Reaching Between The Stars

XXX

The dark void of space was silent and empty. It called to the souls of man, the explorer. Like a silent temptress, she preyed on their desires. The desire for wealth, the desire for space, the desire to explore the vast reaches and claim a portion of the whole for themselves.

But nobody can do such things alone. And so they came together in common purpose, ready to reach out with their hands and grasp the wonders outside the confines of gravity. Sadly, it is human nature that if more than one person does a thing at the same time and the same place, sooner or later, a fight will happen.

And so it was that the region of space surrounding the cradle of humanity, the aptly named Earthsphere played host to a war. It was a war of ideals. It was a war of greed and lust and desire for many things. It was a war between human beings. And human beings are often the ugliest when they fight. Thus for all that mankind had spread through Earth Orbit and the colonies there, the asteroid belt, and even the Helium 3 mines of Jupiter, war was never far behind.

The One Year War of the year 079 of the Universal Century had devastated the Earth Sphere. Earth and her colonies had found their collective population cut into a fraction of what was there before. Entire landmasses were eradicated of life and many those gleaming castles in the sky were destroyed, some even used like the hammer of an angry god upon the big blue and green orb that humans called home.

The O'Neill type colony cylinders of the Sides, possibly the greatest achievement ever engineered by human hands were now more than just the homes of people. They had now transcended their origins into battlefields and resources, and now when men got particularly ambitious, planetary scale kinetic kill weapons. This was a time where man could truly claim the aegis of Death, Destroyer of worlds.

Thus the empty void of space is now primarily a graveyard, of men and machines, of wishes and dreams, of ideals and of the peace which the first explorers dreamed of when they sought to reach for the stars and skies above them..

Xxx

UC 85, September 21, 14:28 Granada Lunar Time(GLT)

Dmitry Sorov took a long drag off of his cigarette and let the smoke fill the air around him. Above him, he could barely see the smoke getting sucked into the environmental filters in his cockpit. A dull green glow lit up the interior of his Mobile Suit cockpit. The cramped space was not ideal for this, but, soldiers made do.

The pair of twenty meter tall humanoid war machines were crouched amidst the rock and metal of an asteroid, one of many that dotted the Earth Sphere. Like many such rocks, it was a resource rock from the early days of building space colonies. Now the thing was just drifting through the space lanes, occasionally interrupting traffic and otherwise serving as a curious relic of a bygone age. When it wasn't a harbinger of nightmares of course. There were stories about this place. And superstitious or not, Dmitry was happy to leave it at that.

His machine, like all other Mobile Suits, was to put it mildly, a giant robot. But this was not a magical machine built to fight monsters. No, this was a machine of war. It had been forged in a factory by human hands. Each component had a serial number and a a military standards number. There were mechanics trained to fix it. It required fuel and resupply like any other machine. The machine as a whole even came with a manual. No, there was nothing magic about this giant robot.

There are people who do now know all the complicated and sometimes absurd seeming events that led to this point in history. Undoubtedly, a historian would have served better on expanding on that knowledge, but a basic summary is not difficult, especially when reality reads like a bad 20th century science fiction novel.

Because this war machine ran on a relatively new subsection of physics, mere decades old, called Minovsky physics, named after it's discoverer, Trenov Minovsky. His contribution to mankind was to create useable, convenient fusion power. It was so convenient it somehow managed to avoid creating neutron radiation, despite the fact that science said that neutron radiation should have come out anyway. Fusion was now, contrary to expectations, "safe". The scientific community collectively cried bullshit.

The history of Fusion and Dr. Minovsky was a bit complicated. Basically, he made a then outlandish theory and got laughed out of the scientific community for it, save for his one true friend. His next action, questionable as it was, was to immediately turn to the most blatant authoritarian faction in Earthsphere, the Principality of Zeon. They were a bunch of colonies at the Lagrange point 3 at the far side of the moon and were perfectly happy to sponsor a spiteful revolutionary scientist on the verge of scientific immortality. They were planning on fighting a war after all. And like any authoritarian regime, were very interested in making shiny toys to kill people with.

While the Principality of Zeon had started out as the space hippy Republic of Munzo, under the guidance of the hippie in chief Mr. Zeon Zum Deikun, that Republic had long been hijacked by the Zabi family into the feudal state titled a Principality. As for the Zabis, history remembered only most of them as amoral megalomaniacs. Their main contribution to history was really making giant robots great again, inventing the most modern incarnation of racism and then murdering most of humanity under the excuse of freedom fighting. But that's a tale for another day.

Fusion paid off handsomely. Humanity could now harness the power of the stars themselves! And they celebrated by weaponizing the hell out of it.

While the long and short of how they did that is...complicated, there is no doubt that everything changed when the Minovsky Particle was found. You see, when Minovsky had played god by reaching for the workings of the stars, he had also unleashed the electromagnetic gremlin, the newly named Minovsky particle. It was a by product of their fancy new fusion reaction. The Minovsky particle defied scientific theories. It was odd, behaved oddly and was rapidly making things like radio and ordinary electronics difficult to work with. On the other hand, someone took a look at its properties and decided that this would make a wonderful weapon, once they figured out how to use it of course.

The rest was history.

Dmitry however was not a historian or an archaeologist. He did not care for what was so much ancient history for him. He was just a 22 year old mobile suit pilot, a soldier of the last big war. His green armoured "pilot suit", known to most soldiers as the one size fits all body condom, was the standard issue, form fitting combat rated space suit that his home, Zeon had produced in the millions. It might not have been the same one he used as a conscript on a long silent battlefield, but it didn't change the fact that in many ways, he was still fighting the last war years after it had officially ended.

The Principality of Zeon had lost the One Year War. But many of its soldiers still fought the Earth Federation. Some fought on Earth, a remnant of the glory days of the Earth Attack Force, where a glorious invasion had taken half the planet in a matter of weeks before rapidly ending up in stalemate. Others fought on in space, as raiders or pirates, each determined to use their hard won skills to hurt the Earth Federation in some small or large way.

Dmitry himself was among the more extreme adherents to that philosophy. As someone scarred by war and it's aftermath, his spacenoid soul, unbound by the gravity that chained his foes, was a hollow, bitter shell of malice. And he was all too ready to donate that pain to his opponents.

But here and now, all that mattered was the lightness he felt as the nicotine sent a jolt of positive feeling into his brain. He probably should quit, he mused, put then, it wasn't like he expected to see another ten years.

He tilted his head so he could keep an eye on the oxygen sensor. His mobile suit's EN-SYS module might have been the most advanced version Zeon had manufactured before the war ended, but it was one without any spares. He was going to have to switch it for an older unit at some point. The earlier gen modules were not only less energy efficient, but also less robust. Undoubtedly, this was due to their ancestry in zero g colony construction pods. However, those things were everywhere, and his military spec modules were not. Which was a shame.

Till then, he would enjoy the ability to smoke in his cockpit. He threaded the glowing end of his cigarette into the clip on ash collector and gave it a tap, letting the ash get sucked into the little metal box that had been taped to the console. Zero g complicated everything. Pulling the little burning stub out showed that this one was done. With a mournful glance, the piece of trash now went fully into the ash box which he closed with a click of finality. Sparing a glance at his monitor, he sighed. Another six hours before he could afford to light another one. Not having enough cigarettes was always a pain.

They were riding Gelgoog series mobile suits, of the so called Marine model. These were among the last, and also among the best models of the massive humanoid war machines that had been so necessary to fight the One Year War. Though their makers lost the war, these machines represented nearly the best as far as Zeon Mobile Suits went. By the standards of that last war, these things were high performance, limited mass production machines effective at turning back the hordes of larger numbers of weaker enemies. However, like the wunderwaffe of a long dead regime, the Principality of Zeon was never in a position to deploy the legions of these that would have been necessary to turn back the clock. Save for a few rushed units used by certain aces, this model made barely any difference to the unstoppable juggernaut of their hated foe, the Earth Federation.

These two mobile suits however, did not have the honour of fighting the war they were designed to fight, maybe even win.

After the war, one of the groups of disgruntled men and women that were grouped under the title of "Zeon Remnants" had salvaged a group of five unused Mobile Suits from a wrecked Pazock class supply vessel. These particular units had been rushed from their factory but never quite made it to the troops who might have made a tiny difference if given these better weapons. Right now though, these machines were now back in use and back in action. The machines were painted that particularly ugly shade of greenish brown that Gelgoogs often had. The paint was not called puke green without reason. Other than that, a plain white 'V' and 'VI' on their left pauldron differentiated them. They stood silent and motionless, in low power mode, waiting and watching.

Dmitry checked his clock again. Their target was running a bit late, but that was not unexpected. The Federation were rarely as punctual and professional as the Earthnoids like to believe. Their professionalism was a facade, like it was for pirates and raiders like him. Dmitry snorted at the thought.

As the seconds ticked by though, he pulled his helmet back down over his head. The visor could be slid up to expose a portion of the face covering the eyes and upper part of his nose, but it wasn't really enough to let him smoke, hence this entire sequence of events. He fumbled at his neck for a second before his left hand found the tab at the front. He slid it half a turn to the right and pilot suit instantly began to pump air inside his helmet. The back of his harness was snugly fitted to a transfer pipe that pumped breathable air directly into his helmet. This allowed the pilot to have pressurized high oxygen air (very useful for pilots needing alertness and better reaction times) directly into their helmet without having to worry about an increased fire risk if something sparked in the cockpit. The reduced risk of suffocating if the air seal broke was useful, but rarely did a Mobile Suit come out with just enough damage to make that relevant.

Right now though, the rich oxygen filling his lungs stretched out the last of the nicotine high, letting Dmitry stay in that intangible place a bit longer before he was back in the sad reality of his life. As per procedure and a million mind numbing drills, he lightly tapped the side of his head and got a quick beep as the systems check ran to make sure everything functioned as it should. A final swishing noise signalled the suit becoming form fitting over his body.

He sighed into his mouthpiece when he felt the light shudder of his teammate's machine clapping a hand on his own suit. For giant robots operated by levers and foot pedals, they had a surprising dexterity of motion when you needed it.

Dmitry was struck by the realization that for some reason, he wasn't too comfortable with this op. He liked killing Feddies as much as the next loyal Zeon soldier, but there was something about this place. He licked his lips and shook his head.

"Jacob to Dmitry. Confirm Contact Link." a voice crackled over the speakers.

Dmitry tapped at the communications console, looking for the green light that meant a useable connection. Given the adversarial interaction Minovsky Particles had with structured electromagnetic radiation, the most reliable method of commnication was to make a physical contact and use the radio through that connection. It was as absurd in practice as it sounded in theory. At least Mobile Suits had actual hands that didn't need to deal with wires and cables and the like.

"Dmitry to Jacob. Link is green." The overhead comms screen finally popped up as both suits verified that the connection was good. Jacob, his teammate of african descent looked serious. He always was, right before an op. On the other hand, he had been unusually grim the past few days here. He would have to keep an eye out for strange behaviour. Couldn't do with a pilot getting space sickness or something equally horrible. Especially when their psychiatric treatment options boiled down to 9mm lobotomies.

"The cruiser is coming in dumb and easy. Just GM-IIs on this one if the intel is right. Fucking grunt trash.... I'll be taking Golf One at Sierra. You get Golf Two at November. Keep cool and do it as normal. Don't get stressed over it. They'll get here in twelve minutes. Keep your motor flares down."

GM-II were the barely improved successor of the Federation's old GM series of giant humanoid murder machines. They looked blocky, were not particularly agile machines, but they had more reactor power, and had the distinction of using directed energy weapons, aka the now ubiquitous "beam" weapons....presumably called that to avoid copyright law.

Dmitry glanced at his status display. His Gelgoog was as good as it ever was. The vernier thrusters and AMBAC reactionless orientation systems read as green. He did a quick manoeuvre check with his controls, and nodded when his damage control screen stayed green. No matter how many times he did this, there was no way the moments before battle would be anything less than stressful. He really, really wanted another smoke.

As the spectre of combat loomed, Dmitry felt himself unconsciously sink back in that terrible hell of his first and last battle of the war, Dmitry was back at space fortress of A Baoa Qu, that giant asteroid where Zeon had committed her last stand. It had been the largest space battle in human history, an orgy of death and violence, where legends were made and died in seconds. And amidst that chaos, there was young Ensign Sorov, flying a Rick Dom underage at seventeen years old, with barely two weeks of pilot training under his belt. And he was lost in the chaos as he shot desperately at an enemy mobile suit GM that danced around him like the white devil himself.

His survival had been a mere quirk of chance. But he was perfectly happy to not waste that chance. He was alive. And until he was not, getting rid of a few fucking feddies was just the ticket to get over his nightmares. Who knew, maybe the secret to filling the hollowness of the soul was murdering feddies after all.

Xxx

UC 85, September 21, 14:34 GLT

The Istanbul crawled to a halt as the retro thrusters finally brought it to the same relative velocity as the asteroid, all of eighty odd kilometers away. The Istanbul was a dark blue painted Salamis class cruiser, a class of Earth built warship which looked remarkably like someone had taken an ocean going warship from the early twentieth century and replaced the stern with enormous rocket engines. The Federation, being based on Earth, had a preference for this sort of design. Even the venerable and now phased out Magellan class battleship looked like someone had taken a battleship from the second world war and bolted a rocket on it. When Zeon called the Federation weighed down by gravity, they were not talking out of their rears, not completely anyway.

This still did not explain the Federation's obsession with building their spaceships to be able to float on water, but it did give them a certain elegance and gravitas hearkening back to centuries of maritime heritage. Even when said warship was one or two hits away from becoming scrap metal.

As for why this space ship was here in particular? Navigation in space was a constantly changing and chaotic field. The stellar movements of earth, moon and sun ensured that colony Sides were never quite the in same place, relatively speaking. And in space where the Sides were thousands of kilometres apart, that meant that there was a lot that could go wrong just because of the environment they were operating in. Hence the reason they sent out military ships on the commercial transit routes to investigate random asteroids. Back in the days before Minovsky interference, they could track these things down to the millimetre.

Now, thanks to the ever wonderful Minovsky particle, which among its other maddening properties, forced visible light to undergo distortion and lensing in utterly random fashion over long distances. What did that mean practically? Well, above five hundred kilometers on average was about as far as you could reliably track a space ship, even with its thermonuclear rockets pointed at you and spewing metal liquifying amounts of thermal radiation. Beyond a hundred kilometers, passively emitting objects like rocks, long dead shipwrecks and the like tended to just vanish into the nether, their existence scattered into meaningless visual noise.

Thus they had to go out and poke them directly, partly to ensure they were updated on the various rocks and their courses....and to make sure there were no pirates or weapons caches on the rocks themselves. A hundred thousand navy men fervently agreed that it was as tedious and aggravating as this whole operation sounded.

However, their main problem remained those pirates that were called Zeon Remnants, or as the Federation called them anyway. They called themselves serving units of the Armed Forces of the Principality of Zeon as if they were all playing along with some cosmic joke.

Like the haunting ghosts of a past that would not die, these marauders plied the void, reaping a harsh toll upon civilians and military ships and personnel alike. Each Zeon killed off or captured left the rest of them that much more smarter and efficient at their task of being the painful thorn in the foot of the Earth Federation. Zeon had not been a small country. It was a space nation, an entire Side, representing hundreds of colonies in space that had millions and billions of citizens. Given the conscription rates, they had a lot of angry veterans and plentiful hidden caches of war materiel to work with. While the "Republic of Zeon" as the post war entity had been named tried to at least look like they were settling down, the ghost of Zeon's hatred was like a shadow, never too far behind, while constantly drawing blood from the Federation like a horde of ravenous mosquitoes.

The fact remained that even now, half a decade after the end of the OYW, civilian traffic kept getting intercepted by bands of marauders flying the Zeon flag. Not only had those genocidal maniacs tried to murder an entire planet with their Operation British, now after the end of the war, the Earth Federation had to clean up after the angry whining losers who had taken arms in service of those fucking Zabis.

Captain Erling Nazeem sipped at his coffee in his oddly shaped silicone zero-g cup while glaring at the asteroid like it personally offended him in the past. He was 42 years old, a veteran ship commander and he had the most magnificent handlebar moustache that was the envy of at least a tenth of the navy.

The former resource asteroid he was parked next to, was one of the many used up in the race to build the gigantic colony cylinders of Side 2. Each of the hundreds of O'Neill Island 3 type colony cylinders that humanity had built in space was 32 kilometres long and 8 in diameter. The material for this colossal undertaking had come from dozens to hundreds of resource asteroids processed on sight in massive orbital foundries that had turned raw rocks into the composite girders, the structural plates, and even the transparent ceramics that went into making the mammoth habitats. 

Now, Julianos 32, as the object was marked in their charts, was slowly moving through the current commercial route number 7031. seeing as it was one of fifteen sufficiently large objects that passed through the route in the last month, he wasn't particularly enthused about investigating this one either.

During the war, at least three ships had crashed onto the thing, making it not only an official navigation hazard, but a war grave as well. There was a reason this thing was still here instead of being saddled with thermonuclear pulse engines and sent literally anywhere else in the solar system. As far as their orders went, unless the asteroid suddenly made a move to crash into a colony, or a city, they couldn't demolish the thing. In fact, if it weren't for this mission, they were generally perfectly happy to avoid getting close it in the first place.

But there was another reason too. The men and women on those ships hadn't died easily. They had been trapped on the rock without relief or rescue. Things had...happened. When the Joint War Graves Commission finally investigated and put together what happened, they classified it as a military secret. It was not exactly the most opaque secret to anyone who served in either military, but there was no doubt that what happened was monstrous. And nobody, least of all the governments involved, wanted the whole thing to be public.

The tragedy of this rock was almost an urban legend at this point, but less than a decade ago, those that had died here had been functioning human beings, with lives, hopes and dreams. Now, there were only ghosts and haunted steel.

On the other hand, he was not even remotely fond of the scum who had made these patrols necessary and dangerous. They had lost the Salamis class Mogadishu to one of those very same pirates three weeks ago. A group of ex Zeon soldiers had launched half a dozen mobile suits out of a wreck in the Shoal Zone and sunk her while she was on a deterrence patrol. Just one mobile suit which had been scouting a path ahead of the ship had managed to survive till rescue. 273 men were gone, just like that.

Zeon had produced a lot of weapons during the course of the war. There was a point in the last few months where Zeon had more mobile suits than it had trained pilots. Even discounting the units built in Side 3 proper, the Earth side production, in captured and Zeon built facilities had been enormous as well. Colonel M'Quve, given authority by the insidious Kycillia Zabi herself, had kept production lines on his Earth bases running far past the point where it made strategic sense. The sheer numbers of Zaku type mobile suits produced was simply ludicrous.

Apparently space racist fascist regimes had no problems making and hiding legions of 20 meter tall battle robots in space and on their crowded planet. Odessa and California alone had contributed hundreds of Zakus to the war effort, most of them distributed into hidden logistic caches. The pattern repeated in space, where Zeon had secreted hundreds of Mobile Suits in several locations, including their precious Axis asteroid. While those supply caches had fallen behind enemy lines by the time Zeon needed them, they were there for the post war looters, pirates and even the victorious Federation to exploit.

The ridiculousness of course stemmed from the fact that Zeon had always had a shortage of both trained pilots and mobile suits to pilot. Why so many useable machines ended up stored away instead of sent to the front lines is a mystery only the enigmatic and completely dead Colonel could have answered. Today, it just served as a headache that would continue to give ulcers to the Federation in the decades to come.

The war had destroyed a lot of war materiel on both sides. Hundreds of ships had been sunk, hundreds of mobile suits shot down, while that was a pittance in comparison to the Billions of civilians killed in just the first month of the war, Nevertheless, it still represented a massive cost in terms of time, money and effort. There was a reason, Captain Nazeem bitterly reflected, that the Federation was reduced to sending Salamis Refits by the pair as patrol elements. They simply didn't have the resources or motivation to build new ships. Save for a few select and secret projects, the Earth Federation military just didn't have the desire to design and build a new mass production class.

He had a feeling these old ladies would be puttering about the space lanes for decades to come.

"Relative Velocity is zero. Ship is stationary to target."

"Helm Aye." his first officer, Kaminski acknowledged.

Nazeem shot a look at the rock once more before looking at said officer. "Lieutenant, tell me what ships sank here again?" He knew them, he didn't think anyone who knew about this rock didn't. Then again, sometimes a reminder was good. It wouldn't do to forget. The crew were looking a little too at ease. He might be a superstitious codger, but he was damned if he didn't pass on some wariness.

"Aye Captain. Three ships are recorded as sinking here, Magellan class Bellerophon, Earth Federation, pennant number B-108, surviving mass 32%. Musai class Brigandine, Principality of Zeon, Pennant number C-12, surviving mass 46%. Papua class Billhook, Principality of Zeon Pennant number T-15, surviving mass 86%" the woman called out clinically. 86%, he reflected with a wince, most of a ship, where "things" had happened. Outwardly, Nazeem nodded and sighed.

"Ok boys, you know the drill."

In the bridge, the crew began to pull on their normal suits. These were multiple generations past the space suits that the first humans in space had used, but they were about as bulky, maybe more so. It was a part of space operations that was necessary, but nobody really enjoyed. A minute of prep work later, he was sealed in the gear and felt like he was moving through molasses. Even if it was psychological, he still couldn't help feel like he was getting into a sports team masot suit.

Having your 5 year old daughter call you a marshmallow man did terrible things to a fighting man's ego.

The main viewer switched its rendering of the battlespace to a split screen of the Hangar and Catapult. Two of the GM-IIs were the recon element for this operation. Not like they were expecting much. This rock had been dark for the past 48 hours as far as the sensors went.

"Bridge to Sierra Element. This is your Captain. You know the mission by now, but I'll repeat it all the same. I want you two to investigate the wrecks. While you're there check for any changes, record the cavity interior and ensure pirates haven't left a Mobile Armour or two in here. Since we're on the job, we'll do the whole thing right."

The fact that he had to even say things like this was possibly the greatest evidence of madness that was the Universal Century era.

"Roger that Captain. Need us to check for any of that Zum City Vodka too?" The lead pilot, Ensign Corbert giggled into his comms.

Nazeem chuckled grimly "No alcohol on while we're on duty. And...don't forget what happened in there. Don't go inside if you can help it."

He shook his head from distraction as he focused back on the present. The catapult alarms went off across the ship, and fifteen seconds later, the Mobile Suits were launching. One then two, the ship jolting each time from the small but sudden difference in mass. The helm officer took a moment to verify that the retro rockets had again zeroed their relative velocity.

"All right, Sierra Element is out, all sensors and watch posts keep an eye out for anything suspicious. We don't want to be caught with our pants down." Not that he thought even Zeon would be crass enough to use this place. This wasn't just a war grave. It was something monstrous beyond words. It was an inadvertent temple to the savageness of humanity, and its darkest depths.

Time ticked on slowly. Five minutes, then ten. As the two machines disappeared into the Asteroid interior, a crewman announced that the ship could no longer track its two mobile suits, with sensors or optically.

The mobile suits had been instructed to go in slowly and carefully. Unexploded ordnance was always a danger, and even in the age of beam weapons and helium 3 reactor fuel, and there was always something waiting to go boom in a derelict piece of equipment. Not only were there actual warship wrecks with probably unexploded missile ordnance, he fully expected a reactor or two to be operating at minimum power in there. Eighty Six percent was a hell of a lot of hull to be left intact in a wreck.

Not to mention, there were, to put it lightly, rumours about this place.

"Captain! Musai detected behind the asteroid! Two turret model! Range 0-8-4 kms! Bearing! 3-3-2 mark 0-1-5!"

Nazeem took a second to bemoan the interruption.

Almost as if to punctuate the announcement, two pairs of Mega Particle Beams stabbed out to the port side, terrifyingly close to the hull. The actinic yellow beams were only physically present for a fraction of a second, but the high energy beam weapons had a tendency to burn themselves into the eyes of those watching, giving the illusion that they lingered on for over a second in space. Even with the bridge windows automatically polarizing to compensate, this was still light produced from the particle decay of the energized by products of a fusion powered directed energy weapon.

Zeon capital ship energy weapons had always been yellow, while the Federation ships favoured red, a simple colour scheme that meant battles were easier to keep track off. Since the photonic decay phenomenon was dependent on firing mechanism than the magnitude of energy of the beam, it served no function beyond identifying the manufacturer of the gun more than anything. Thanks to the proliferation of beam weapons, post war weapons tended to all be a near uniform reddish pink hue.

Nazeem was far more concerned with immediate tactical considerations. Even in a low Minovsky Particle Density condition, that was damn good gunnery. But a part of his mind was roaring. Did these clowns even realize they were fighting on top of a war grave?

The klaxons went off, telling all and sundry that fecal matter had well and truly impacted the turbine. His first officer had dutifully hit the alarm, as was expected of a competent one.

"General Quarters! General Quarters! All hands to your battle stations! Condition state is Charlie-Gamma-Epsilon-Epsilon. Contact report is zero one Musai class Cruiser."

Kaminski's voice barked out, her voice carrying over through the ship wide intercom, repeating it two more times as the ship got very, very busy all of a sudden.

On screen, the computer generated a rough silllhouette of the enemy ship. It was, as expected, a Musai class cruiser, Zeon's most prolific capital ship and general purpose naval workhouse. To a human from even fifty years ago, it would have looked odd. It looked like the designers had looked at the old tv show Star Trek and asked themselves how they could copy it without actually copying it.

And the resemblance was there. Compared to the fictional Enterprise, what would have been warp nacelles were now two squashed looking multi-axis thermonuclear rocket pods, attached to the rest of the ship by limited mobility angled struts. What would have been the deflector dish in the television series was where the bridge was attached. And instead of a saucer, an elongated lozenge of a main hull sat menacingly, ending in a point. The "neck" was where its main guns were, two barrel gun turrets, either two or three according to the model.

In all honestly, it didn't look like an actual spaceship or at least one built by humans. It was a design only someone who had not grown within a planet's gravity could have dreamed up. Even its name didn't really mean anything, coming from an acronym that had been lost in the long forgotten efforts to hide military secrets. And like practically every other Musai ever built, this one was painted a dull, menacing green.

Xxx

Meanwhile, Captain Nazeem was in the middle of the shouting his own orders.

"Helm, bring us about to face them, minimum profile, reactors to combat output, heat pumps to full. We have less than a minute before they can fire again, so use it! Main guns one to four! Target that Musai and fire when you have a lock!" A chorus of Ayes followed.

Turrets 3 and 4 were the two gun side mounted main turrets, two turrets that had been removed from a Magellan and bolted to the sides. It was one of the more visible things that differentiated the Salamis refit model from its OYW counterpart, other than the front section.

The things were massive, power hungry and were a significant chunk of power usage during battle. On the other hand, there was no doubting that they had excellent range and punch. Sadly, their Mega Particle recharge time was a whole 75 seconds. The single barrel ones the Salamis class was originally built with had a recharge time of forty seconds, but they tended to have less accuracy over range. There was a reason Salamis captains needed to be aggressive and charge.

Technically speaking, bow on was not the most efficient use of firepower. The highest damage, what was called the alpha arc of a Salamis Cruiser was forward and up when you looked forward from the bridge. However, this only worked for one shot as it was frankly impossible to get the reactor to supply Mega Particles for every turret after that first salvo, not in a timely manner anyway. So it was inevitable that the cruisers ended up with their bow or stern pointed at the enemy, to minimize profile. One major advantage to the bow front orientation was that it pointed the MS catapults directly at the enemy. Stern approaches were thrown away for a simple reason, showing your rear and the hot glow of a thermonuclear rocket engine right at the enemy was equivalent to having god show the enemy exactly where to aim his weapons at, and was possibly the stupidest thing you could do inside combat ranges. Sure, you might be forced to, but deliberately? Why would anyone make it more easy for the enemy to shoot at you? That was the reason that braking was done through the slower, and frankly inefficient thrust diversion ports than by pointing your stern and slowing down. Better to vent the hot gas slightly sideways and diffuse your signature than confirm it and let the enemy get a cleaner shot.

"Pilots Macready and Shay are engaging enemy mobile suits. They are identified as MS-09R Rick Dom."

And that was the other headache. His mind had automatically filled in the statistics of the unit. Rick Dom were heavy mobile suits, the middle child between the earlier and disgustingly common Zaku and the later and more powerful Gelgoog. They were big, beefy and strong. They weren't supposed to be able to match up with GM-II models, but then, a veteran can make anything work. A Musai could carry a total of 4 of the beefy units in that forward hull. The green painted cruiser, for all that it was an old ship was a lethal thing. He couldn't afford to underestimate the ship. As an academy instructor had told him a lifetime ago, "Big Guns are their own language."

"Captain, I don't think there are any more mobile suits out here for us. They must have sent some to ambush Sierra element. Instead."

Nazeem nodded grimly, as he stared at the monitors displaying the data a veteran cruiser captain kept in front of him. The individual gauges for each of the main guns, the operational status of the different sections of the ship, the reactor power generation, the heat levels in the cooling systems, the atmospheric pressurization of interior spaces and of course, the battle map itself. In some ways, it was like playing a very detailed computer game. But when shots hit, that would change fast. This wasn't his first battle in command of a Salamis, but it was always a tense thing, especially at this range.

He wished he could identify the ship on the other side. Earth Federation Military Intelligence had compiled dossiers on all Zeon officers of note that were still unaccounted for - any one that wasn't confirmed dead was a potential Remnant commander. Knowing the ship might help tell him who it was, and what they might do. But it wasn't helping him now. He was also aware that Sierra Element, the two machines sent into that rock were probably facing their own troubles. Unfortunately, he couldn't do anything for them either. That haunted place was becoming more troublesome by the minute. Another near miss renewed his annoyance at the fact that even without an industrial base to resupply and repair their gear, Zeon ships and crews were still capable of disgustingly disciplined action.

But that was fine, the Federation was no slouches either. Time to break the stalemate.

"Bring down the bow! Hug the asteroid for cover!"

The first officer, competent woman that she was, instantly saw the problem with that. "Sir, doing that carries the risk of exposure to ambush units on the rock."

The captain sighed ruefully. "Sitting here isn't helpful either. At the moment we're in a stalemate, and it leaves too much to chance. We're lucky they missed that first salvo to start with"

Kaminsky did not look convinced, but followed orders anyway.

"Helm! Change heading 0-0-0 mark 3-3-0"

"Aye!" The helmsman yelled, getting caught up in the tension.

The shudder as the retro rockets began to tilt the ship down was not exactly big. But as it was punctuated by yet another near miss from the Musai, it gave the eerie impression that they had been grazed. He was a bit relieved that they were finally dipping below the enemy line of site. Now things were simpler and complicated. Like the last war, this battle would now depend on the handful of soldiers fighting in their 20 meter tall robots.

Xxx

UC 85, September 21, 14:57 GLT

Doris Day, the unfortunately named captain of the Musai class cruiser Luna Marie glared at the Federation cruiser opposite her.

For all the 7th Autonomous Strike force's historic capabilities, there was no doubt that someone had screwed up. The Musai simply was not hitting her target. And now the blasted thing was hiding behind the rock now.

Fucking Feddies.

Since the completion of the war, the cruiser had duelled three Salamis class cruisers in one on one duels and killed them in the first strike without problems. After all, the two most reliable things on a Musai were its engines and its guns. And now the Mega Particle Cannons simply weren't firing straight.

It was absurd. The gunners on her ship had effectiveness ratings not far removed from the best that Zeon ever fielded. That was how they had won all their engagements to this point. They shouldn't have had an issue hitting a single Salamis cruiser within this sort of range, especially when the Musai had been in such a perfect position for an ambush too!

But no, her guns weren't firing straight.

"Glendon! Tell me you can fix my guns now!" she growled into her intercom, scowling so fiercely that the rest of the bridge crew were pointedly staring away from her.

The Chief Gunnery Officer, Lieutenant Cain Glendon's intercom reply was short and depressing. "Sorry captain, but not a chance. Turret one's gyro is worn out and Turret Two is experiencing fluctuation in the magnetic fields."

The Captain's face paled slightly. She could panic if there was a later. A gyro going was unusual enough by itself. They must have picked up a gyro with too many hours on it already. That was always a danger when your spare parts bin consisted of scrapped and sunken ships. It wasn't like they could waltz over to Side 3 to requisition a spare after all. On the other hand, magnetic containment fluctuation and Mega Particles are not words that should go together.

"Is Turret Two about to blow?" she asked, her words much calmer than she felt. The turret and the bridge were separated by dozens of meters, but that was nothing given the amount of energy stored in those guns. Mega Particles were formed when physics bullshit happened, and when they were not kept in controlled conditions, explosions happened, lots and lots of explosions.

"Oh its not Mega Particle Containment! I'm talking about the fine laying contactless electric motor on the turret ring. Magnetic suspension is shot. We're not shooting anything straight."

As if to underline his point, the guns missed, again. Day clicked her teeth in frustration.

Well, the first turret was now more useful as a fixed gun, and her second Turret had less accuracy than a drunk man taking a piss. What a wonderful day.

She scowled at her own accidental pun and took a deep breath. Like the rest of her crew, she was in a normal suit, though her helmet was hanging to the side. If there was an emergency, she would have the time to put it on. If she didn't, she would have been dead anyway. To be fair, not many people survived a bridge hit with or without a normal suit.

Not that things were looking too good. Two Gelgoogs and two GM-IIs had gone into the asteroid, but neither had come out. Which wasn't a good sign. Gelgoog Marines were among the most advanced machines at the end of the war if you ignored the ridiculously expensive prototypes. Or the fucking Gundams. If they hadn't steam rolled over a couple of measly GMs and gotten back into the action, something was seriously wrong. The whole reason that Zeon Remnants remained a threat instead of something the feddies steamrolled over was that the Earthnoids kept fielding weak suits. GM-IIs and Hizacks were pretty weak suits. Despite their paper stats, use of modern materials and the like, it was still a close match to suits like the Rick Doms and the late model Zakus. Hell, the Hizack was almost literally a late model Zaku with tweaks. Combat vets were pretty good at taking apart these grunt suits even with the conditions they had to work with. So not seeing her pilots returning successfully? That was not a good sign.

Xxx

UC 85, September 21, 14:46 GLT

Dmitry watched the GM-IIs with a grimace. For shitty suits, they were at least professional about it. The GM-II was the slightly better version of the OYW era GM, where "better" meant slightly better performance and vastly better capability for mass production. On the other hand, the Gelgoog Marine had been designed based on a design specification for a state of the art mass production colony assault unit, back when both the Zeon Military and the designers were under the impression that contested colonies would need to be assaulted against determined defenders. Of course, by the time the technology and the specification itself changed to match engineering reality, and actually began manufacturing, Zeon had needed defenders more than attackers. So rather than waste the design, they assigned the new machine to a few of the many spec ops or breakthrough units, joining the ranks of oddball and one off mobile suits that Zeon manufactured, sometimes against common sense.

In all tangible metrics, his was the superior machine.

Dmitry was crouched in the second cargo bay of the Papua class ship that was wrecked here. The Papua had begun life as the second design for Zeon's first Mobile Suit Carrier. The ship that would eventually become the Musai, the Arcana, was far more suited to the dual use nature that Zeons nascent navy preferred, so it got the funding. On the other hand, the Papua still held promise as a military transport, so it didn't get junked. Also, it was far better suited to their needs than the large lumbering Galleon class haulers they used mostly for Jupiter He-3 runs.

The Papua class, like every Zeon ship ever built, looked odd. It had two enormous cargo bay/rocket engine hulls that sat side by side, and they were connected by metal struts that linked to a tiny bridge pod underneath and between them. As one Earth analyst put it, it looked like two flattened zeppelins stuck sided by side with the gondola between them.

While a few examples would be converted into the pseudo carrier role, like it's Federation counterparts, the Papua was in the end used as a transport. Surviving examples were still used among the sides as a civilian transport...though these were never painted green and had a higher chance of being stopped by Federation patrols. In any event, by the end of the war they would be replaced by the uglier but faster Pazzock class anyway. The latter looked even less like an actual spaceship, but that was a tale for a different day

The wrecks were a gruesome sight. The Papua itself might be relatively intact, but the hulls of the Musai and the Magellan in the opening of the mining shaft made things interesting. There were three places that were wide enough to allow a mobile suit through, which he knew because he had to use one of them himself to get in. So he had forced open the forward Cargo Hatch on the Starboard hull for creating his space.

Dmitry knew in the back of his head that this was a haunted place. Men and women had died willingly and unwillingly, it wasn't a clean death for most of those folk either. But he compartmentalized. After all, whether it was haunted or not, he wasn't going to be too bothered by it as long as more Feddies joined the ghosts of this place.

Dmitry took a moment to examine his battlefield. He was crouched, upside down relative to the hull of the wrecked transport. A kilometer in front of him, at the beginning of the gargantuan mining tunnel was the twisted hunk of metal that used to be two ships. With his experience, he could even replay the scene in his head. A Magellan had rammed a Musai in the neck, right where the turrets were. The Musai had almost bent inwards at that point the bridge hull and hangars almost wrenched loose in the impact. Further, the struts holding the two engine nacelles in place had flexed, breaking off one and distorting the other. At that point, the Magellans primary reactor had blown, not a true reactor detonation, but rather a catastrophic casing failure. High temperature plasma, Mega Particles in the capacitor, the suddenly vaporised coolant, not to mention the fuel and moderators had all escaped within the hull, blowing out parts of the hull spectacularly and half melting the surface metal on both ships. The end result was what he saw in front. The wreck was jammed into the narrow opening of the mining tunnel, while still looking half intact. The outer hull looking waxy and discoloured from having melted and re-cooled for a second or two. In ship terms, it was a macabre sight, especially where the melted remnants of paint clung to the burnt surface.

He was crouched, into the hull, his long range beam rifle in position for the GMs that were coming. The plan was simple. The Federation would always send two machines. The first one, he would ignore for his buddy to take care of. The second one on the other hand, that one was his to play with.

The First enemy floated through the opening clumsily, taking a second to sweep the inside of the cavity lazily before rotating and rocketing towards the deeper cavity beyond the wrecked ships. So predictable. The second one came in carefully, and slipped through without care. He wasn't even trying!

The enemy drifted into his crosshairs for a full second before he smiled and took the shot.

Unfortunately, the violent beam of red energy had only managed to hit the GM's shoulder, clipping it and the head removing the units 90mm rifle from play, but leaving the one armed, headless unit alive. Dmitry could not believe it. Had his weapon not been calibrated correctly? He was on target, with minimum range on a target that was literally blundering into his firing line. It should have hit the cockpit directly, no deviations.

However, all of that could wait. He had an enemy to kill.

He waited for the complex energy handling mechanisms to complete their function and then shot again. But the enemy pilot was already flailing randomly in a panic, making him miss a second time. Dmitry screamed obscenities into the recycled air inside his helmet as his machine leapt out of concealment. Vernier rockets fired and legs flailed as the Gelgoog's computer interpreted the Pilots actions into how the machine moved.

And move it did.

The Gelgoog leapt out. In its head, a cyclopean eye pulsed into life, a bright red circle known as a monoeye sensor swung on rails to track the frantic motions of the enemy. While he could continue to snipe, hsi experience told him that he shouldn't risk shooting through the wreck and into space. With how close that enemy cruiser could be at this point, there was no way they would miss that sight. And seeing as he wanted to surprise the Feddie light cruiser right outside, if he wanted to do this, he had to do it himself.

So Dmitry discarded the rifle and grabbed his beam sabers, the only meaningful melee weapon of the universal century. They were also the evidence that Star Wars still survived the space age. The Gelgoog Marine supposedly carried two, but he had lost one long ago. So he grabbed his sole beam saber and pushed his throttle up, heading straight to the one armed GM. In the space of five seconds, the Gelgoog's rated 0.68g acceleration had pushed the mammoth machine to more than a hundred kilometers per hour in relative velocity. Then it was a matter of moving the arms and legs to position the giant man shaped war machine into position to make a swipe as they drifted past each other. The weapon activated, a crimson rod of energy materializing in the humanoid hands of his machine as if he was Palpatine of yore.

By luck or skill though, his calculated charge missed. Dmitry blinked at the impossible result before groaning. The GM had frantically spun around him, but lack of arm was throwing his own mental calculations off. Now the enemy was heading to the Papua and he was rocketing towards the other wreck. Shaking his head, and thankful for the sweat absorbing padding in the helmet, he pulled his control levers back and pushed down on the pedals. Years of practice letting him feather his landing on the wreck and then pushing off it to leap towards the Papua that the GM was even now entering.

Dmitry noted a distant glow of red and yellow. That was the stern of the wreck, where Jacob was tangling with that second GM. He scowled at the thought that rookies were holding back over two combat veterans. Sure, he wasn't a war era ace, but that was because he was underage even as the war ended. He had proven himself after that. These two feddie punks shouldn't be able to frustrate them like this. 

He groaned as he watched the other suit had just dived into his own sniper nest. He cursed loudly and tried to contact Jacob. Unfortunately, the static, and a cheerfully pink graph told him his effective radio range was less than a hundred meters from the Minovsky particle density. So much for that idea, he groused.

Minovsky interference was the defining factor of Universal Century warfare. When Professor Trenov Minovsky had invented the neutron less fusion reaction, he had inadverdantly created the so called Minovsky particle, a subatomic particle whose existence was hell on long range electromagnetic radiation. And since beam weapons were created from using the physics bullshit of having lots of minovsky particles in a small volume, Dmitry's use of energy weapons in a confined area had effectively made him deaf mute as far as radio was concerned. Line of sight communication was as good as it got now.

He rocketed back towards the cargo bay, knowing that he couldn't let the feddie pilot free either. Given time, even a one armed mobile suit could be a thorn. In the worst case scenario, the enemy could wait for him to go out for the Salamis, and then attack the Musai. And having a one armed suit beat a Musai wasn't the most ridiculous thing he had heard of. Really, it would be simple to just mission kill the Zeon cruiser by shooting the bridge. Dmitry hesitated for the long seconds that it took to reach the transport. The unmoving mobile suit was right there. The GM seemed to have crashed head first into the side of the bay, as if driven by a complete rookie. He looked around, his monoeye tracking various differences to the last time he had scanned the place, hours ago. A mental twitch made him see glance at an open airlock. The asshole had run into the ship. Great.

Dmitry spent a solid ten seconds contemplating the idea of destroying the suit inside the cargo bay and ending this farce then and there. Unfortunately, his Gelgoog was not meant for delicate operations. And he had no idea how to disable the enemy unit without destroying it. Energy weapons would detonate the reactor and inside a ship like this, which had not already exploded, he was likely to cause something else to explode. He did not want to create his own tomb.

Dmitry looked at the screen that showed the dark interior of the ship blankly before sighing. This was staring to turn into a comedy of errors. He thought about what he was doing before sighing to himself. He wasn't going to be able to leave happily with the idea that he was leaving this fool alive. A part of him, the unconscious part of him he didn't acknowledge thought of the cold darkness of space and the kind of death a stranded man would face and wanted to spare some poor kid that. The other part wanted to just kill feddies.

He loosened the straps on his harness and picked up a sub machine gun. The venerable gas operated 9mm wasn't quite a recoilless weapon, but the thing did have a gas setting that would allow it to cycle in vacuum at the flick of a switch. He blinked and took his trusty pistol as well. That feeling of something terrible just wouldn't leave him.

He hit the button for opening the hatch and waited. There was a sudden wheeze as all the air in the cockpit got sucked out. The main screen winked out and hinged outwards. Even though he was inside a sealed normal suit, Dmitry couldn't help smell the dust and echoes from within this zero gravity mausoleum.

He tapped the standard issue jetpack, making sure the connectors to his waist were live and that the two joysticks were working. He didn't want to know what a misfiring thruster could do, even if this was one of the most reliable pieces of technology in space. Trepidation filled him, dragging his actions as his mind began to fill with more and more reasons not to visit the charnel house this place was.

But, he didn't want to leave this man alive either. His mind refused to contemplate the option of just leaving the one armed suit behind and joining the battle outside without forcing a confrontation. He took another deep breath and moved into the wreck of the ship. For a fleeting second, he felt like he was being welcomed into the depths of this long forgotten vessel. Behind him, the Gelgoog stood besides its damaged enemy, two silent titans uncaring of the everything, and everyone.

Xxx

UC 85, September 21, 15:03 GLT

The wreck was a spooky place, Dmitry admitted to himself. For one thing, the power was still on. While it might seem odd, Shipboard Minovsky Thermonuclear Reactors were a bit like the marine diesel engines. They were designed to and could potentially run for decades without supervision, especially a military design like this one. From what he could tell at a glance, only one of the reactors was still working, and the lights had yet to be switched off. Hadn't the Joint War Graves Commission already gone through this place? Why was anything still running? He wasn't too sure about the air quality though, even if his appropriate wrist patch was coloured blue to indicate there was sufficient oxygen. He was more worried about the Co2 levels. You never knew if the scrubbers were working correctly in derelicts like these. And the human body was not built to detect if there was too much CO2 in the air. Just 4% of CO2 in the air could kill you without you realizing.

As his helmet mounted flashlight passed over the walls, trails of green illumination trailed after them. It was something more common for civilian ships from long before the war, having sections of wall painted with fluorescent paint. In a running vessel, having the lights suddenly go off could lead to panic in a civilian vessel. The idea had been that having the walls glow instead of complete darkness would reduce panic and a bigger disaster.

At some point, someone realised that it was cheaper to get normal emergency lighting than to end up spooking the civilians even more with the all too little light and shadows. However, the Zeon Military at least hadn't given up on the idea, and most of their warships in the first half of the war would see a similar idea being applied. Now however, it felt terrifying, as if the ship was marking his passage, and an invisible hand was erasing it as he went further in. There was a dull glow to everything, from lighting that should have been long replaced to the pale glow that followed the helmet's attached lights. It was not a very comfortable setting.

The stories he had heard about this place were not helping.

As a troop transport conversion, a big chunk of the cargo bays had been transformed into stores or sleeping berths. This made navigation tricky and harrowing. The dim glow of intermittent lighting cast long shadows. Here and there the evidence of the violence that once marked this ship was clear. Spatters of blood, bullet holes, bloodstained shoe prints and of course, the bones. And there was everything else of course. There had been a pile of Federation and Zeon Uniforms in one carelessly closed officer quarters. There was a fetus skeleton, picked clean of flesh, in a jar of fluid. There was a Pilot suit with a skeleton inside, the skull again, scraped clean of flesh. There was no end to the creative ways the remains had been left.

Dmitry was getting very good at discerning the signs of bones scraped clean of flesh. He was also starting to get disturbed by all the Human remains still present on a wreck supposedly picked over by the Joint War Graves Commission. What had happened here? And where was the one living feddie he had come here to find?

He was currently looking at one of the most disturbing images he had ever seen. It was a wall decorated with human bones. Someone had taken the time to painstakingly glue the fragments of he didn't know how many people's bones and what appeared to be pieces of empty food rations, uniform scraps and other coloured bits into a picture that, at about 4 meters from the wall suddenly resolved in his eyes into the image of what looked to be a robed figure with a scythe. Considering that this ship was infamous for basically driving it's survivors insane till they created a cannibalistic death cult, he wasn't surprised. On the other hand, he had thought that the Joint War Graves Commission had removed all the human remains from this wreck. Something felt off in his mind, but he had something else to do. Where was that bastard?

He was playing cat and mouse with an incredibly annoying GM pilot. And he was starting to feel like he was losing. The other man, in his white and blue Federation Pilot suit, was staying just a step ahead of him. He had fired at him three times, wasting a full magazine and missed. Now he was in amongst another bunch of sleeping pods, and the wall opposite that was another piece of death cult bone art thing that he was getting a bit distracted by, only this one was just two skeletons looking like they were kissing and hugging. Oh, and now the other guy was shooting at him, and also missing.

Dmitry shook his head, mindful of the bloodstains around and also keeping an eye on the radiation gauge at his waist. Space was an unforgiving environment before you started shooting at each other. He checked the magazine again and kicked off the wall, making for another corridor. More lighting flickered. He fired at a glance of fight and found himself looking at a crumbling skull. Dmitry was really looking forward to getting out of here.

He turned off his lights every now and then, trying to spot the telltale spots where the Federation Pilot's own lights would have left a glowing trail. But, mostly he saw signs of his own passing. It was getting terribly frustrating.

He pulled himself through another door before he gasped unconsciously. He glanced to the side to see a faded marking "J-A1-87 CARGO"

A mess hall, which he had somehow walked around earlier was not in its original configuration. The normally bolted tables and benches had been ripped out and welded haphazardly to the walls. There was an open space in the middle. And yet, it wasn't empty. The room itself was covered in red black symbols, macabre finger painting that reinforced the insane death cult thing lie nothing on this wreck had before.

There were skeletons here, a dozen skeletons, all scraped clean of flesh, wearing faded, bloody informs, complete with officer caps and helmets. And they were all arranged in a loose circle facing a single dead woman, posed as if kneeling on knee, with heads bowed.

A single woman that was noticeably not a skeleton.

She was the only intact, if mummified corpse of the lot. Her hair, black and shoulder length floated in the null gravity, her feet stuck to the floor. Why did this woman not rot? Dmitry felt the words leave his lips, of all the questions he had cycling in his head. And where was her helmet, he asked himself, before realizing the absurdity of asking that.

"She gave herself fully to her god and suffered for it."

At the sound of the what was sometimes called Fancy British accent, Dmitry looked to his left, where the placid looking Federation pilot was standing there, his own pistol pointed away but ready. The man, no boy, was young. Black hair, pale skin marked a face that must have barely graduated from academy. He couldn't have been twenty years old. It was surreal to see what the other side of this little skirmish looked like. With a thought, he lowered his weapon also, his thumb automatically switching the safety lever without consideration to the fact that his enemy stood before him.

"What do you mean? Who is she?"

"That is Ensign Aleesa Nazeem. She was a Rick Dom pilot from that Musai that is wrecked outside. She was the last to die in this place." the Feddie replied disinterestedly before looking at him. "No relation to Captain Nazeem of course." the Feddie pilot added wryly.

Who? Dmitry thought but did not ask.

Dmitry felt like he was in a dream. Scarcely a minute ago, he was hell bent on killing that other kid and now he felt strangely detached from reality. Things just didn't make sense anymore he admitted.

"Why? What happened here?" Dmitry found himself asking. The Feddie looked amused at the question. "Do you know the story that the War Graves Commission released?"

Dmitry nodded, checking to himself that he hadn't let go of his weapon.

"Well, what they did not put in their report is that the Commission did not pick up any of the bodies. The Commission itself did not last a week here. This wreck has a...peculiar effect on the human mind. Four of the members committed suicide before they left." Dmitry nodded to himself. It made complete sense to him. His mind strained to put to words, some indescribable feeling that he had been experiencing all this time. It was a peculiar feeling that he had been changing, in some tangible yet undefinable way, like he was a bit stretched at the edges.

"What's wrong with this place?"

The other boy shrugged, still looking as unbothered as a Buddhist monk. "The people here did not die easily. There were more than three hundred people trapped on this ship when it was stuck here. They ran out of food in a few months. Then they began to eat the bodies of the dead. And as more died and were eaten, the rest began to slowly go mad. Cannibalism has consequences on human physiology." He paused as if in thought, before turning to stare him in the eyes.

"Do you believe in higher powers?" the enemy pilot suddenly asked, throwing off all his thoughts with that non sequitur.

Dmitry shook his head. If he had a god, it would be Zeon Zum Deikun, the first man to dream of an independent spacenoid nation. It was not an uncommon belief within the Zeon nation that their all but prophet in name was also a god.

"You really should. After all, when these people turned into a cult, they appealed to the higher powers.... And unfortunately, they got an answer."

Dmitry felt it then, a pressure in his head, like a mild hangover, or a morning after too little sleep.

Something was wrong, he distantly realised.

"And that power was happy to accept the sacrifices made in its name. After all, they really do not care for Humans or your lives."

What was happening? Dmitry screamed in his mind, suddenly all too cognizant of the fact that something was really, really wrong. His body felt disconnected, as if his mind was trying to pilot a damaged meat puppet.

The silence of the dead ship seemed to be terrifying now, where it was disconcerting before. The skeletons facing that still flesh covered corpse seemed to be looking at him now. He looked beyond the horror of this room, and an endless labyrinth of dead bones stared at him in turn

Wait, was that woman's empty eye sockets glowing?

The boy continued, uncaring of the whirlwind of thoughts and screams in Dmitry's mind.

"There is a price to be paid of course, as there is a price to all things." He paused, as if to let Dmitry soak in the words. "To obtain, something of equal value must be lost. That is to say, a law of equivalent exchange. And to a higher power, that principle has weight."

The boy smiled, and Dmitry suddenly realized that the other kid had not moved from his spot all this time. He also realised that neither had he. They had been frozen in this tableau for minutes now.

Ah, Dmitry sighed with a horrified calm, he was paralysed.

Something was wrong.

He was trapped, he realized with a sudden, helpless clarity of thought.

Echoes of A Baoa Qu lurked in the corners of his vision, ships sinking, mobile suits exploding, people dying, all while the radio sang a cacophonic dirge of static and screams.

Dmitry shuddered, or tried to, and with an effort of will wrenched himself back into the present.

But there was no respite to be found here.

"You see, The entity that answered their call was Death. Or perhaps a Death. Or perhaps it is more correct to say that it is an entity that is considered to be a Death?" The boy seemed to ponder. "It is hard to make a distinction that humans can understand, not at that level anyway. This one believes you saw that mural they made? A bit tasteless really, but allowances must be made for being starved cultists perhaps?"

What was this boy talking about? Was there a nerve agent in this ship? Was his suit leaking? His chemical test patches had not changed colour on his right arm when he last checked them, what seemed to be hours ago, so it wasn't a common agent. Maybe a Zeon chemical weapon that never got announced or deployed? Yes, that must be it. It would explain what happened to the crew anyway. It might be too late for them, but he knew that at least the Feddie Pilot would go with him.

"Ah, but this one digresses. All this is quite pointless really. The moment you stepped inside, your fate was sealed."

Why was that kid talking so much? Dmitry screamed silently. Just shoot and be done with it, he cried out soundlessly, or a small part of him did. A part of him wondered at the wording the kid was using, that ominous tickle at the back of his head that he knew he was ignoring. Every other part was pointlessly screaming defiantly.

The boy shook his head and moved towards the corpse. Small details that Dmitry had not paid attention to began to resolve themselves in his eyes. There was the dull green, slightly faded Pilot suit, with the "heavy" anvil shoulder insignia that he personally wore when he piloted a Rick Dom; the distinctive handle of the standard issue Zeon Space Force knife, a copy of the one on his ankle, sticking out from where it had been plunged into the chest; the very little blood staining the entry wound; the way the leathery skin on her face stretched grotesquely over her skull, and of course, the fact that there was little blood overall.

Except that there was blood now. And it was everywhere except the corpse. Little droplets of blood, were suddenly everywhere. From the thick plates of sheet metal that formed the structure of this room, it seeped through, little puddles of crimson that seemed to be floating up into the null gravity space of this hall. Like red rain, semi frozen in time, the little spheres were floating into the air in the room and just staying there.

What was happening?

Where did it all come from?

Why couldn't he move?

What was happening?

Dmitry's head pounded with questions he could not answer. His blood pounded through his skull, a staccato beat that underlined his helplessness, a drumbeat to oblivion.

He could only watch wide eyed but otherwise motionless as the dead woman started to move, still as corpse-like as it was before. The emaciated figure straightened out from its kneeling position and then rolled its shoulders, with all the nonchalance of someone getting out of bed in the morning.

Creaks and noises echoed in the room as bone scraped against bone and mummified flesh scraped against the far more pliable Pilot suit material. Her jaw opened and closed with a click of teeth, cheek flesh crumbling to allow her jaw to move. Her long dried out lips could not close and flaked off from her face, exposing more brown stained teeth and the bone holding them.

His eyes kept moving up and down, between that nightmarish face and the knife that was embedded in her chest. Her name was Nazeem, he recalled that boy saying.

He wondered what she was like before she crashed here.

He wondered if she had been a monster before she died.

He wondered if this was what he would be like after he died here.

And that was it, he realized, that connection he had still not made in his head.

He was going to die here. Alone, in a ship he should not have entered, fighting a kid he didn't even personally hate, fighting a war long over.

This unhelpfully timed enlightenment did not help him as he screamed and pleaded in his head, trying to rise above the pressure in his skull, the pounding in his brain and the sound of his own voice screaming in his mind. But it was of no use.

Twenty two minutes after he entered the ship, Dmitry Sorov lay dying as his consciousness disappeared amidst a spectacular brain haemorrhage.

As the Gelgoog pilot floated in place, unconscious and slowly dying, the drops of blood floating around them began to vanish. Looking around, the Federation Mobile Suit Pilot enquired calmly into thin air.

"It is done?"

A female voice rose from between the teeth of the female corpse, both harsh and seductive in its subharmonics, "Yes. Death will have its due."

The female, still looking like very much like a mummified corpse, grabbed the knife stuck in her chest and pulled it out, leaving a hole. The blade was blackened and corroded, covered in dried blood and with bits of dried mummified flesh stuck in the sawtooth etching on the back side of the blade.

"This is not ideal." the Federation pilot observed, scratching idly at a red rimmed hole on his own chest.

The corpse let out a huff of amusement before shrugging, it's bones creaking disturbingly. "That is to be expected. This is the only ritually sanctified Athame in this solar system suitable for our purposes. This condition is not surprising given it was created in a....in an unconventional manner."

'Will the vessel suffice?" the Pilot enquired, now staring curiously at the death spasms of the Zeon soldier.

The corpse did not answer, instead it grabbed the hand of the dying man and dragged the edge of the knife over the gloved palm.

Nothing happened.

"Perhaps you might restore the blade before you do that? Athame or not, it is merely a standard issue carbon steel knife. The intervening years have not been kind to it." the pilot offered politely.

The corpse tilted its head and released the spasming hand it was holding, letting it drift off slowly. The corpse brought her hand towards the blade and gave it a resolute flick with a gloved forefinger. Rust and other brown residue seemingly shattered and fell off, leaving a pristine steel knife that was polished to a mirror shine.

"This will suffice." The corpse noted blandly as it picked up the hand again. This time, the knife parted the material and flesh quite easily, and the blood began to creep out of the somehow still breathing Zeon, a sphere of life giving fluid. 

"We require at least 3 Litres." The pilot mused.

"Indeed. The dead make way for the living." The corpse waved an arm at the slowly expanding crimson sphere.

The uniform wearing skeletons around them rose from their respectful poses, ripping out the glue that had once held them in place, a sight that might have given Dmitry an aneurysm on its own were he aware. They quietly floated their way towards the slowly expanding sphere of blood and one by one dipped an index finger in it. Each one hopped backwards to draw more hieroglyphic symbols on the floor and ceiling of the once Mess Hall. Neither the pilot nor the mummified corpse bothered to compare the fantastical happenings till now with the logistics of having animated skeletons doing finger painting to draw ritual symbols in their vicinity.

"The battle outside will end soon, will it not?"

The corpse nodded. "In six minutes, the Luna Marie will no longer be fighting. There will be enough time to complete the task."

Around them, a massive array of circular lines of Egyptian looking script was taking shape. The symbols changed as they were written, as they were meant to. Concentric circles of written script, an art all on its own revolved as they were completed, each symbol changing their shapes in dizzying rapidity.

"So that is the Zeon ship's name? This one supposes that will be interesting information to consider once this body returns to the Istanbul."

The corpse turned its head. "The actions taken by the warships on the outside will have no bearing on our current task. Please avoid speaking. The damage to the vessel may be magnified.", it scolded, gesturing at the lightly bleeding bullet hole in the torso.

"Humans are too fragile" the Pilot complained. "This one cannot be held responsible for this mutilation."

The corpse did not reply. One of the skeletons finished it's drawing and pushed off the wall, drifting in front of them and stopping there. The corpse head nodded at the Pilot. "Fifty seconds."

The Pilot sighed and pushed himself to the centre of the array. He stood in a circle drawn of blood, surrounded by more blood in inexplicably moving blood and held his arms out. "Shall this one remove the bullet?"

The Corpse shook its head. "No. The current level of damage will be useful to establish narrative." The corpse paused before continuing. "This is an impromptu summoning, but we can mitigate the bureaucratic consequences if there is an explanation at hand."

The corpse paused and then walked closer to the dying Zeon. The ankle holster held a knife identical to the one in her hand. Taking this new blade out, it examined the weapon and looked speculatively at the dying man. "Perhaps if...?" It mused aloud squeezing the handle on one of the knives, which promptly shattered into dust. Dmitry's knife vanished into nothingess, erased amidst the growing strangeness that permeated everything.

The skeletons surrounded the Federation pilot and held him to the floor, the centre of a runic arcane array, something yet unseen in this universe. The corpse of the woman floated towards the Pilot, somehow dragging behind it the still groaning Zeon pilot and the blood.

"Preparations are complete. Vacate the vessel."

A faint mist rose out of the Federation pilot's nose and mouth, before he immediately relaxed into unconsciousness. The mist seemed to collect into a humanoid shape before fading away.

The corpse bent its head and placed a gloved palm on the chest of the long unconscious Zeon, the other holding onto the knife. The voice from the corpse raised in volume as it solemnly intoned.

 Oh madness that lies behind the veil

 I am the gatekeeper of Balance

 The task is set and fires lit

 End calls to end and all are without

 The scales are set and bargain made

 The deaths performed as ordained

 The stars align upon this day

 The words are heard and all obey

The knife came down, stabbing into the throat of the dying Zeon pilot, ending that particular life once and for all. There was a blinding flash of light, a roar and then silence. 

Xxx

Between two war vessels, there was an explosion as a Rick Dom exploded. The heavy assault mobile suit had impressive armour and acceleration, but what it did not have were beam weapons. The enemy GM-II it was facing might have been less agile, but it was ridden by a well trained, if inexperienced pilot and was holding a beam rifle. The Rick Dom was piloted by a good pilot, a veteran even. Unfortunately, he made a mistake and paid for it. As is the way of these older machines, there was no ejection module for the pilot, who died in battle.

Free of their opponent, the victorious Federation mobile suit dived into the other fight in the area, shooting down the other Rick Dom with a single well aimed shot. This time, the shot did not hit the reactor and the battle dragged on for another twenty seconds until both arms managed to get disabled. At that point, the Rick Dom was about as tactically significant as an orbital shuttle. The defeated Zeon soldier, rather than be taken prisoner, detonated his reactor. At that point, the Zeon cruiser's fate was sealed.

Xxx

UC 85, September 21, 15:05 GLT

Watching the two Rick Doms die was the last straw.

Captain Day took a brief moment to solemnly light up a cigarette and took a long drag. "Soldiers of Zeon..." she trailed of before continuing. "We have about a minute before those feddies close the gap to close range and they sink us. Do we surrender?"

The bridge crew glanced at each other and shrugged. They knew the stakes before they went in and that had not changed as they were about to die. It would take a miracle to save them now. And none seemed forthcoming.

The Captain took a look at the crew around her before taking another drag. If she was going to die, then she was not going to care about what her lungs did before that. The Helmsman looked at her and spoke calmly. "We followed you till now. We'll follow you now. We've had a good run so far. We played it smart and killed a bunch of them. No point in giving them another kill marker."

Day glanced at a screen that showed the approaching GM's and took another drag, trying to savour the nicotine high as much as she could before dying. It was a good run she mused. Sure, they lost the war, but for all that, they had managed to not be captured till now. They had taken down a good three cruisers and more than a dozen mobile suits, after the war. It was not like they hadn't sent enough of the Feddies to hell first. They had done Dozle proud. Well, that was the good part she judged.

Glendon chimed in from engineering. "Patrick's right Captain. It's been a long few years. We have taken our pound of flesh....Lord Dozle was an honorable man. I don't think he'd begrudge us our lives at this point."

Day sighed at...everything. Glendon was right too, she knew it in her head. She really didn't want to give these particular pricks the satisfaction of bagging a Musai in combat either. Not from a lack of spares at least. She might be out of combat options, but that didn't leave her without choices. Of course, it could also be the part of her that really didn't want to be killed around this asteroid in particular, but it wasn't like she would acknowledge thought anyway.

"Well children, I'm going with Cain today. We've done as much as we can, and I don't think the Zabi's would begrudge us a surrender after our tally of feddies. What say you, you loyal bastards? Wanna give prison a try?"

One of the sensor techs on the Bridge yelled back "We already said we'd follow you Captain." a brief round of hesitant chuckles broke the tension. There were still risks even with this choice of action. There was the possibility that they might decide this crew were pirates and ignore the protections of the Granada Accords. And there was always a chance the Feddie pilot would "not see" their surrender message, but well, that was not much different that not surrendering anyway.

She took another drag, letting the warmth settle in "Fire off the surrender flares. Lock down the guns and put the reactors on standby. I suppose our war is over...we'll know in a minute one way or another" She looked at her pack and sighed. Prison wasn't going to let her smoke all that much she knew. What a drag, she grimaced.

The 2 GMs were on their zig zagging attack run when they saw the tethered white flares, indicating a surrender. The two took a few seconds before they actually stopped moving erratically. Or rather, one of them did. The other moved backwards to keep watch and record if there was any treachery about.

The grainy voice of a short range radio over such high Minovsky densities was impossible to understand, so the wary Federation unit was forced to approach point blank distance to the ship before it laid its non weapon carrying hand on the metal hull above the bridge. The Pilot wasn't an idiot and had chosen to approach the bridge from the front, keeping its beam rifle pointed at the Number one turret. It was in one of the dead zones of anti air fire, so it was safe. The bridge speakers came to life with a bit of a whine from the contact link.

"Zeon cruiser! Confirm your surrender communication!"

The Captain felt her eyes go upwards involuntarily. Sure, there were all kinds of fanatics ready to misuse a surrender, but not even those fools were that desperate to lose a full fledged warship in exchange for a single pilot in his mobile suit, especially a piece of trash GM. She did acknowledge that some of her old colleagues were spiteful enough for one last act of revenge.

"This is Captain Doris Day of the Principality of Zeon cruiser Luna Marie. I am surrendering this vessel and her crew under Article 4, Section 7 of the Granada Accords. All weapons are safe and reactors are disabled."

There was a pause as everyone held their breath, bridge crew and Mobile suit stared at each other. After a pause, the line opened again.

"I, Ensign Arthur Macready of the Earth Federation cruiser Istanbul... accept your surrender under per Article 4, Section 7"

Everyone on the bridge exhaled in relief at that. Section 7 guaranteed their rights as proper Prisoners of War, rather than pirates. By acknowledging a post war Republic of Zeon, it was a legal fiction meant to allow the Zeon soldiers to surrender with full POW rights even after the polity they served was legally non existent. While the Antartic Treaty of 079 had a surrender clause, that entire document was only valid as long as the Principality of Zeon existed. With the Federation victory, the Principality was a legal fiction, and could not negotiate or cover its duties under the treaty.

The Granada Treaty was thus a very important document by allowing non surrendered formations or fighters enlisted or commissioned in the armed forces of the Principality of Zeon from by allowing them to use the Republic of Zeon as their proxy government. Not only did this provide a structure for the surrender process, but it also prevented the those surrendering under this treaty from being treated as non state actors or illegal combatants as they would under the previous Hague Treaties which would have then become the applicable document

The Captain felt a surge of emotion in her chest and sighed as she was awash in the despair and relief at what had happened. "Everyone gather in the MS hangar. Don't sabotage anything. Just incinerate the post war logs."

Some 2 hours later, they had gathered in the Hangar, now empty of the four mobile suits that had launched to do battle with the Earth Federation. The whole crew was there. It was not a full complement, just 122 odd men and women, most just silently weeping, but otherwise stoic in their normal suits. They stood there, motionless, tethered to the deck by the weak electro magnets in their boots.

"Soldiers of Zeon. It has been six long years since the war began" The tired looking Captain began. She spoke of duty, honour and sacrifice, commending the crew for their devotion and commanding them to return to Zeon and rebuild their war torn nation after they were returned back to the homeland.

Watching over them was the Marine detachments of the Istanbul and Denver, about forty men in all, all wearing the armoured pilot suits and jetpacks that equipped the void soldier of the future. Their hands held bullpup assault rifles, loosely held, but ready to shoot at the first hint that things were going wrong.

"Long speech ain't it?" One of the soldiers murmurred to another, an arm on their shoulder, a personal contact link to prevent anyone from listening in.

"Let them have it, They're not likely to get much happy times for a while. Not unless they like prison fucking at any rate."

Both of them chuckled grimly.

"Why'd they take them under Section 7 anyway? They were in a commercial route anyway right? What makes these fuckers so special?"

The other shrugged lightly, barely felt by his comrades hand on the shoulder. "Admiral's orders. Don't want to push the remaining Zeke holdouts so much they try to drop another colony on Earth." he commented wryly. Classified did not mean anyone forgot about the last time Zeon had tried to drop a Colony on earth, barely two years ago.

"You think anyone actually surrenders instead of that suicide charging thing they do?" the trooper made a vaguely rude gesture at the prisoners.

The other had to think for a moment. "Well, there was that bunch of Zekes in...I think it was the Amazon? Entire infantry battalion. Went silent after we overran South America. Poor bastards didn't even know the war ended. They had to get...I'm not sure what's the name, but she was that prick Gihren's secretary out of prison just to tell them the war was over."

"For real? Retro!" the astonished soldier exclaimed.

"Troy, Ali, cut it out there. You're supposed to be alert and shoot first if the Zekes decide to commit suicide, not gossip like my third wife and my mother."

"Sorry Sarge!" the two chorused before returning to a boring, if peaceful shift.

Xxx

UC 85, September 21, xx:xx GLT

The Federation Pilot woke up in confusion. Faint memories tickled at the edge of his consciousness. What was he doing here? Where was here? What time was it?

Wherever it was, the place was deserted. It was still space, as far as he could tell.

The subdued green glow around him told him it was a Zeon ship. The faded empty uniforms just floating around made no sense either. Odd, was he in a storage bay? What was with all the furniture shoved into the sides?

What was he even doing here?

He shook his head and glanced down as if to confirm that he was alive.

"Oh shit!" he yelled in surprise. There was a bullet wound on his chest. And it was bleeding freely. How was he still alive? How long had he been bleeding? That was not a small stain. And the blood on his arms couldn't have come from his own would either.

He quickly unzipped the pilot suit until he could expose the wound. He ignored the sting of the fabric that was stuck into the flesh and sprayed the area with a bottle of antiseptic from his first aid kit, packing the wound with a quick field dressing. His chest hurt, but he was still functional. He was lucky this time. Next time, he might not wake up.

 He quickly suited up again. His helmet floated nearby, about three meters away. It was all so strange and disorienting. At least he couldn't find any other leaks. He was lucky this place had breathable air. Whatever he had been doing, he wouldn't have woken up if he had been helmetless in unbreathable air.

He paused to put an air tight adhesive repair patch over the bullet hole and sighed. He didn't know where he was, or who was here with him, but he had to get out of here. He went outside the relatively large room he was in and was immediately confronted with a dead body. It was a fresh body too, with just a little bit of blood seeping out of the wound. There was a knife prominently stuck in the neck, and a sub machine gun gripped tightly in one hand, locked open where it had fired its last rounds. There was a literal spray of blood near the head, drops of liquid still floating in the air after leaving the neck. It was a vomit inducing urge, and he felt the gorge rising up. But there was nothing in the stomach, and he took deep breaths to calm down, trying desperately to ignore the smell and taste of metal and bile.

On a hunch, he checked his own pistol, holstered in the small of his back. The Colt M71A1 pistol slid out of its holster almost reluctantly. It did not take two seconds for him to realize it was completely empty, and his spare magazines were gone. The barrel was still warm enough to be felt through his gloves. He was getting a really bad feeling about this.

"Oh! That's where the blood came from." He breathed hysterically. "Get a grip Ensign. Get out of here. Figure out what's wrong later." Het hrew away the empty weapon and took the dead man's pistol, still holstered beside two spare magazines, which he also grabbed mechanically. Now armed, he kicked off the floor, managing to pass a foot through some of the inexplicably wet and floating drops of blood as well. Decontamination was going to be a pain, he thought, dazed.

The corridors were dimly lit, but seemed intact. There were scars of long forgotten combat littering the halls. Little holes and stains that were probably far worse when they had happened than they were now.

He rechecked the seals on his suit again. Breathable air or not, something wasn't right about this place. There was a Zeon beehive berth, a wall with a large honeycomb of hexagonal sleeping berths used to house enlisted men and NCOs. Opposite that wall was some kind of mostly off white mural. He didn't know what it was, or what it was made of, but some sixth sense told him he didn't want to know. He left the area in a hurry. He checked the dead Zeon guy's pistol again.

The pilot found his way to the cargo bay and found himself amazed at the sight. He could recognize his own red and white GM-II, one armed and missing a head, not to mention the mobile foot sized footprint on the cockpit hatch. He could also recognise the intact Gelgoog, just standing there, anchored to the hull via its magnetic feet. He gaped for a second before blinking out of his shock. "That's...that dead man's suit. I need to...."

He paused in frustration before groaning. He flipped his jetpack from the compact state and used short burst of thrust to point him towards his own relatively trashed mobile suit. He pulled himself into the cockpit, twisting himself at the entrance so that he landed back first on the seat inside. He pulled off the jetpack unit and shoved it to the side. A few flicks to the controls and the hatch closed, his entire cockpit lighting up as it returned from standby mode. As the sudden whoosh noise of the EN-SYS flooding the cockpit with breathable air washed over him, he pulled off his helmet and began hyperventilating in the non enriched air.

Once his brief episode was over, he nursed his machine, armless and with a pancaked head, as it began to slowly stand up from its rather undignified position. After a second of reorienting the large combat machine, there was a second of disorientation before the unit slowly made its way towards the imposing hulk of the two ship wrecks at the "mouth" of the tunnel he was in. Something niggled at the corners of his consciousness. Something had happened. How had he gotten shot? How had he killed the Zeke?

Questions without answers circled around him as he carefully coaxed the damaged machine towards the outside world. Bits of memory were coming back to him now. He had launched in along with Corbert to investigate this rock. Wait, then where was Corbert?

He hesitated a second before pulling on his controls. The one armed machine did a shaky looking pirouette before slowly making its way around the ship he definitely wasn't thinking very hard about.

Given the sizes of the machines involved, it took two minutes of careful manoeuvring before he found himself looking through his secondary cameras at a very disturbing scene.

Corbert's GM and another Gelgoog were lying in two halves each. Unfortunately, both were well and truly dead. Fencing wasn't a priority in the course of normal Mobile Suit training and that fact was on full display here. The two of them had neatly killed each other in completely offensive lunges.

Craters around the two were indicative that they had been shooting at each other first at least. In any case the sequence of events was clear. They had shot at each other, and at some point run out of spare recharges for their energy weapons. They had then charged at each other in their semi damaged mobile suits and neatly killed each other without touching off the other's reactors. After receiving their giganto lightsabers, aka beam sabers to the cockpits, both suits must have had their reactor failsafe activated and thus survived the event without blowing up. Not that either pilot was more than carbon dust floating in the area though. Mutual killing was a surprisingly frequent enough end to mobile suit battles that he wasn't shocked by that. No, he was more surprised by the fact that neither suit had blown up. Now that was absurd.

A whisper in the back of his mind suggested that it was this place that made the difference. That this was a place where men failed, but machines did not. He ignored it without a thought.

The currently alive GM pilot looked at the scene and just laughed hysterically. This was a bad, very bad even. He made sure to back up the camera footage, especially since all he had were the secondary cameras and began the tedious process of returning to his ship if his ship was still alive. He didn't know what ship if any the Gelgoogs came from. For all he knew, there was a Zeon Gwazine class Battleship waiting outside the asteroid for him to pop out. There was no question that he couldn't stay in here though.

On one hand, there was the passable intact horror show of a ship where his only known companion would be the still cooling body of the man he still couldn't remember killing. On the other hand, there was the possibility that he would be forced to walk into space only to find his ship turned to scrap metal and a ship full of murderous Zekes pointing big guns at him. As if to mock the past few minutes, his memory chose that moment to remind him the Denver would be coming in a couple of hours, possibly to die in the same ambush as his own ship.

But there was absolutely no question that he was leaving this place, whether there was life or death outside this mining cavity. 

With a sigh, he made his way back to the entrance again. This time, it took five minutes before his machine made the trip to the tunnel entrance and made it past the wrecks. He took one last glance at the slightly melted and re-cooled metal plating on the wrecks and he was again in open space. He tried a quick scan on communication frequencies before the static made him give it up as a bad job. What sensors were working on his unit told him that the Minovsky particle density was too high. The glowing dial on his screen happily told him that radio communications was restricted to less 200 meters. Given the condition of his secondary cameras, he was starting to suspect that he was better off opening his cockpit and looking around with Binoculars.

However, the poor Ensign was tired. And he wasn't thinking straight. Which meant he ended up going with the default option in his case, he raised his one intact arm and shot off a flare.

It might have been the events of the day, or the possible blow to the head, but when he saw an honest to god Federation GM visually appear up on his screen, he started to cry.

"Hang on there Potter. We're coming to get you."

Xxx

UC 85, September 22, 00:23 GLT

The five man marine detachment silently gathered around the GM-II they had hitched a ride on to come to this place. The cargo bay, with its hatch open to the void of space was an unassuming entry point to the single most disturbing place these marines had ever been in.

The Ravenous Pit of Julianos. That's what the members of the War Graves Commission who came here called the place. Having just reviewed the files and finding this less common nickname for the place, there was no doubt among them that the name was all too appropriate. The lack of starlight was eerie. The ship itself emitted a dull glow. The reactor was still barely active, or something was running on reserve batteries.

Who knew with this place. They certainly were not sticking around to find out.

But a vague illumination spilled from the non airtight parts of the hull. In particular, the Cargo bay airlock had a vaguely green glow that you noticed if you stared at it too long.

The GM-II was moving to secure the Gelgoog. A marine had already checked out the cockpit as empty and it's reactors were on standby. With a bit of instruction from the their friendly pilot, the marine had been able to get the thing into a more...movable orientation than they had found it in. They had then stashed the dead Zeon's corpse into that before closing it up.

One of the marines passed the mission specific shoulder camera to the pilot of the GM, very much avoiding any thoughts of holding on to that thing. He didn't want to even see whatever had gotten saved up in that thing.

It took half an hour, but the marines, the GM-II and the Gelgoog arrived on the scarred catapult deck of their ship.

The sergeant, a steel willed man unless he was talking about his long grown son, held back his men before they trooped into the airlock.

"Boys, you know how I normally say that alcohol is prohibited?" He let his shudders show. "Forget all about it. Get plastered as fuck after the debrief. We are getting smashed until we die or forget about whatever shit was in that place. You hear me?"

The men nodded silently, gamely ignoring how they were shaking, faint tremors passing through their arms and legs as they tried to come down from stress of simple proximity to that accursed rock.

None of them would sleep well for weeks.

Xxx