SHIN KIDOU SENKI GUNDAM WING

SAINAN NO KEKKA
ACT XII, PART II

 
 
Scene V: Chasing the Dawn

 
When Zechs had woken up to see Une standing by his bedside, looking especially grim, he knew this was not going to be good. Une had been especially grim-looking in most of the photos and clips he'd seen of her, but seeing her in person, looking at least five years older than when he had left for A007 a month ago, with a certain desperate look in her eyes...it was startling.

He glanced at the clock. It was 5 AM.

"You're awake," Une said, folding her arms and staring down at him. He stared back, sure the expression on his face wasn't the most intelligent one on the planet, but the medicine they had given him before he had fallen asleep made him a little dizzy. Though his arm wasn't throbbing anymore, which he took to be a good sign.

"Your sister took your Gundam."

There was a slight pause in which he was completely sure he had misheard her, or else his hearing had been damaged too, along with the rest of him, or he was simply deranged.

"...what?" he said.

She sighed, giving him a patient look. "Milliard. We didn't say goodbye on quite the right foot when you left for the colony, and when you came back you weren't exactly in any shape to debrief me on exactly what happened there. I would like nothing better than to throw you a welcome back party, and then sit down with you for about twelve hours and grill you until your brain comes leaking out of your ears, but unfortunately, we don't have that option."

All this information overload was making his ears ring again, and he blinked and shook his head, trying to process it. "Relena did what?"

Une gave him a critical look. "Did you two have some sort of fight?"

She took his Gundam? "EPYON?" he said incredulously, hearing his voice rise at least two octaves higher than it normally sounded. "That's impossible."

"Your sister seems to specialize in the impossible."

"You're joking," he said, staring at her. "You've got to be joking."

"If I were someone who liked to make jokes," Une said dryly, "now would be the time to make them. Too bad I'm not."

He pushed himself up on one elbow, staring at her, feeling her words start to sink in, feeling a horrible gaping feeling in the pit of his stomach. "Une. Please tell me you're not serious."

Her face was grim. "I'd lie to you, Milliard, if I could, but the situation is too serious for that. Relena and Hilde Schbeiker got into Epyon's hangar last night and took off with it. I have reports that they've been spotted at Sparta, where there's currently a large-scale battle going on."

He squeezed his eyes shut. "Damn," he said dully, falling back to the bed. "Relena...why the hell..."

"Whatever you did," Une said, "she obviously feels this is the best way to gain back your trust."

"Why do you automatically assume that I-"

"I know you both," Une interrupted harshly. "I don't know you that well, that's true, but I do know your sister better than most people, and I conclude that something must have happened between you two. Relena Peacecraft does not go randomly stealing people's Gundams and heading out to the battlefield."

Because...I want you to be able to love me.

"It wasn't supposed to be like this," he whispered. "It wasn't-"

"What are you going to do about it?"

His eyes snapped open. "What?"

"Are you going to lie there like a zombie?" Une demanded. "I can't believe you, Milliard Peacecraft. Your sister's life is in danger, and you're lying there feeling sorry for yourself! If you're not careful, you're going to lose everyone who's precious to you!"

"How dare you," he growled, lunging out at her, but she neatly sidestepped, and he fought to regain his balance, narrowly avoided tumbling out of the bed onto the floor, tangled in his sheets. "How dare you! You have no idea!"

"Don't I?" Une's eyes flashed dangerously. "I saw what Treize did to himself at the end, and I am not losing anyone else to his own self-pity!"

He clenched his fists. "Don't talk about Treize like that!"

"I loved him, Milliard," Une said, the anger seeming to fade out of her stance, leaving her standing old and frail against the wall of the hospital room, and he felt himself trembling, felt his nails dig into the palms of his hands till it hurt, but he couldn't stop. "I loved him, and yet I let him die. I understood why he did so...but I don't want it to happen again. There is more to life than war and peace and grand ideals."

"Treize was..." he whispered. "Treize..."

"I cried when Noin died," Une said, and he shivered at the name, wanting to stop the words coming from Une's mouth but feeling suddenly tired, weak, unable to do anything but stare at his clenched hands and shake. He couldn't stop the shaking. "I cried when Sally betrayed me and I cried when Trowa was killed at her hands. I almost killed Quatre Winner two days ago, and now even he might not live the night. I cried for him too. So many people I have wept for in the past few days, and yet I couldn't even cry when I lost Treize."

"It's not-" he said, and she smiled sadly.

"I don't want you to become like me."

"It's not your choice," Zechs said dully, feeling the muscles in his hands relax, opening them slowly, staring at the red marks left by his nails on the skin. "I am what I am. Noin is dead...Treize is dead...I almost killed Dorothy...and my own sister is now in danger because of me. I can't erase all of that, not even if I was reborn."

I have tried to do that, he wanted to add, but didn't, knowing that she knew. I thought by changing my name, by running from one place to the next, I could escape the past. But I should have known that it's not that easy.

"We can't be reborn, maybe," Une said. "But there's nothing that says we can't change who we are."

He stared at her, and for the first time he saw not the colonel of OZ or the military leader who had built the Preventers, but a woman who underneath everything had a noble heart, and he realized why Treize had loved her.

"Go save her, Milliard," Une whispered. "You're the only one who can do that."

It was a last-ditch reinforcement effort for the forces at Sparta, and he should have known that Une would have chosen someone like Chang Wufei to be in charge of it. Only someone like Chang Wufei would glance at him as he hobbled into the hangar, still bandaged and a little lightheaded from the pain medication they'd given him, and simply say, "Hello, Zechs Merquise. I assume you'll be joining us on our operation."

"I suppose you've heard about Epyon," he said, not exactly sure how to deal with the Chinese pilot, who standing there calmly watching him. They had never met physically during the war, but Treize had spoken admiringly of the pilot of Shenlong. Belatedly, he noticed that Wufei's arm was also bandaged. "I won't be piloting her today, for obvious reasons."

Wufei simply nodded. "I've heard. It won't be a problem. We've got a Taurus for you." He turned his head to the young Asian man standing behind him, most likely his second-in-command, judging by the rank he wore.

The man gave him a brief nod and the thumbs up. "It's ready for your use, sir, if you would like to take it."

"It's not Epyon," he said, "but I don't have any objections."

Wufei shot him another long, discerning look. "It's right over there, then. That white Taurus."

Zechs stopped walking.

"You mock me," he whispered, and Wufei appeared at his side, but he didn't have the strength to hit him or even raise his voice, simply gazed across the hangar at where the white Taurus was standing, looking like new, and he remembered when Noin had saved him from himself. Both times, she had stood in his way and prevented him from doing something he would regret.

And yet, when it really mattered, he still hadn't been able to save her.

"I simply thought," Wufei said, the dark Chinese eyes unreadable, "that her spirit would calm you." He looked away, across the hangar. "If you wish, I will give you a regular mobile suit."

Zechs forced himself to look up at the other pilot, followed Wufei's gaze to the tall, silent Gundam that stood sentinel over the gathered mobile suits and the mechanics running to and fro, doing final flight system checks, to the pilots who stood patiently, waiting to enter the cockpits. Shenlong's face, he mused, was very calm.

I simply thought that her spirit would calm you.

"Does Shenlong calm you?" Zechs wondered, not quite sure if he was allowed to ask the question, but Wufei just smiled.

"Yes," he said. "She does."

It was all right, then. "I understand," Zechs said quietly. "I will pilot the white Taurus." He reached out uncertainly and touched Wufei on the shoulder, just a brief touch, the reminder that they were both still human, still warm and breathing and alive. I understand.

Wufei smiled again, then straightened, the commander once more. Zechs let his hand drop. "Heero Yuy is at Sparta," Wufei said. "I have great faith in his abilities, as does General Une, but the Liberation Forces have thrown pretty much everything they have into this attack, and he's requested reinforcements. We are the reinforcements."

"Sparta's the Combat Command base," Zechs said, frowning. "Unless Une's done some sort of massive arms reduction since I left, shouldn't there be plenty of mobile suits there?"

"Mobile suits, yes." Wufei looked grim. "But where there are mobile suits, there might not always be pilots."

The Asian man behind him said, "We had enough pilots until the newspapers started making a big deal out of the Gundam crisis and Winner's trial, and many of our pilots were either transferred to other command bases...or they quit."

Zechs gritted his teeth. "Quit."

"You two haven't met, I presume. My wingman for this campaign," Wufei said, jerking a thumb at the man, sounding almost nonchalant as he said the word campaign. "Lieutenant Jeong Hye Sung, formerly 11th Taurus flight commander."

Zechs frowned. "You look familiar."

"I was your temporary executive officer for two weeks when you first arrived at Sparta, sir," Jeong replied promptly. "That was before they snatched some personnelist and moved me back to the squadron. And then you moved your office to Geneva shortly after that."

No wonder. He remembered Jeong now, a shy-seeming, soft-spoken man who had been almost like a ghost at times around the building - very different from the self-confident pilot standing before him. Perhaps his first impression had been mistaken. He had always had a problem with misjudging people.

"After the riots, Une had to shift personnel to Kashmir," Wufei said. "And also to Forteleza, both of which are controlled by Sally now." He sounded pained as he spoke her name.

Jeong seemed to sense Wufei's discomfort, because he stepped in, nodding at Zechs. "Po's forces also attacked Chi Lai Command Base in China and MacDonnell down in Australia, but she either miscalculated or was just feinting, because we managed to turn her back. That was yesterday."

"Still," Zechs began, and Wufei nodded.

"Yes. Still, that is not enough. I am not exactly sure what Sally wants, but my guess is that she is after those mobile suits at Sparta in order to launch some kind of grand invasion."

Zechs shook his head. "How can she do this? How can she start another war? Doesn't she realize what Treize died for?"

"She doesn't believe in Treize," Wufei said quietly. "I hate to say it, but perhaps Treize's death was not enough."

"I don't want to believe that," Zechs said. Wufei crossed his arms across his chest.

"Hopefully, I'm wrong."

"Commander Chang?"

"Are we green?" Wufei asked, as the tech came running up, handing him a stack of papers, which Wufei handed off to Jeong. The Korean man flipped through them, then gave a curt nod.

"Looks good."

"As far as our checks permit," the tech said, "all craft are functional and ready for takeoff. We didn't have time to do as thorough of checks as we would have liked, though."

"That's fine," Wufei said, signing the papers and handing them back. "I trust you. Jeong, sound the crew show call. All pilots to aircraft."

The tech disappeared, as did Jeong, and Zechs held out his hand. "I will follow your lead, Chang Wufei. Good luck."

Wufei hesitated a moment, then took his outstretched hand, shook it firmly. "When we get there," he said, "go save your sister. We can take care of the rest...our mission is for her."

The siren began sounding through the hangar, and Zechs heard the running of feet, pilots calling to each other, ingress hatches opening with a hiss and engines starting up. "I won't get in your way," Zechs said. "Do what you have to."

The sun was already above the horizon as the transports took to the skies, and Zechs sat at the controls of the white Tarurus inside the shuttle, staring at his hands, running his fingers along the console, the stick and the scope screen and the guns and wondering where Noin had touched them last. Here her finger had keyed in the code for engine run, he mused, and here was where she had controlled the mobile suit's arms, holding him back when he had wanted to run from her, and here...here she had had her finger on the trigger, ready to use it, just as he had been ready to kill her.

And yet he couldn't kill her, in the end.

He had cursed himself for that. His heart was weak, he had realized, and he could not imagine why it was so.

Because humankind is weak...you and I are the weak!

Heero Yuy was at Sparta. Heero Yuy was holding Sally's forces back...Heero Yuy was protecting his sister. Heero Yuy, in the end, had understood what he had not, and Heero Yuy had saved him. Heero was always saving everyone when no one else could.

He wondered if the Wing Zero pilot understood exactly who he was, what he symbolized to people. Treize had been a great symbol, but he had been the symbol of a dying age. Relena, his sister, was the symbol of the new age. But Heero somehow surpassed all that, had become the symbol of everything dear and important to the human race.

In the end, it had always been about Heero.

And Noin had understood that when he could not.

I simply thought her spirit would calm you.

There were no thoughts of revenge anymore, no desperate need to avenge her death and to make it mean something, because he realized now that she had died at the controls of a mobile suit, doing what she loved most - her duty. It had always been about her duty, and he had admired that in her.

Through it all, she had loved him.

He wondered who Wufei's ghost was, the woman that haunted the Shenlong pilot's past. Whose memory drove the Gundam that he flew? Whose voice did Wufei hear when the lights were off and there was no one there to remind him that he was still human?

They were chasing the dawn, both of them, flying forward into the rays of a sun they could never catch, a sun that rose and hung in the sky and then set as they futilely pushed their crafts to the limit, because they were only men and their Gundams were only machines, and they could never be as fast as the stars. Noin had understood that, and he was sure that Wufei's ghost lady had as well.

We're all the same, he thought ruefully. Pilots...chasing something we can't catch, living for it, dying for it.

"Zechs."

He jumped a bit at the voice in his ear, looked down and realized it was a private channel. "Chang?"

The scope pinged, and he adjusted the distance, saw the first enemy dots appear on the screen, saw the preliminary data readouts for Sparta Command Base scroll across the page. There were the Liberation Forces...there were the Preventers, outnumbered...Wing Zero...Epyon.

Heavyarms?

"Sally has Heavyarms?" he said incredulously.

"What you're fighting for today..." Wufei said, then stopped, as if looking for the words. "What these men and women are going to die for today. It's not about honor anymore, it's not about justice. I wish it still was."

"Was it ever?" Zechs said, and Wufei laughed ruefully.

"Today I'm just fighting for the world to have a chance to survive. For people - common people - to have the right to be happy." He stopped again. His voice was thick when he continued. "I don't want anyone else to have to die because of Treize."

The list of names. "Yes," he said softly. "99,822 people was enough."

"Then," Wufei said, "forgive me."

The comm clicked off.

"Chang?" he demanded. "Chang? Answer me! Dammit, Chang Wufei!"

The scope buzzed and he realized that there was an extra green dot in the midst of the formation of Preventers shuttles, a dot that hadn't been there just a moment ago, a dot that was moving almost too rapidly for his scope to follow, and with a muffled cry he activated the Taurus' power systems, propelled himself forward.

"Colonel Peacecraft! It's not time for the drop yet, Colonel!"

The doors to the shuttle burst open at the Taurus' command, and he launched the beautiful white machine into the air, saw the blue glow ahead that were the engines of Shenlong Gundam, saw even in front of that the red and orange flashes of battle, the explosions that tore at his heart even though he could not hear them in the airtight seal of the cockpit.

The Greek ocean to his right was blue and gold in the light of the newborn sun. A stray shot zinged past his window, like the beating of a mosquito's wings.

"Chang Wufei!" he shouted, and pounded at the controls because once again, the Taurus was too slow.

"Colonel Peacecraft!" Jeong's voice demanded over the comm, and he closed his eyes.

"I'm sorry," he said softly. And switched it off.

Wufei would not respond, anyway, and there was no point in keeping it on just to hear commands that he would not obey, because in the end, he'd promised to obey Wufei, and Wufei was trying to kill himself for nothing.

He imagined Noin's voice, calling him.

There was no Zero system on this mobile suit, but he closed his eyes, imagined the warm yellow glow surrounding him, imagined seeing the thousands of enemy targets spin and collide and then condense into one, just one giant enemy that he had to fight, imagined opening his eyes again and being flooded with a vision so clear it was almost like being God.

Zechs.

There was Otto and the beautiful and terrible explosion when he had sacrificed himself in Tallgeese to attain the Cinq Kingdom.

There was Treize, who he hadn't even seen die, had pretended that he hadn't cared, had only heard his last words over the crackle of radio static, calm and accepting . Zechs, I'll go ahead of you.

There was Dorothy, the girl who had never known him become the woman he couldn't know, and he only had realized too late that she loved him and that he had lost a friend because they had both been selfish.

And there was Noin.

His hand twitched on the stick, and he swung the Taurus into a tight loop, eyes still closed, knowing that if he was as good a pilot as he thought he was, he would be able to somehow survive this, and if he died, then it was fate.

He felt the Taurus shudder as it was hit. The Taurus spun faster and faster, and everything was a roaring in his ears, and he gasped for air, feeling his g-suit compress as the pressure became too great. Saw the thousands of targets again, reaching out, trying to feel with his mind the blasts coming toward him, trying to-

You and I are the weak!

Heero is the heart of space.

OPEN YOUR EYES, MILLIARD!

The breath was sucked out of his lungs in a long, gasping heave, and he forced his head up, forced his eyes open just as something in front of him exploded. The Taurus shrieked like a dying thing through the resulting debris cloud, and looming up in front of him on the horizon was Sparta Command Base, all on fire, and then there was Shenlong Gundam.

"Chang Wufei!" he cried again, slapping on the comm, and then a voice.

"...Oniisama?"

She swooped down upon him, tail whip trailing behind her like the devil's own fiery punishment, and he spun the Taurus to one side as Epyon arced to the other. They screamed past each other, almost touching, twin birds of prey, and at the last moment he turned and seized Epyon's right arm with the Taurus' hand, and the black Gundam twisted, but did not struggle.

"Oniisama," she said. "You came."

 
Scene VI: Dance of the Cybernetic Gods

 
He must have slept, somewhere in those long, desperate hours trying to track down Aidoru, for eventually even the stimulants failed and the knowledge that he was not part of the golden flow of ones and zeros around him, that he was merely a mortal human being, easily broken...all that was trickling away. He was no longer Quatre Raberba Winner, prince of the Arabian colony, Gundam pilot, friend and brother. His consciousness knew nothing except the silent surging of the machine through which his lifeblood pulsed.

He was the machine.

If he slept, he dreamt of the net, the world that was laced with information that could turn to poison and characters who could never be trusted, traps that could fry a mind, pitfalls designed to take out the unwary. The soft hum of the Zero had been the only constant; it lulled him whenever he felt too frustrated by the various knots that almost entangled him time and time again. He didn't know this, of course. How could he, when he was invincible?

The people of the net were hostile, but they were hostile to most, and he knew it was nothing personal. That was a pleasure, a nearly addicting drug as he realized that there was such a thing as anonymity and that he was rated on his own skills, rather than who he was.

He was dangerously close to becoming a drowner, he knew...someone who went under the net and never emerged, forgetting that there was something more outside of the information and lights. The fail safes on his unit had been removed, and he realized that it was unlikely that the techs would pull him up before the crisis was over.

Quatre was starting not to care...but forgetting to care would be his downfall.

From the moment he'd entered, pursing the hottest hacker perhaps in the history of hackers, he knew that the odds were against him. He was untried and didn't know the laws of this land, and even though he was using the Zero, the machine could easily turn around and suck him under and drive him insane... though his sanity now, perhaps, was all a state of mind.

He'd been weaving through holes and layers within an hour, trying to be unobtrusive. After his first encounter in the entry hole, where they had stared at him oddly, he wondered if he was doing something wrong, to make it clear that he was a newbie.

Then one of them had asked what his fixation with Winner was.

"Huh?"

"Why are you using Winner's form?" The stranger, who resembled a little girl with a man's deep voice, leaned forward curiously.

"I'm..." Quatre had been trying to find information, not wanting a deep discussion on forms. He hadn't realized that he hadn't selected a new form, like most people did unconsciously - apparently his mind was projecting his own body, instead of something he wanted to be, in a fantasy. Maybe that was the greatest fantasy of all - the chance to be himself.

"You really are new, huh? I bet you didn't even consciously select your avatar... what's your name?"

He opened his mouth, about to say I am Quatre Raberba Winner, and who are you? before remembering the rules were different here. "Prince. Call me Prince." He wasn't sure where the name came from, but for some reason, it seemed right - an impersonal name that struck something at his core, a secret he wasn't willing to tell the real world, but was fine to speak among strangers.

The girl had laughed. The man's voice coming from the little girl's pouty lips was unnerving, but Quatre paid it no mind. "Clever. It's a lot to live up to," she had warned. "Winner's definitely a prince, though." He hadn't argued, knowing that his money and power made many feel that way.

He hadn't found out anything of value from them. Aidoru was rocking the net world, shaking it each time he reconfigured it. Quatre had caught on quickly that Aidoru's tactics were no mere cat-and-mouse game; no, the master hacker was after one thing only: destruction. Aidoru was after L3's defense system, and Quatre's fixes were Aidoru's playthings.

It made traveling interesting, to say the least.

Zero made things go more swiftly. Zero seemed to be able to pierce through the facades and layers of tricks, letting him see through to the heart of the net...

...and there was nothing there.

The one thing that kept him from forgetting the real world was knowing, somehow, deep in the part of him that remained human, that this false one was built entirely on fantasy.

She was close. It was a taste of heaven, knowing that it was less than four hours now, the moment which her whole life had been moving towards. In four hours, all the pain of groveling under another person's feet, waiting for her turn to shine - the secrecy, the constant fear of being discovered in those early days - all that would end. It had been the world against Aidoru, and Aidoru would prove that she was invincible.

She didn't have much time to think, but for the most part, she did not have to. Most of what she was doing was trying to unbraid the strands of L3's security system. It was a long and meticulous process, and even she had nearly been tangled a few times in the numerous safe guards that had been created to prevent a hacker from pulling them down. Perhaps ten or twenty of the world's top hackers could have made it as far as she had; perhaps five of them could even follow her into the webs she had woven around herself and understand her movements. But there were none who could complete the task. Except her.

The Nesting Place was perhaps the most dangerous hole that had ever been made. It was ancient, created back when the net was just turning into VR, before people realized the differences in data content and how much the human brain had been able to handle. For them, closer had been better. Always build it closer to the pure information flow, and you'd have more control.

In theory, that was true. The closer to the source, the more control over the information and the easier it would be to access. The Nesting Place rested at the key junction of several supercomputers, where they interfaced under high-security measures. It was a highly illegal hole, but had been created so long ago that destroying it would have been counterproductive, as systems had been build on top of it. Unlike many holes, the Nesting Place didn't look that different from the outside. No one dared to try to put their personality here, so all it resembled was lights and cables of information, dancing around a space which was barely big enough to move in.

To her, it was like swimming through a thick liquid, like a drug hit that sent one soaring to the utmost high. To most computers, it existed as a part of the core system. To those in the know, it existed as a dangerous temptation, a chance to take things apart and gain control at the same time.

Almost all truly great hackers eventually gave into the desire and visited it at least once...and only about half of them returned. Those that did never went again, becoming afraid of what they had found there.

You shouldn't touch the sun, they said. Man wasn't meant to do some things, and that was one of them.

She didn't believe them. Man was master over the machines they had created, and while she loved and respected their power, she knew that in the end, it was all about who was the strongest, the best.

Man was the master, and she was man's idol.

To her, the defenses for L3 looked like a complex braid, one which had to be carefully untangled piece by piece. Thousands of delicate threads, full of information and protection codes, were bundled into tight clusters, and hummed into life before her sight. It was a beautiful, living thing, changing a bit whenever L3's sensors made it adjust, and she almost regretted destroying it.

Almost. People like her were not made to create.

Sally had asked that the she pull the defenses down at least an hour before the missiles were launched. She fully intended to made sure she timed it exactly, to show exactly what Aidoru was capable of. Sally was one of the few human beings in this world who understand a little of what it meant to be the underdog, of working your way from the bottom to the top. She was not like Kushrenada or Peacecraft, born to power. She was not like the Gundam pilots, given power as if it were a toy. Sally Po was intelligent and ruthless and knew how to destroy.

But she wondered how long even Sally Po would be useful to her. In the end, there was only Aidoru.

The information flow was freeform around her, and though there was no true "here" nor "there" in the net, she still felt stretched out, bobbing up and down in the waves the data rivers created. It gave her an illusion of defenselessness, she knew. Every hour or so, she would pause in her work, to make sure that no one was coming after her, that there were no silent hackers sneaking up behind and intending to pull the plug. She didn't trust them...but they knew better than to get in her way, not after she'd fried six of their best.

No one was going to tangle with her.

Her fingers tugged on each braid patiently, working slowly to make sure that the work would be thorough and unfixable. The system was layered, a complex mix-mash of old and new, and utterly unique. Each supercomputer was like that, really, but this was the biggest one she had ever tried taking down. Some of the braids were hidden by other machines, other computers. The security guards were good, and once she had even been thrown out of the net when she'd made a near-fatal mistake and triggered an alarm.

It took three hours to recover from that, and she'd been lucky she hadn't been fried. The people who had built this system were serious, and meant to take out any would-be intruders with their defenses.

By now the net world was well-aware of what she was doing, and it had been amusing that none of them had dared to stop her, not even with the ripples her gradual destruction was causing. She'd had to shift several of the systems to the side when they got in her way, and she knew the reverberations had probably triggered a cascade collapse in some of the lesser machines attached to the net. Those hackers who were smart and cautious would be gone by now. The ones who were dumb and reckless would stay and would never know what hit them. The ones who were smart and reckless - hell, they made their own rules. She wondered how many of them would stay, too.

Her computer had alerted her, two days ago, of an intrusion from the Preventer's base, and then a second, but it seemed that whoever the agents that had been sent were not going to be able to find her in time. She laughed inwardly at the idea. She knew what Une had to work with, and none of the hackers were anywhere near her level. The two best had already been killed by Masumune.

L3's defense system was putty in her hands, sticky like strands from the yolk of a raw egg, dripping into pools of liquid data, disappearing with plops that slivered in her enhanced vision like fireworks. A few more yards and then there would be no more braid, simply ribbon of phosphorescent silver strands winding their way into the distance, and as soon as the hour arrived, she'd cut through them all. Without any system to support them, the threads would tighten, quiver, shatter like broken glass, and L3's defenses would fall.

And no one would be able to put it back together.

He wasn't sure exactly when and where he first heard of the Nesting Place. Perhaps Zero, accessing other systems on his subconscious commands, tapped into something he wasn't aware of, but as soon as he thought on it, he realized that was where Aidoru had to be.

Quatre didn't consider himself particularly proud, but as he thought on the situation, he realized with a sinking heart exactly what Une had asked him to do. She had asked him to go into a battlefield practically unarmed against an opponent who was almost guaranteed to kill him.

She wanted him to be a diversion.

He didn't like the idea. He never did anything just to die.

He wondered if the fighting was over, and if he was wasting his time. He wondered if Sally had already killed the rest of his friends, or if she had been killed herself. He wondered a lot of things...but wondering was getting him nowhere. At least he could be certain the Preventers headquarters was still intact, because if Sally had gotten to it, he would not be here wading through crumbling strands of data. He would be dead, and so would the net.

It was dying anyway, he realized as he pushed forward. With the Zero's enhanced visuals, he could see that the ancient architecture that held the data walls in place were crumbling, and that level of the golden "water" he waded through had risen steadily until it was now thigh-high, and still rising. No matter who won this war, it would be a long time before the information world would be safe to use for any hacker of any level.

He had a decision to make - should he chance it, a direct confrontation with a hacker who was rumored to be perhaps the best ever? Or should he find an alternative route? He had never been particularly good at subterfuge, but like most pilots, he knew that sometimes a knife in someone's back solved matters more quickly than the direct route.

Or maybe...they could negotiate.

He was sick of the killing.

He didn't know anything about Aidoru, and had no clue what kind of person he was. Maybe he had joined Sally because he genuinely believed that Sally was right and the World Nation was wrong. Maybe he had beliefs and killed only because he had to. Maybe.

Quatre didn't believe it. From the utter ruthlessness Aidoru had shown when it came to abusing his fellow netphiles, Quatre's instincts told him that the hacker was egotistical, and in it for something that was beyond ideals and causes. Aidoru was most likely Sally's ally, not comrade. Each of them was using the other, and most likely knew that was the case.

It seemed like his only option would be a direct confrontation.

The Zero seemed to agree, and Quatre found himself drifting again, falling into a gold glow that was familiar and warm, and trying to fight off fatigue and heart-sickness, because he knew that if he gave into his emotions, the Zero would overwhelm him, like that time. He forced himself not to think of Trowa, probably dead now, or Heero and Wufei and Duo or...

It was getting hard to think, but there was no choice.

Think of the mission. Yes, that was what they had always done, right? Mission accepted, mission complete, like Heero was so fond of saying. Don't fail, others are depending on you. It's okay if you get soiled in blood, because that way the ones you love won't have to know the same pain...

Trowa's face, stained in blood as he was killed by Sally. Trowa's face, as he smiled and told him that it was all right to hate them, that they deserved to be destroyed. Trowa, dying again, this time by Duo's hand.

This isn't real. I'm after a person, a human, a murderer trying to destroy a colony...

Haven't you already done that?

Yes, yes...

What was the feeling like, the power?

It's not about power...

He was drifting again, too tired to fight against the Zero's pull. He wanted to see the truth. He wanted to show everyone that they were wrong, that he was right, to show the world that sorrow should be spared from those who you loved...

Duo. Heero. Wufei. His sisters. Trowa, dead now, killed by Sally...

He hated her.

He hated the one whom he had once called a friend, whom he had once trusted. She had killed Trowa, killed his best friend, for an ideal...

But you would have done the same, had your positions been reversed.

Right?

His fatigued mind recognized the turmoil, recognized the golden glow to his memories as he thought on what had been, what should not have been, and the possibilities. It was too much, to really believe in anything, but right now, he had to believe in something, and there was nothing left to believe in, except...

His own face, looking back at him.

When it came down to it, he was all alone.

But others trust me.

Une. His sisters. His comrades. Trowa, dead now...

No. Trowa isn't dead until I see his body.

And then he shattered into a million pieces, the golden light around him flaring dangerously. "You won't beat me," he swore, and he wasn't sure if he was talking to the Zero or to Aidoru. Either way, he had won, because he had finally sunk down to the level where the Nesting Place was hidden. All that he needed to do was take the final step...

...and enter.

She was nearly there when the alerts she had placed around The Nesting Place triggered. The alarms went off, sounding like the base's klaxons, and she turned, curious and ready. The work she'd been doing had been of the most tedious sort, and she was almost looking forward to frying the intruder. It would be a welcome break from the meticulous work of separating the strands, one at a time.

Turning her head, she chose a guise, a silvery body that resembled the fluid constructions she'd often seen as a youngster. The headset rested on her eyes, lights flashing dangerously, and she knew she would resemble some kind of cyber artwork that most people would consider ideal for the hacker who was reshaping the world.

It was rather a pity no one knew who she really was. This kind of artistry almost demanded to be signed.

The Nesting Place opened like a great shell, ripples of metallic data flow dripping, lava-like, down into the core, pooling at her feet. She was impressed despite herself. Few hackers had been able to find this place near the core systems. Who was this, she wondered, who could make his way here unchallenged? Was it Masamune?

The intruder's footsteps echoed oddly through the hole, and she blinked as she recognized his face. The user's image was that of the famous Quatre Raberba Winner.

She would wager it really was him. She knew how Une's mind worked. "Hello, Winner," she said, smiling slightly. "Welcome to my parlor." Said the spider to the fly, she thought, and surpressed the urge to laugh.

He blinked a bit in surprise. "Are... are you Aidoru?" he asked, and his pleasant voice was slightly hesitant.

"Who else would be here?" she asked, turning her head slightly as she returned to the task of unbraiding the security system. "What do you want?"

"I'm here to stop you," he said.

"You can try," she challenged. "But you won't succeed."

"Why are you doing this?" he asked. There was no accusation in his voice, just fatigue of a man who had seen too much and was prepared to expect anything, no matter how unpleasant.

"Because I can," she replied. "Do yourself a favor, pretty boy, and get the hell out of here." She was in a generous mood, and beginning a cyber battle here would result in nothing but destruction of the system she was so carefully arranging to dance to her command.

"No. Aidoru, if you take that system out, millions of people will die."

She sniffed. She really didn't care what happened on L3. "So?"

His eyes flashed, and she realized that she had finally pushed him into the corner she wanted. "I'm going to stop you," he announced, and suddenly a string of code was flying from him, zipping past her head, designed to throw her out of the net.

She threw up a defense and smiled at him as his code hit her shields and shattered. Pity. Waste of a complex piece of work. "I don't think so, Winner. I've never lost."

"You've never faced a Gundam Pilot before," he returned, and suddenly more codes were flying, as he attempted to get her system to disengage.

"So what?" She laughed, evading his throw again. It might be fun, this bit of child's play. "You may be the best at piloting a machine, but in here, I'm the god."

He stared back at her, blue eyes steady, burning, unafraid. "No human is a god," he said, and then the battle begin.

 
Scene VII: Hymn to the Fallen

 
It did not take Heero much to admit to himself and the rest of the world that they were badly outnumbered. It wasn't that he had any problem in asking for help, but it was simply that he would be asking for help that the Preventers could not give.

They had mobile suits, but they had no pilots. There were hangars and hangars of Tauruses at Sparta, newly manufactured from before the end of the last war, all sparkling and never piloted, waiting to be taken up in the air for the first time. The problem was that the World Nation had forbidden the Preventers to train pilots for these craft, because it had been their belief that combat air and spacecraft were no longer needed. And now Sally was after those same mobile suits that somehow, through all of the World Nation's insistence that war was outdated, had never been scheduled for destruction and the scrap pile, but had just been sitting there for two years.

Now, the World Nation was getting its stupidity thrown back in its face, but that was no comfort to anyone.

The odds had evened out a little with the arrival of Epyon, but as good a pilot as Hilde was, she was no Duo or Zechs, and even if Duo or Zechs had been here, it would have made little difference, because Sally's forces were too many. This isn't going to be pretty, Hilde had said, and as the Liberation Forces had struck with all the firepower, they had, he had realized the truth of her words.

Almost one-fifth of his force had been wiped out in the first wave of Sally's assault. The Preventers had regrouped and gotten into some semblance of formation, but three more transport craft had appeared over the horizon, and he had wondered exactly how many forces Sally had up her sleeve, and then wondered why exactly she needed the Sparta mobile suits anyway, if she had so many available already.

The answer was simply that this was war, and more equaled better, and if nothing else, Sally had been fighting wars all of her life one way or the other, and she knew how things worked as well as the next person. If the enemy had it, you wanted it.

He had wondered if Sally would try to speak directly with him, but she had never attempted to open a channel. It was understandable...they'd never been very close during the war, and she would probably realize that nothing she could say would sway him. Still, he would have appreciated at least a gesture from her, to acknowledge her opponent.

After another sixteen of the Preventers Tauruses had gone down in flames and the Liberation Forces had set two more buildings on fire, Heero had decided it was time to call for those reinforcements they hadn't got.

He hadn't been surprised to get Une herself on the comm when he had radioed Geneva requesting backup. The expression on the general's face hadn't been pretty.

"We can't afford it, Heero! You already know that!"

"You either send backup," Heero said, "or we die here. Your choice, Une."

Her face was like a thundercloud, and if looks could kill, he would have been dead several times over. He knew she was not really angry at him. She was under attack from all sides, from the World Nation, from Sally, from the Preventers, her own organization. It was a lot for one woman to take, but if any woman could do it, it was Une.

"I can't promise anything," Une warned him. "You're asking for the impossible here."

He really did not feel like dying at Sparta, so he pulled the last card that he had. "Chang Wufei is still at Geneva," he said. "Send him."

They stared at each other, the Gundam pilot and the general. The Zero system fed numbers into his brain. Two more mobile suits down. Combat Operations Center 50% damaged. Three enemy fighters at his back. Aim beam cannon, fire, take out two suits. Let third suit crash into falling debris.

"Marauder leader! Sir, we've lost the flightline operations center!"

And finally, Une's lips quirked in a sort of half-snarl, half-smile.

"I'll see what I can do."

"You do that," Heero said, pulling Wing Zero into a dive as two Liberation fighters came out of nowhere, wove through the resulting crossfire as Epyon shot them off his back.

"How are you doing, Eypon?"

Hilde's face appeared on the screen. "We're fine," she said, but Heero could see the strain in her face and her movements, and behind her at the secondary fire controls, Relena didn't seem to be doing much better. He had been surprised at how quickly she'd picked up the art of targeting, and perhaps that was another sign that combat skills were more genetic than people liked to think.

He wished Zechs was here, but Zechs was injured and was probably better off in the Preventers hospital. He wondered what would happen if the two of them chanced to meet before this conflict was over, and raised one hand to his face, rubbing his scar.

Zechs had given him the scar, had set him free, or so he thought. And now the two of them were caught up in the great tide of world events again. If Sally managed to fire those missiles...

The Breaks would be destroyed, he knew. He wasn't sure how he felt about that; sometimes the thought would bring him almost to anguished tears, and then other times, he would feel nothing. Were the Breaks his home? Did his past and his heritage lie there, as Wufei's had lain in L5? And if so, what right did Sally, who was fighting for the freedom of her homeland, have to destroy someone else's land?

The hours crawled by and then sun crept higher up into the sky above the lapis-lazuli blue of the distant Greek ocean, and he desperately tried to keep his forces alive, tried to keep himself alive, peered into the horizon hoping for a miracle, and no one came.

"I don't think they're coming," Hilde said over the comm as Epyon dove to avoid a barrage of missiles, and he spun Wing Zero around, slapped the comm.

"Green team, come with me. We're going to initiate a ground assault!"

Heavyarms would have seen the mobile suits diving for it, and as he expected, Sally opened fire. The Taurus next to Wing Zero in formation was not quick enough, exploded. Heero gritted his teeth and opened fire back. Heavyarms sidestepped, brought up its shield. The mobile suit hangars were behind it, and he knew Sally wasn't about to let the Preventer troops push her off her territory.

What's she waiting for? he wondered. Was she trying to simply get enough men to jump in each Taurus and take off with them? Was she planning to have shuttles load them up and take them back to whatever base she was operating from - most likely Kashmir? Was she simply going to stand there till the Preventers had run out of men and ammunition, and declare Sparta her territory also?

Wing Zero's feet touched ground with a jarring thud of metal, and Heero swung the craft around as Heavyarms sought to grab his arms from behind. He swung out with the rifle, catching the other Gundam in the shoulder, but it didn't fall, simply wavered on its legs, took a brief step backward, and then reengaged.

"We'll cover you, chief!" one of the Preventers said breathlessly over the comm.

"Roger," Heero snapped back, knowing, seeing only on the red and orange monster on the viewscreens, matching her blow for blow, wanting so badly to open the comm channel and say Sally, Sally are you there? It's me. Heero Yuy, but knowing that it would make not one whit of difference, because he was the enemy now.

He'd fought in Heavyarms before, knew exactly how the machinery worked, knew how the cannon felt when it fired, but he was not Sally. It was the pilot that made the Gundam, not the Gundam itself, and though he knew all the secrets of hand-to-hand combat in Heavyarms, it did not matter. He could still lose.

Trowa couldn't kill her, and now Trowa was dead. Could he kill her? He had told Duo that he might have to, if it came down to it...but it was not like killing Treize, or even Zechs. Treize or Zechs had always been the enemy, at least in name. Sally he had known, he had believed in. She had saved them when no one else would give them a second chance, and she had helped bring them to victory.

Sally thought that the World Nation was just another Federation. Sally didn't believe in Treize. Even he, a failed soldier and child of the war, believed in Treize...believed that Treize had died so that the world could be a better place. That was why he had wanted to survive, at the end, as the Libra fell to earth and he could have fallen with it, too.

Sylvia Noventa had called him a coward.

"Marauder Leader! We're picking up a-"

"It's a Gundam!" shrieked someone, and his eyes widened as the scope pinged. Four shuttles...and Shenlong Gundam?

"Wufei," he whispered, just as Hilde snapped over the comm, "It's Shenlong. He's here."

He swung away from Sally, leapt into the air as Heavyarms opened fire, bullets tracking toward him as he wove and spun through the buzzing cloud of shells. "Wufei?" he said, opening the channel to the other Gundam, "Wufei, are you there?"

But something wasn't quite right as he watched the blip that was Shenlong Gundam shoot towards them with an almost frightening speed. Wufei wasn't responding, and the white Taurus that emerged from the shuttle a moment later was something he thought he'd never see again, because wasn't Noin dead?

"What the hell is going on?" he snarled, and he heard Hilde gasp, and Relena's startled voice.

"Oniisama?"

And he knew she was right. The pilot in the white mobile suit wasn't Noin. It was Zechs Merquise.

"What are you doing, Wufei?" he demanded, but the Shenlong Gundam was silent, just like Heavyarms was silent, and he could see now that Shenlong wasn't even attempting to evade the fire that surrounded it like a swarm of insects. Bullet pinged off the Gundam's hull, leaving black scars, but Shenlong kept coming, barreling through like nothing in the world mattered anymore.

Only Heavyarms.

With a cold feeling in his gut, Heero realized what Wufei was trying to do.

"Wufei! Wufei, answer me. Dammit!"

"Heero Yuy!" the comm crackled, with the familiar deep voice he knew so well, a ghost out of the past, "No time for pleasantries. We've got a suicidal pilot on our hands."

"What's going on?"

"I don't know. He thinks he can beat, Sally, maybe. He thinks he's going to kill her?"

"Damn you, Wufei," Heero snarled, folding Zero's wings into a dive, and pulled the stick back hard.

The Gundam shuddered and then he felt the crushing impact of g-forces as the plane hurled itself back up into the air, shooting straight up through the clouds like a rocket, higher and higher, and then just as he felt the craft arch its back into the stall, he threw down the stick again and Zero rolled over on itself, looped around, and the g-forces eased for a split second before they were back, and the ground was coming up at him and Shenlong was in his front viewscreens.

"Wufei!" he shouted.

Heavyarms' fire was tracking him, tracking Shenlong, tracking both of them. He saw Zechs faintly through the side screen, saw the Preventers shuttles move into dropping range and saw the doors open.

"Sir, they've got the Taurus hangars completely surrounded! We're out of ammunition and-"

Static.

"Wufei, stop!" he bellowed, just as Zechs said over the comm, "Our reinforcements aren't going to be enough for that," and then Epyon brushed past his left with a roar of afterburners and Hilde said, "What the hell is Wufei thinking?"

"Grab him!" he shouted, and Epyon stopped, dropped like a sinking stone, swooped behind Shenlong that was almost on top of them, and caught and held one leg, both Gundams twisting from the impact, spiraling through the air.

Shenlong's dragon head arched out, and Wufei fired.

"You bastard," Heero said, and suddenly he was back in the Wing Gundam, and it was not this war but the last one, and he heard Doctor J's voice in his ear, heard the scientists' voices crowded around him, knew only the sound of his heart beating in his ears that was not even a real heart, because was a killing machine even truly alive?

It is unnecessary for our weapons to have human emotions. Retrain him.

Wing Zero slammed into Shenlong with a force that threw him back against his seat, a force so hard that he cracked his head on the back of the chair and saw bright spots and stars for a moment before realizing that his right shoulder hurt like hell, and that he had probably dislocated it. But pain was nothing to him, nothing to a killer like him.

A killer like he used to be, before Wufei had saved him.

Kill him, the Zero whispered in his ear, but he ignored it as the Gundam transformed from the shape of a bird to the shape of a man, reaching out and grabbing Shenlong into a wrestler's hold. Metal strained against metal, and he heard the satisfying click of the comm, the calm voice. Too calm.

"Let me go, Heero."

Preventers mobile suits streaked past him, but Heero knew it was too late to save the Sparta base. Sally had taken control of the hangars, and her forces, firmly anchored on the ground, would annihilate the Preventers' in a heartbeat.

"Zechs!" he snapped. "Take your Preventers. Send them back to the shuttles."

Zechs did not ask why, did not question his orders. He was almost surprised to hear the former Lightning Baron's voice over the comm, ordering a retreat.

"Heero! Let me go!"

He hit visual, and Wufei's face appeared on the screens, blown up to three times its size in real life, and at this magnification, Heero could see that there was no desperation in the Chinese pilot's eyes, just a simple and heartfelt wish to end it.

End it.

"I'm not letting you go," he whispered. "Don't do this, Wufei."

"I deserve this!"

"You do not deserve this!" he shot back. "Killing yourself now won't solve a thing! We're beaten here...Sally's won!"

"If I kill her," Wufei said, "I can win the war. I can do this, Heero. Let me go!"

Are you God?

I'm not God. Just...a messenger.

"I won't let you go," he said, the words coming out thick and broken from dry lips. "Wufei...you told me...you told me I had a life left to live. That I had a cause. Even when I didn't believe in myself, you believed in me! Are you still trying to atone for your wife's death? Didn't my words to you mean anything at all?!"

The slanted eyes narrowed, but behind the anger, Heero saw grief. Shenlong struggled against him again, but he saw Epyon tighten its hold on the Gundam's legs.

"She needs to die," Wufei said quietly.

He pounded the console desperately. "The world doesn't need another Treize, Wufei!"

"I'm not trying to be Treize," Wufei said. "I'm just trying to finish what he started."

I've spent the past two years doing penance, telling her I was sorry, that I'd failed her because she died for nothing.

"He didn't die for nothing, Wufei," Heero whispered. "Treize died so that we would be able to live. He understood the meaninglessness of war...the foolishness of the human race! He died so that he could end that!"

"You don't understand-" Wufei snarled, and Heero closed his eyes, sent up a prayer, a wish, a command to the Zero system, and it responded. Wing Zero's afterburners lit, the engines powering to maximum thrust, pushing Shenlong Gundam back, back towards the shuttles.

"I understand," Heero said quietly. "I understand that you saved me from myself once. I'll save you too."

"Let me go! Heero!"

Shenlong's engines roared to life, and he felt the dragon Gundam ram against Wing Zero's restraining arms, saw Epyon in the background fighting to hold on, to pull back, heard Zechs' voice over the comm. "Heero! It's pointless...she's leaving!"

The Liberation shuttles were rising off the ground, and Heero realized that Sally hadn't even waited, had sent that many shuttles not because she had so many troops, but because the shuttles could carry loads of unmanned Tauruses. Sally was taking them back to Kashmir with her.

It was too late now.

"There'll be another time," he said to Wufei, throwing Shenlong back. Epyon let go of the Gundam's leg and swooped forward to help him brace Shenlong, and he saw Wufei sag on the screen, saw his arms go limp, and Shenlong stopped in midair.

"Don't go, Sally..."

"What are you going to do, Yuy?"

He did not remove Zero's arms from around Shenlong, keeping Wufei's image on the screen just in case the other pilot decided to do something stupid and try and go after Sally after all. "She's after L3," he said. "She won't stay at Kashmir long. She's probably got the pilots suited up and ready to go once the shuttles get in."

"I wouldn't doubt it," Zechs said, and he pushed the visual button, and one of the side screens that had held the image of Shenlong's control panel blinked, reappeared with Zechs Merquise's face on it. The former Lightning Baron looked odd with the short, cropped hair, like a shadow of his former self.

"It would be pointless to go after her at Kashmir," Heero said at last. "We've got...how many? Four shuttles here full of mobile suits?"

"Three and a half," Zechs corrected. "Part of that last shuttle was Chang and myself." He looked at Shenlong. "I doubt he's in much shape to fight."

"I can fight," Wufei said, his head bowed. "I won't be left behind."

"How's the damage to the base?" Heero said, and there was a click as Epyon routed him the feed, and the readout started scrolling across one of his console screens. It didn't look good, but there was still at least one working fuel depot.

"Here's what we're going to do. We're landing at Sparta. I don't think we can have much hope for maintenance, but we can refuel. Then we're heading for space."

"L3," Wufei said. Not a question. Heero nodded.

"And you are not going to do anything stupid again, or I'm leaving you behind."

Wufei raised his head, and Heero stared into those dark eyes, matching anger for anger, and Wufei finally smiled a small smile, though something behind it chilled him.

"I am Chinese," Wufei said. "You couldn't hope to understand her. Not at all."

"I know," Heero replied. "But even though I don't understand her, nor do I know her now, I know you and I'd like to think I understand you, somewhat. I told you once before, that I am glad it was you that I have had the privilege to know. And I want to have that privilege for a long time to come."

He knew Epyon was hovering in the air at his side, silent, waiting, and Zechs was listening also, but strangely, it did not bother him that other people were listening to what should have by all means been a private conversation. They had the right. They all carried scars, all carried ghosts, and they all knew what it was like to be haunted and unable to let go.

"What shall I do, Heero?" Wufei said, and the tension inside of him eased. At least for the moment, the danger had passed.

"You'll stay here at Sparta with us," he said. "If you want to see Sally again. Your Gundam is repaired for space combat?"

"She's fine," Wufei murmured. "Nataku will be all right."

"But I'm not staying, Yuy."

He narrowed his eyes at the white Taurus. "What are you talking about?"

"There's something I have to do," Zechs said, and Relena said "Oniisama!" and he laughed.

"Epyon, both of you are coming with me. Unless you have any objections?"

"None here," Hilde said, sounding curious, just as Relena demanded, "What are you up to, Oniisama?"

"I'll wish you luck, Heero."

"Not till you tell me where you're going."

Zechs laughed again, a curiously lighthearted laugh that sounded almost sacrilegious in the red light and smoke of the burning buildings below and the three Gundams still locked in a twisted embrace in the air above.

"I'm going to Kashmir," he said. "Don't worry about me. Perhaps this may not work, but it's not us you should be thinking about." He leaned on the screen and caught Heero's gaze, held it. "Two years ago, we fought each other in a duel that was supposed to end all wars on this earth and restore peace to mankind. But that didn't happen. Maybe this is why. Maybe it's because you, Heero Yuy, are the true hope of mankind, and you were destined to live."

"Zechs-"

"Don't let me down, Heero. You're all we've got."

The white Taurus turned, and he saw Epyon turn and follow, knew that Relena was in there but Hilde and Zechs were there too, and she would be as safe as she could be right now. Hoped that Zechs knew what he was doing, in this battle that might be the last battle.

He slipped Wing Zero's arms away from Shenlong, and saw Wufei look up at him from the screen, but Shenlong did not attempt to follow.

"It's time," Wufei said.

His fingers tightened on the controls. "Preventers, this is Marauder Leader. We're descending to Sparta, coordinates A-five-twenty-nine, for hot pit refueling. Get in, get gas, get out. We're going to be as quick about it as possible."

"Lieutenant Jeong here," a voice responded. "Preventers forces commander. I estimate about 40 troops with me, so we shouldn't take long. What's the battle plan after refueling?"

Wing Zero shifted around him, transforming into the bird again, great wings straining against the sky, wanting to fly higher, faster, break through the clouds until all they could see was the blackness and stillness of space around them, the burning of a thousand suns.

"And then," Heero said, "we are going to the stars."

 
Scene VIII: Deus ex Machina

 
Getting - no, more like swimming - to the place to which Masumune had directed her took longer than Dorothy would have liked. It wasn't simply about just wishing herself there, like the net had been in a kinder, gentler time. But rather it was almost a battle in itself, about weaving through the layers of encryption and security Aidoru had left behind him, making sure she didn't follow any dead ends or make any mistakes that would end up with her falling into a loop, all the while knowing that the very fabric of the computer structure she wove through was about to come undone. Masumune had been vague about where The Nesting Place was, merely telling her to follow the information, and eventually she'd find it.

"Haven't you ever been there?" she'd countered.

"I'm not crazy," he told her. "There comes a point when you know exactly where to stop, if you're smart. And if I go there, I'll lose that instinct."

"What's there?" she demanded. "Aside from pure data?"

He had laughed. "You still don't understand, do you? It's power, Valkyrie, nothing but power. And the reason the net is shaking like it is because the very foundation on which it's built is being shifted at the whims of a madman."

"It's like being near the root of a tree," she mused. "You can poison the leaves, eventually, if you go about it in the right way."

"Think of it more as the source of a river. There's other sources, but the one the Nesting Place is located near is one of the oldest and strongest. It has a lot of control over the currents."

"And if Aidoru can divert something from there, it's like being upstream. Even if you build a dam down lower, there's nothing you can do without the water," Dorothy had mused. "Why haven't you tried it, if it's such a wonderful place to work from?"

"Let's stick with our water metaphor. I'm a good, strong swimmer, but even with the best equipment, I'd be swept away if I tried to swim during a tsunami. The force of the information is that intense...being able to think while being surrounded with that much stimulation is too much for most people."

"Not for me," she had replied. She had expected him to sniff, to point out that no one had done it and that as far as he knew, it couldn't be done. But he had simply fallen silent and looked at her with a considering look in his eyes.

Dorothy mused, as she took leave of him, that his silence had been more of an acknowledgement to her chances of success than any verbal platitudes would have been. She supposed that would have made her feel better about the whole ordeal if it had been any physical battle. But this was different. This was not like piloting the mobile dolls, or storming the headquarters on A007.

When she let her mind drift, for just a minute, there would always be the fireball glow of Noin's exploding mobile suit, the blank shock she felt as her own mobile suit hit the ground with Milliard's cries over the intercom.

This wasn't just for herself. It was for him, for Noin, for Relena and Catherine and Sylvia, for Une and the Preventers, all of the former enemies who she finally realized had been friends all along.

Milliard...the true battle begins here!

She had begun to swim upstream after exiting Masamune's sanctuary, trying to find the information's source. There were several places of origin and more than one supercomputer in action, but here was where she used her head and realized that the shifts would actually help her.

When the information chains began to move for what seemed like the millionth time, she braced herself, waiting for the storm to settle, and keeping an eye on where the point of origin was. Some of the chains seemed almost tied down, and if she could trace them...

It took far longer than she would have liked, and she ducked into one of the holes once to let herself rest, but she realized that she was getting closer when she saw the cords of knowledge become so thick she had to squeeze through, feeling them cut into her fake body. The violent waves that were shaking the net began to grow more intense as she pushed through until they seemed to be striking every thirty seconds or so.

She couldn't tell which way was up or down. But it didn't matter. No matter what, the Zero assured her, she was moving forward, always forward.

Finally she came to a place where it seemed there would be no passing - wires corded so that there were would be no way of getting working her way through. She hammered on them experimentally, but her pounding did not even move the massive structures, did not even make a sound. She was stuck.

When things came to a point like this, Dorothy firmly believed that a little judicious destruction could be applied. She drew the sword that her mind had given her and expertly began to hack through. The sword did make a sound - a ringing, bell-like tone that reminded her faintly of music boxes. As the first pillar-wire shattered, she felt the shards explode outward and ducked just in time, squeezing her eyes shut and feeling little pieces of data burying into her back. She wondered if she was bleeding in the outside world.

It had always been a possibility that she might die, but she had never really considered that, at the core of the virtual world, at its very heart, the information streams were powerful enough to completely wipe her mind, leaving her body intact. Everyone had heard the stories of the hackers who had plowed too deep and were now reduced to living life as vegetables.

What would her mother say if that happened? she wondered, hacking her way through another pillar, leaping out of the way as it toppled with a crack, crashing to the spot where she had just stood moments before. What would Une think? Milliard? What if...Quatre was dead already?

I am Valkyrie.

Her arms were growing tired. With every pillar she cut down, it seemed like the next one had grown some new defense mechanism, and she, the analytical part of her mind that was Dorothy Catalonia, knew what was happening. The system was detecting her as a virus, tracking her movements, gathering data to delete her from the system.

Getting thrown out while this deep would make her fears a reality...life in a nursing home, a mental institution, on life support. That was no future for her. She glared at the code fiercely, and then the Zero acted for her.

The security was good; Zero was better. Zero saw through to the core of the fiber, and seemed to slow down the information flow so she could actually make sense of it, and in turn manipulate the cords to her own bidding.

There were several places where the data flow was impenetrable now, so thick that even her enhanced visualization of the sword did nothing to help her. She bit her lip, very glad that the net at least was not conducive to the ugly visualization of sweating, and tried to think. Quatre was in there already, she was sure. Whether he was dead or alive was hard to say, but he had no idea what he was getting into there. She had no doubt that he had simply cut a straight line all the way to The Nesting Place, not bothering to test the currents or to see how the land lay. His simple naivety would someday, if not now, be his undoing. If Aidoru was anything like Masamune had said, he would be manipulating the raw data on its own, simply reaching out and grasping it with bare hands, something that even advanced net hackers called forbidden for fear of their own lives.

That was why he was called the master hacker. And if Quatre did not know that, he would be wiped out before he could utter a word of his no-doubt carefully thought out defense to bring Aidoru back to the world of good and reason.

There were some people, Dorothy firmly believed, that could not be convinced with words, no matter what you said. Quinze had been one of them. The man who killed Noin had been one of them. Sally Po was one of them. And Aidoru was one of them.

That's why I'm here, she thought wryly, and then the plan came to her, so simple in its execution, but so utterly brilliant at the same time. She stared at the data lines a little longer, enhanced vision digging deeper into the mess of lines that lay within, seeing the traps there and the massive amounts of pure energy flow that could kill her in a mere nanosecond if she was not careful of where she treaded. Yes, the plan could work.

She gauged her distance very precisely, constructed the image in her mind exactly of what she wanted. She felt the Zero system struggling to keep up with her calculations, as her brain raced through infinite possibilities, choosing some and discarding the others. It was a few nanoseconds before the Zero system registered what she was trying to accomplish - a negligible amount of time in the outside world, but here in the net, it was valuable time lost.

Do you understand? she asked it, and she felt it gathering, forming into a tight ball of roiling golden energy just behind her eyes, all of the power and all of the terror that had caused countless pilots to go mad concentrated into her mind ready to do her bidding. The rush of power was enough to drive any sane woman out of her mind, but Dorothy was no ordinary sane woman.

She was Valkyrie.

"Wish me luck, Milliard," she said, and for a moment she could almost hear his voice in her ears.

You can do it, Dorothy. We're counting on you.

She took a deep breath, raised her sword behind her head, focused, gritted her teeth, and swung.

Aidoru was strong, Quatre realized, and it wasn't till the hacker launched his first real attack that he discovered how woefully he was outmatched, even with the Zero System. He didn't know what he had expected; a blazing firestorm of power, maybe, or a total redirection of the data flows that would turn his world upside down, like in the movies. But as the currents of the Nesting Place gibbered in his ears, Aidoru simply reached out two fingers with a sardonic smile, and twisted.

Quatre cried out at the pain of it, a fiery, searing pain that he could not remember having experienced before, not in any battle - and he had been in many battles, some even to the point of death. But all those wounds had been bodily wounds. This was different, a burning brand thrust into his very brain, frying nerve endings, withering cells. He screamed.

Aidoru laughed.

"Why are you doing this?" Quatre rasped, fumbling for a handhold, anything. His legs felt like jelly, like he had been strapped into his G-suit for hours in the cockpit of his Gundam with the intense crushing pressure bearing down on them. Except, of course, there was nothing there but the flickering golden visualization of the Zero system.

"What business is that of yours?" Aidoru sneered, twisting again. Quatre saw it coming this time and tried to dodge. He failed.

As he collapsed onto the ground again, he heard the clicking of footsteps on the floor that didn't exist, a mercury-colored foot coming over to probe his side experimentally. He reached out one hand weakly to push it away...it was all he could do...

- and everything changed.

It was not Aidoru's doing. He could tell that when the foot suddenly removed itself from his line of vision, by the snarling grunt of surprise from the hacker. The floor he was lying on now was made of marble, cool and smooth and soothing to the feeling of fire creeping up his nerves. Quatre took a deep breath and sat up.

And gasped.

The surrounding visualization of The Nesting Place - pure energy, raw data pulsing by in lighted streams - had completely disappeared. Instead, the place was now a hushed sanctuary of high vaulted ceilings, fresco paintings on the walls, stained-glass windows through which he could see what looked like lightning but what was, he realized, simply the outside of The Nesting Place and the ferocious data streams still there, like mighty thunderstorms.

Quatre had the split-second thought that the place looked familiar before reality set in, and he gaped, stunned. Not only was it familiar, but he had spent most of his waking hours in this place for the last few weeks, wondering if he would emerge a dead man or a live one. He swept his eyes unbelievably over the forbidding jury stand at the far end of the hall, at the eerily empty spectator stands.

It was the Geneva Courtroom.

"You are dead, woman," Aidoru spat, and for the first time, Quatre saw the figure standing tall behind the judge's podium where President Alderman would have been, glowing with the same golden glow that pulsed around him. She was clad in a blinding net visualization - rippling armor, holding a long broadsword in both hands with ease - but he would have known her anywhere, even without the golden aura of the Zero system surrounding her. She looked like a goddess.

"Dorothy?" he whispered.

"Let me make one thing clear, Aidoru," Dorothy Catalonia said, a sneer twisting her beautiful Valkyrie's face. "I'm not here for Winner, and I'm definitely not in this for the World Nation. I don't give a damn whether either of them lives or dies. That's not my problem."

Quatre craned his aching neck, searching for a trace of emotion on Aidoru's previously volatile face, but Dorothy's statement seemed to have wiped every trace of feeling from the hacker's expression. "Then why are you here?" he said, flatly.

Dorothy's mouth quirked in a small smile again. "Because," she said. "Because I need to know that I am better than you."

Her attack was a whirlwind, the broadsword moving like lightning, so much faster than even Quatre's Zero-system enhanced eyes could follow. He rolled out of the way as she leapt from the stage, flung the weapon down, cut into Aidoru's shoulder. The cybernetic master howled. The sound of the sword moving through digitally rendered flesh was a high-pitched splintering, tearing sound, like screaming.

The only thing Quatre could think of as he dragged himself across the marble floor, away from the combatants, was How did she get so good?

It was oddly humbling. He had never been arrogant, but he had accepted that he had been one of the better pilots in terms of intelligence. Heero and Duo had more raw skill, but Quatre Raberba Winner was still, in all of their minds, the de facto leader. Or at least, had been two years ago. His mind dredged up memories of that uncomfortable meeting at the base with all five of them, and he realized that things had indeed changed.

Now, Wufei was the leader, and he was just a man besieged by his own successes, and Dorothy Catalonia was showing him the truth of that.

He gripped one of the side rails, trying to pull himself to his feet, but he couldn't feel his legs. Were they broken in the real world? he wondered. If he woke up in the chair after this was over, would he even still have the use of his legs? Petty things to worry about at a time like this, but it would have been comforting to know.

The Valkyrie sword shrieked again, and Aidoru's grunt echoed through the high ceiling. Quatre raised his eyes to the stained-glass windows, seeing the light flashing there, and that was when he realized what Dorothy had actually done.

This courtoom was not merely another visualization, a false "reality," of The Nesting Place. Instead, Dorothy had taken the data lines, shoved them out of the way, and constructed, in essence, a Hole within a Hole, a blank space within the tightly entwined data lines. Outside the windows, energy rushed ferociously on in waves of electric power, but inside here nothing could touch them.

The idea was brilliantly stunning and frightening at the same time. Here, Aidoru could not keep manipulating data to his will, because there were no active data lines inside the Hole. At the same time, Quatre did not know how much Aidoru had already programmed the outside data. If the Nesting Place was about to self-destruct, it would take this Hole with it.

He had no doubt that Aidoru already knew that. Having no data in here to manipulate would prevent the hacker from attacking Dorothy like he had attacked Quatre, but he had no doubt that it was only a minor setback.

His legs trembled as he clutched the railing with all his might, willing them to move, to twitch, to do something. Feeling was starting to come back into his left leg, and he relaxed it a bit, letting the Zero system to speed up the process, casting an anxious eye over Dorothy, who was now standing frozen on the marble floor of this strange duel arena, facing the master hacker with her sword out in front of her. She was holding it like a fencer, Quatre realized. He wondered how much the sword actually weighed, if it was really just a fencing foil in disguise.

The fact that there were no data lines here was apparently confusing Quatre's version of the Zero system, and it gibbered futilely at him. Dorothy had thought ahead and brought a sword, but he had thought to beat Aidoru with the hacker's own code. But the air was empty here, empty, crisp, pure...and useless.

He felt frustration creeping in, forced himself to relax and take several deep breaths, eyes fixed on the motionless combatants in the center of the arena, hearing Instructor H's voice in his mind.

In battle, you are as calm as the center of the earth, as brilliant as the sun. The breath of Allah is your voice, and the strength of your fathers, your weapon.

Calm as the center of the earth.

He had no doubt Dorothy had a plan, as he straightened and let go of the railing warily. His legs seemed to hold. But the problem was knowing what that plan was, or even if she was willing to tell him. He thought back to their fencing-foil duel in the bowels of the Libra during the war, and the wrath and rage in her eyes. Dorothy was definitely capable of defeating an ordinary mortal by herself, but against Aidoru, it might not be enough.

Dorothy, he called, reaching out through the Zero system, knowing that even here, it could work just like a regular mobile suit comm device, but he had no idea if she could hear him. Was she even listening? The sword twitched above her head, slightly, just slightly, and Aidoru smiled. Quatre knew what he was thinking: that Dorothy was getting tired, that her arms were bowed down with the strain of holding the sword. But Quatre knew differently. The expression on Dorothy's face was the one she wore when she was about to do something dangerous, and the twitch of the sword was a test of the air.

Oh yes, Dorothy had a plan.

Dorothy! he snapped. What are you doing?

"You can't beat me," Aidoru smirked.

Dorothy smiled unpleasantly, raising her eyes above Aidoru's head, and acknowledging Quatre with her eyes for the first time. I have a plan. Are you sure you want to know? she said, and the Zero system trembled.

He stood with his hands loose beside him, feet in en-guard position, feeling the invisible weight of a fencing foil in his hands. Fencing partners, he replied, and felt her smile. Outside, the Nesting Place roiled and raged against the thing that had been forced into its midst, and the Valkyrie sword sparkled with the lights of millions of data streams all racing together, closer and closer.

"Watch out, Aidoru," she said. "This is Valkyrie's revenge."

 
Scene IX: The Last Electrical Storm

 
There were explosions on the scope even before they were fully into L1's orbiting radius. Duo was the first to notice and he didn't say much, but Helena could tell that he was tense. She wanted to reach over and give him a hug, but the shuttle's cockpit was a tight fit, and even she realized that this was not the best time for a hug.

Her first time in space, and instead of gazing with wide-eyed rapture at the vast blackness around her, instead of immersing herself in the experience, she was fighting down a feeling of nausea, wondering if she would live to see tomorrow. If any of them would.

"That is not L1," Shinobu said with an air of finality, toying with the scope. "It is too far away...look, the distances aren't matching."

Helena expected the other two other boys to breathe a sigh of relief, but instead, Duo looked grimmer. "You're right," he said. "It's not. Guess what it is?"

She glanced at him warily. "I don't know. What?"

"It's L3," he said. "Sally's hacker is destroying their defense system. Even I could tell you that when a defense system for something as big as a colony starts falling apart, the results aren't pretty. L3'll be burning for weeks." He clenched his hands so tight that the blue veins on the back stood out with startling clarity, like blue ridges of flesh. "If it's not one colony, then it's another. Dammit, Sally! Why are you doing this?"

Darkflight said something in Japanese and Duo narrowed his eyes. "Bitch," he said.

Helena tapped him. "What did he say?"

Duo sighed. "Darkflight said something to the effect that she doesn't care who she runs over as long as she gets her point across." His eyes were dark. "It's true, you know? I never really realized this during the war, because she was on our side, but it's very true. Sally's not a considerate person."

Helena turned her head to the side to avoid answering, because something in Duo's tone of voice warned her that he wouldn't be quite happy with any explanation she gave. Something caught her attention as it flashed past the viewscreen and she wondered if it was an asteroid. "Duo-" she began, and then another one flashed, a speck of white. "Duo, what's that?"

He didn't even look around. "Civilian shuttles," he said shortly. "People fleeing the colony...making for some other colony, maybe, or Earth. They don't want to be here when those things hit."

"But I thought we-" Helena began, and Shinobu interrupted her softly.

"We are going to help as many people as we can," he said. "Most of L1's citizens cannot afford a shuttle ticket. The shuttles you see - they are government officials, perhaps, or rich people." He glanced at Darkflight and said something in Japanese, and the dark-skinned boy spat something back, to which Shinbou nodded in confirmation. Helena didn't need a translation to recognize the contempt in the assassin's tone.

"Ilene's father could afford it," she murmured softly to the wall. "Chris...all our friends at Cliffside." She took a deep, shuddering breath. "Why, Duo? What is it that makes people so...unequal? Why is it so unfair?"

Duo touched her lightly on the shoulder, just a soft brush, but it was comforting. "I wish I could tell you, babe. I asked that all the time when I was growing up, and I couldn't find the answer either. I'm on the other side now, and I still don't think there's an answer. It's just the way the world works."

"And some of us would rather not have been born there," Shinobu added. Helena bit her lip and looked down. She had forgotten, for a moment, about Shinobu's heritage. The Japanese boy laughed softly and squeezed her arm. "It is all right, Helena. We are going now to help people who those in power have called unworthy. Perhaps we will only make a small difference, but that is still good, I think."

Darkflight stiffened as another explosion appeared on the scope, and said something to Duo rapidly under his breath. Helena could see the dark mass that was L1 approaching on the screen now. Everything looked intact to her untrained eye, except for the mass of civilian shuttles escaping from hatches at random intervals, making the colony look somewhat like a metallic beehive.

"A beehive," she mused, "except the bees are leaving the nest."

Duo caught onto her train of thought, as she knew he would. "The queen will die, then," he said.

Shinobu looked confused, frowning at her as he obviously tried to decipher the English phrases, but she simply smiled at him, making no move to touch him, hoping that her face showed a comfort she did not feel, because if she had put a hand to his arm, he would have felt the nervous clamminess of her palms.

It wasn't that she was afraid, exactly. She was already prepared for the fact that she might die - Ilene had already died, after all, and Chris had almost died. Death was no longer a foreign concept to her. But it was the prospect of torture, of pain before death, that frightened her.

"You can't use Deathscythe here," Shinobu said to Duo in English. Duo blinked, and then his face hardened.

"I know."

"What do you mean?" she demanded immediately, her nervousness heightening her anxiety. "Don't say things like that, Shin! Isn't that why we came in the first place? That Duo could-"

"Helena," Duo snapped, and she clamped her mouth shut, sitting on her hands to hide the fact that they were shaking.

"I-"

"What do you think would happen," Duo said patiently, "if we landed and I took a Gundam out into the city?"

Helena swallowed. "I don't-"

"There'd be riots," Duo said. "People are scared to death right now, thinking the world is going to explode around them. The last thing they need is a symbol of that destruction standing in the middle of their city."

"But we're going to help them!"

"They do not know that yet." Shinobu's voice was soothing. "We must first convince them that we are on their side. And then, when they believe us, Duo's Gundam will be useful. Right now, it would only cause panic."

"L3's not looking too good either," Duo murmured uneasily. "Looks like the security system is still holding up for now, but only because it seems like the de-construction process has been halted. I wonder what for. Sally surely can't be getting soft in her old age."

Darkflight said something else, and Shinobu looked surprised, then concerned. Duo made some control adjustments and leaned back in the seat, his Japanese easygoing and nonchalant. The sound of it should have been soothing to Helena's ears, but she couldn't relax.

"We were just remarking that it was odd we haven't been hailed yet. Usually by this time when you're this close into orbit, they pull you up on the screen and ask what you're doing here."

"They don't care?" Helena wondered, and Duo shook his head.

"My guess is that there isn't anyone there to man the tower. No one in their right mind would want to be coming into the colony right now, not when the way to save your hide is to figure out the best way to get off the damn place before it blows."

She wrapped her arms around herself, shivering. "I want to go home."

"Too late, babe," Duo said grimly. "You're in for the ride." He threw a lever forward and the shuttle whined, seeming to gather itself for a final charge. Two more civilian crafts flashed past the windshield. Helena could see one of the open hangar ports growing wider as they drifted closer, and even to her, who had never been in space before much less on a colony, the inside of it looked eerily empty.

"Don't worry, Helena," Shinobu said, and when she glanced at him, she was surprised to find that something about him seemed changed. He looked taller, maybe, or more mature. Maybe it was just his voice. This wasn't the Cliffside Heights student she had gone to school with. The man sitting beside her was colony royalty, one who had power at his fingertips and knew how to use it.

She wasn't sure if she liked that.

"Prepare for landing," Duo said, throwing another lever. "We're about to do some serious damage. Get ready to run as soon as she hits the ground."

Her plan was easy, almost too easy. It was so absurdly simple that Dorothy couldn't believe that Aidoru hadn't already thought of it in the first place.

But apparently, he hadn't.

Quatre understood, of course, as soon as she had even started to give him an inkling of what she had intended to do. He stood his ground, slightly behind Aidoru and to the hacker's left. It took less than three nanoseconds for the information flow to transfer from her Zero system to his, and all the indication he gave was a slight, almost unnoticeable nod of the head. Still, in the world of the net, three nanoseconds was almost an eternity.

"Are you going to stand there all day, little girl?" the hacker challenged. "Or are you afraid?"

"The only thing I'm afraid of is not getting home in time tonight for dinner," Dorothy retorted. "You're defenseless here. You've got nothing to work with, and you know it."

"Don't be so sure," Aidoru countered. Dorothy searched the hacker's expression, trying to find some sense of weakness, some indication that he was breaking, but there was nothing. The visualization was completely probe-proof. He must have sensed her trying to dig, and laughed.

"Everything I've wanted to do has already been set in motion. Even if I die here, nothing is going to stop the L3 security shields from falling. Do your worst, Valkyrie."

"Don't be so sure," she muttered, hefting the sword behind her, and then Quatre said, wait.

Wait?

It took all the willpower she had not to narrow her eyes at him, but looking back there would be futile, would only alert Aidoru's attention to his other combatant. She was sure Aidoru hadn't forgotten about Quatre, but right now, she was the more direct threat, and the hacker obviously had no idea how tough the Winner heir was.

She had also underestimated Quatre once. She would never do so again.

What are you thinking? she said to him.

Your plan is fine, he said. It's a good plan. But what's to make sure it will work like you want it to?

I don't see why it shouldn't, she huffed, trying to suppress her own unease, and she felt Quatre smile.

It's not that I don't trust you. It's just that I think a guarantee would make everything more efficient. Quicker.

More humane, you mean, she said, grasping his idea, and trying not to toss it in his face with scorn. Quatre, people like Aidoru don't deserve to be treated humanely. He's killed hundreds of people before getting to his own goals, and if he finds a way to get those data threads back, he'll fry us like a bunch of shrimp in oil.

Do you trust me? Quatre said.

She felt the sword waver again, light as a feather in her hands, but suddenly her muscles were tight. I trust you with my life, she said. I trust you to tell me if my plan is simply something made up by my Zero system-high mind, which apparently it is not. I don't guarantee it will work, but it's worth a try. And what's the loss, if all three of us die here?

Nothing, he protested. But-

Aidoru was narrowing his eyes at her now. "What's going on?" he demanded. One of his feet twitched, and she knew that any moment he was going to jump at her, power or no power, and break the stalemate.

Quatre, I-

Aidoru leapt forward and she barely had time to bring the sword down before he was on top of her, twisting one of her arms behind her. She grunted, slamming her elbow into his rib cage and catching his body armor full-on. Pain was no stranger to her, but even without his data flows to manipulate, Aidoru was strong. It had to be pure human strength - no net visualization, no matter how good, could mimic the power of human muscle and bone in hand to hand combat.

She lashed out blindly, struck something with the side of her fist. As pain lanced through her hand into her upper arm, there was a clang. The headset around Aidoru's eyes fell to the ground, shattering in two. Dorothy dared to flick her gaze to his face as she jabbed the sword forward, meeting a bloodless, colorless pair of alien-looking eyes.

Aidoru twisted. The sword fell from her hand. She lunged for it, but it skittered out of reach into a corner of the marble hall, and she rolled to the ground, narrowly dodging the hacker's foot. Aidoru fought like a trained martial artist, she realized, and for the millionth time, she wondered who he really was. A fist punched into her left jaw. She heard something crack. Blood in her mouth.

"It's almost time," Aidoru whispered, those pale, mad eyes staring through her into a distance she could not fathom. She dove at him, aiming for his throat, knowing before she did so that it was useless. One killed hackers with the net or one did not kill them at all. This was merely foreplay, the sparring before the battle.

She was so tired.

Dorothy, said a voice in her mind, and she looked up, startled, before Aidoru's fist caught her square in the nose and then both of his hands were around her throat. Quatre was standing at the speaker's podium, the Zero glow a hazy mist around him.

He was holding her sword.

"Quatre!" she screamed hoarsely, struggling to break free of Aidoru's death grip. The hands around her neck loosened slightly as the hacker turned, startled. Dorothy felt a surge of triumph. Against all odds, he'd forgotten that Quatre was even there.

"What are you-" Aidoru snarled, but Dorothy beat him to the punch line.

"Quatre!" she shouted. "NOW!"

He could hardly distinguish which one was Dorothy and which one was Sally's hacker as both of them desperately grappled for the upper hand in a weird conglomeration of hand-to-hand fighting that could only be described as street fighting. He had taken martial arts, and while he was not the best, he could tell that this contest had quickly degenerated from formal sparring match to battle to the death by whatever means necessary.

Dorothy's sword lay where it had fallen, next to the courtroom podium, and he had hesitated at first, then walked over and gingerly picked it up. The eerie silence of the great hall, penetrated only by small scuffling sounds from the two combatants that somehow even seemed muffled, burned in his ears. The sword was light in his hands, and true to his earlier hunch, looked like a broadsword but felt like a fencing foil.

Would Dorothy's plan work?

He wanted to throw the sword back to her, tell her that it was time, but how could he do that if she could not even get free?

Quatre swallowed, gripped the sword with both hands, then turned and ascended the steps to the podium, one step by slow step. Looking out onto the empty floor, up to the stands, he could see the seats that he and Yaminah and Jaffa had occupied during the endless days of questioning. Where Relena and Sylvia and Dorothy had sat patiently waiting. Where Fatima had steepled her fingers and smiled, catlike, sure that she would win. And it was here, in front of this very podium in the waking world, where Une had drawn her sword and held it to his own throat, vowing to kill him if that was what it took.

He made his choice.

Dorothy, he called, and through the flash of metal on metal, he saw her eyes dart up to meet his.

"Quatre!"

He readied the sword, held it high in both hands. It would be a broadsword, he told the Zero, not a fencing foil. A broadsword of immense weight, heavy iron bearing down on him, crushing the bones of his hands as he fought to hold it aloft. He felt Dorothy's efforts adding to his, felt the muscles in his arms waver as the true sword materialized, stabilized into an actual entity. His knees wobbled. He gritted his teeth.

Outside the stained glass windows, the lightning flashed.

"Quatre!" Dorothy cried. "NOW!"

He closed his eyes, gritted his teeth, thought of Jaffa and Reeshya and Une and Trowa and all the people he was fighting to save, and with every last ounce of strength in his body, he threw.

The sword left his hands like a bird of prey, soaring through the false air of the false hall, whistling as it passed over Dorothy's head and then Aidoru's. He felt, rather than saw the hacker turn, tense, raise one hand in an aborted attempt to stop the speeding weapon. The sword's flight took only half a nanosecond, perhaps faster than that, faster than even the computing power of the world's fastest computer, but to him it seemed like an eternity.

With a shriek and a splintering of glass that was not there, the sword shattered one of the hall windows.

And the tidal waves of data rushed in.

Quatre was ready when it slammed into him, and he reached for the comforting presence that was Dorothy's Zero system, found it, and latched on. Dorothy! he shouted. Hold on!

I'm trying! she sent back, and he reached out both hands, knew she was reaching out hers too, as the raw information surged over them like an angry ocean. Cut power lines writhed like snakes, spewing out gigabytes, terabytes, of pure data, poisonously sharp like fragments of metal or glass. There was the smell of ozone, of burning metal, of burning human flesh. He wanted to throw up. He wanted to scream. He wanted to die.

Quatre!

Hold...on... he gasped, and gritted his teeth as the second wave slammed into him. Aidoru's work, coming undone strand by strand, cable by cable, and nothing in the world would be able to stop it. He wanted to open his eyes, to look for the hacker, but it was all he could do to keep from wailing out loud at the pain. Fire. Everything was fire. His mind was on fire. Even the Zero system was screaming at him, no more, no more, stop this or you will die!

Something smashed into his stomach and he grunted, felt himself thrown clear across the ocean of surging data currents and electric waves, felt himself land. He couldn't get up. He couldn't even move, but he found he could open his eyes, that it no longer hurt. Perhaps his pain centers had gone numb, or perhaps he was really dying. There was no longer the jungle of cables and wires that had been the center of the internet...all that was washing away in vivid rainbow colors that his addled brain found quite beautiful. Instead, it looked as if everything was melting.

Melting...melting like liquid metal...

Quatre, said Dorothy, a little dazedly, and he was startled to find that he could still hear her. But yes, there she was, hobbling towards him knee deep in the rainbow surf that was all that was left of what had once been The Nesting Place. She didn't look like Valkyrie anymore, he realized. She looked simply like Dorothy.

He realized that even the melting had stopped, and all that remained was a slow dripping and a soft grinding. Drip, drip. Grind. Drip. Drip.

The Nesting Place, and Aidoru's carefully laid plans, were gone.

We made it, he said softly. Dorothy...we made it.

But someone else didn't.

He tried to turn his head in the direction her wobbly finger was pointing. Failed. She reached him, dropped down beside him, and turned it for him with gentle hands. He almost cried out at the pain, but when he saw what she was pointing at, all that fell away.

There was a tangle of what looked like old metal scraps a few paces away, poles leaning together in a tangled mess, jagged edges where their tops had been cut away raggedly. It took Quatre three tries to realize that they were the remains of what had once been The Nesting Place's supercomputer, and six tries to realize that the dark object impaled on the poles was not old rags or someone's laundry.

It was a body.

No, more than that. It was still alive.

"That's..." he whispered brokenly, sickened, and Dorothy nodded. She looked a bit nauseous herself, glancing only once more at it before turning away.

"We're done," she said. "Let's get out of here."

But he held up a hand. "Wait," he said.

"Wait?" she sounded incredulous. "The Nesting Place is going to collapse, Quatre! We've got about a minute before it all goes to hell, and you want to wait?"

"Wait," he said again, and he did not know how, but he pushed himself to his feet, limped over toward the figure still twitching on those long metal poles. He had gone about fifteen steps when he realized that the ground was shaking, and that the poles were standing in the middle of a wide lake of what looked like steaming molten metal. He stopped.

"Quatre-"

He held up a hand, willing the Zero system to work. It creaked and groaned and gave him little puffs of steam in protest.

No. Don't give up now. I need you.

One final burst of energy, and for a split second, he saw what he needed to see. It was enough. He turned away, not sure whether to feel sorry or just feel sick.

"What was that, Quatre?" Dorothy said, coming up behind him painfully.

"Can't you see it?" he said, pointing out at the lake, at the poles, at the body. It spasmed, seeming to hiccup upon itself, but he stood his ground. It was just a shell, he reminded himself. The mind that had inhabited it had not, for all its brilliance, anticipated the sheer simplicity of Dorothy's attack. And that had been its undoing.

Aidoru's heart still beat and Aidoru's blood still flowed, but Aidoru as the world had known him, was dead. If "him" could even still be used.

"Aidoru...was a woman," Dorothy breathed, sounding stunned. "Wait a second, Quat...Oh my God. That's Major Li. That's Une's aide." She swallowed convulsively. "She was Aidoru?"

He drew a deep breath. "I can't believe we didn't realize it. All this time, right under our very noses. Even me, and I was in trial most of the time I was at Geneva. I should have noticed something."

The ground shifted again, and this time everything slid noticeably ten meters to the left. Or maybe it was to the right. He couldn't really tell. The metal poles shook too, and Li's head lolled towards the ground, her long hair straggling over one shoulder. Dorothy grabbed his hand. "Stop looking. We're leaving, Quat. We've done what we came to do. L3's techs know what to do from here. The place is about to blow."

Quatre cast one last look at Li, pinned to the very machine which had once proclaimed her a god, trapped forever inside her own mind. He tried to feel sad, tried to feel something, but all he felt was very, very tired.

"We're leaving," he said, and the Zero system swelled inside him, almost as intoxicating as the very first time he had experienced its power, and took him away.

 
Act XII Part I | Act XII Part III | Back to Sainan no Kekka