SHIN KIDOU SENKI GUNDAM WING

SAINAN NO KEKKA
ACT XII, PART III

 
 
Scene X: A Hundred Million Suns Will Fall

 
He felt the thrumming of the Taurus' engines beneath him like the blood pulsing through his veins, piercing into his bones and muscle and the very core of himself. He hadn't felt this alive in a long time. It was like coming back from the dead, he thought, and a tired amusement crept up from the core of him, wondering what Noin would have thought of all this.

"Reading Kashmir missile defenses, still dormant," the hard-edged, no-nonsense voice said, the voice that was Hilde Schbeiker's but reminded him very much of Noin. "If we keep our present course and speed, we'll be waking them up before too long. What do you want to do?"

Zechs almost smiled. Not what are your orders, sir, or what would you prefer to do, sir? But equals speaking as equals. He'd seen her work in Epyon earlier at Sparta - it was fair enough to say that Hilde was the pilot that Noin had been in her Academy days. He'd heard of Hilde through hearsay only - the friend of a friend of a friend, so to speak, but all he'd heard about her had been good. Relena had spoken highly of her, back in Cinq.

In Cinq...

"What are we doing, Oniisama?"

You shouldn't be here, he almost said in response to her tremulous query, but he held his tongue. The fear in her voice was very real, but there was something else that sat on the edge of his soldier's blood, and he wondered if Relena also had both in her - the far-flung ideals of their father and the unceasing yearning of the warrior. Even a year ago he would not have acknowledged he had it too, the Peacecraft legacy of war and peace, both longing after the other like the scorpion and the eagle.

"Trowa Barton is not dead," he said.

There was a long pause after that, and Zechs sat and let them think about that for a minute. The Taurus hummed around him and he unconsciously adjusted the throttle controls, holding back, saying not yet, not yet. The seat of the machine was comfortable now, familiar. He felt he had been sitting at the controls of Noin's old mobile suit for as long as he had lived. Epyon was dark evening on black in the rearview screens, and he watched it out of the corner of his eye.

"So we're going to rescue him," Hilde said flatly. He couldn't tell what the other girl was feeling at all from the timbre of her voice, and laughed.

"The Federation trained you well."

"Look here-"

He flipped the screen to let them see him on the cameras, and held up his hands in a parody of surrender. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be rude." There was a slight pause, a blink, and the two girls flashed onto the monitors at the bottom right hand side. They were skimming the treetops now, the Indian jungles rising weird and twisting and foreign under them, and he let the Taurus glide lower and waited for Epyon to catch up to him. The monster's eyes were shining amethysts in the light of the rising sun.

"Explain," Hilde said at last, folding her arms under her breasts and glaring at him with those fierce eyes.

Zechs paused. He hadn't even really stopped to think about it, only that Trowa Barton was alive, because he was, well, Trowa Barton. "I'm not sure how to explain it," he said finally. "I don't think Sally would have killed Trowa. Not out of friendship, certainly, because Sally does know how to get her way and won't hesitate to kill to do so. We've seen that. But...something else."

"Trowa would certainly be a good bargaining chip," Relena said dubiously, but Zechs shook his head.

"Good thought, but Sally's past the bargaining stage. No, I think that there is something inside Sally that she might not even understand. Something that won't let her kill Trowa."

Relena looked thoughtful. "I think, Oniisama...underneath everything, Sally is a good person."

Zechs arched an eyebrow. "Is that the Peacecraft in you talking?"

She gave him a wan smile. "What do you think?"

Hilde looked from one to the other, but it was one of those sibling things, Zechs supposed, even though it was rather odd to think of Relena as his sister once again. He found that he liked it. "It's not about friendship," he said again. "Even Treize understood that in the end, friendship might not be enough."

"Sally doesn't believe in Treize's world," Relena said automatically.

"I know. But Trowa does. And someone with a vision like that...it's hard for someone as idealistic as Sally, I think, to just eliminate that in one blow. She's someone who admires strong enemies." He reflected. "Treize was like that too. A little frightening, if you think about the similarities between the two of them."

Relena frowned. "But Treize...he at least understood that war was wrong."

"Did he?" Zechs said, and Relena chewed her lip, staring at him.

"Well," Hilde said, blowing out her breath in one long whoosh, breaking the uneasy silence. "Then what are we going to do about it? Surely you're not crazy enough to just think we can take the base by storm. Even with Epyon."

"If Trowa is in there," Zechs said, "which I believe he is, he'll be held in high custody. It's been a while since I've actually gone anywhere around Kashmir besides the visitor's quarters and command post. We might have to do some sneaking."

Relena looked alarmed, but Hilde's face brightened, and for a moment she looked almost devilish. "That sounds fine to me," she said. "I like sneaking."

"The safest place for anyone to go right now is off the center of the colony into one of the clusters!" Shinobu slammed his hand into his fist. "Surely you can see that!"

"No use, boy," the balding Japanese official said wearily, waving one hand in a parting gesture, like an overweight man trying to swat a very large fly. "Too many people. It's a stampede."

Shinobu seethed, and Duo stood to one side, trying very hard not to lose his own temper, glancing at the doors of the large hangar and hearing someone with a bullhorn outside shouting at what sounded like a very large, very angry crowd of citizens. Helena stood to one side, Darkflight to the other. The former assassin's face was unreadable, but anyone would have recognized Helena's darting eyes and nervous hand-wringing as she stood in Duo's shadow, trying to make herself very small. He would have put an arm around her, but he had a feeling she would have flung it away.

They'd landed to utter chaos outside the very empty hangars, cavernous ceilings and bare concrete, scorched-marked floors the only thing testifying to the number of shuttles that had once been parked here. Gone, and, Duo was willing to bet, holding only a few of the colony's richest citizens and high officials. Those shuttles were certified to hold up to a hundred passengers, and most of them likely only held one or two, or three at the most.

It was colony politics, and Duo had never liked it. But he had never believed it would come to this.

With the shuttles gone and no feasible way for the people to get off the colony, the next safest place they could go was off the main core cluster and into one of the outer clusters orbiting the central government complexes. Most of those were industrial, some which were used to manufacture explosives or petroleum, and some which housed nuclear reactors. But there were just as many others that held very little or had not yet been developed, that faced away from the earth, and would at least offer some protection when the missiles hit.

There was, Darkflight had muttered, very little hope even there. But someone had to try.

The police officers and colonial militia who had been mobilized to deal with the evacuation were not that someone. This was the third man they had been referred to in the chain of command, a man who called himself a squadron leader, who stood there, mopping the sweat off his brow, fingering his gun nervously, and told them that they should just go home to Earth.

"L1's done for," he said, and Duo could see him eyeing one of the police cruisers behind where they had landed their shuttle. He wondered why the man didn't at least recognize one of the "wanted" Gundam Pilots, but decided that his brainpower would be better used for other matters at the moment. "You kids might as well go home where you came from. Don't know why you'd want to come back to the colony at a time like this. Don't know why..."

Shinobu turned away in disgust as the officer trundled off, still wiping his forehead. Duo tugged on his braid.

"Duo," Helena said in a small voice. "What...is going on?"

Belatedly, he realized that she didn't understand a word of Japanese, that no one involved had even given her a second glance or the luxury of at least a running commentary, if not interpretation. One more reason he shouldn't have let her come. Besides the fact she'd never been off the planet surface before, when it came down to it, there was no time to be acting as interpreter.

"Fucking bastard," Shinobu said under his breath and Darkflight scowled. "They're all the same. Overpaid, fat, stupid, old men."

A faint explosion rocked the colony. He waited for it to pass, but the floor swayed under their feet and there was something else - a faint humming sound that set his teeth on edge. Everything was vibrating, he realized after a split second, from the steel of the ceiling to the concrete under their shoes. The roar of the crowd outside intensified into an angry screaming. Helena looked at Duo, her big eyes frightened.

"Not us," he said firmly, though his heart sank. "But something's happened to L3."

"Sally?" she whispered.

"No way to be sure," he responded, but he knew in his bones that the answer was yes. And tremors this large in scale could only mean the worst.

Shinobu closed his eyes in desperation. "We're next," he said softly. "If no one does anything....everyone is going to die."

"Pull yourself together!" Duo snapped. "No one is going to die...not unless you keep standing there and feeling sorry for yourself!"

"I'd like to see you do something!" Shinobu shot back. "Why don't you go out there and tell those people that the ones supposed to be saving them are too scared to save their own skins?"

"In the end, Seki," Duo said coldly, his brain a whirl of tightly wound emotions, the words jumping off his tongue like sparks of electricity, "you're just a coward like all the rest of them."

"Fuck you, Duo Maxwell."

Darkflight looked from one to the other, unable to come up with a comment for either side of the argument, and in the back of his mind, Duo knew that there was nothing to argue about - that they had lost and they might as well just get off the colony and come back the way they came.

Duo Maxwell was not used to giving up.

"Instead of standing there like a fucking idiot-" Duo shot back - and then something alerted him, maybe something out of the corner of his eye, maybe just years of fine-honed instincts from life on the streets. But even before Darkflight sprang into action, racing toward the hangar doors yelling epithets in Japanese, he realized what Helena had done.

Her honey-blond hair was the only thing visible from the far side of the hangar, and he knew Darkflight would never catch her in time. Shinobu swore next to him and braced to start running, but Duo grabbed his arm. "You're too far away," he said.

The cartel heir looked at him with haunted, frightened eyes. "You know what happened to Chris during the attack on the base?" he demanded. "Chris was doing the same thing! He stood there and told assassins they had no right to do what they were doing! And he would have been killed - should have been killed! Helena-"

"I know," Duo said hoarsely, fighting back tears, realizing that for all his bold words and the experience he had under his belt in warfighting, he still was not prepared for any of his friends to die. He'd already lost Ilene.

"She thinks she can save them. Just like Chris thought he could save them. They're the same, the both of them - they don't know what war is!"

Darkflight skidded to a stop at the hangar doors that Helena had slipped through, looking back with dark eyes that shone even in the dim light, like a wolf's, and Duo shook his head stiffly. "No, I don't think you're right, Shin," he said softly. "I think Helena is very very aware of what war is. But I think..."

Shinobu looked at him sharply.

"I think," Duo continued, "she knows what L1 means to you. And she's willing to do anything for you to have that back."

"I won't have her die for me!"

"She doesn't see it that way." But of course. Everything was very clear to him now, for some reason. He felt like the world had come to a halt, that everyone - Sally, Une, Heero, the two of them standing in that empty hangar - were statues staring across a vast expanse of beautiful undiscovered territory. "Don't you see, Shin? Helena doesn't care if she dies or not. And honestly, she knows you're willing to give her up if that's what it takes. Isn't that right?"

The Japanese boy looked like he was going to protest, and then the lines of his face shifted into something heartbreakingly like agreement. Duo wanted to hug him, but now wasn't the time or place. "But she's ok with that. She didn't come here for you, really, or for me, or for Chris. Helena just wants to make a difference. If she dies doing that, she'll be the happiest girl in the world."

"I can't-" Shinobu began, his voice choked. This time, Duo did touch him, only briefly on the shoulder.

"Come on," he said. "It's not over yet." The roar of the crowd was deafening through the walls, but his sharp ears caught a new sound on the bullhorn - the sound of a girl's voice. "Let's go help her...us...get through this."

They landed in a rice paddy about five kilometers from the base. While not Zechs' first choice of landing spot, the paddies provided sufficient coverage for their machines that someone just walking along the dirt path leading to the nearest village would not spot anything out of place. There were various tropical foliages and leaves that were handy for a canopy of sorts, and Zechs discovered firsthand that Hilde was better at this than he had thought.

"All in a day's work," she said when he questioned. "The Federation trained me well." Arching an eyebrow at him, and he had to laugh.

He had worried about Relena, if she would still be as willing to accompany them after the impact of what they were about to do hit her. She could die, he told her firmly after she had stumped over to the Taurus, wading through the paddy in ill-suited civilian clothes and boots. She'd looked him firmly in the eye and responded, Oniisama, we could all die. Heero's up there maybe dying right now.

He had no response to that.

They set out, the three of them, armed with only the pistols on their belts. They must look rather ridiculous, he thought to himself, and that almost made him smile. He wondered what Treize would say if he knew what Zechs was doing now - wading through a rice paddy with his sister and an ex-OZ pilot in tow, headed toward a base that, even though damaged, was still one of the most heavily fortified in the world, to rescue a boy who, technically, he had sworn to kill two years ago.

For some reason, he thought Treize would approve.

They reached the end of the rice paddy, and he waited a moment for Hilde to help Relena up and show her how to drain the water from her boots. Pilots' boots, though comfortable in flight, were not waterproof, and he gave credit to his sister for watching Hilde carefully and doing exactly as the other girl said, without a sour look on her face, without a word of complaint. Peacecraft Queen. The words came unbidden to his mind.

When she nodded that she was ready, Zechs nodded back silently and motioned them onward. His feet, still used to the combat environment of A007, found their way with little trouble through the short grass, and Hilde's OZ-trained survival skills should have enabled her to keep up. Relena, however, was slowing them down, as Zechs expected. Hilde hung back with her, talking to her in a low, steady voice in which Zechs could not make out the words. He wondered how exactly Relena had persuaded Hilde to help her in the first place, then decided that it didn't matter.

It was things like that, small things, which were why she had ascended to the throne of Cinq and he had not. He looked back at her, face screwed up fiercely in concentration as she put one careful foot in front of the other, over tree roots and tangled vines, sweat dripping down her face, a scratch on one cheek, and almost smiled. That's my sister, he wanted to say. Father, look at her. You would be proud.

The foliage that had almost crept up around them as they pushed their way nearer to the base ended suddenly at the edge of a vast clearing. Zechs stopped short with some surprise, kneeling abruptly, and the two girls stood back silently, watching as he rolled bits of scattered dried grass through his hands. The traces of fire were faint - perhaps a week, perhaps a little more. It rained so much here that it was hard to tell, but the signs of controlled burning were there for anyone who looked closely enough. He raised his head, putting a hand to his eyes to shade them from the sun scattering through the clouds in little spears of brilliance, and thought he could very hazily make out the base's east gate.

Fumbling in one suit pocket, he rescued a pair of binoculars from their leather pouch and shoved them up to his eyes. Yes, there it was, the Kashmir East Gate. Half of it was missing, the other half singed black, and there were trucks with unfamiliar markings going in and out, but it was the east gate. He had miscalculated, after all, trusting that his visits here of a few months ago would suffice for intelligence.

"What's wrong?" Hilde whispered sharply from behind, and he put the binoculars down abruptly and turned.

"There used to be jungle almost right up to the gate," he said, and handed her the binoculars. He heard the click-click-click as she focused them, heard her stop and knew she was focusing on the gate. "At least, there was five months ago when I last came here to check on some supply issues. I wasn't aware that they'd burned down most of the vegetation around here. Makes sense though."

"Terrorists?" Relena said, and he shook his head.

"Wild animals. Too much roadkill. You might laugh, but it was a huge problem - the last time I came here, there had just been an entire supply convoy carrying generator parts from the nearby city that had been wrecked when a herd of wild goats ran between the tires. Cost us almost 45 million rupees to replace all those parts. In the end I suppose it was easier to burn down the forest around it than to risk that happening again."

Relena was silent for a minute, staring out at the short grass plain that had once been forest. "It's ugly," she said finally.

Zechs stood, then put one hand on her shoulder, lightly. "War is ugly," he said.

"What you're saying, then," Hilde said, her rough whisper a contrast to Relena's barely-there sigh, "is that we can't just walk in."

"I wasn't planning on just walking in," Zechs said. "Unlike the last war, I would, as much as possible, like to come out of this one alive."

"So do you have a plan?"

"Not really," he admitted. "I was hoping you would."

Big blue-violet eyes regarded him for a thoughtful moment. "You suck."

"Thank you," he said with some amusement.

"It would be suicide for you or Relena to come anywhere near the base," Hilde declared after some thought. "You'd be recognized in a heartbeat."

"You can't be suggesting that you go in alone and leave the two of us out here to wait."

Hilde's eyebrows went up. "Why, that's precisely what I'm suggesting. Forgive me, Zechs, you're sharper than I thought."

"That's crazy," Relena said abruptly. "I'm not letting you go in alone and get killed."

"Begging your pardon," Hilde said. Her voice was hard now, none of the bantering tone she had been using only seconds ago. "I fail to see how you coming with me will increase my chances of survival." She stared at Relena and Relena stared back, blue versus blue, a battle of wills.

Zechs waited.

It seemed an eternity but was in all likelihood not even more than five seconds before Relena dropped her eyes and folded her hands in front of her. It was all the gesture Zechs needed, and he looked at Hilde, saw the knowledge of what she was about to do written in her eyes, saw her cast another look at Relena's bent head, this one full of an emotion he could not name. Sorrow, maybe, or longing.

"What exactly do you have in mind?" he said.

She was used to public speaking, but that was in small forums - at the town council, in the Cliffside auditorium to the student body, dressed as some other character for a city play. It shouldn't be her up here, she thought as her sweaty hands grasped the bullhorn tightly. It should be someone like Ilene. Or any of Ilene's friends, or Chris, or Shin, or Duo or Heero Yuy. Any of them would know what to say to the sea of upraised fists and chanting voices and eyes that sparkled so fiercely in the blazing electric lights that they looked like a sea of glinting dark waves.

Helena Rosenbaum had never been so frightened in her entire life.

It took her brain several tries to process that what her ears were hearing was not just mindless screaming, but a chant, something in Japanese that she could not make out but that sounded very foreign and very very angry. The anger was thick in the air, congealing like tar, dripping from the very rafters of the hangar and falling in steaming droplets onto her skin. She felt like she would drown in her own sweat, choke on her own saliva.

But she was up here now, on the stage to which she had pounded across the empty hangar in one sheer moment of desperate bravery, leaving the man she had trusted for so long and the man who she loved. To do...what? To do something. To help, because she had seen the look in Duo's eyes, and Darkflight's and even in Shin's, though he didn't know it, which meant that she should not have come.

"Listen!" she tried to say through the bullhorn, but her voice failed her and all that came out was a whisper drowned under the rushing tidal wave of the crowd's hollow chant. She knew why, now, everyone she knew described Japanese as an ancient language, not just in age but as a language that sounded as old as the earth and as forbidding as mountain roots. The sound of it sent chills down her spine.

"Listen!" she tried again, but no one paid her any heed. Those gleaming eyes were staring at her now, a crowd of them, and she could feel their angry focus. You foreigner, they seemed to say. This is our colony. Get off the stage. Cold sweat trickled down her neck.

The hapless police officer from whom she'd grabbed the horn hadn't struggled or tried to stop her. He had been all too glad to escape, leaving her standing there with the bullhorn in one limp hand. The crowd, which had suddenly fallen silent at the sight her, had begun murmuring, and then the chant had begun again in full force, twice as loud as it had been before. All the platitudes and rousing speeches that came to mind would, she realized, do nothing to move this crowd. They were colonists and she was from Earth, soil-bound, trapped inside the cage of atmosphere.

She remembered that once, her father had come home one day from work silent and angry, refusing to speak to either of them, and she had cried herself to sleep that night. But the next night when he came home, he sat them down on the couch and gave them an apology. Helena had been thirteen then, Cliffside bound, ready to take on the world, but the sight of her father's face tight, drawn, looking like he had not slept in days, frightened her.

"I shouldn't have acted the way I did," he said. "But I was angry. The colonial representatives have called off the peace conference that we've been working on for months."

She had been furious for her father's sake. "Why?" she demanded. "They know how important this is to us. To the world!"

"It's very hard to be a colonist, Helena," he had answered. "Last night I couldn't fathom it either. Then I thought about it and realized that they're following human instinct. What is it like to be a colonist? I couldn't tell you, but I can say that if I were one, I would be scared all the time, knowing that my home, my family, my way of life could be taken away at any minute. They see Earth as cold, unfeeling, a heartless parent punishing its stepchildren for a crime they didn't commit. That's why they're doing what they do. They're scared. And they have a right to be."

Helena had never dreamed she would be witnessing her father's words firsthand, but as she gazed out over the sea of eyes, she suddenly realized that these people were angry only because they were scared. She imagined her average two-story house on her average suburban street in her average city just like any of the other cities around the world, and then tried to imagine it bursting into flames, burning down around her. That was what these colonists were facing now - the loss of everything, all the life that they'd ever known.

But there were so many of them. And they were so angry.

The chill of fear wrapped its coils around her and squeezed, and the lights swam before her eyes, and she reached up to her neck and pinched herself. Hard. Almost yelping at the lancing pain that caused, her head snapped up and her eyes refocused, though watering with involuntary tears. Her hand which held the bullhorn was shaking almost uncontrollably, and with a sound that was almost a snarl, she took hold of it with her other hand, bringing it up to her mouth.

This was Shin's home. And Darkflight's. And Heero Yuy, Duo's friend.

"People of L1!" she shouted desperately, focusing not on the glittering eyes but on the darkness beyond, imagining faces of people she loved. Her parents. Her teachers at Cliffside. Her friends. "Listen to me!"

And then she was aware of three more forms climbing on to the stage beside her, familiar forms, people who she would have wept with joy to see if she had the courage to turn and look. But she could not, because if she turned then her strength would fail her and she would falter, stop. She couldn't afford that. "People of L1! Listen!" she screamed through the bullhorn, feeling her vocal chords ache with the effort, and suddenly there was a second voice from beside her, a male voice.

"L1 no mina-san!" he cried, the timbre of his words strong, commanding, echoing throughout the hall. "Kiite kudasai!"

That's Shinobu, her brain registered in shock, recognizing even through her poor command of Japanese that he was translating her words. He's...here. He's...helping me.

"Go on, Helena," someone whispered behind her. Duo.

She took a deep breath. "People of L1, I know this is a frightening and horribly unthinkable time for you. Your homes and families and very lives are threatened by an enemy that has just revealed its face. You must be thinking that there's nothing you can do to save yourselves. That no one cares about you, and they've left you to die."

The roar of the crowd intensified as Shinobu translated, then diminished, and she was aware of a ringing in her ears as it died down, as if the aftermath of the noise was more terrible than it ever had been. She gaped, at a loss for words, clung onto the bullhorn with all her might, as if it would save her. I can't do this, she wanted to say, wanted to throw it down and run.

There was a soft touch on her shoulder, a cool hand grasping her arm, supporting her. She expected to see Duo, but it was not Duo.

Darkflight.

Suddenly Helena realized exactly how much he had to lose - more than Duo and Shin put together. Shinobu had power at his fingertips, and L1 was not Duo's colony. But Darkflight was a nobody, bound to the slums that he had lived in all his life and would most likely die in, and now even that was being taken away from him.

"It is going to be difficult," she said into the bullhorn. The crowd was murmuring now, but the chanting had stopped. "We are here to try and help you, but we cannot save you with our strength alone. You must help each other. I and my three friends...some are from L1, but some of us are just here because we didn't want to stand by and do nothing. We didn't want Earth to be remembered as cold, unfeeling, punishing her stepchildren for crimes they didn't commit." The words of her father echoed in her ears as she paused, let Shinobu translate. The crowd's murmur rose and fell, swelling like the ocean surf on the shore, then drawing back like the tide.

Helena had no idea if they were listening, if they believed her words, but she at least had their undivided attention. Most of the eyes staring at her were Asian, some Western, some Middle-Eastern, but they all had that same hardness, a steel that she had never seen in any Earth dweller's eyes. It was the same look that Duo had, she realized, something that even in the beginning had set him apart from all his other classmates except Shinobu, who had it too.

"Will you let us help you?" she asked softly. Darkflight's hand tightened on her shoulder and she glanced at Shinobu and then Duo, reading the approval and desperate hope in their eyes.

Then a man stepped forward out of the crowd, staring up at her with hands on his hips. He was dressed only in a shirt and long slacks, and his bald head glimmered faintly in the cold hangar lights, but he wore authority over him like a rich cloak, as if by the way he set his feet he was saying, I lead these people; they are mine and I am theirs. Helena met his gaze squarely, and he held it for a second, then snapped his gaze to Shinbou and fired off a rapid question in Japanese.

"He recognizes Duo," Shinobu said to her, but she'd seen the narrowing of Duo's eyes as the question was asked, knew that the former Gundam pilot had been preparing for this. "He wants to know why we should trust a band of children allied with a wanted man."

Duo strode to the edge of the stage, looking down on the man with no fear in his stance, but no arrogance either. His shoulders were set, squared. It was how he used to look in classes before giving a presentation or a speech - poised, cool, calm, almost like a fluid statue. He answered back in clipped Japanese that was somehow still gentle, the short reply rolling off his tongue effortlessly. Helena held her breath.

Shinobu bent to her ear. "Duo says that if he is going to be sentenced to death, he would rather die like a colonist."

The crowd was completely silent now, waiting for their leader to respond. The man stared at Duo for a moment, then threw back his head and laughed.

Helena jumped, but only from surprise, because it was a laugh of welcome, or acceptance. Instantly, the atmosphere of the room changed, and the four on the stage glanced at each other with obvious relief. She looked over at Shin, expecting him to address the man with instructions, but instead, the big man turned to her.

"My name is Kazuma Yamazaki," he said. His English accent was almost perfect, and Helena blinked at him in confusion for a second, her brain spinning with the language change, as well as with the sudden knowledge that he was treating her no longer as simply the small group's speaker, but also their leader. "I am the president of the Common Council and now speak for the people here of L1. When our colony leadership, all who were rich enough to afford a shuttle off the colony, deserted us, I led the people here."

"I am Helena Rosenbaum, from the United States, on Earth," she said gravely. Her heart seemed to be acting more normally now - the moment of panic had subsided. It was just like school, she told herself firmly. Like she was speaking in front of the student council, like she was giving one of her friends a project, like she was introducing herself to an important guest. "These are my friends Darkflight and Shinobu Matsuura, and the Gundam pilot Duo Maxwell of L2." Kazuma nodded briefly to Duo, but did not blink at the two other names. Of course, she thought. He wouldn't recognize Shinobu's false name, and Darkflight probably had another alias he had gone by.

Another series of small shocks rocked the hangar, and the crowd began muttering again. Kazuma turned, and they quieted, but the look of calm had vanished from his face as he turned back to her. "The tremors. What are they?"

"Sally Po is attempting to destroy L3's shield system so she can take over the Preventers base there," Duo said from beside her. "We don't have much time."

"We only have a little equipment," Helena said. "A shuttle and Duo's Gundam. But we'll do what we can."

Kazuma's eyes crinkled in a small smile. "In that case," he said, "it is still a start. I am honored that you have decided to meet the end with us, whatever that end may be."

Two hours and forty minutes later, in the bottom of a garbage truck headed into Kashmir to pick up rubble and twisted metal parts from the attack, Zechs wondered if he had finally gone insane.

It was a good plan, he admitted grudgingly to himself, and he was getting soft. He hated to admit it, but two years of command and paperwork had almost turned him into one of those office-bound commanders he had always scorned. Even Treize couldn't escape it, he remembered, and Zechs had once vowed to his friend that he would never set foot in an office of his own free will. But that had been before the end of the war.

Hilde had been as good as her word. Instead of trying to sneak inside the base to cough up some sort of transportation, she'd declared that all she needed to do was wait by the roadside for a little bit. When she emerged through the brush two hours after that, covered in grass and dirt and looking pleased with herself, Zechs did not ask too many questions. The drivers had not been killed, simply tied and gagged and knocked unconscious.

Relena lay pressed up against him, and he could feel her heart beating fast, her breathing coming in barely audible gasps as she tried to stifle it, tried to hide her nervousness. He reached over and grasped her hand as best as he could without disturbing the pile of dirt next to him, and she glanced up at him, the movement of her head almost invisible in the dark, but even if it had been pitch-black, he thought he would still have been able to feel it.

"Oniisama?" she whispered.

"We're not going to lose," he said hoarsely, as much for himself as for her. "We've got too much at stake."

A silence. "I'm sorry...about Noin," she offered finally. He closed his eyes.

"Thank you."

"I wanted to come to your wedding."

Hearing his sister talk about the woman he had loved should have made his chest constrict and his eyes burn and his brain curl up into a shadow of itself. But oddly, he felt himself relax at the sound of her voice. "I don't think either of us was thinking that far," he confessed, letting her face enter his thoughts for the first time in what seemed like ages. "But I think she would have liked that."

She squeezed his hand. "I'm glad you had her. I...really don't know what to say to..."

The truck bumped over some gravel and Zechs pulled her closer into the crook of his arm. "It doesn't matter," he said at last. "Noin was...well, I loved her, but I think she and I both knew that happily ever after was never really an option for us. We both had too much of the soldier in us, you see. I told her once that all good soldiers die young. Noin was the best soldier she could ever be, and she proved it on A007."

"What about you?" Relena whispered.

What about me? He heard the demons flit around his head for a moment, bringing old doubts back, old fears, the sound of Treize's voice, and then dismissed them. This was a new war, a new age. Time to leave the ghosts behind.

"I haven't been a very good soldier," he said. "But I don't think it's quite time for me to die yet."

The truck stopped.

There was a slight scuffling of footsteps, the sound of a door opening and closing, and Hilde's muffled voice. They lay rigid and silent as she spoke for a moment, then heard a male voice responding. Footsteps toward the back, then a squeak as someone opened the small egress door in the back. Sunlight poured in.

Zechs held his sister tightly, staring at the patch of sun on the far wall, knowing that they were well hidden by the strategic mounds of dirt and sludge that they'd shoveled in before crawling into the truck, but there was always the off chance. He had been on plenty of espionage expeditions, and twice he'd gotten caught. They'd escaped, of course, but he still remembered, almost ten years later, the smell of fear rising off the soldiers around him. He didn't think he had ever been afraid, because back then he had nothing to lose.

Tightening his arms around the girl he held, he realized that now, he did have something to lose.

The door slammed shut, and he felt Relena sag against him. "It's all right now," he said. "We've passed the checkpoint."

"Trowa has to be alive," her muffled voice came against his muddy flightsuit. "He has to be."

The truck began to move again, a slow creaking that seemed to rattle and jar his very bones, and he wondered if the bolts that held the thing together might even now be unwinding themselves and falling in little piles to the ground. He'd given Hilde general directions around the base, but he had no idea what the gate guard had said to her, and she would have to at least pretend to go to the place he had directed her in order to not appear too suspicious.

After what seemed like far too long, the truck ground to a halt. The hiss of the air brake reached his ears, and he pushed himself up stiffly, muscles tense and alert. Relena started to struggle up, too, and he placed a hand on her shoulder. "Wait," he said.

She didn't argue but simply lay back down. With a creaking, the egress door opened again and a familiar form poked her head inside.

"I think I confused 'em," Hilde said with glee, "but you better hurry up. I don't know how good security is here."

Zechs helped Relena up and passed her along to Hilde before making his own way to the door. "Where are we?" he asked.

"According to your map, we're as near the high-security prisons as we can get without appearing weird. I tried to maneuver it so that we wouldn't have to walk too far. There's a row of what I think are petroleum tanks blocking us from any view, but we'll have to go quick."

A scan of the immediate area told him that Hilde had done her job well. The petroleum tanks stretched in two straight rows almost to the edge of the fence that separated the main base from the prison, and there was a high sand and mud embankment beyond the tanks. They crept, single-file, alternately running and pausing, as Zechs tried to work out in his mind the best way to enter the facility.

The plan that finally came to his mind was risky, and it would probably give them less than half an hour at most to find Trowa Barton, but it was better than nothing.

"This will be very very dangerous," he told them as they came to the end of the tanks, to a security door set into the fence. "It'll buy us about twenty minutes of time. Not because of any alarm, because this should be foolproof. But any idiot who looks into the computer is going to figure it out. I am betting they do security checks every twenty minutes."

"Why any idiot?" Relena said.

He reached into one muddy pocket and pulled out a flat piece of plastic. "This is my Preventers identification card. I've been granted access to all security levels of any Preventers base - which means that unless they've completely deconstructed this system and built a new one from scratch in a day, I'll be able to use my card to get through the gate. However, the computer system's built so that it logs name and ID number of anyone coming through."

Understanding in both their faces. "So in other words," Hilde finished for him. "When they do their regular security checks they'll see Zechs Merquise logged in."

"Milliard Peacecraft," he corrected. The name sounded strange on his tongue. "But yes. You're right."

"Got it," Hilde said grimly. "It's better than nothing. Can all three of us get in?"

"That's the catch. The gate will only let one person in at a time. The two of you will have to stay here and wait till I get back. It's safe enough here, and I don't think anyone will see you."

Hilde's eyes flashed. "I'm not staying behind. Two's better than one in there. You'll be killed."

"It's-" he began, then stopped as his sister touched him on the arm. The expression on her face was set, determined. He recognized the hardness of her blue eyes - the look of a woman, of a queen, who would let nothing get in her way.

Hilde noticed it too. "You have something," she said quietly. Not a question.

Relena held out her hand, and even before he saw that she was grasping something flat, white, and plastic between her fingers, he already knew what she was going to do, mentally cursing himself for not remembering that she was the Queen of Cinq, under Une's protection, and a key civilian with top-level clearance to work on the Winner trial...and so therefore would have been granted all-access security.

But it was no longer his choice to stop her. She'd proved that much to him already by coming after him.

"Here's my ID card," Relena said steadily. "Hilde, use this. I'll wait, and you two go in together."

 
Scene XI: The Art of War

 
Without harmony in the state, no military expedition can be undertaken; without harmony in the army, no battle army can be formed.

The words of Sun Tzu pounded themselves into Sally Po's mind as Heavyarms screamed around her, rising into the heavens like the avenging angel she had always imagined herself to be, soaring up above this world she had worked so hard to create. Hers was a world about which men the likes of Treize had only dreamed - all Treize Khushrenada had had to work with was a world of warring states, colonies that harbored no hopes of peace, only war. But Treize had been a nobleman, content with the upper-class' view of the world, seeing people and cities and lives as something to be played with, like a chessboard.

Sally Po was one of the people.

"We're still being pursued," her wingman crackled over the radio. Sally clucked her tongue impatiently.

"No surprise there."

"Shall I tell B company to hang back for a diversion?"

She considered it briefly, then shook her head to the negative. "No. That would buy us only a few seconds precious time." Her wingman started to object, and she held up one free hand. "Don't argue with me, Rogers. I know how Heero Yuy fights, and he won't be stopped by a mere diversion. No, I intend to face him, like adults, on the real battlefield."

"Yes ma'am," he said, disappointment evident in his voice. Sally gave him points for bravery, but he was young and inexperienced. He'd told her when he first joined that he had trained for years as an OZ pilot at the Academy, had graduated with top honors, had been selected as a training instructor for one of OZ's top colony schools, and had ended up watching the final battle and the spectacular destruction of the Libra from the screen of his Taurus, still hovering in formation, waiting for orders to strike.

Whose side were you on then? she had asked, and he had shaken his head.

To be honest with you, ma'am, I'm not sure. People will give you different answers, but as far as myself and my company, we were on whichever side was the winning side. That was the problem, he had continued. That none of the several sides appeared to be winning. And so he had sat out the final battle, but assured her he had no intention of doing so again.

Sally knew that right now, he was very firmly on her side.

The red blips on her screen came no closer, moved no farther away as her formation surged farther up into the thinning atmosphere, and it was obvious that Heero was content to let her go. He was always too noble for his own good, but then again, so was she. It was inevitable, the clash among the stars. Treize had wanted to end his days that way also. She had no doubt he had never intended to leave the battlefield alive, but that was just another one of his dramatic schemes. You did no one any good if you were dead.

"Ma'am, I-"

"Stow it, Rogers. Heero Yuy can pursue us all the way to L1 if he likes. I don't care at the moment. All personnel still present and accounted for?"

A slight cough, a hurriedly bit-off exclamation that Sally knew would have been a sharp-edged retort. But Rogers, though hot-headed, had a bit of sense in him. "All hundred and thirty mobile suits still on track to target," he said heavily. Heavyarms shuddered a bit as the first zero-gravity hit, adjusting engines and cockpit pressure. She let it think for a minute, then keyed in full life support, feeling the familiar hiss of artificially pumped air enter the cockpit. All the soldiers around her in their mobile suits should be doing the same at the moment - few of them had actually been in zero-g combat, but she'd trained them well.

A ping on the comm system sounded, and she started a bit, noting absently that the last wisps of atmosphere were fading away on the screens surrounding her, that the true blackness of space was at once warmer and colder than she remembered. Her heart gave a little jump and there were goose bumps crawling across her flesh at the vast darkness around her, unmarred by starlight. She'd forgotten how lonely true space was.

The ping was Commander Albairat, the hard lines of his face looking even more rigid in the harsh cockpit lights, his obvious impatience concealing the ease with which he moved his hands over the controls of his mobile suit. "Just checking to confirm," he said, "Plan A is still in action."

She narrowed her eyes at him. "Don't waste your breath over the comm," she said. "I didn't ask for comm silence, but you of all people should know not to call if not necessary."

The corners of his eyes crinkled a bit, and she saw him relax. "Accept my apologies, ma'am," he said. "The other part of my transmission was to wish you good luck, and to tell that no matter what happens, you will have my loyalty till I die."

For a moment, Sally couldn't think of anything to say, then realized that a simple smile was all that was needed. He held his for a moment, longer, then snapped the rigid glare back to his face, his eyes growing cold. "Albariat out," he said, and broke the connection. She stared at the dark screen for a long time, wondering what exactly the future held in store for all of these men and women, following her into a battleground that was apt to be almost as fierce as the last battle two years ago.

Sally was no Treize Khushrenada, and her dreams did not aspire to such glorious and overblown dramatic heights. Treize's and Milliard Peacecraft's grandiose starships, their innate nobleman's silver tongues and honeyed speech were not her weapons, and even if she had tried, she would fall flat on her face, be hailed as a laughingstock for trying to pretend to be what she was not. No, she was simply a common middle-class Chinese girl, raised as a civilian, trained as a doctor, and born to be a soldier.

The vaunted Plan A was really no plan at all - not as much a plan as just more waiting. Sally had already calculated down to the millisecond when the shields of L3 would give way to Li's prying, and the instant they did so, half her fleet would veer in that direction to take out what was left of L3's garrison. She had made sure several months ago that the mobile suits which had made up most of the colony base's forces had been transferred to Sparta. Ironic that fully a fifth of the suits which her pilots had stolen had originally belonged to the colonies in the first place.

She glanced at her scope again, saw the strings of green dots, saw the much farther red dots keeping pace. It was a game of cat and mouse, she thought. Heero Yuy was no fool, and neither was Wufei. The thought of her former friend made her frown as she keyed the buttons to check Heavyarm's shields, thinking of both Wufei and Trowa and then Quatre in quick succession.

Quatre she had tried to convince the world to burn at the stake, and that had failed because of Une. Wufei she'd tried to win over with words and then by force, and that had failed because of the still nameless soldier who'd died saving him there on the beaches of Greece. Trowa Barton she'd confronted in the tiny room on the fields of Kashmir, and found that she couldn't kill him. Before him, she would have been willing to say that the legend of the pilots' immortality was based sheerly on the fact that they had loyal friends in times of danger. But that didn't explain Trowa.

There had been something in the way his eyes met hers, the anguish and despair there that no child should ever have to know, and the knowledge he had imparted to her in that split second of silent communication was that he had been born a soldier and he would die a soldier. And some part of her, perhaps the part that had saved Wufei from OZ and the Federation all those years ago, did not want to accept that the hand he died by would be hers.

Sally Po did not want to be called a murderer.

The clock ticked down. Thirty seconds till L3's shields blew. They'd already seen traces of the colony's instability: shuttles fleeing the collapsing shields, small explosions within the nuclear reactors of the colony themselves. The L3 shields were projected in clusters along the outer perimeters of the base, forming bubbles that enclosed the different spheres of the colony, and in order to take down all of them, each bubble-generating reactor's computer would have to be attacked. Li had not balked at the task, and she did not doubt Li's word, because Li was the best.

Sally keyed the comm. "Attention all units. Jade and Dragon units, prepare to deploy when the L3 shield goes down. All others stay with me on course for L1."

The acknowledgements were trickling in when she sensed that there was something out of place. At first she thought it might be a hole in the formation, or that Heero and Wufei were finally closing the gap. But no, the dots on the screen were in place as they had been for as long as they had been climbing through space, and she could see the first faint glimmer of L1's signal on the scope as well.

But there was still something off.

Slowly, she cycled through targets, checking each one in turn. L1 sat still and silent, a few shuttles darting out from its bulbous docks like tiny fish from behind an anemone, trapped and desperate to flee. She let them go. She had no quarrel with the people of L1 themselves - only with the government that kept them under its thumb. She could see nothing besides them. It was silent, with the ominous silence of something pressing down on her, something that she should see but didn't. Something was wrong.

"Albairat," she snapped, her fingers grinding down on the comm button as if it were the thing that had wronged her. "Do you sense anything fishy?"

His grating voice came back at once. "It's been more than thirty seconds, hasn't it?"

The world stretched long and empty in those few milliseconds that it took for his words to go from her ears to her brain to her eyes, and then she saw why it seemed so quiet. Because it was. Because the explsions that they had been monitoring from L3's shield system had suddenly stopped, and the readout showed shield levels holding steady at 75%, and slowly climbing. Because she would have sent her two best units out to take down a base that was still more than capable of holding its own. Because that meant that the computer systems had not been breached, and that meant Li had failed.

But Aidoru could not fail. That was absurd.

"Shit," she hissed.

The comm crackled, and before she even reached over to slap the button, to turn on the second screen and see the grim expression on her wingman's face, the scope told her what she was about to hear.

"The Preventers are coming," he said.

In war, then, let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns. Thus it may be known that the leader of armies is the arbiter of the people's fate.

As she watched the red blips begin to close the gap between her forces and theirs, Sally gave herself a mental shake. Li had failed. There was no use denying it. Perhaps Heero Yuy had grown tired of waiting, and perhaps Li's failure had emboldened him. If they wanted a fight; she would give it to them. She was no coward.

Heero had come wanting one last battle, but she would show him that the war was just beginning.

Etille had almost begun to think they would not come for him.

Not that he considered himself nearly important enough to have Une send reinforcements to get him out. No, Une would not risk the lives of her troops to bail out an old soldier who had fought in so many engagements that it was almost laughable he was still alive. But he had thought surely she would try to save Trowa.

He wasn't sure why. Une wasn't the soft type, nor was she a fool. If he had been in command, he told himself, staring out the barred window of his cell into the empty, metallic, echoing hallway of high-level Kashmir security, he would have left Trowa here to die. L1 or Trowa Barton? The choice was clear.

Wasn't it?

The guards had thrown him back in his cell with very little preamble, and Etille hadn't tried to resist, instead looking serenely around him at the gray stone walls, at the gray floor, anywhere but the face of the guard who was trying to address him.

"You're never getting out of here," the man said, and Etille almost couldn't stop himself, had to bite his tongue to keep the reply between his lips, because he was surely getting softer as he grew older. The young Etille would have never risen to the bait in the guard's sneering voice.

That's what you think, he wanted to say, seeing Trowa's face rising up before him, the haunted face of the boy he'd seen in the hallway of the Kashmir hospital. The thought of it made something cold and hard ball up in his chest. It shouldn't have to end this way.

The truth hurts, Sally...but sometimes you must learn to accept it.

He wondered if sometimes, Treize had stopped believing in himself. It was hard to believe in something you could not see, could not touch. What exactly had Treize Khushrenada set his faith in? Friends? It did not seem too possible that as hated a man as him had had many friends. Definitely not religion of any sort, he would think. Perhaps he had only the belief that in the end, what he was doing was the right thing. Etille pressed his chin into his hands, thinking, studying the wall idly and wondering what Dorothy was doing. Doubtless she was out there still, trying to win the war with her will alone. Alicia had been like that too.

They'd left him his watch even as they stripped him of his weapons. Doubtless to prolong the agony, to make sure he would know the very hour and minute that the missiles would explode from their silos on their way to annihilate L1. Five hours, twenty-seven minutes.

Fidgeting, he got up and began pacing. The minutes ticked by. From his few interrogations with Sally and his narrow non-escape, he knew from experience that the hallway outside opened only to another hallway, and another hallway after that - windowless and almost endless. He missed the sunlight. He missed the sound of voices, even of footsteps. There were no sentries, no guards; only the ever present cameras. He hated cameras.

C-Block 251, he recited to himself, craning his neck to stare out the barred window again, willing someone, anyone, to come for him. He tried to imagine Trowa alone in his own cell, could not. It was like imagining the son he did not have in the hands of captors who would stop at nothing to gain control of the knowledge he held, because in Sally's eyes, Trowa Barton was only a tool. The back of his mind whispered to him that Trowa was a Gundam pilot, had doubtless been captured before and probably was functioning as well, if not better, than he was at the very moment, but the well of emotions that had been opened there was very deep.

A tool. Not a person. Only a tool.

That, he realized with a flash, was why he wanted to believe in Treize. Sally spoke of freedom, of self-government, of the will of the people, but the people who she championed were the same people she now threatened to destroy. If all revolutionaries were like her, then the world's greatest heroes would be nothing but hollow shells of words.

But Treize was different, Etille wanted to say. Treize had not been right, but neither had he been wrong, and unlike Sally, Treize had known that. He wanted to see Trowa again to tell him that he finally understood. That he saw that the world was really the place of beauty and potential Treize had wanted it to be, and even now, they could make it that way again.

Somewhere not too far away, a door creaked open.

Instantly, he was on his feet, peering through the bars. Someone was coming. He could hear footsteps, soft, faint, but definitely shoes tapping against the floor of the passage. Quickly, he considered his plan of attack, drawing back from the bars and wedging himself into the far wall opposite the door so that he would have a moment of surprise advantage before he struck.

Waited.

The footsteps neared his door, stopped as he hoped they would. Good.

The door creaked open.

He did not peer into the shadows that surrounded the movement as it slid back from its frame, did not bother to glance at the face of the person moving cautiously into his cell. He simply let the old instincts take over, pouncing from behind the door without a sound, bearing the intruder to the floor and raising both handcuffed fists to smash the hapless guard's face into the concrete floor.

"Etille?"

He froze, fists inches from the man's face, boot in the middle of the other's back. Slowly, he drew back, getting a good look at his visitor, who was grimacing at him in shock through blond bangs that had gone a little too long uncut, one cheek smeared with grease and mud and the other bleeding from where he had hit the ground.

It was Milliard Peacecraft.

The lift shafts and tram cars were still working. Otherwise, Darkflight had no idea what they would have done. Perhaps they could have rigged something together with the shuttle and the Gundam, but the shuttle could only carry twenty people at most, and the crowd that was gathered in the hangar was only a small fraction of the frightened L1 residents swarming at the gates of the space terminal, frantic to be saved.

He wasn't sure what he had expected. He'd had little love for L1 when he had left, and it certainly didn't make him ecstatic to be back where he'd started. But yet if his experience with Wing had taught him anything, it was that L1 was a part of him that he couldn't deny, just as it was a part of Wing, a part of Heero Yuy, and it would be foolish to try and deny that.

Even the Breaks would always be a part of him.

Duo had swung into swift action, directing Darkflight and Shinobu this way and that, with the de facto leader Yamazaki taking charge of the bands of citizens clutching bags, backpacks, small children, boxes of precious possessions. Darkflight had looked at Shinobu when the big man had started issuing orders to the citizens, and Shinobu had looked away. Darkflight hadn't pursued the matter. He recognized Yamazaki, and he was sure Shin did too, though the other would have definitely denied it. Whether Yamazaki would recognize them was an entirely different matter, because he'd never seen Darkflight's face, and Shin might have been too young at the time. But the leader of one of the most powerful assassin's gangs in the Breaks was not a man Darkflight would have easily forgotten.

Strange, he reflected, as he methodically helped each passenger up onto the train car, cramming as many people onto one car as possible, that war could make such equals out of the rich and the poor, the hunter and the hunted.

Duo's plan was simple. Keep 'em moving, he said, keep them believing that one place was safer than the next. In truth, the colony cluster to where they were evacuating their passengers was scarcely safer than the space docks they stood at, but it was worth a try. According to Duo, who had evidently taken great pains to study maps of L1 at some point in his life, this particular destination was protected by a pseudo gravity-well generator as well as three other clusters, none of which held nuclear reactors.

I hope you know what you're doing, Darkflight had told him simply after their hurried consultation. Cause I sure as hell don't.

Duo had smiled the cocky smile that Darkflight had begun to realize was his trademark, but his eyes told a different story. He had grudgingly admitted to himself that the reason Duo Maxwell seemed familiar was because the set of his jaw, the hardness of his eyes was the same as Wing's when they would set out before a mission.

The first train was full, and Darkflight signaled to Shinobu, who released it with a crank of a lever. They'd reprogrammed the train system, setting all of them to run a two-way course there and back from their safe haven, and Duo estimated it would take them at least nine hours to evacuate the entire crowd that was waiting patiently for their rides to safety. Darkflight scanned them again, trying to locate familiar faces, but found none. Something was odd, however, though he couldn't say what.

He scanned the faces again, then realized what was bothering him. There were few elderly people in the crowd. There were young mothers carrying babies, small children being towed by older brothers, fathers with families lined up behind them, all carrying packs of belongings. But no elderly, no lined faces. The oldest faces he could spot couldn't be more than forty years old.

Shinobu saw his look, slipping from his post at the lever for a brief moment. Yamazaki took his place and the cartel heir glided to his side with the grace of a trained assassin.

"You realize that there aren't any old people here," Darkflight whispered. "Why?"

Shinobu's face took on a set look, and his voice was clipped. "I know. I wasn't about to ask, but Yamazaki told me."

Darkflight knew the answer before the other boy spoke. "They didn't want to leave, did they?"

"Damn fools," Shinobu said, his voice thick. "They're like the people of the Breaks, in a way. You notice there aren't many of those here either. You can tell Breaks people when you see them, and I guess most of them didn't want to leave either."

"That's where we should be," Darkflight mumbled, trying to sound convincing.

Shinobu's fierce eyes regarded him. "Do you really believe that?"

He wanted to, he told himself, but that would just be lying. "A month ago, that might have been true," he muttered. "No, not even then, really. I don't love the Breaks, but it's all I've ever known, and I thought I just wanted to know I had something to go back to. But..." he glanced up at Shinobu.

"You've seen the world through the eyes of a Gundam pilot," the other told him softly. "That changes everything." He smiled ruefully. "I can't go back either, you know."

Babies were crying above the roar of the trains, and it was very hot. It was inevitable, he supposed, that Wing would outgrow the Breaks. Darkflight hadn't expected that they would outgrow them together. He wondered what Atsuki would think, then decided that she would have been proud of them.

The sea of humanity surged around them, voices babbling in Japanese and the occasional foreign tongue. He thought he heard a dog bark, once, above the cry of children's voices and the hiss of machinery. Yamazaki shouted something and Darkflight crammed the last person into the train and pulled the door shut. The car creaked as it shot off down the tracks. Shinobu shook his head grimly.

"It's been an hour, and we've barely gotten any of these people away. We don't have enough time."

The crowd was beginning to move restlessly, and Darkflight glanced over their heads, meeting Duo's eyes, wondering if the Gundam pilot had another plan, knowing the answer even as he thought of the question.

No, Duo's face said, I have nothing else.

And with a sickening realization, Darkflight saw that no matter their efforts, the outcome would be the same. People were going to die.

What did we come here for, then? he cried out silently, appealing to the blank, harsh, nothingness of Duo's eyes, blurring flat like lines on a television screen, the fierceness of his emotions startling him to the point of tears. Why did I come back home, if just to watch my friends die?

And the part of him that had always jolted him to reality when he had been Darkflight, Breaks assassin, said: you've never had a home.

But that was wrong, Darkflight knew. As much as he had hated the Breaks, hated his life and hated the choices he had to make to stay alive...there was still something there.

"I never thought," Shinobu whispered softly, "that it would come to this."

They stood there together as the flood of humanity crowded past them into the straining doors of the tram cars, panicked men and women raising their voices as the timer ticked down, the second hand crawling by on the clock, never slowing because one could not stop time, not even if one was a Gundam pilot. The heat haze of air was heavy on his skin, the pain of thousands of combined minds reaching out to embrace their condemned colony one last time, and he couldn't help it, wanted to reach out his hands and take hold of that, to pull it to him and make it his own too. Because in the end, L1 was still his colony.

"Maybe it was never a home," he said out loud to the stifling air, barely conscious that Shinobu was still standing there frozen, "but it was...a place to return to."

The cartel heir's face contorted in a curious mass of emotions, and he could see the effort it cost Shinobu to straighten, to square his shoulders, to pretend that he was supremely in control. "Stop it," Darkflight said. "It doesn't suit you."

"What?" Shinobu sounded surprised, a little pained.

"The lying," Darkflight said shortly. "Just because your grandfather did it doesn't mean you have to do it." The words came out rougher than he had intended, but it was the only thing he knew how to say.

Shinobu looked at him, and those dark eyes sparkled with something he couldn't identify, something powerful, something like life. He would have never known what life was, if not for Heero Yuy.

"Out of everyone," Shinobu said, "I think I needed to hear that from you." A moment of heavy silence that seemed to blanket even the milling crowd, and the rising sense of panic dimmed just a bit, but it was enough. "Thank you."

Darkflight glanced at him curiously. Yamazaki threw the lever and another train car shot off down the rails, and Shinobu turned with a suddenness that surprised even Darkflight, clamping his hands down on his shoulders urgently.

"How heavy is one hangar?" His voice was burningly feverish, as were his eyes. "Can you find out?"

Darkflight stared at him before the shocking flash of an idea crossed his mind. "You can't mean-"

"We have a Gundam," Shinobu said. "I suggest we use it."

"Where is Trowa?" Zechs demanded, as soon as Etille removed his boot from his back and he could roll, grimacing somewhat, into a hurried seated position with one leg curled under him because it hurt too much to move it. "Has anyone ever told you you've got a very deadly tackle move?"

"He's down two floors," Etille said without preamble, offering both hands, encased in flimsy-looked handcuffs, to help him back up. Zechs grasped the outstretched hands and jerked himself to his feet. His leg was asleep. Damn. "How on earth did you know I was here?"

Zechs flashed the ID card and saw that Etille understood. "We've got to get moving immediately," he said. "We've only got ten minutes left, more or less. I've got someone standing guard there in the hall, but even if they haven't spotted us in the security cameras by now, it's only a matter of time." He produced a knife from one flightsuit pocket, and with a few quick, practiced twists, had the handcuffs clicking open.

"Who's your friend?" Etille wondered, glancing quickly around the cell as Zechs jerked his head towards the door.

"An acquaintance of Duo Maxwell's. You might know her. Hilde Schbeiker? She's an ex-Federation pilot."

Etille raised one eyebrow. "You're traveling in strange companies these days, Peacecraft."

"I have a feeling Une would approve," Zechs returned in a sharp whisper, "if I had her permission. Where's Trowa? Two floors down, you said."

"I managed to locate him in the computer on one of my...planned excursions cut short. They've got his data masked well. I assume you looked for him and found me instead?"

"Affirmative." He looked around for Hilde but didn't expect to see her where he'd left her. She was no fool - staying in one position for too long in enemy territory raised the odds of being found exponentially. Briefly, he wished they had radios, then motioned Etille to follow him into another hallway.

"There's no use ducking and hiding, Peacecraft," the other man said calmly, as composed as Zechs remembered him from their brief acquaintance. "You know there's security cameras installed all over the place. You might as well save your energy and stop looking like an idiot."

He considered rebutting that statement, because it seemed just plain wrong to be moving slowly in a potentially dangerous environment, but knew that Etille was right and settled rather grudgingly into a fast walk. The former rebel second-in-command kept pace, looking unfazed by his rapid rescue; aside from days-worth of stubble and an awkward cast on his left foot and swaths of bandages around his shoulders, he looked more alert than he ever had been on A007. "You don't look too worse for wear," Zechs said instead. "Sally feeding you well?"

"She tried to worm some Preventers information out of me," Etille said. "I assume by that sheer fact that Une had some secrets of her own, secrets that she didn't even trust Sally to keep." His voice went odd on the last few words of the sentence, and Zechs looked sideways at him. "In hindsight, I'm sure she's glad she did so."

They turned the corner and Zechs had a feeling Hilde would be around the bend of the next turn. "Une's smarter than most people give her credit for," he said. Etille seemed different somehow, though he wasn't sure how, exactly. Lighter was the word, maybe, or less burdened. "She didn't become Treize's second-in-command for nothing."

"Treize," Etille intoned softly. Zechs frowned.

"What about Treize?"

Etille made a noise deep in his throat. "I think," he mused, "that I would have liked Trieze Khushrenada."

Before Zechs could question that peculiar statement, there was a flash of brown hair, a rustle of clothing, and Hilde stepped out from behind the left hand wall ahead, where two hallways met in a T-junction of a crossroads with a gun in her hand. "You're late," she accused. "And that's not Trowa."

"No," Zechs said. He looked at Etille. "You know your way around?"

"Not as well as you, I'm sure," the general said quietly. "Where do you want me?"

Zechs looked at Hilde and she stared back at him with a hint of challenge in her eyes, but only a hint. I won't be left behind, those eyes said, and Zechs answered back with his own gaze, don't worry, you won't be.

"Tell me where they're keeping the last Gundam pilot," he said. "Hilde and I will go get him. Etille, I need you to find a way to get out of this place - there's someone very important out there who needs your help."

It was refreshing up here in space, calmer and cooler and serene, with nothing but the invisible sunlight and the whine of Nataku's engines purring against him, and Wufei remembered the last few hours as if they had been a dream.

He did not need to apologize to Heero, he knew. The other pilot would forgive him anything - had already forgiven him everything, because war was like that. It drove people mad. Whether Zechs Merquise would ever trust him again was another matter, but he didn't really care what the man thought.

"Heero?"

His voice was a little rusty, as he hadn't used it since they'd landed at Sparta to refuel, but almost at once, the left screen flashed and a picture of the Japanese boy appeared, as emotionless as he remembered him. Almost. The flesh of the scar was a little more puckered than usual, and on second glance he saw that Heero was frowning.

"Are you all right?"

"I had a moment," Wufei said. "I'm not sure what got into me."

Heero almost smiled. "I don't blame you. Can I trust you not to turn psycho on me again?"

"You can." He shifted in his seat, brought up the targeting scope. "Do you mind letting me in on your plans?"

"I told Jeong," Heero said, "that if you didn't snap out of it by the time we were up beyond orbit, that I would hand over command of the second squadron to him. But I also told him not to count on it. That you were more stable than you looked."

"Thank you," Wufei said warily. Was that a compliment? Shenlong's life support system coughed a bit as it kicked in, and he looked at the altimeter, knowing that meant they'd passed above the threshold of 50,000 meters, the last wisps of atmosphere floating past them like ghostly clouds. "One group to pursue Sally and the other to...?"

"I don't think I am mistaken," Heero said flatly, "when I say that Sally will split into two groups. We know that she's after two targets, the biggest of those being L3. But with L3's shields being taken down, a few mobile suits should be able to do the job. The garrison on L3 is small and I don't see them putting up too much of a fight."

"No," Wufei murmured. "So she splits her command into two, with one headed to L3 and the other to L1?"

"Not quite L1. She's not after L1. If I were her, I'd try to get as far away from L1 as possible before it blows, because only a madman would want to be there when the missiles hit."

Wufei heard the dead stop at the end of the last sentence and raised one eyebrow. "But?"

"But," Heero said, "Gundam pilots are known for being insane."

Shenlong's computer whirred for a second, calculating the raw data he had entered and spit out something back at him. "Fifteen minutes," Wufei said, "till we pass through the atmosphere at current speed and trajectory. Ten till you estimate the L3 shields are scheduled to blow. Shall I take group one, then, and attempt to stop her from gaining control of the L3 garrison?"

Heero hesitated, and again Wufei was struck by how different this Heero was from the old. The new Heero voiced thoughts where the old Heero would not have, hesitated before making decisions where the old Heero would have rushed into without a second thought, looked you in the eye when he was speaking not because he considered you a potential foe, but because he valued your opinion as a friend. "I thought," Heero said, "I'd lead group one. I thought you might want to see Sally again, on your own terms."

A shiver of goosebumps crept down his arms and he shuddered, an involuntary shaking that ran down from the top of his head to his toes which curled up on themselves in his boots. The death of the heart is the saddest thing that can happen to you. "I'd like that," he said at last, barely managing to say it in more than a raspy whisper.

"Get as close as you can to L1," Heero said, "without killing yourself. I'd like you to come back in one piece. If possible, I'd like Sally to come back in one piece too, but I don't think the thought of death will stop her." He scowled a bit. "She's too much like Treize for her own good."

Wufei scrolled through the list of bright red target blips blinking at him from his targeting scope, noticing that Jeong was adjusting his speed automatically to match the enemy's, and that the rest of the squadron was doing the same off his lead. Jeong would be a good commander someday. "She wouldn't like to hear you say that," he replied, one lip curling up in a small smile. "Treize, to her, was nothing but an imposter, a poser pretending to be an altruist."

"That's the catch, don't you think?"

"You mean, that it was really how he was?"

Heero considered. "Not exactly. Treize hid a lot of secrets, and in the end I think he saw things too much through the guise of a galactic opera. But through it there was still something. You'd know better, I'm sure."

Strangely enough, thinking of Treize's death did not jerk his mind back to that horrible last battle, the image of Tallgeese exploding in front of him, the long seconds of eternity in which he wished he had died with Treize. "People like Sally who don't understand Treize now will never understand him," he said. "I don't quite understand him myself. But it's how you look at the world, if you see the world as some place to be controlled or liberated or destroyed, or if you see the world as a living entity, made up of people."

"I don't think I catch your meaning," Heero said, and Wufei smiled.

"Treize wanted to bring peace by destroying all soldiers. Obviously, he failed. But Treize also realized that the road to peace lay not only through the death of the soldier, but through the hearts of the people."

Heero opened his mouth, and the scope pinged.

"She's moving," Wufei said tersely. "Looks like L3's about to blow."

"There's a transmission from Jeong," Heero said. "Hang on." He punched several buttons in rapid succession and the Korean man's drawn face flickered onto the screen.

"Something strange is happening, sir," he said. "See for yourself...are you on channel? I'm having one of my communications officers monitoring the energy spikes from the colony shields, and they're not behaving like we expected them to."

"How long till they're down, then?" Wufei asked.

Jeong shook his head. "That's the problem, sir." He glanced to the side for a moment, and Wufei saw the mobile suits behind him begin to rearrange themselves into classic battle formation. "They don't seem to be going down."

Wufei frowned. "How is that possible?"

"The energy spiking's frozen," Heero said. "I'm sending you the readout. Look." The data that flashed onto his right hand screen was a messy jumble of raw code, but it was not hard to decipher if one knew what one was looking for. Heero and Jeong were right, he realized. The spiking should have reached critical point some five minutes ago and then disintegrated into random electronic signals, indicating that the shield had been fragmented enough for base security to be ineffective. But instead, it held.

"Malfunction?"

"Of the shield?" Jeong looked confused. "I would say this is anything but a malfunction, sir. The shield seems to be doing its job nicely."

"No, of Sally's...whatever she's using."

Jeong looked unsure. "It might be. But look, sir, the energy levels are going back up. The shield's recharging."

Battle formation was complete, he saw, and suddenly he saw the red blips change, too, their engines powering up, their formation beginning to split and regroup. "I don't know what it is," he said harshly, "but this doesn't look good. They seem to be speeding up."

"Preventers, this is Marauder leader. Increase engine power to 90%," Heero instructed. "Looks like the enemy is going to attempt the classic evade method. Prepare to surround and engage on my command."

"Are you sure this is wise, sir?"

"It's not a matter of wisdom, Jeong." Heero stared through the screen at both of them, but Wufei felt that those hard blue eyes were staring mostly at him. "Sally's lost her chance, and we're not going to let her get it back. We need to move her as close to L1 as possible, so if she really intends to fire those missiles, she's going to have to be prepared to go down along with them."

"That's crazy!"

For a moment, there was the Heero Yuy he had once known - cold, emotionless, a deadly efficient killing machine - and then something in his face changed imperceptibly and he became human again. "We're hoping that it won't come to that. Hoping that she'll change her mind."

But, Wufei added silently, hearing the words that Heero could not say to Jeong, who for all his loyalty to the Preventers and standing in the ranks, was only a mere child after all, if it does, we will be there till the end.

"It's your performance, Wufei," Heero said instead. "The final act."

His hands moving of their own accord to open the comm channel, muscle memory fueling each cell, each nerve synapse, and he felt the world collapse and then expand around him as if everything was rushing in at the same time, felt Shenlong shift around him as Nataku ignited the beam lance one last time. He saw Tallgeese exploding again and heard Treize's calm words in his ears.

Zechs, I'll go ahead of you.

"Sally!" he cried. "Stop!"

 
Scene XII: In My Own Words

 
She was huddled in a crouch when she heard the footsteps approaching stealthily from someone where her left, beyond the far row of petroleum tanks. The Kashmir sun's rays, hot on her already sweaty skin with the unmercilessness of summer, prickled where they burned steadily against the thick cloth of her jacket, filtering through the curtain of her hair. She could swear even the ground was smoking.

Thud. Thud.

Hunkering down in what remained of the shadows surrounding the nearest tank, she squeezed her eyes shut and tried to hold her breath. It was just a patrol, she told her herself. She would just remain very quiet and still, and they would pass.

Thud. Thud.

They were coming this way. Frantically, she tried to remember the rudimentary basics of operating the military-issue pistol that Hilde had loaned her, then realized with a stricken start that she didn't have it anymore. Hilde had taken it back because she would need it more where she was going.

This was not looking good.

The crunching on the gravel was definitely headed her way. She wrapped her arms tightly around herself, feeling her nerves quivering. Closer. Closer. Then a pause, where she wasn't sure if the thudding she heard were the feet running or if it was just the pounding of her heartbeat in her own ears.

The footsteps stopped.

"Relena?"

She jerked her head up, an involuntary reaction from hearing her name on someone else's lips, and almost fell backward with the shock.

"I'd love to stop and chat," Dermand Etille said, "but I'm here with a mission from your brother. You feeling well enough to go on a hike?"

"Where are we going?" Relena asked breathlessly, her head still whirling. Shaken, she stared up at the tall man standing over her, his shadow a welcome breather from the pounding of Kashmir's sun. From somewhere close by, she heard an engine start, and then a shrill siren so loud it seemed to split the cardboard-flimsy air in two. Etille heard it too, throwing a glance over his shoulder urgently.

"They've spotted your brother. Let's hope he gets to Trowa before they do."

"We're going to rescue Trowa?"

"No," Etille said, reaching a hand down and almost dragging her to her feet. "No, I've acquired the emergency reprogram code to those missiles. We're going to see if we can't do something with it."

Zechs was already pounding at a flying sprint down the hallway, Hilde right behind him, when the sirens went off.

It was no surprise to him; he'd calculated almost to the minute when the guards would check, and he was right. Twenty minutes, he had said, and looking at his watch, it had been twenty minutes and fifty seven seconds. Sally's people were good, he had to admit. It remained to be seen whether they were better than he was.

"Turn right," Hilde snapped, and he didn't question her, simply dove into the hallway opening that appeared on his right. The cell numbers were increasing. C123. Further. C140. Almost there.

"It should be the second one on your next turn on the left," she called from behind him, "judging from the way these numbers are going up. Check - right ahead of you. Look, there!"

He stopped in his tracks, panting slightly and fingering his pistol, senses kicked into overdrive just in case. C251, the metallic panel slightly above eye level read, set into the frame of the door with a grim precision that showcased the unforgiving air of the place. There were no windows. The entire complex reminded him of Treize's underground hangar, where he'd built Epyon.

"There's no lock on the door," Hilde said, and Zechs smiled tightly.

"Yes, there is." Feeling in his pocket for a minute, his fingers touched the rectangle of plastic, and pulling it out, he stood silently for a second, gauging the length and width of the door. It would be about where his hand was hovering now, he thought, maybe to the left. Yes, there was a small line. To any untrained eye, it would be a crack in the metal, but to Zechs, it was simply one of the state-of-the-art scanning systems that all Preventers high security prisons were fitted with.

He waved the card in front of the line, hoping that they still had a few minutes remaining.

The door beeped, and then it clicked open.

Zechs was not surprised to find Trowa Barton standing there, facing the door waiting for them to enter. Barton had always been like that, Zechs knew, even though the two of them had never truly met - calm, unfazable, deadly and efficient to the very end. The descriptions he'd been given of the former Heavyarms pilot did little justice to the wiry boy who stood in front of him now. There was no trace of teenage awkwardness in his obviously still-growing frame, no hint of the indecision that had plagued him as Sally Po's forces demanded him to surrender the missiles. Trowa's eyes flicked to Zechs' face, and then to Hilde's behind him, and Zechs read approval there.

"Hello, Trowa Barton," he said.

"I must be important still," the boy said, stepping toward him and holding his handcuffed hands out. Zechs produced his knife and jimmied the lock as efficiently as he had Etille's. "Une's sending the entire chain of command out for me."

"Oh no," Zechs said, before Hilde could open her mouth, raising his voice above the sirens were still wailing outside in the hall. "Don't thank Une."

"Then-"

"No time for questions," Hilde cut him off urgently. "The enemy'll be here any second, and we've gotta leave now if we want to catch Etille."

Trowa went very still. "Etille?"

Zechs smiled. "We thought his cell was yours, but it turned out to be a good thing. He's got the new code to the missile silo." He slammed the door behind him, heard the automatic lock click. Shame that there were so many cameras installed in the hallway; if not for that, Trowa Barton would still be in his cell, as far as anyone knew. "Let's get moving. It's quite a walk."

There should have been reports piling high on her desk, aides running frantically in and out, giant voices from the loudspeakers booming down the hallway of launches and sorties. That was what Une was used to during a war, what years under Treize's tutelage had taught her to expect.

But it was silent.

Her television had been on for the better part of the day before she had finally gotten sick of it and jabbed the off button on the remote with a vehemence that probably would have been better saved for shouting insults at Fatima bint Narish, or telling the entire World Nation emergency council that they were a bunch of fools who couldn't touch their butts with both hands.

Or something along those lines.

Instead, she was reduced to sitting here at her desk, staring out the window of her office and wondering what the world was up to. The sky was blue, slightly cloudy, but clear enough that shafts of mid-afternoon sunshine slanted down through the puffy clouds to fall in golden puddles on the floor. Her coffee was cold, the computer was overheating, and it was time for her usual snack but she wasn't hungry even though she hadn't had anything to eat in the last 36 hours.

The clock on the corner of her desk read 1646. Less than two hours till Sally pulled the trigger, and no matter what the doubters at the World Nation said, Une believed that Sally would not hesitate to carry out her threat. Sally was always too good at keeping promises.

A knock on the door.

Instantly, she was on her feet, whirling around as if God himself was here in person to deliver a message.

"Come in!"

But it was only Lopez, looking too tired and haggard after another sleepless night. He carried nothing in his hands, no papers or briefcase, but all the same, in his tired face was the look of someone who was bringing important news.

"What?" she snapped, not bothering to apologize for her tone, knowing that he would understand.

"Winner and Dorothy Catalonia are back," he said. "L3's shields are still holding."

She felt something pass over her eyes then, a shadow like a gray cloud, and she blinked several times, steadying herself on the back of her chair. "What? When? How are they?"

"Catalonia seems to be fine. She's showing signs of minor trauma, but most of her symptoms seem to stem from dehydration and exhaustion. Winner, on the other hand..." he trailed off.

"Winner what?" Une demanded. She wanted to shake him.

"He opened his eyes for about two seconds and then went unconscious, apparently. I wasn't there when they came out of the Zero, but he's having a hard time. They rushed him to the hospital right away. I think the last report we heard was he's in shock, some danger of going into a coma. I think it's just data overload on the senses. I don't doubt he'll be fine." Lopez's voice held an almost spiritual note of conviction. "He's a Gundam pilot, after all."

"They're not invincible," Une murmured, then took a deep breath, let it out. The sunlight was still falling in graceful folds to the floor, and she allowed herself to look out the window, to feel its warmth and admire the golden glow instead of trying to see through to space beyond.

"Ma'am?"

She shook her head. "Nothing. Keep me updated on his status when you get any word."

"Yes, ma'am."

"What about Heero? Duo?"

Lopez looked crestfallen. "Nothing on either of those fronts, ma'am. We do have reports that Sally Po has left Earth's atmosphere, presumably headed for L3. I'm not sure what she'll do once she realizes that those shields are still up."

"If Heero knows what's good for him, he'll set her on course for L1," Une said. "I would bet that's what he's got his mind set on doing right now." She clenched one fist, staring up at the sky and those clouds, knowing that maybe if she left her office and went down to Intel they could give her better information, but not wanting to cling to false hope.

What would Treize have done? She tried to imagine his face in her mind, to recall some of the gems of wisdom he'd bestowed on her when she was still a headstrong young officer intent on making the world his, and found that she couldn't quite remember what his voice sounded like.

"Lopez-"

Her phone rang.

She let the words drop, moved to her desk and picked up the phone with hands suddenly gone cold. "General Une."

"Ma'am," the voice at the other end said, "we've got more information regarding Major Li."

She frowned. "Li?"

Lopez fidgeted and she glanced sharply at him. There was something in his face she didn't like. "Call me back in five minutes," she said, slamming the phone down before the man could answer her, and turned to face her aide. "All right, Lopez. Spill it."

He took a deep breath. "Two hours ago, right before Winner and Catalonia exited the Zero system, we heard something from Major Li's office that sounded like a desk or bookshelf or something had collapsed on itself."

An unpleasant suspicion crossed Une's mind and she dismissed it. There it was, one of Treize's proverbs: Jumping to conclusions is nothing more than not respecting what your subordinates have to say. "Go on," she said instead.

"We'd assumed Li was gone on some mission for you to Forteleza. She'd sent us the orders herself a few days ago, signed by you. So you can imagine it was a little hectic when we forced open the door and saw her sitting in her chair."

"I never signed any orders," Une said grimly. "I haven't had time to sit down, much less sign anything." Another enemy right before her eyes, practically in her own bedroom, and she had missed the mark again, too busy with Quatre's trial and thoughts of Sally to realize that Li had been missing for at least two days. Treize would have called her dull and stupid, and she would have deserved it. "I think I know where you're going with this."

Lopez nodded stiffly. "I knew that Major Li was a genius with computers. But...I never realized she was this good. The goggles and wires were still hanging off her eyes when we entered, but she was laying backward on the floor. She'd fallen out of her chair. The crash we heard was the chair smashing into a bookcase filled with data disks and glass. The glass broke, of course, and some of it was embedded fairly deep into her skin. If we hadn't been there, she would have been dead."

Une took a breath. "Well that's good."

"Not necessarily," Lopez said. "I don't know how Winner and Catalonia managed to defeat Aidoru, but...the result isn't pretty. The doctors told me worse case, brain death in a matter of hours, best case she would be a vegetable for the rest of her life. It would have been better, I think, if Li had died."

Li was Aidoru.

She knew she should be feeling something - shock, maybe, or disbelief. Grief at Li's medical condition, anger at being betrayed. But instead, she looked out the window again, noting distractedly that the sunlight was a little less bright than it had been before, that the clouds were tinted with the faintest hint of sunset rose, and that meant that evening was coming and Sally's countdown clock was running out.

"What do you do, Lopez, when everything as you've known it is coming to an end, and you can't do anything to stop it?"

He hesitated for a second, perhaps wondering if it was a trick question, but she could see the bright spheres of his mind working behind the bland face. It was a shame, she thought, that Treize had never met Enrico Lopez. Trieze could have harnessed the burning potential she still saw in him, could have drawn it out of him like a fire out of the coals and made it into something great.

"Honestly, ma'am," he said, "I don't really know." He took a deep breath, staring at his shoes, then bringing his gaze up to meet hers. "I honestly don't even have the credentials to tell you. You've been through it once already, with Treize...I would imagine it would be almost too sad for you now to go through it again."

A great feeling of sorrow welled through her at the mention of his name from someone else's lips, like a burst of fireworks exploding and melting away, and she almost reached out one hand to him. "No," she said, "I think I'm just beginning to realize that today isn't the end at all."

"I don't think I understand," Lopez said, a hint of frustration in his voice.

"Maybe I've been a fool in trying to hold onto Treize for two years, even when I knew he would have just liked to be laid to rest. Maybe that's the point Sally is trying to prove to me right now. You can't cling to memories - you have to learn to rise above that."

"Memories aren't bad things," Lopez hazarded. "Not all of them."

Une shook her head. "No. They're not. But they can blind you to the truth." She rubbed her eyes, allowing herself a brief moment of weakness, then squared her shoulders. "Lopez, take me to the hospital to see Winner and Catalonia, and then I want to go down to Intelligence. In a few hours, we'll have our ending."

Lopez nodded, lips curving into a sudden smile. "No, ma'am," he said. "Not an ending. You just said so yourself. Maybe instead, it will be a beginning."

He tried to imagine that not everything was resting on his shoulders, and that after this, he could hop down from Deathscythe's cockpit and grin and pretend that everything was still all right. But Duo knew that if this failed, then everything they'd come to L1 to accomplish would be for nothing.

That was always the cincher, he thought wearily as he threw power to engines, easing the Gundam out of its cramped position beside the shuttle in the hangar that was a little too small and a little too empty. There was always something that only he could do, always something that depended solely on his shoulders, and if he failed, people would die or colonies would be destroyed, and when it came down to it, he had always failed.

The image of Ilene beat against his eyes still, even when he told himself that her ghost was laid to rest, and that there had been nothing Trowa could have done.

It doesn't matter, he decided, releasing the gravity brake with a hiss of hot air, and feeling the Gundam rise as if on dark wings. The hangar door was a black square through the blazing hangar lights, and he shot through it into the void of space, letting Deathscythe bear him up silently, closing his eyes and imagining that nothing had changed, that Treize was still alive and if he opened his eyes he would be able to see the Libra there like a mythical monster, hovering.

He thought, as he opened his eyes to the empty reality before him, that he might have even preferred that to what he had gotten himself into now.

"Duo? You there?"

"I'm here," he answered, his voice cracking. He cleared his throat. "Is everything secure?"

A brief scuffle. "Ready as they'll ever be," Shinobu responded over the comm. "I've got five men manning the release, but we'll have to time it exactly, or-"

"I understand," Duo said, cutting him off. It had been almost absurd when Shinobu had approached him with the idea of using the Gundam to push the hangar away from the colony, as if it was just a big box with no strings attached. Duo had wanted to laugh. He could have argued no, it was too large, it was too heavy, there were too many people.

But really when it had come down to it, Shinobu had a point. There were three hours remaining, no time to lose, and all the haste in the world wouldn't be able to deliver all those people to where they had to go. He didn't want any more people to die because of him.

In that moment of indecision, with Shinobu and Darkflight staring at him intently, with Helena and the rest of the colonists still believing that they were guaranteed safety because one of the Gundam pilots, savior of the colonies two years ago, was among them, he had understood how Wufei felt.

"We'll do it," he had said harshly. "Shin, you go find out what it'll take to detach the hangar from supports. There's got to be release handles somewhere holding it down. L2's hangars had them, and I'd think L1's would be the same. Also find out about atmospheric control in here and how long oxygen will last if we have to bring it out of the colony atmosphere. Darkflight, go tell Helena and Yamazaki. I'm going to get Deathscythe."

The words had sounded brave and noble to him then, and maybe to everyone they still were brave and noble. He wished Hilde was here. She would have known what to do.

"All right, Shin, I'm coming in," he said. "Vector three-zero on your starboard."

"Copy," Shinobu said, sounding for all the world like he had been born to space combat. Duo toggled Deathscythe's targeting computer. The hangar wasn't too heavy for one lone Gundam to move, but it would be tricky. One wrong calculation, one wrong twist of the Gundam's arms, and they would all spin out of control.

You're a better pilot than that, his brain scolded him, and he replied, but I haven't piloted in two years.

The colony loomed against his front viewscreens. He cut engine power. Deathscythe whined in protest. "Get ready to release the levers in three," he said, holding the Gundam steady. He could see the gleaming metal of the support beams flickering out at him. Odd; he'd always imagined colonies as old, rusted. But there was no rusting in space.

"In two-" he said, guiding Deathscythe in on the trajectory, calculated just so that the hangar's center of gravity would be perfectly balanced when the Gundam's arms took hold of it.

"One-"

There was another slight tremor from L3's shields and the readings fuzzed out for a bit, then returned with bits of static.

I wouldn't be a pilot if I wasn't able to believe in humanity. One day there won't be a need for people like you and me, Duo. I hope we both live to see that day.

"Now!"

Deathscythe was coming up fast, too fast, but he saw the snap of the great metal pincers releasing, the shudder of the massive metal structure untethered, wobbling unsteadily, and before it could begin to drift, Deathscythe had clamped itself around it, metal to metal. He was calm. Well-remembered actions, as if programmed into his fingers. Release shields. Full power to engines. Jamming the lever forward with more force than was needed, as if by the sheer will of his very being, he could force the Gundam to move.

It moved.

Slowly at first, and the hangar was wobbling uncontrollably, and Duo had to stop himself from wishing for at least something to tie it down with, or a slave cable. There was no time for wishes. There as only one Gundam, one pilot, one hangar and thousands of people inside, and this was his mission.

"Shin? You there?"

His scope beeped at him as the other boy responded. "We're here. We're all fine. How long, do you think?"

"It shouldn't be more than twenty minutes, if all goes well." If, Duo reminded himself, then shook his head hard. Regrets never got anyone anywhere. Deathscythe's engines were at full power, and they were still moving agonizingly slow, but they were moving, and that was the important thing. "I've got the center of gravities balanced as well as I can, but if there's a problem, I might have to take emergency measures. As long as you can hear me on the comm, I'd say don't panic."

"All right," Shinobu said, sounding perfectly calm. Duo could hear a baby crying somewhere in the background. "I trust you."

The scope pinged at him again, and he turned sharply in his seat to peer out the targeting pod. "Shit," he said. Deathscythe wasn't going to go any faster, and this did not look good at all. There were at least three squadrons of them, maybe more, and at their head, unless his eyesight was failing him, was Heavyarms.

"Trouble?"

"I'll be willing to bet anything those are Sally's forces. What the hell she's doing out here, I have no idea, but-" He broke off, scrolling through the list of targets rapidly. "Hold on just a second."

"Duo?"

He gave a sudden whoop of delight, already reaching for the frequency channel button as he clenched his hands in sweaty relief. "I might not be the brightest kid around," he said, "but Deathscythe's scope doesn't lie. That's Wing Zero."

"Duo?" the comm crackled, familiar voice sounding faintly startled. "Is that you?"

The forbidding hump of the missile silo was dark, seemingly deserted, doors shut tight against the late afternoon heat wave, and Etille jerked his hand back from the entry panel with a snarl and a muttered curse.

"They've changed the entry code," he said. "Damn my stupidity. I got the missile code but forgot the one to get inside the damn silo."

"Would Milliard know it?" Relena wondered, her eyes wide. He looked at her, mind whirling through a thousand options, wondering how she could be so calm despite having never been in combat before. It must be a Peacecraft thing.

"I doubt it," Etille said. "This one's fluid. We're going to have to improvise here."

Heero had seen the huge hangar detach from its mother colony cluster, but it wasn't till they had closed into within firing distance of L1 that he had seen the Gundam pushing it, dwarfed by the giant metal structure. It was oddly bizarre to see the tiny machine there, engines flaming. They were moving by sheer force of will, Heero realized with some shock, because inside that hangar, there were people.

"You're just in time, boss," Duo's voice said from the comm with its familiar bantering tone, and only someone who knew Duo as well as Heero did could read the relief and fear in there. "Why don't you take care of those pesky enemy suits for me? I've got something I have to do."

"Roger," Heero said. "Wufei, you take second squadron and get as close as you can to that colony as you can. You've got fifty mobile suits at your disposal, and Duo can't push that hangar by himself all day. Use what you've got."

"Understood," Wufei said sharply, and the comm clicked and Heero saw the formation to his right peal off in a flowing maneuver that reminded him of the way Treize had flown, graceful, like a bird.

But there was Heavyarms in front of him, barring the way, and he couldn't let her go without a fight. Not here, not in front of L1, which even through everything, through the experiments and Doctor J and Operation Meteor and the Breaks and Atsuki and the loss of the childhood he'd never had, was still his home.

"First squadron! Do whatever you need to, but your mission is to make sure none of Po's forces get through to that colony. You understand?"

"Roger that, sir," Jeong replied, and Heero gunned his engines, heading straight for the Gundam that should have been a friend, waiting for Sally to say something, to break the eerie radio silence, but she did not. She simply stopped and waited.

Heero had the odd sensation that she was laughing at him. For some reason, that made him more infinitely sad than anything she could have said.

Our hands are stained with enough blood as it is. And if killing Sally is the only way to stop the cycle, so be it.

"I won't let you destroy my colony," he said softly, and Wing Zero spread its arms like the wings of a bird, and dove in for the final strike.

"We've got a delivery here," the guard said over the viewscreen, and the silo commander frowned for a second, but the credentials on the ID scan were genuine, and the man seemed harmless enough. The helmet covered most of his head, but those green eyes were carefully blank. He seemed somehow familiar, too.

"All right," he said, gesturing one of the controllers to go get the door. "We'll have it open in a second for you. But you'd better be quick."

The guard nodded deferentially. "Yes, sir." The screen went blank.

Not two seconds after that, there was the hiss of the door opening from the tunnel entrance, then a brief yelp, the sound of a body falling to the ground. Silence.

"Castell?" The commander tensed. "Castell?" He turned.

The barrel of a pistol jammed itself against his neck and hard blue eyes met his.

"If you know what's good for you," Zechs Merquise said, "You will keep very, very still."

Sally Po had been waiting for Heero Yuy to say something as he came roaring in on Wing Zero, trying to draw her off in a feint, but she wouldn't be drawn off. Surely he didn't think she was as inexperienced as that.

Military tactics are like unto water; for water in its natural course runs away from high places and hastens downward.

Sun Tzu was always right, Sally told herself grimly. She swung Heavyarms to follow Wing Zero in a wide arc as the other Gundam swooped behind her in a veil of stars, fired, missed. "Rogers!" she snapped instead to her wingman. "Get away from here. Go stop that hangar!"

"But-"

"Don't argue with me," she hissed. Wing Zero lunged forward, and she whirled to the side. The white Gundam shuddered as it passed, body armor almost brushing. "I don't need your help here! Go!"

Don't try to stop me, Heero Yuy. You could never hope to understand.

"Sally," his voice came over the comm at last. "Don't make me do this. Please."

"I'm not making you do anything," she replied softly, lining the white Gundam up in her sights. Wing Zero, an angel floating toward her on wings of destruction, unearthly white against the deep black infinity of space. "You've made your own choices, and so have I. It's too late to change that now."

With the work of fifty more mobile suits, the hangar had been pushed along at a much accelerated pace, rounding the far side of the L1 colony cluster faster than he had hoped, and Wufei stared out at the dark bulk of Duo's Gundam, wondering at the other pilot's sudden silence.

"You should go," Duo said suddenly.

"What?"

The destination cluster was in sight now, a small, bare sheet of metal that looked like a giant helicopter landing pad. There were chambers under the surface, Wufei knew, which most likely housed the evacuees that Duo had told him had been taken there by train before time forced them to take desperate measures. In his eyes had been the knowledge that this protection would not even be enough, but it was the best they could do. They had to try.

"It's Sally. I know how important it is to you to be out there right now." Duo's face appeared on the screen, and Wufei stared at him, hearing the words but not quite understanding them, knowing that Duo was right but not wanting to admit it. Because to admit it would be to throw off the last of his chains and face the fact that maybe Sally couldn't be stopped, and maybe he would have to kill her.

"I don't-"

"Stop arguing with me, man," Duo said. "Look, Wufei-"

Wufei held up one hand. "Don't."

But Duo didn't stop, plowed on, "-you know, I'm grateful for all your help. But this is my fight, not yours. Don't you think that you should be out there with Heero? When it comes down to it, you're the only one who really understands Sally, if only a little bit, and that little bit is all we have."

He shook his head stubbornly. "I'll help you first, then go."

"Stop running, Wufei."

When does the hurting go away? When do I stop hating myself?

"In the end," Duo said softly, "your greatest enemy is...just you. There's people out there who need your help."

Nataku shuddered around him and it was as if he heard her voice again, felt her gentle hands on his face and was cradling the warmth of her against him, looking at her as she died, seeing her eyes stare up unseeingly at the sky, but she was still smiling. You were stronger...than anyone.

What had Treize fought for? Why had he died? He was nowhere nearer to really understanding that than he had been when the last war had ended, Wufei realized, but he saw for the first time that didn't matter. Because now what mattered was Sally, and Sally was someone who did not have to die, someone who he still believed could be saved.

"I know," he said a little huskily, slapping the controls. Nataku pulled away, and as Deathscythe shrunk in his targeting scope, he saw Duo smile. "I know, it's only a little bit. But if that's all we have, then that's what I'll give."

There were no stars in space, he knew, but as Nataku looped in on herself, screaming back toward the way they had come where Heavyarms and Wing Zero were locked in combat, he could almost see those stars Treize had so loved, still burning so brightly that they brought tears to his eyes to even look at them. All those stars, all of them calling to him, igniting his blood like they had the blood of those soldiers who had gone before him, drawing him closer, drawing him home.

There were ten minutes remaining on the clock, ten minutes till the automatic timer reached zero and the missile power-up system activated. Trowa stood silently against the far wall watching Etille kneel by the side of the control panel and painstakingly type in code after code, hoping that these codes would be enough to stop the clock from ticking.

It was odd, he reflected, to be standing in the same room as he had three days ago when he had discovered he did not have what it took to destroy Sally Po after all. The silo was the same as he remembered, blinking lights and glaring plasma screens, dark and cold and deathly still. He looked over at Relena and Hilde, who were hastily conferring in one corner, then at Zechs Merquise standing over Etille, double-checking his work. Strange allies, yet it seemed fitting.

The silo commander and his two underlings had been knocked unconscious and propped against the far wall with bits of cloth binding their hands and feet. Crude, but it did the job, and they had no rope or handcuffs available. Zechs had started to ask Trowa if he wanted to help Etille reprogram the codes, but a look from Etille had stopped him, and he had gone over instead.

And Trowa was alone.

Catherine, he thought, how are you doing? I've wanted to tell you many things that I've been thinking about in the last few days when you haven't been with me.

"No," Zechs said to Etille, jerking a thumb at the panel. "You've got the order wrong. Look-" A beep as another code was entered, another piece of the puzzle put into motion.

I used to think that the world was just a place in which I had to survive the best as I could until I was killed. There wasn't anything in it for me, and I didn't expect anything to be. That's how I was raised. I wonder if you can understand that, but maybe you can. We're all selfish beings in the end.

The countdown timer's huge red letters were burning themselves into his mind, but he stared at them, watching the numbers tick, shrinking into ever smaller increments. Somewhere over their heads, Zechs had said, Heero and Wufei were even now fighting to save L1, but it might already be too late.

I grew up on L3 and never really knew what it meant till after the war, when I went home and had no home left to go back to. I tried to be happy with you, but maybe even you realized that I wasn't. It's hard to be a child of war, drifting. You get tired after a while. You just want someone, somewhere, to come back to.

One of the captives twitched and Hilde gave him a sharp look, rising and walking over, her hand on the butt of her gun. Trowa tried to look away from the timer, but it fascinated him, those blood-red letters glowing grotesque like fire, as if saying in five minutes and fifteen seconds and forty-six milliseconds, the end of the world would come.

Are you still in Geneva? There's no safer place for you in the world right now, I think. You should be all right there. No matter what happens, stay there and I'll come to find you. Then we can go away, the two of us, and...

And what?

No, his brain said slowly, that wasn't right. Perhaps after the last war that could have been right, but too much had happened, and the world was such a different place than he had imagined. Catherine would tell him that, if she were here, he knew. She would tell him to wake up, to look around him and see how many people there were who were important to him, who needed him.

When I faced Quatre in the Vayeate, I couldn't think about him, because I would have never had the courage to go through with what I had to do. Was that what Treize felt too, at the last moment when he knew Wufei was going to kill him? Did he simply let go?

He thought of Catherine's bright smile and the way she smelled, like springtime and summer all rolled into one, and for a moment the red numbers in the timer and the chill of the silo and Hilde's frown and Zechs and Etille's tense conversation faded away. Let go, Trowa.

I want to believe in a better world.

A girl's muffled scream. A gunshot.

His eyes flew open and he saw Hilde sprawled on the floor, leg twisted at an unnatural angle, pistol skidding away from her to smash against the far wall of the silo. Relena leapt for it, but the silo commander, not so unconscious now, had grabbed her leg with a vicious baring of teeth, dragging her to the floor.

Trowa gave a wordless yell and sprinted forward, landing with a whoosh of air on the man's back. They pitched forward together, and he saw Zechs out of the corner of his eye diving for the gun.

The clock read 00:10:13

It was too late, Trowa realized as the man raised his fists to knock Etille out of the way. Precious seconds lost as Etille reeled backward to avoid the blow, landing heavily on his side, forehead banging against the glass front of one of the screens, hand flying backward. Something clicked. The lights flickered, and the screens activated.

00:05:47

There had been just one last bit of code, Trowa thought to himself in the part of his mind that was still calm, rational, that had always been like that even in the thick of battle. He hung on grimly to the man's shoulders, trying to gain enough of a foothold to smash his fist into the man's jaw, knowing even as he did so that it was futile.

"Stop this," he begged the man. "Don't you understand?"

The man snarled. "I don't need you preaching to me, Gundam pilot! You tried to kill us once, but you won't succeed again!"

"I tried to save you!" he cried, and then the timer's huge numbers flared large and red in his mind, like the giant maw of some unnamed creature from nightmare.

00:00:00 BEGIN FINAL COUNTDOWN

There was another gunshot and the man shuddered, bucking forward and flinging Trowa off in one violent motion. He rolled as he hit the floor, enough to avoid head contact with the ground, came up in a combat crouch and saw Zechs standing over the man's motionless body, pistol smoking.

"We were too late," Zechs said wearily, and Trowa got to his feet painfully, hobbling over to help Etille off the console. "We got most of them, but there's two missiles headed directly for L1."

SILO #1 FIRING

Whatever happens, Catherine, he thought, as the tremors began and the air around him gathered itself for the final moment, I want you to know that I love you.

Sally fought like Duo, Heero had realized with some surprise, if Duo would have ever fought in Heavyarms. He remembered Duo telling him that Sally had obtained a complete readout of his fighting techniques, and he wondered if this was the result of that. She moved much quicker than he had expected Heavyarms to, lightly, like a dancer.

Beside him, one of the enemy Tauruses exploded, and he twisted to the side. Shrapnel pelted Wing Zero's screens.

You've made your own choices, and so have I.

He threw the Zero into a spin, feeling the familiar golden glow hovering at the edges of his vision. No time for mistakes now, no time to think. The Zero system whispered to him, and he let it take him in, let it surround him with its visions of the past, present, and future, saw himself holding Heavyarms in his grasp, saw himself slicing through the Gundam's heavy armor hull with the beam saber, visions of the battle around him dissolving into nothing as Sally died, and he rejected them.

The Zero system was only a machine, after all. It had no heart, no soul.

Heavyarms fired at him and he avoided the blast easily. The HUD gibbered at him with the mechanical precision of the targeting computer's scopes, and he folded Wing Zero as tight as she could go, screamed through a cloud of fire coming at him from below the Gundam's belly. He had not yet activated the beam cannon, and he did not want to. Not yet, he told himself, not yet.

Sally came at him again, fire raking in from starboard, and Heero was preparing to come in hard around her other side in a feint when she suddenly pulled away, dropping like a stone down under him from starboard to port, and he turned his head to see what she saw.

"Sally," Wufei's voice came hard and flat over the speaker. "Stop this. Or I will stop you."

And before she had even time to respond, Shenlong was there, sweeping in low and fast, a mass of silver and white like the dragon that gave it its name. The dragon's maw was red like fire and the beam lance was green as Wing Zero's eyes, burning eerily brilliant through the nothingness. Heero hit the controls, all power to engines, pulling Wing Zero away, just in time.

Nataku rammed into Heavyarms with the screech of metal against metal, electronics shrieking and crackling and Heero covered his ears as the whine filled the cockpit and yet couldn't block it out, a brilliant fireball blossoming out from where Wufei's Gundam had jammed its free fist into Heavyarms' fuel tank.

"WUFEI!"

Heavyarms shuddered once, twice, and to his horror, Heero saw that the beam lance had cut through one of its legs and part of the other. The severed leg twisted, snapped with a sickening sound of bursting electronic components, and began drifting slowly away from the Gundam. Heavyarms sat motionless.

"Wufei!" he cried. "Get away!"

Almost too late, as Shenlong limped backwards with all the power its crippled engines could muster, a flurry of laser fire shot through the spot where the Gundam had been. Heero drove Wing Zero up, dodging the cloud with singleminded fury, swinging Wing Zero's beam cannon wide, taking a deep breath and knowing that whatever the cost, he had not wanted to do this.

The beam cannon streamed out, bright and white, and he had to turn his face away as Sally's forces crumpled in the pure energy beam, melting away like ice under the sun's rays as if they had never been. They had been people, but it was war, and Sally had shown that she would not listen.

"You've lost, Sally," Wufei said. "Give up."

For a moment, Heero thought that the challenge would go unanswered, and then Sally said, "I thought once, Wufei, that we were friends."

Wufei snarled. "You gave up that right to call me friend when you threatened the lives of the people in that colony over there!"

There was a gathering energy reading coming from somewhere below on the planet surface.

"You don't understand," Sally said, a note of triumph creeping into her voice, and Heero knew she saw what he saw on the scopes. Energy levels this high could mean only one thing: the missile silo at Kashmir had activated. "I'm merely doing what the people want. Have you ever thought about that, Wufei? What about you, Heero Yuy? In fighting your war, was it really for the colonies? You've played into Treize's hands! You're nothing more than pawns!"

"No, Sally," Wufei said. He sounded calm now, no longer angry, and looking up at his screen, Heero saw the Chinese boy staring thoughtfully at his own readouts, watching the energy spike higher and higher. "What the people want more than anything is peace and what you've given them is more war! In fighting for what you think is right, have you been really thinking about the people? What makes you different from Treize?"

"Treize and I fight on entirely different principles! He didn't know what it was like to die for something he loved! He knew nothing about duty!"

"No," came a new but familiar voice. "No, Sally, don't you see? Treize died for what he believed in. But what did that prove? Yes, it takes courage to die for our beliefs... but it takes even more courage to live with the decisions we have made."

Deathscythe rounded the last turn of the colony, coming majestically toward them as if the cloud of enemy fire did not faze it at all, brushing them off like small insects. "The colony is safe as it'll ever be," Duo said. "Do your worst, Sally, but just remember when those missiles hit and the entire colony is eliminated like it never was, that it was your actions and your actions alone that caused the death of hundreds of thousands of innocent people."

"I cannot be responsible for the casualties of war," Sally shot back. Heavyarms' engines fired weakly, but Deathscythe was there behind her, grasping Heavyarm's shoulders with both metallic claws, oblivious to the other Gundam's struggles. Duo shook his head.

"You're wrong, Sally. Don't you see what war is? War is about the fact that no matter how many people die, no matter what new regime gains power and then is overthrown, in the end it still comes down to accepting responsibility to the people. Don't tell me that you are not responsible, Sally. Treize knew that he was responsible, and he accepted that. He understood war, understood that in order to stop a war, you had to responsible for your actions!"

"The missiles have fired," Wufei said urgently.

Heero scanned his console. "Trajectory?"

"They're not heading straight for the colony." He saw Wufei calculating. "Most of them...their courses have been changed." He heard the puzzlement in the other's voice, thought, Zechs did make it in time. "But even if one or two hit, the resulting explosion is going to be bad. We need to get out of here."

The enemy mobile suits were pulling back, Heero saw, but too many of them had been grouped around L1 as Jeong and the rest of the Preventers had been luring them in. He had the sudden urge to yell for Jeong, to tell him that he was sorry and that he had hoped it would not end like this, but Jeong already knew. Duty, he would have called it.

"No matter how you struggle, Sally, you've lost." Wufei stared into the screens, his face set. "It's up to you to accept that and to decide how what kind of leader you're going to be for those under your command who are left, because they will have to pay for their crimes. This is your chance to show us that you were different from Treize. Will you leave them alone to face their judgments, as Treize did? Or will you face it with honor, like a true daughter of China?"

"I won't accept that!" Sally cried, a note of desperation creeping into her voice. "None of you understand what we