PART 12 - Tortuosity
Pyongyang, Chengdu, Zamboanga. Gladstone and Antanarivo and Kinshasa. Fderik, El Obeid, Amman. Samara and Kabul and Mirnyy. Fort Severn, Bermuda, Cali. Alegre and Montgomery. The seventeen largest military jewels that might have adorned an imperial crown, had Mariemaia chosen to style herself as an Empress. Spread evenly over the Earth's inhabited territories, some were embedded in the continental interior, others clung to the ocean-lapped perimeter, a few were studded on islands. All were armed to the teeth, all had so far proven loyal to the Dictator.
In the hemispherical room which served as the rebels' Central Directorate, Zechs Merquise faced eighteen display screens, gravely saluting the commanders who would boldly engage those fortresses. No ordinary men and women, these. How far they had come, burdened with hope for freedom, amassing strength for the final confrontation. Their separate struggles of love and loss were untold, unknown to Zechs Merquise, but their stories had converged to this point, knotting with his into the tapestry of the ultimate battle.
"Preparing to attack on our side - good luck to us all."
"Yes, God willing, we shall have tomorrow to celebrate. Bonzer!"
"Approaching the 46th parallel, as yet unchallenged by Eotvos. Heh... esta de vacaciones?"
More brief messages in half a dozen languages, then one by one, the screens blanked as each leader logged out and commenced engagement. However, one screen was still activated. Quatre Winner remained in contact with Central Directorate, his blue stare intense.
"In an hour or so you should have your opening." Zechs found himself studying the burnline on the Arab's face; it looked as if it had been drawn on with a rule. "Go with clear conscience."
"The same clear conscience as yours, knowing that Sally and Relena might both be in Brussels?" Quatre's brows pinched downwards, the skin around his scar puckering slightly. "Knowing that there are men following you into an uncertain doom?"
"This is the way it must begin." The former OZ pilot spoke resolutely to one who was his comrade in this battle, though his own heart was torn with the guilt. "They say that if you cannot live with regret, then never love, and never be loved. For when they love you, they would die for you, such that the dying never stops... But there must be death if there is to be life afterward. So put aside your regrets."
"I will still fight. My regrets will go into battle with me." Quatre's hand went to the side of the screen, preparing to log off. "Quatre Winner: preparing to engage."
The screen went blank. Zechs felt a hand on his arm, and looked into Noin's shining eyes. For a moment he was startled by the energy in them, then he relaxed and covered her hand with his own. "I thought you'd already left with the rest of our Tauruses."
Noin shook her head. "Not yet." She did not give a reason why; there was no need. For in spite of the desire to wield arms against the enemy, a greater wish kept her away from the fighting.
It had never been Zechs' place to remain tied to tactical control, but for the sake of maintaining cohesion, he would have to hold to his post until desperation called for his appearance on the battlefield. In the past, a lack of self-restraint had been a weakness, the conduit for rash actions. He recognised this. It would be difficult, but this time he would not err.
He moved his left hand to the console, bringing up a projection of the Earth as a glowing net on the display, but his right hand clasped firmly that of the woman beside him.
"Stay with me, Noin."
Curled up against two large crates, Duo stared up at the metal reinforcements bolted across the plane's cargo hold. Man, the place was a mess. St Bernard puppies yapping and whimpering away in their plastic kennels, numerous parcels piled up everywhere, and above it all the roar of the plane's engines. It had been difficult finding a plane equipped with a temperature-regulated compartment for carrying live cargo, and this one was headed for Hong Kong, not Papua New Guinea. Yet had he been foolish enough to stow away on any other plane, he would have frozen to death in the hold.
The plane jerked in the turbulence, and the puppies all yelped in synchrony.
"Hey, cool it guys. Dogs are supposed to be spunky, you know?" A long buried memory suddenly surfaced: a mossy rock halfway up a mountain, aching shoulders from the heavy backpack, a cup of tea eagerly accepted. In the midst of chaos, Duo smiled.
The climb up the seldom traversed mountain path had been fairly strenuous, and the two young men were sitting down for a timely rest. Anyone overhearing their conversation would have come away bewildered, yet it was ordinary lighthearted talk, so recently a luxury in the wars.
"179, Year of the... Rooster." Duo was slightly out of breath but cheerful. "So... what comes after that?"
"The Year of the Dog."
"We're all born in the Year of the Dog? Cool." Duo eased off the straps of the backpack and stretched his wiry frame, taking a deep breath of the delicious mountain air. "Pretty unglamorous, but cool anyway."
His guide shot him an irritated look. "Dogs are loyal, resilient, intelligent. They hang on unyieldingly."
"Yeah. Well, I guess that's why we're all so damned determined. We're born scrappers. Rowf!"
Chang Wufei wrinkled his nose. "I'm not sure you weren't born in the Year of the Monkey, Duo Maxwell. You have the tail of one."
Not at all offended, Duo grinned and scratched his ear. "Hey, thanks for showing me this place, Wufei. This is the kind of thing we should be doing now that the wars are all over. I mean, we should be living life, seeing the world, just doing stuff."
Wufei snorted, but did not contradict him. Then he lifted his hand and pointed at a peak rising out of the low clouds in the west. "Speaking of monkeys, there it is - Hou Tou Shi."
"Huh?"
"It's a rock shaped like a monkey's head. "
Duo looked across the valley to the next peak. "Yeah, I see it. But it looks a lot more like a skull to me."
"And there is the lake called The Monkey's Mirror. That is where Shenlong was hidden when I first arrived on Earth."
Duo chuckled at the bizarre name, but true enough, it did look very much as if the head perched atop the mountain was inclined downward, looking at its reflection in the calm surface of the water. There was an almost cynical, exasperated look on its weathered face. "I still think it looks like a skull."
Beside him, Wufei had crossed his arms, an identical expression on his features, and Duo rolled off his rocky seat in amusement, cackling. Only a quick grab at the long grasses saved him from rolling off the mountain as well.
"Clown," said Wufei, offering him a hand.
"Yeah, but we'll always be paaaals, right?" drawled Duo, and then stuck out his lower lip in mock pleading.
Wufei suppressed a smile at this, hauling him unceremoniously away from danger. And so passed a carefree day early in the year of AC 196; before Sogran, before Mariemaia. A day now lost forever.
We'll always be pals, right?
Hadn't he heard the echo of his own words in Deathscythe Hell's cockpit as he watched Heavyarms cut in front of the Serpents and take the blow meant for Sandrock? Too few, too few of them, too many of the enemy. Then, at the very edge of desperation, when they had decided to self-destruct together in front of the bunker in Brussels, a mobile suit had appeared.
But it had not been Wing Zero. It had been Altron...
"Wufei, stop this! Stop!" Duo had screamed into the communication unit, except that it was too hoarse to be a scream.
"Trowa - " Quatre's shocked murmur fizzled over the speakers, then there was a blue flash, Sandrock's frame blasted by a beam from somewhere to the right -
Tallgeese III was in the way, Duo couldn't see what was going on, all he knew was the bite of the scythe through innumerable enemies, Altron closing in from the left, more suits going down, the terrible flames, and the knowledge that Heero and Trowa and Quatre must be dead...
"Wufei, why?!"
Did he truly expect an answer? WHY was but a battle cry, anger and pain given a voice. No, there would be no answer. Wufei was a dog of war, and dogs hung on unyieldingly...
"See what you're doing, damn you! Do you understand? My God - why can't you understand?"
The evening sun cast long shades on the rough-hewn stone, exaggerating its texture, turning the surfaces of the walls and floor into a topography of crags and canyons. The few items of furniture in the room were made from thick, heavy wood, but their shadows were distorted into spindly, delicate forms.
In truth there was only one delicate thing amidst the coarseness. The woman who was tied to the chair in the centre of the room, blindfolded and gagged. She was beginning to stir from the numbing sleep of the drugs they had injected into her, just beginning to recall the pain in her broken wrist - it was there in the way her breath caught. And then she grew fully conscious of her restraints, and began to struggle, pulling against the ropes.
Her captor remained crouched at the doorless entrance of the ruin, perfectly silent for the moment. Now a sheen of perspiration had formed on her smooth forehead, and panic was setting in, seen from the quickening rise and fall of her chest. There was nothing more threatening than the unknown, after all... Finally, he rose, and she flinched when the scuffing of his boots broke the quiet, telling her that she was not alone. He could see that she was steeling herself as he approached, and when he removed the blindfold and gag her face had already hardened. Weak as the luminosity of the setting sun was, she averted her eyes from the light.
Wufei tossed away the two strips of cloth with a negligent flick, and then circled round to walk to the entrance again, his hands behind his back. Sally's eyes eventually adjusted to the light, and she followed his movements warily. He seemed more alien than ever in his stiff adult body, with his hair cropped above his collar. She had never seen before the anachronistic black dress uniform he was wearing, the tunic gathered tightly by a wide red sash, silver glinting on the narrow black sleeves of the undershirt. It hinted of ceremony and dark splendour and power.
"I have no time, Sally."
Sally did not know how to respond. The fact that she was in a bare room carved out from natural rock - and not in an interrogation room in some government facility - had just occurred to her. Together with his cryptic opening and the aftereffects of the drugs, she was highly disorientated.
"You will tell me where to locate the centre of rebel operations."
"I don't know anything." The first words out of her seemed withered; indeed, she was almost completely dehydrated.
"You will surrender your knowledge to me, call off your plans, and in doing so there will be no bloodshed."
Sally stared at the man silhouetted against the doorway; his back was still turned to her. Overriding her fear and her pain she felt an unquenchable sorrow, but was unsure whether it was for herself or for another.
"Zechs Merquise is alive." He enunciated words with diamond-cut precision; they were full of loathing. "He is with your rebels. Tell me where he is."
"What have you done to Shuyan?" It took an immense effort to keep her voice from cracking.
"The little girl?" Wufei slowly turned to look at his captive, and the most unnerving thing was that his face was completely expressionless. In the gloom it was difficult to make out the whites of his eyes - the dark irises were lightless pools. "What do you think I have done to her?"
For the first time in her life Sally was truly terrified. Though he stood three metres from her; though his hands were still behind him... She could not answer.
"What do you think I will do to you?" He took a single step forward, and Sally knew that she was at the edge of a precipice. The Chinese boy she had known was now gone forever or too far away to recapture, and taking his place was a creature in strange plumage, a raptor of Mariemaia's army.
He took another step forward. He had spoken of preventing bloodshed, but the words had seemed hollow, a mere formality. Did he truly care anymore? Or was it simply an echo of habit, casually offered as an empty gesture?
Another step. Sally's eyes darted about the room, as if she could spy out a means of escape. In her mind she frantically raced through the possibilities. There was no longer any hope for herself. Time. Time. She needed to buy time for Operation Crystallise.
Wufei moved in still closer. "Zechs Merquise. And Lucrezia Noin. Tell me, Sally."
If he knew that Quatre was alive as well, and had personally targeted him all this time... Sally directed her gaze to the floor in front of her, shaking her head. When the jet-black boots encroached upon that space she closed her eyes.
He half-crouched directly before her, his voice perfectly moderated. "Do not fight me, Sally. You are not nearly strong enough."
She had challenged and been challenged. Determined not to submit to the terror, she willed herself to open her eyes again, only to see Wufei flexing his fingers inward, the brown knuckles cracking as he tightened his clenched fist. And Sally shook her head for the second time.
Now there was a hint of emotion in the black eyes. "I said - do not fight me, Sally."
"I know I am not as strong as you are." The thudding of her heart must have been audible to them both, he was close enough.
"Then you will only be broken! Do you hear me, woman? My strength is beyond your imagining, now." He studied his own fist as if there were secrets in it. "And it gives me answers beyond your comprehension. Give up your weak schemes and surrender - "
He was mad. He had to be. No matter how Sally's lungs heaved behind the restraints, she felt suffocated by his presence.
" - you must give up." Black eyes kindled in the twilight. Don't turn from me, Sally... Don't say no...
"No."
There was a low-pitched hum of rushing air as his fist shot forward.
With a colossal bang, the frame of the entire aircraft shuddered, and Duo was tossed to the far side of the hold, crashing painfully into the metal wall. Stunned, he blinked as the aftershocks continued, amazed that he could hear the frightened wails of the passengers even through the thick insulation and the sound of the engines.
An explosion? Outside - The craft was still intact, Duo was sure, and they had not begun freefall, though he could feel from the queasiness in his stomach that they were losing altitude. The muffled booming continued menacingly as they descended, and Duo realised that though the plane had not been hit, the pilot had banked sharply and was taking the craft down to avoid whatever danger had suddenly materialised.
Damn... I'll never make my way back to Port Moresby now...
If Duo had had the vantage of the cockpit, he would have seen what the panicked pilots saw - white Tauruses and khaki Serpent-(A)s in aerial combat. The barrage of beam and projectile weapons ripped across the sky, turning it into a cloudbound no-man's-land. Humans had taken their hell to the heavens.
Let me survive this. Let me find my way somehow...
More explosions, some uncomfortably close to the aeroplane, turned the cargo hold into a vibrating toybox of puppies, parcels and passenger. It seemed as if the shaking and creaking would never stop, but all at once there was a final shock which jarred through Duo's entire body, and the plane was still. They had succeeded in their emergency landing.
The puppies were whining pitifully at this stage, and Duo dragged himself away from them over to the wall which separated the main cabin from the live cargo hold. Wincing from the pain in his sprained elbow, he pressed his ear against the metal, listening. Now that the engines had stopped, it was much easier to hear.
"Please, everyone, keep calm..." The pilot's unsteady voice hardly sounded reassuring. "We have contacted the nearest airport at Tanggu and they are informed of our location. It seems that we have flown into... a minor confrontation zone, but it is unlikely that we shall be harmed if we Keep Calm..."
Duo's brows knit as he drew his gun and stared at the hatch. There was a possibility that he could hijack the civilian plane, fly himself to New Guinea... no, wait, there would never be enough fuel. But if he could at least get to Hong Kong - ?
The shrill whistle of air-to-air missiles overhead answered his question. Whether by accident or intention, he would be shot out of the air within minutes.
Consumed by frustration, he wrenched down the red safety lock and the hatch swung open, letting in an unexpectedly fresh fragrance of rainwashed grasses. The smell cleared his head, and he gingerly stepped out, surveying the long valley they had landed in. As he did so he gained more respect for the pilot; the valley was treacherously narrow and hemmed in by mountains green with vegetation. To the east the mist obscured the limestone bluffs, but to the west, the sun was just beginning to set behind the unusually shaped peak of a mountain.
It looked like a skull.
Major Girot had died in the early hours of the morning from cerebral haemhorraging, and no-one was quite sure if it had been a direct result of participating in the test of the Preterid. As Acting Commander Yonoi signed the letter of condolence to Girot's family a heavy sense of foreboding descended upon him. The former Captain was no fool, and his piloting skills were far from paltry. Yet he was painfully inexperienced and he knew it himself. In the absence of Colonel Chang and Major Girot, he was now in full charge of the 1st Mobile Division, and with it, the defence of Brussels. The Colonel had been convinced of a rebel attack in the near future, and had assured his return to command the 1st MSD before that attack. Now this was the evening of the third day since his departure with the Preterid and there was no news...
Rumours flew about the Palace that the Dictator had pinpointed Chang Wufei's whereabouts in China, but the intelligence bureau - which usually cooperated with the 1st MSD - was tightlipped this time around. Yonoi was about to put through a communication to certain agents when a more urgent communication arrived for himself.
Seventeen major bases were under simultaneous direct attack - the reports were sketchy and confused, but there was no doubt that this was the largest movement of rebel troops since the beginning of the glorious regime. Which could only mean one thing. Brussels would be next.
He did not waste time on blind panic. Then again, he did not know that Wing Zero was but 300 miles out from the city. All he knew was that he would have to mobilise his division and ensure the Dictator's safe retreat to the underground bunkers. He had been assigned a weighty responsibility and he would see it through.
...Sir, where are you?
Wufei stood frozen for a minute, stunned by the intensity of the blow he had just dealt. Forceful enough to smash right through wood, violent enough to crush bone and kill, had it made contact with human flesh. One side of the chair was a splintered mass, the fragments scattered on the floor behind it. An inch to the left, and it would have been Sally's life.
Wufei retracted his fist and lowered it, his own blood falling to the floor in a looping trail of ragged, circular drops.
Sally's face was completely drained of colour, her eyes wide and fixed to some point in the distance. She was unscathed, but it was as if a part of her had been slain by the shock of that blow, leaving her diminished. The sound of the dripping blood drew her eyes to the ground, but the bright red was already fading to grey as she began to black out.
He didn't kill me -
In a way, it was a very small victory.