the house had been knocked clean off the foundation, to say nothing of the mobile suit sized hole through half of it. My dad would've been pissed if he was still around. I was angry enough for both of us.
The door to the spare room was torn off its hinges when I got to it, the chest of the mobile suit was sitting where the bed should have been and everything past that was completely gone. I didn't know if it was the impact that had done it, but the chest plate was folded up and away from the rest of the suit and there was a second hatch inside that had opened up.
I took a step closer and heard a raspy cough to my left: The pilot. He was wearing zeon green and had blood running out of his mouth, his leg looked broken. He wasn't going anywhere, not like that. No threat to me.
I looked back to the open cockpit and took another step towards it. The power was still on. I'd operated a mobile worker before. It couldn't be that different. Even if it was, I had to try. It took the Federation six days to show up and do anything about the Zekes, who was to say it wouldn't take even longer next time?
One last look at the remains of my house was all the motivation I needed; I jumped in.
The controls were largely the same as I had been expecting and it didn't take me long to close the hatch and bring the displays back online. The system warned of damage to the right shoulder but it looked like it was still operational despite that. The only real risk at the moment was that the Federation forces would fire on me as soon as I stood up.
But I'd come too far to stop.
I stepped into the pedals and rolled the control sticks and pushed the suit to its feet as the rest of my house started to come down around me. Whatever that meant for the Zeke pilot was no longer my problem. This was revenge.
The inventory system was pulled up on a monitor to my left and told me that the only weapon I had left was something called a 'Heat Hawk', located on the rear skirt armor. I twisted the controls to retrieve it and found that the controls were a lot lighter and more responsive than on the mobile worker.
That was fine by me. The screens showed the four other Zeke suits, which the sensor system told me were called 'MS-06J Zaku II', which meant that the unit I was piloting was a Zaku as well. Two more unknown types showed up and they were fighting the Zakus. Those would have to be Federation mobile suits.
Even if they had taken their sweet time showing up, I didn't want to get in a fight with them, because late was better than never.
The four Zaku IIs were ahead and to my left, the unidentified but most definitely Federation suits were further ahead to the right. They probably wouldn't shoot at me until they were done with the other four because I didn't have a ranged weapon and if their sensors were half as good as mine they'd know that.
The Rio Grande Valley wasn't completely flat but for a mobile suit it may as well have been, there was no terrain cover to speak of. There was no hiding, anyone with a pair of eyes in their head within ten miles could probably see us.
Hell, you gotta die of something.
I threw the Zaku into a sprint towards the nearest Zeke suit, the one second from my right, and readied the Heat Hawk. He had a machine gun and I needed it to be my machine gun instead. I tapped a control switch on my right stick and the external speakers showed as selected on the main MFD.
“I got your 'Sieg Zeon' right here!” I screamed out over the loud speakers as my axe came down into the Zeke's shoulder joint. The blade slid through the joint and halfway into the torso before it stopped.
I released the handle of the Heat Hawk and grabbed the severed arm of the Zeke suit. The machine gun came free with a relatively gentle tug and I had it raised and ready to fire before the other three Zekes could turn to fire on me.
Though I wasn't a soldier, I wasn't a moron either. I didn't stand still long enough for them to start firing. Instead I turned towards the Federation suits and returned to the Zaku to a top speed sprint, firing the machine gun towards the remaining Zekes as I ran.
I could have thought the plan out better, that much was true. I'd managed to take one of them out of the fight, so I'd at the very least avenged my house and pasture. I could probably sell the mobile suit and make more than enough to get all of that back.
The machine gun clicked empty by the time I reached the Federation forces and I dropped it. I'd neglected to grab any spare ammo, not that I'd really had the time for it. I still had my shoulder armor and my fists, that would have to do.
The cockpit jostled unexpectedly and I turned my head to see that one of the Federation suits had reached out and touched my armor. I started to wonder why when a comm window crackled open on my display and the pilot of the suit appeared in it.
“I was about to ask if that fall had knocked something loose, but I'm getting the impression you're not the Zeon pilot.” He sounded young, but I couldn't really tell with his helmet blocking most of his facial features.
“You'd be right. You boys took your sweet time getting here. Thanks for dropping this mobile suit on my house too, by the way.” Complaining, that's what you should always do when met with the military. Complain at them.
“Alright, well I'm not gonna turn down the help. Take this.” He said before reaching his suit's hand up and pulling the white stick out of his mobile suit's backpack and handing it to me.
When I closed my suit's hand around it, a pink beam of light erupted from the top of it. Unlike a beam rifle, the beam stopped after reaching a certain length and, while I didn't know what it was called, I didn't need to know that to know what it was for.
I twisted the controls and the Zaku held the saber out in front of it in an attack posture. I wasn't much of a swordsman, but I knew how to swing a club and I couldn't imagine it was going to be a whole lot different against someone who didn't even have a sword.
“So I'm just gonna go ahead and run back in there with this then, right?” I asked the other pilot with as neutral a face as I could mange.
“We'll cover you. You'll do fine.”
I changed my mind, maybe late wasn't better than never. Regardless, I stepped into the controls and threw my Zaku into a sprint into incoming machine gun fire, shoulder shield first. Large caliber rounds pinged off the shield and kicked down into the ground as I crossed the quarter mile into attack range.
My damage warning screen kept flipping more and more segments from green to yellow but I was too far to turn back. Two of them had stopped firing and had drawn their own Heat Hawk weapons. The third went up like a stack of dynamite without warning.
A lucky shot from one of the Federation suits?
Fifty feet, thirty, I crashed right shoulder first into the lead Zeke and slammed against my seat in the process. He stumbled back and crushed the neighbor's old grain silo when he finally fell over. Even from my own Zaku I could feel the ground rumble with the hit.
The damage screen flashed orange along the outer armor on the right shoulder, the controls got a little heavy on me and when I pushed the beam blade weapon down towards the Zeke the shield fell off completely.
There was nothing I could really do about it. I pushed the control stick forward and jammed the blade down into the chest of the downed Zeke. Right through the center of the chest armor. Right through the cockpit. The suit's arms dropped to the ground and the 'eye' in the head went dark.
An explosion to my left drew my attention and there I saw one of the Federation suits holding a beam weapon like the one I'd just used, standing over the bisected wreckage of the final Zeke mobile suit. The Federation suit looked like an avenging angel, standing over the slain demon and holding a sword of fire.
I wasn't sure what that made me.
I let go of the hilt of the beam weapon and the blade extinguished itself. The fight was over and I'd survived it. My house was a complete loss, but I'd survived, and my farm had more or less survived. Once I laid claim to the salvage of the two Zeke's I'd taken out and the Zaku I'd stolen from them I'd more than cover my damages.
“Now that that's out of the way, I suppose introductions are in order, eh? Have a step outside and let me get a look at you.”
I stepped into the pedals and twisted the controls to re-orient myself to face the suit sending the transmission. The Federation suit was walking towards me with his weapons stowed, the same suit that had handed me the beam weapon.
I reached up and started powering down the suit, then popped the hatch release. The screen in front of me folded up and out of the way and the hatch itself folded downwards, giving me a platform to stand on.
By the time I'd made it out onto the platform the other pilot was already waiting for me, but then he'd had a lot more practice at this whole mobile suit business than I had. He was a little taller than I'd expected from the youth in his voice, at what I guessed was around six foot even.
A fair bit above my own head, but that wasn't really an unfamiliar experience.
“Well that wasn't the most skilled fighting i've ever seen but it got the job done. Name's Kars Alexander, and you are?” He asked with a grin that conveyed a cockiness that I would absolutely expect out of a Federation soldier.
“Veronica Jackson. This is my farm, or well it used to be a farm. Damn Zekes have spent the last week acting like they own the place. Could have used the help last Sunday when they showed up.”
When confronted with the military, complain.
“Well Miss Veronica, I can't say you're what I expected to find inside this Zaku, but you don't disappoint. Why don't you give me a couple hours and I'll see if I can get some people down here to put things back in order, alright?”
I shrugged and held my arms out, “I mean, yeah that sounds good. You do that, but I'm keeping this Zaku and the ones I killed.”
Kars shook his head and laughed as he took a step back towards his cockpit, “Alright Miss Veronica, that is definitely a conversation we're gonna have.”