Scene IX : A Thoughtful Morning in Enemy Hands
"I'm no heroine, at least, not last time I checked
I'm too easy to roll over; I'm too easy to wreck."
--Ani DiFranco, I'm no Heroine
Lucrezia Noin woke in a cell.
It wasn't the conventional definition of a cell. The ceiling was high and sunlight streamed through the triangular, modern windows and skylight. The bed she lay in was soft and there was the smell of breakfast wafting through the air.
Still, she was a prisoner in a cell.
She blinked, trying to clear her eyes of sleep, and rolled over and swung her legs over the side of the bed. It was cold, she realized, as the chill air hit her bare legs. She rarely slept in anything more than a long shirt nowadays, and it might be some time to ask for some comfortable pants for the colder nights that were sure to come.
Her cell was not large, but not too small, either, a bedroom of sensible dimensions, with a queen-sized bed at one end of the room, a dresser and mirror, a small desk, and a closet. The only windows were set high in the walls overhead, and there was a small skylight. Escape was not impossible, but it was far from easy.
Her captors liked a challenge, she knew.
She had been careless. That was how she had been captured. If she had considered all her options, hadn't gone foolhardily into the enemy compound with only limited intelligence information, she would not be here.
They had taken her comm equipment to make sure no one knew where she was. Maybe they were hoping her troops would think she was dead, and retreat. She hoped they wouldn't do that. Granted, there were not many of them...but surely they didn't think she was this easily beaten?
The end of the war had been an anticlimax for all of them, Noin included. She thought of herself as Noin now. She had always hated her first name, and going into the military was just one of the excuses for her to be known simply as Noin. Everyone at the academy had called her Noin. Cadets were surprised to learn that the lieutenant was human enough to have a first name. She'd heard the stories, and laughed. Even...
Even Zechs had called her Noin.
She had gone to the L2 colony to help with the rebuilding effort. Colonists had avoided her warily for a few weeks, knowing her only as "That OZ Bitch" who had been with Khushrenada and Merquise. But in the end, the need for money and supplies had won out over hatred, and Noin had connections to both. In the meantime, she spent her days proving to the colonists that she was not really that much of a bitch and really did have their best interests in mind.
And she did. She'd grown to respect Duo Maxwell during the short time they'd known each other, and the least she could do was to help rebuild the colony where he had grown up. Maybe someday he would actually come back to L2, see the things that had happened there, and learn to let go of the bitterness and the loneliness she could detect in his voice every time he had mentioned his childhood.
Maybe.
Then she had heard of the Preventers. At first it was only a word on the lips of one of the puzzled colonists, and she had dismissed it as some new group or hearsay. Then it was in the newspapers. Then it was on the holovids. The Preventers, created to keep peace across the galaxy, headed by the woman known as Lady Une.
That gave Noin a shock. Une?
She wasn't surprised when the call finally came one day, asking her if she wanted to skip off L2 at last and join the cause of the Preventers.
"I know we were never the best of friends, Noin," Une had said. "But you're one of the best we've got. With you on the team, we can recruit people faster. They respect you, Noin."
She didn't like to admit it, but she was eager to get off L2. She loved the colony, but it was not her home. She'd sold her house, transferred her funds off-colony, announced to the man she was seeing that she was leaving. He had taken the news in stride, taken her out to a farewell candlelight dinner, and bought her flowers. And then she left.
She had not heard from him since, and she wasn't surprised. Maybe a little sad, but it was all right. She hadn't loved him anyway, and she had suspected the only reason he had been dating her was because of her visible status within the colony. She had always had that effect on people, both men and women; a stepping stone for them to gain something. Only one man had never treated her that way.
The only man she had ever truly loved was Zechs Merquise, and he was dead.
Une had been kind and more generous than she ever could have imagined. She'd given Noin the rank of major, assigned her to the new Preventers base at Sparta to take command of the new mobile suit combat squadrons being formed there. There were very few new mobile suits being manufactured nowadays, and when she had asked Une for more, Une had revealed that the new World Nation was so terrified of another war that they had decided to restrict mobile suit production until further notice. Asking what that "further notice" was brought a shadowy smile to the former Lady's lips.
"They think that by getting rid of the weapons, they can stop war," Une mused. "Let them try. But in a few years, Noin, I'll be willing to wager there won't be a single mobile suit left in our arsenal."
She spent the first two weeks or so shuttling back and forth between Sparta, Kashmir Command Base in India, Forteleza Sea Station in South America which had the sea docks in which the Cancer suits were kept, and the main base at Geneva. She was most comfortable at Geneva, not only because it was the main headquarters, but because Une and Sally were there. When she was at Sparta, she was in command, but she was alone.
"Noin," said Une, a few weeks after she'd settled in, "how would you like to take an assignment?"
The assignment was to the part of the solar system known as the Outer Territories, a new expansionist project by the current government to Terraform and colonize several moons in the nearby planetary systems of Jupiter and Saturn. Apparently, one of the new colonial governments had decided to take matters into its own hands and launch a small-scale rebellion. There were always some of these little rebellions taking place in one place or another, but this one had been going on for a while and the government wanted it halted. Quietly, if at all possible, which explained how it had not and probably would never make it into mainstream galactic media coverage.
"This is the first real chance for us as Preventers to have an effect," Une had said, pacing behind her desk, hands clasped in front of her. Treize used to do that sometimes. Noin wondered if Une knew how much like Treize she had looked just then. "If we manage to stop this rebellion, the government will have to be grateful to us. They'll have to recognize us as a legitimate organization."
"Aren't we already?"
Une pursed her lips. "All they know of us is that we are former OZ soldiers. What I have heard from Queen Relena is that they think of us as our own little rebellion, 'a relic trying to stay afloat in the ocean of modern times,' as one general put it."
Noin frowned. "So why send us?"
The smile that graced the general's face was not pleasant. "Maybe they can't spare anyone else. We're expendable, Noin. That's how it's always been."
She was tired of being expendable, but she went anyway because it was the only chance she had to get away from the loneliness, the ghostly presence of Treize Khushrenada which still haunted the Preventers headquarters, and the memories of one Lightning Baron. Une had given her a handful of troops, a handful because the Preventers could not afford to spare more. Expendable was expendable, but there was a limit to how many could be expended at one time. They could not afford to expend any more mobile suits, so Noin was not given any of those.
The small rebellion was larger than the government had made it seem in the information they had received. She thought back to the rebel uprising in China when the Gundams had appeared a few years back. It was little larger than that, but large enough to keep Noin and her troops on their toes. Still, it had seemed controllable, until six months ago, when the rebellion had unexpectedly gained some old model OZ mobile suits from somewhere. Noin didn't know where, but with her troops equipped only with ground arms, it was a losing battle.
If she could only get a hold of one of those mobile suits, she was sure her battle reflex was as sound as ever, and she had been one of the best pilots in OZ and the Federation. But the mobile suits were too closely guarded, and she could not spare a single one of her men. Soldiers might be expendable to the government, but not to her.
She had resigned herself to the fact that they were probably going to die here on this far colony, unknown and unmourned, because the government wished to keep this quiet and it would never be revealed to the media. Apparently, the media was more dangerous than rebels.
On second thought, that was probably true.
She had been captured on a raid into a mobile suit yard where two Aries models were kept. She hadn't seen the guard until too late, and beforehand, she had ordered her men to retreat if she was captured, promising to rejoin them later, downplaying her concern over the rebel's prison facilities. A piece of cake, she'd told her second-in-command.
"I'll be back with you in no time. Move the forces back and wait for me."
It had been two weeks, and she had not figured out a way to escape yet.
They had taken her not to a prison, as she had expected, but to the mansion of the colony governor. He'd treated her with respect, telling her with eloquent elegance that she was a fool to ever have come here, and locked her in one of his guestrooms. For all she knew, she could spend the rest of her life in here. Or maybe one day they would poison the food that came sliding into the room from the mechanical food dispenser and she would die young. That was more likely. She had always known she would probably die young, one way or another.
That was the fate of a soldier, Zechs had told her. Good soldiers die young, Noin. It's our glory.
Noin got up from the bed, grabbing the bathrobe from the floor and wrapping it around her to ward off the chill. The breakfast on the delivery tray looked tempting, but she needed a shower. The mansion was equipped with excellent bathroom facilities, and she intended to take full advantage of them, prisoner or not. She wondered if they could somehow find a way to poison the shower water.
Flipping on the light as she walked into the bathroom, she glanced at herself in the mirror and was surprised to find how pale she looked. She had been eating and sleeping well, but she had lost at least several pounds in the past two weeks, and she looked like a ghost. Maybe the food was poisoned. Or maybe she was just imagining things.
She touched a hand to her cheek, watching the reflection in the mirror do the same. If she had a comm unit, she would radio her troops right now, and if the governor knew what she would say, he would have gladly lent her one.
Go home, she would tell them. Go home, and forget this war.
The bath water was already warm when she turned it on, and she watched the smoke rise from the heated bath, filling the air.
There was a skylight in the bathroom too. It was frosted, and as she watched, something dark passed over the surface. A bird? A transport? A mobile suit?
She would tell them to go home and tell the world what was happening here. The world deserved to know, after all the pain and darkness they had been through with the last war. Keeping civilians in ignorance was the worst thing soldiers could do to the ones they were defending.
Of course, her ideas were old-fashioned. She had never believed that soldiers were expendable, either. She was probably wrong about that too, because all good soldiers died young.
Zechs had said so.
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