Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ Appleseeds ❯ Episode 3: Shinigami ( Chapter 3 )

DISCLAIMER: I do not own Gundam Wing.

Episode Three: Shinigami (December 24, 279 AE)

“UNDIS!?” Wufei exclaimed loudly.

“Are you sure?” Trowa asked in a much quieter tone.

“What about the antibodies?” Wufei demanded. “Trowa said there is no cure. How could an UNDIS be immune without inoculation?”

“Wufei is right,” Sally added softly, “From what I could gather from the S.A. files, not even our bolstered immune systems have a chance of surviving the QR145 virus without the vaccine.”

“It's an UNDIS sample!” Heero repeated stubbornly.

“Yuy, you can't seriously believe-”

“Hang on a minute Chang,” Trowa interjected, “Let's give Heero the benefit of the doubt. This particular UNDIS may have had a natural immunity to the virus.”

“Next to impossible; the likelihood of such distinct mutation occurring is next to nil!”

Giving Sally a blank look, Trowa continued undeterred. “The UNDIS may have been able to find a cure.”

“And how would they have done that, on the run from the S.A. and without access to sophisticated medical equipment?” Wufei challenged.

Trowa merely shrugged, “We don't know that for sure. Some of their refuges were quite well equipped, and they had many scientists among their ranks.”

“Rumours though,” Wufei countered again, “we don't have anything definitive on their hideouts, and they were all ransacked and destroyed by those dishonourable Liberators!”

“True,” Trowa conceded, “but just because they did not possess the same genetic advantages the rest of us do, doesn't mean they were unintelligent.”

Wufei bowed his head, “Yes, I admit that. Some of them were highly intelligent. It's terrible to think of the intellectual potential that was lost.”

“So back to the possibilities,” Trowa calmly continued. “They may have been able to steal some of the vaccine.”

“Wouldn't the vaccine need to be administered before they were exposed to the virus? Although, I suppose if the S.A. had staggered the infection, some of the UNDIS may have been pre-warned of the attacks.”

“Give me a minute,” Sally said as she rapidly scrolled through the files on her tablet, “I think I may be able to answer that. Yes, it's here. The attacks were staggered, but only by a matter of weeks. Even if they were able to somehow contact each other through the communications ban, they would only have had a few days to a week at most to locate the vaccine and steal it.”

“How could I have missed this, I'm sure I would have noticed something as malicious as the QR145 virus being used as a weapon,” Wufei muttered, turning back towards the monitors and typing away furiously at the keyboard. “I knew about the influenza viruses, but not this…”

“You didn't miss anything,” Trowa pacified the furiously typing man, “It was only mentioned in the footnotes. I'm amazed that you even recognized the code.”

“And I only know about it because Heero told me to look specifically for it and because Trowa gave me the S.A. medical files to sort through,” Sally piped up helpfully.

Wufei glared at Trowa, “If you already know everything,” he gritted out, “why did you make me waste an entire day, sorting through files!?”

Trowa shrugged, “I know the material because I collected it all. The files I gave you were what I managed to get off the Liberators databases. Because of the damaged memory banks, the Liberators files were all disordered and fractured, they needed to be organized and categorized for them to be of any use to the rest of us.”

“Since you already know the files so well, why didn't you do it!?” Wufei bellowed.

“Aww… I think someone's a little grumpy. Do you need a hug?”

“WOMAN!”

Trowa sighed and shook his head at the pair's antics. “I asked you to sort out the files because I thought we could benefit from a fresh pair of eyes, especially since you are much more detail-oriented than I am.”

Wufei only grunted in reply but was clearly placated by Trowa's compliment.

“There is one other possible explanation as to why an UNDIS would have the QR145 antibodies in their bloodstream; at least that I can think of.”

“And what would that be?” Wufei asked, his earlier anger clearly forgotten.

Trowa watched Heero carefully as he voiced his final supposition, “It was given to them.”

“Given to them?” Sally exclaimed, “By who?”

“Why, someone from the S.A. of course.”

~*~

“You ever been up there?” the figure reclining in the shadows asked, a bony finger pointing upwards.

Unmindful of the lack of response, he continued. “Not a single chunk of scrap metal for miles! They've got actual organic rock up there, and when I say organic, I mean from earth! Well… maybe some of it was excavated from the moon. It's too bad some of the buildings were damaged, even if those bastards are extravagant as hell… those buildings are nice to look at. And the church, damn it's beautiful. Stained glass an' all. I saw a picture of it once; Sister Helen had a small reproduction of it on her desk. She used to worship there ya know, before she was shipped off to L2. She said they had real wooden pews too! I couldn't get close enough to look inside though, and they lock the doors at night. Not that a locked door's ever stopped me, but I have no business there. Father Maxwell used say a church's doors should never be locked, that everyone was welcome in the House of God. Not that I believe in Him… maybe they don't either,” he laughed humourlessly.

“I never imagined it was so big though… all those buildings are so damn big. You could house hundreds of orphans in the lobby of the senate building alone! Damn greedy bastard politicians. I guess looking at all that pretty stuff lets them forget the state of L2 and L3. I hear L4's pretty nice, wonder how they manage to keep those greedy L1 leeches from sucking `em dry… and L5... well that place went `BOOM!' a decade ago.”

The figure glanced down the cozy nest the mother rat was currently occupying with her pups. “You're lucky ya know, I don't think you would have liked L2 all that much. None of these crushed moon-rock and cobalt steel tunnels for ya,” he patted the wall behind him fondly.

“An' the condensation on the pipes is pretty clean too; pipes aren't all rusted up either. `Course, you were lucky to find that nice piece of pipe for that nest of yours. Good thing those S.A. bastards were so sloppy when they were making those secret passageways of theirs…”

Slightly winded from his monologue, the figure silently contemplated the ceiling above him before a rattling wet cough wracked through his emaciated frame.

~*~

A deadly hush fell over the room as Trowa calmly leaned against the wall, unflinching under Heero's angry blue glare. Wufei exchanged a concerned look with Sally before daring to break the silence. “Why would an S.A. member to do something like that?”

A stony silence was his only answer until a tired voice piped up from the open doorway.

“Why would the S.A. do what?”

Quatre Raberba Winner slumped into the room and collapsed into the chair Trowa hurriedly pulled out for him. Tugging ineffectively at the silk scarf and large ruby brocade pin tied elaborately around his throat, he smiled gratefully when Trowa gently pushed his hands aside and quickly divested Quatre of his scarf and heavily embroidered blue frock coat. Bending at the waist to place a tender kiss on Quatre's golden halo of hair, Trowa spun Quatre's chair around and lightly began kneading his shoulders.

“Oh… you can stop that never,” Quatre groaned as he kicked off his glossy white dress shoes and began to massage his tender soles.

“Rough night?” Wufei asked as he watched the two with amusement.

“Awful! Horrible! Dreadful! Terrible! Vile! Unbearable! Repulsive! Nasty! Atrocious!” Quatre groaned. “Got any more?”

Wufei tapped his chin in thought. “Ghastly and appalling?”

“Ah yes, those too. I don't even want to consider how many brain cells I lost tonight.”

“I take it the intellectual level left much to be desired?”

“Quite the opposite, they're a bunch of sharks all of them. All of them out for blood, all strategizing on how to seize power - all under the very polite veil of social protocol of course.”

“So? You enjoy a good battle of wits; you're a veritable shark yourself.”

“Thanks for the compliment my friend,” Quatre smiled wearily at Wufei before frowning sharply, “but today was far from invigorating political strategy games. It was downright self-serving and obnoxiously short sighted!”

He continued with a snarl, “I was just so incensed by the gall of those people; I swear that my blood was boiling within my very veins and frying my brain to a crisp! Our resources are still suffering from undergoing a civil war, everyone's still on restricted rations and what do they serve for dinner? Organic meat! Game, fowl and FISH! Can you imagine? Don't get me started on all the fresh produce and wine. And some of those pigs had the nerve to say that this was how they deserved to dine all the time! I don't want to know how many luxury credits they squandered for tonight's extravagance!”

“They didn't,” Heero growled. “The official records show a pooling of resources and luxury credits from the attendees plus a small `tax donation' from all L1 inhabitants. That's just a smokes screen. Someone hacked into the luxury credits and resource distribution networks and diverted existing orders and credits. It didn't raise any flags because the shipments were still sent out under the original customs orders and then redirected upon arrival in L1. The hacker erased their tracks but they would have needed an inside man on both sides of the delivery.”

“How did you catch it?” Quatre gasped, “I didn't even realize that something was suspicious until they served dinner. Even then, I wouldn't have imagined a `switch and grab' job.”

“I had a tracking device installed on my luxury order.”

Wufei raised an eyebrow, “You received your monthly shipment of apples just last week, I saw it myself Yuy.”

Heero shook his head, his shaggy russet mop of hair stirring with his irritation. “No, I made a special order for berries with my saved up luxury credits. I received a notification that my order had been cancelled due to a systems glitch and that my resource credits would be refunded. However, my tracking device showed that my shipment had arrived two days behind schedule. I checked with our network and discovered that the scheduled cargo shuttle had indeed docked at the L1 customs port yesterday but later disappeared off the radar and is now listed as MIA.”

“I didn't know you liked berries Heero,” Quatre stated, seemingly perplexed. “This is very troubling… we'll have to find the offenders soon. If they're cloning existing credits to inflate the number of luxury credits, it'll only be a matter of time before people realize that resources are low, inflation will skyrocket and we could have a mass riot on our hands! Worst case scenario, we could have another incident like the one on L5 where… oh Allah!”

Quatre clapped his hand over his mouth as he stared with dismay at Wufei. “Oh Wufei, I am so sorry. I wasn't thinking, it just slipped out! That was so careless of me, I -”

“It's alright Quatre,” Wufei replied stiffly while Sally gently placed a hand on his shoulder. “What you say is the truth.”

An uncomfortable silence filled the room until Heero cleared his throat. “We should return to the UNDIS matter. We need to find a way of tracking the sample donor down.”

“UNDIS? Sample? Could someone bring me up to speed?”

“Of course,” Trowa replied, the affection evident in his otherwise soft monotone. “Heero gave Sally a blood sample to analyze. The results came back to an undocumented male with immunity to the QR145 virus. Heero believes the sample came from an UNDIS.”

“Can we confirm for a fact that the sample is from an UNDIS?” Quatre's analytical mind was already running through various scenarios.

Sally tapped a few commands into her tablet and shook her head. “Not yet, I just finished mapping the genome, the computer is looking for specific markers now. The lab's swamped with the identification of all the Liberators samples and since someone,” she gave Heero a mild look of reproach, “insisted that I handle this personally, I've gotten a little backed up in my work.”

“I don't trust anyone in the lab but you Sally.”

Sally sighed in exasperation. “I'll take that as a compliment Heero. I'll have you know though; I rule my lab with an iron fist.”

“Of course you do,” Quatre soothed. “So, what's so special about this blood sample, other than being immune to QR145?”

“Did everyone know about this virus but me?” Wufei wondered, his irritation mounting again.

“It's alright Wufei, very few people know about the QR145 virus. The S.A. kept the knowledge of the virus strictly under wraps, even the Liberators were largely left unaware. I think it was only mentioned within the Liberators files as a footnote recording the inoculation of the troops.”

“I suppose you've read all the files as well?”

“Well yes, I did skim through them briefly,” Quatre admitted. Trowa nudged him gently and he hastened to add, “Of course the files were much too out of order and disjointed to really glean anything valuable from them. Your efforts to organize and classify them in a more ordered manner will no doubt be invaluable.”

Quatre beamed at Wufei; Wufei's dour mood was defenceless against the million wattage of Quatre's smile.

“Back to my question, what's so special about this sample? And where did it come from?”

Heero shifted uncomfortably under Quatre's searching gaze, his right fist clenching and unclenching spastically.

Getting no response, Quatre tried another approach. “Don't take this the wrong way Heero… but you've been acting strangely since we took down the S.A. Is something bothering you?”

Heero kept his head bowed in silence until he started speaking haltingly, his eyes never leaving the floor. “Remember my last mission on L2, the one before we captured the remaining S.A. leaders?”

“Yes, you went in to immobilize the last Liberators stronghold and disable the beam cannon aimed at L1 and the Sector 17 resource satellites.” Quatre supplied, urging Heero on.

“The calculated probability of mission success was 20%.”

“Those calculations are never accurate,” Wufei argued, “there are too many variables not to mention much of the data is subjective. There is no doubt in my mind that even if those cowardly and incompetent fools hadn't blundered and killed themselves in the process; you would have succeeded in the mission. And regardless of their incompetence, you're still a hero for saving the L2 colony from self-destruction. Even though it is badly damaged and uninhabitable at the moment, there is no reason to believe that it cannot be salvaged."

“Not to mention you located the data that made it possible for us to take down the remainder of the S.A.” Sally added.

“It didn't add up.”

“I'm sorry Heero, I don't quite follow.” Quatre frantically tried to predict where the conversation was heading.

“Last week, Noin sent me home to recuperate.”

Sally nodded. “Yes, the political system was still in limbo and we were trying to determine how to proceed. You had already done more than your fair share of the work Heero. The decision to send you home wasn't a reflection of your abilities; Noin and I thought you would benefit from a brief period of rest.”

Heero remained silent before finally admitting, “It was bothering me, so I went back to L2.”

“What!?” Quatre gasped. “Why?”

“It was bothering me,” Heero repeated stubbornly. “There was no way that those soldiers managed to accidentally trap themselves in the control room, shut down the oxygen pumps and manage to warp the code for the beam cannon so that it would self-implode. It couldn't have been coincidence or `divine intervention' as Noin called it.”

“The S.A. was getting pretty desperate near the end,” Trowa interjected. “The quality of their recruits was declining and their training nonexistent. And I was part of the clean-up crew that went in afterwards. The bungled commands that cut off the oxygen supply to the control room came from within the control room itself. What they were trying to accomplish I have no idea. Whatever was left of the coding was frantic and sloppy.”

“Perhaps it was suicide,” Wufei offered with a frown. “They were cornered and desperate. And considering their fanatical nature, perhaps they would have rather died than surrendered.”

Quatre shook his head. “That's possible, but they still had the upper hand by holding L1 and Sector 17 hostage. We're missing a piece of the puzzle.”

“That's what I went to find. I went over every inch of that base.”

“What did you find that the clean-up crew missed?” Trowa dropped heavily into the chair next to Quatre. “The crew was very thorough, I checked their work myself.”

“Affirmative. But the crew went in with the notion that the Liberators were responsible for all that went wrong. They would have been biased in their search. I searched with the theory that an outsider was responsible for sabotaging the Liberators base.”

Sally gasped and almost dropped her tablet. “Did you find anything?”

“Yes. Someone accessed the base through the vents. The life-systems scanners and heat sensors were disabled in all the vents. They were not knocked offline though, so no alarm would have sounded. Upon closer inspection, it seemed as though they were jammed by some sort of electromagnetic pulse.”

“They got in through the vents? They must have been either very small or a child. A woman?” Wufei inferred with a look of horror on his face.

“The base's communication system was hacked into and an alert for all troops to report to the command centre was broadcast at 0900. At 0905, the building's locking codes were all overwritten and the entire communications and security systems were taken offline. I checked the doors leading to the beam cannon's control hub and all the locks showed slight signs of manual manipulation. I also re-checked the calculations last entered into the beam cannon's programming. The final coordinates were entered at 0913. I noticed that although the false coordinates were made to look like a simple calculation error, they were precisely calculated to cause the cannon to overheat and implode. The slightest difference in the formula and the beam canon would have simply malfunctioned and terminated the program.”

Stunned silence fell over the room as the room's four other occupants tried to grasp the implications of Heero's discoveries.

Finally, after several tense minutes, Quatre dared to venture, “Let me see if I understand this correctly. Someone infiltrated the L2 Liberators base through the vents. They misdirected everyone to the command centre and shut down the communications and security system. Then they picked all the locks leading to the beam cannon, reprogrammed the cannon with calculations to make it implode but made it look like simple miscalculations? And they did this in less than ten minutes between the shutdown of the other systems and the reprogramming of the beam cannon? Are you sure it was one person?”

“It had to have been a team,” Wufei agreed. “Only Heero could have performed such an undertaking.”

“It was a one person job. I went back and checked all the electro-static footprints. There was only one other set of foreign prints, other than mine, and they were barefoot.”

Sally jerked in surprise. “Barefoot?”

“Most likely to better manoeuvre through the vents,” Trowa rationalized.

“What about the oxygen supply?” Quatre asked.

“That was the only real accident,” Heero supplied. “The life support systems were not accessed from the outside. Most likely those trapped inside the command centre shut down the life-support systems when they were trying to open the door.”

“Oh Allah,” Quatre breathed, the shock finally setting in. “Who do you think could be responsible?”

“The blood sample I had Sally analyze came from one of the vent openings. He must have cut himself when he exited the vent.”

“The UNDIS!?” four voices shouted in unison.

“That's not all,” Heero stated, ignoring their flabbergasted expressions. There was a message encrypted within the fake beam cannon coordinates.”

“Shinigami grants no reprieves.”

~*~

The shadowy figure watched as the mother rat finished nursing her litter of pups.

“Sheesh, no wonder ya tried to take a bite outta my foot. Feeding all those pups must be hell.”

Reaching into his coat pocket, the figure pulled out a slightly bruised apple. “I was gonna save this for later, but there's no time like the present, eh?”

Biting off a chunk of apple, he offered it to the rat. She eyed it suspiciously with her beady eyes before snatching it out of his grasp and scurrying back to her nest. Once safely ensconced back in the pipe with her pups, she promptly began stuffing her cheeks full.

“Woah, slow down there! If you stretch it out, you can make it last longer and feel fuller,” he advised.

Taking a bite for himself, the figure chewed slowly as he considered the rat and her pups.

“Making idle talk with strangers is one thing, but sharing a meal without exchanging names is plain rude. Sister Helen always looked so sad when I forgot my manners.”

He grinned broadly. “Pleased to meet ya! The name's Duo Maxwell to my friends and Shinigami to my enemies. I may run and hide, but I never tell a lie!”

Chuckling to himself, Duo Maxwell took another small bite of his apple.

~*~

AN: Well… that was a beast of a chapter to write! On to the next one I suppose. I wonder if anyone's even reading this story. Well, if you are and you're reading this right now, thanks for reading!

C&Cs always welcome.