Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ God of War, God of Death ❯ Chapter 1
[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]
By: Shinimikra 
Anime/Manga: Gundam Wing Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Shounen / Sci-fi / Romance / Mecha / Adventure / Action | Type: Shounen-ai | Uploaded On: 05.24.2013 | Pages: 2 | Words: 4.3K | Visits: 183 | Status: Work In Progress
Anime/Manga: Gundam Wing Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Shounen / Sci-fi / Romance / Mecha / Adventure / Action | Type: Shounen-ai | Uploaded On: 05.24.2013 | Pages: 2 | Words: 4.3K | Visits: 183 | Status: Work In Progress
[Short Disclaimer: This fiction is entertainment purposes only, the author makes no claims of property over any part of the Gundam franchise.]
Soft lyrics drifted through the cramped compartments of the small cabin of the freighter. The sound bounced off of the metal walls, acoustically perfect, a happy accident that this model suffered from; any sound could carry through the halls of the freighter. As if to make up for it, the bulkheads were soundproof; however, Duo rarely closed any of them since he almost never had any crew. It didn’t matter that he chose to listen to the rich sound created by the dichotomy of his intercom and the metal of his hull. In fact, when he was out on a salvage mission it was rare for him not to have music playing.
The ship had been a “gift” given to him from the sweepers before they had disbanded at the end of the Oz conflict. It was a small matter to forge the paperwork for the ship and disappear, in the ensuing chaos that marked the forming of the Earth Sphere Unified Nation; and as they honored any previous credentials, Duo had taken off with the ship, and a brand new pilot’s license without a hitch. This all paved the way for his brand new salvage company.
He hadn’t known if he agreed with Relena Peacecraft’s approach to peace at the end of the conflict, but he certainly didn’t want the mobile suit wreckage floating around the colonies used to build a resistance force, and God knows there was enough of it. He chose to begin his salvage company to do his small part to make sure that the more dangerous stuff stayed out of the hands of the more dangerous people.
Duo had draped himself sideways and naked save for an older pair of boxers over the fold-down armrests of the captain’s chair staring blankly at the ceiling. He had launched from L4 two days ago and was en-route to a salvage site that he commonly frequented on his way back from the large quarterly auctions held in the L4 colonies. He had done well this quarter, selling all of the salvage he had brought to the auction at well over the market price. However, he couldn’t seem to muster any excitement over the sales since he had almost entirely sold illegal mobile suit weapons. While it was true that it was a closed auction, he was able to pick his bidders very carefully, run an almost unwarrantedly strict background check on each one, and unload all of the guns keeping the ammo in his cargo bay.
He had promised himself that he would not sell the weapons he collected at the beginning of the venture, but if he had to break that promise, he sure as shit wouldn’t sell the ammo to the damned things. Certainly couldn’t make it too easy on the bastards. He actually had many storage units filled with weapons and partially intact suits from the war in discrete locations around the colonies. The ex-Gundam Pilot didn’t want to contribute to another conflict, no matter how small; but as a salvager he couldn’t bring himself to destroy the units. However, the salvage business that had blossomed after the war was slowing down.
He and his wife, Hilde, were seeing the mechanical salvage stay in their storage longer, and the bills were starting to look more and more daunting. It was Hilde who pointed out that there was always a market for weapons. As the CFO of his small firm, she knew of most of the salvage that he had tucked away. She started urging him to sell them off a few months ago, after the contracts started drying up. Duo remembered a particularly bitter fight where she had demanded that he liquidate his full stockpile. He had spent two nights sleeping on the ship. It had almost spelled the end of their relationship; however, theirs was a marriage of convenience allowing them to dodge taxes. Duo was still convinced that fact alone was what saved their marriage. Even with that thought, he wasn’t sure it was worth keeping the relationship intact, but he knew he couldn’t leave Hilde. His marriage to her was the only thing that helped him reconcile with his faith after the war.
The war. Every time he thought of it uncomfortable images floated though his mind. He had been young during the war, too young. All of the pilots had been, and always together especially at the end; their stay on Peacemillion came to mind, along with worrisome memories. Memories he had spent years trying to forget; memories that stirred something troubling in his loins.
Memories of tussled dark chocolate hair, and unbelievably blue eyes, that he found himself lost in too often for comfort. Duo was shocked that the extraordinary pilot had allowed him to touch his chiseled flesh. True it was just two teens in over their heads blowing off steam after the problems of much older men came to rest on their shoulders; that didn’t change how Duo felt about the other pilot. After the war Duo had cut and run, going as far as taking a new name, James Elliot Monad. He told himself it was to escape a boring desk job in the Preventers or worse a pity position in the Winner Corporation. He knew the real reason though. No matter what he told himself, he couldn’t handle a “No” from those perfect lips in lightly accented English.
Slight Asian features swirled through his mind fogging his senses pulling him back to the memories that plagued him. There was a husky male voice whispering in his ear. Duo couldn’t make it out around the pleasant tickling of other youth’s breath; there was a distinct possibility that the sweet noise wasn’t even English, but Duo didn’t care as long as the voice kept murmuring. Heat rose somewhere lower than his waist, and an intense urgency swept over. Duo turned to kiss the other youth; electricity flowed over his skin upon contact. Passion spread thickly over his loins and the urgency built into something more…something primal. Hands were running through his hair, splitting the plaits of his braid. The thick locks fell limply around his face, but all Duo cared about was the contact of his skin with the other young man.
The proximity alarm shrieked its one piercing note, filling the cabin with unpleasant reverberations. Terrified, Duo shot out of his seat, smashing his crown on the low cabin ceiling. The colors drained out Duo’s vision, while the noises seemed sluggish as he floated listlessly in the micro gravity. It took several seconds for the world to put itself into proper focus; the first color Duo saw was red. Small rivulets of blood streamed out of his head twisting wildly with a strange weight in their lazy fall to the steel hull, but the sound of the proximity alarm took precedence. He slammed the emergency bulkhead seal and flipped on the external monitor. A small cathode ray tube set in the left corner of the front viewing port fuzzed to life and in it floated the carcass of a cargo vessel. It was half a nautical mile away, careening toward him at nearly 150 knots. Dread washed over the American at the sight of what was surely his death.
He snatched the yolk, and twisted. The roll gauge screamed as he flipped the belly of the freighter up. The cabin was safe, but at the expense of his cargo bay. Cold fear gripped Duo as he realized what he had done. All of the mobile suit ammo was in the cargo bay. All it would take was one round to go off… and sayonara bucko.
Duo’s grip on the plastic handholds tightened, he pressed the yolk into the con and floored the pedal for the bow booster. The stern of the vessel shot beneath the body as the freighter flipped just in time. It started with the rasping of metal plates scraping against one another. Duo didn’t let off the accelerator as the horrendous noise washed over him, shaking him violently in his seat. It was all he could do to stop himself from flying across the cabin and becoming very well acquainted with the wall. The scraping quickly built into a crescendo of cacophonous crashing, finally ending in a resounding shudder that actually did throw Duo from his seat. He held onto the yolk, knowing that loosing his grip now meant certain death. He swung wildly about the cockpit, his legs colliding heavily with the console.
The main impact was over scant moments after the affair had started; now all he had to worry about was trailing debris. He had been lucky up until this point and nothing had compromised the cockpit, but luck couldn’t last forever. The shaking of his flight deck slowed as the secondary collisions of the cargo ship’s scrap peppered the hull, resonating through the freighter’s frame. On the hull integrity’s compact panel, it’s single button flashed urgently as a hidden speaker buzzed informing Duo of the emergency. He drifted slowly toward the floor, exhausted, still gripping the yolk with adrenaline infused strength, but now, that small yellow-lit button occupied all of his attention. He had to know what sections were compromised. He had to know if he could get to his normal suit.
Duo hated environment suits, they reminded him of the war, and so they spent almost all of their time strapped down in a survival station located at the back of the ship. When he had obtained the ship each compartment had a survival station, but Duo hated looking at the suits, and so he consolidated them to the back of the ship, in the cargo bay. He did however leave the extra air tanks, flares, and grapple wrist-guns in all of the small alcoves.
Duo made his way, still floating, over to the compact panel, and pressed the flashing button; immediately a folding instrument panel swung violently open, snapping into the extended position with a loud crack that echoed throughout the cockpit. Duo flinched; he was not prepared for what he saw. Each compartment had it’s own LED, and in the event that the compartment ruptured, their corresponding light would automatically switch on. All of the LEDs were alight including the cockpit; the damned thing had shorted. If he set off toward the normal suit storage, he had no way of knowing if the door in front of him had air. He cursed loudly at the console and slammed an open palm onto the exposed surface, he felt something give, and the steel bend. The LED’s fizzled and slowly faded out.
“Damn it!” he muttered and looked away from the console. By chance he looked port. His heart stopped. A large piece of debris had dislodged from the back of the ship, and was flying straight at the flight deck viewing portal. Duo pushed off of the co-pilot’s panel so hard he heard something tear. He was launching toward the survival station. Slamming hard into the alcove, he scrambled for the wrist-gun, his fingers momentarily lost and batting uselessly at the restraints. It took several seconds to get the object free, seconds he didn’t have. Frantically he tried to get to the air-locked bulkhead, snatching at the release. As he laid his hand on it, a mighty sound filled the room around him.
It started with a crystalline crash. Daring one look, he pulled the lever. There was a prolonged cracking noise and Duo watched in horror as a tiny chip, in milliseconds, spider webbed throughout the triple paned glass…and then the aperture just stopped being there at all. There was a terrible high-pitched whistle as all of the air in the room tried to stuff itself out of a two-foot hole.
The strong current wrenched on his braid, flapping it harshly, and tearing at his scalp. Duo pulled the lever, terrified that all he would find on the other side was a wall from the other ship’s hull, or worse vacuum. Duo held fast to the handle as the door opened, with the invisible howling hands tearing at him, and hollow sounds of alarms in the rapidly thinning air. Before the ex-Gundam Pilot knew it, more invisible hands started pushing him toward the void that had been a window. He crowed loudly. There was air on the other side.
He wasted no time in firing the wrist-gun at the far wall; the emergency override was already trying to shut the door again. His feet could no longer hold traction, and he hung suspended by the wrist cannon’s wire. The grappler whined loudly against the tug of the vacuum, it pulled him halfway out of the room before he started seeing smoke shoot out of the small winding motor. The wind grabbed hold of his underwear, making the soft fabric slide down his thighs. He was three quarters of the way into the hall with the bulkhead half closed, when the wrist-gun started shooting pink flame out of its side, grinding to a halt.
Duo’s legs were still trailing into the cockpit; he reached up on the braided tri-filament wire, hauling his way out of the doorway. Duo pulled free of the threshold and wrapped some of the slack around his hand to hold him fast incase the air should get too thin for him to hold himself. Something rocked the hull again and Duo felt the wire slice open his palm as he slipped a few precious centimeters toward the still open bulkhead.
The current finally tore his garment off, while his blood splattered heavily on his face, stinging him where it stuck. Globules of it rolled around his face, resting in any recess it could find, the majority of it found its way into his mouth or came to rest uncomfortably in his eyes. He squinted his eyes shut, praying for the flight deck entry to seal so he could rub the bothersome stuff out of his eyes. Duo felt metal brush his toes and he knew he was almost safe.
“Just a little longer,” he whispered to himself as he felt the bulkhead glide smoothly beneath his feet. The roar of rushing air was abruptly cut off. The taut cable slackened, and Duo felt himself float lazily toward the deck. He reached up and wiped at the blood on his face with his good hand streaking it down his cheek. The air was so thin it felt as though some one was holding a blanket over his face. He didn’t care. It was better than decompression.
The American continued to work the blood out of his eyes. When he could see again, he lay near the metal plating of the corridor’s deck in the stifling silence and stared blankly at the ceiling trying not to panic in the thin air. A loud clunk made him jump. He was floating nine centimeters above the hull and could still feel the vibration shake the cabin.
Frantically he scrambled for the next airlock, not even thinking to pray that there was air on the other side. There was a mechanical whine followed by another thud, the cabin pressure indicator light flashed and Duo felt cool air wash over him. He giggled at himself hysterically. The ex-pilot realized that if he had any chance of surviving this incident he was going to need a normal suit.
Duo floated naked in the hall waiting for the air pressure to normalize, he wanted a few easy breaths before he did anything. Feeling a little too relaxed in the cool breaths the ventilator blew over him, a pleasant buzz filled his head. His grip slackened in the micro gravity, still gliding toward the steel bulkheads. It vaguely occurred to him, that he might have a concussion, but his eyelids were so heavy. It felt like leaden weights were attached to his eyelids, irresistibly pulling them shut. A small snore escaped his lips before his eyes had fully closed. He was unconscious. Duo finally came to rest on the steel floor of the hall, lying absolutely still except for his slight breaths that were much too shallow.
A crash rattled the entire ship, harshly throwing the sleeping American into the wall. Still attached to the hull via the wire that had dug into his hand, he bobbed furiously at the end of it, slamming periodically against into the wall. The lights dimmed and flickered. The air ventilator halted momentarily, clattering back to life in a fashion that if Duo had been awake, would have made him very uncomfortable. Another collision…and the hall shook harder.
Duo’s limp sprawling body impacted heavily into the bulkhead of the galley on the adjacent wall to the cockpit. By chance his right arm slid under the release latch, catching the grappler’s wire. The American rebounded off of the door, flailing wildly, while his limp body hit the end of the slack hard. A very unpleasant crunch echoed throughout the hall and Duo’s right arm hung oddly, as though barely attached.
Soon the hull stopped shaking and the American’s furious movement slowed. The fluorescent bulbs flickered and died. It took the emergency lights several seconds to engage. Small red LED’s laid into the floor of the hall snapped on and several red light bulbs set into the corners of the hall’s ceiling flickered to life with a soft buzz. The new light threw strange and harsh shadows over the silhouette of the still swaying young man.
“Lion, this is Archer. I have a positive ID on the target.”
Duo started awake to the sound of a human voice speaking above his head. He tried to stifle the physical reaction he had to the new stimuli rousing him out of sleep, an old habit from the war, an effort that was not entirely successful. Hearing a change in the other person’s voice, he knew he had been discovered. Before he could undo the glue that held his eyelids shut a heavy blow landed just beneath his rib cage.
Duo’s eyes had no trouble flying open after that. His eyes locked on the insignia embroidered into the fabric of the man’s normal suit…OZ. If he were able to catch his breath, he would have gasped, hard. Oz had been officially disbanded for 5 years now and all of the soldiers imprisoned with the end of the X18999 incident…or so every one had thought. Yet here they were knocking the wind out of him. Duo took advantage of the temporary paralysis; using all of the self-control he could muster, he sprawled limply. Another blow landed painfully in his ribs and to Duo’s pleasure the paralysis didn’t allow him react.
Duo slammed into the wall, rebounding harshly and flailing wildly. The slack caught, stopping the American by his damaged right arm. There was an almost inhuman sound that filled the hall as the taut wire swung him wildly back toward the wall. It wasn’t until the American smashed into the steel and the metal started reverberating the sound back at him, did he realized that it was his voice he was hearing. The pain came crashing in, filling his skull with nothing else. It took Duo several seconds to realize that something was digging painfully into the bottom of his chest; the item was suspended between him and the wall. Duo, again, went limp and shifted his left arm under his chest as quickly as he could shimmy the damned thing, hoping for a weapon.
His hand clasped around soft leather. There was a sinking feeling in his stomach as he realized what the object was; the wrist cannon. He could do more damage to the OZ solder with the cotton side of a Q-tip. Duo grabbed the object furious, hoping to damage it more than it had frustrated him. There was a soft clunk from the other side of the hall. The wire jerked.
Duo loosened his grip on the cannon elated; he had by chance pressed the release. He tried pulling on the wire with his right hand; his arm didn’t so much as sway. The effort rewarded him with white fire shooting through his arm. The pain was fantastic, almost unreal. He heard the soldier shout something at him as more pain filled his right side. The man was digging his heel into Duo’s shoulder. The ex-Gundam pilot rolled under the man just as the sound of a gunshot echoed through the hall. Duo wasn’t sure if he had been shot, but he didn’t care.
Flashing his eyes open, he inventoried the man who was pointing a small pistol at him. The soldier’s visor was open, staring down at him with wild eyes. The normal suit he wore only had one mention of OZ; all other brandings were of the Romerfeller’s lion insignia.
Duo snarled at the man reaching up with his left hand. He tore at the wire, sending waves of kinetic force through the thin material. The small metal spike tore out of the bulkhead, rebounding heavily through the air. The soldier snapped towards the small sound and watched the anchor fly at him in terror. It landed with a crunch inside the open visor; the man curled backward. Screaming in a primal way, the now injured soldier fired off a couple of misaimed shots that ricocheted loudly off of the hall’s metal.
Duo felt something strike his vindictive side and snatched the grappler. He deployed the anchoring pins; they snapped out filling the hall with a sickeningly wet crack. The man convulsed wildly. Duo picked himself up, painfully trailing his useless right arm and walked over to the galley door. He freed the wire from the release hatch and stumbled toward the OZ soldier. The low pull of micro gravity was the only thing that kept Duo upright as he tripped clumsily over his own feet.
When he reached the soldier, the man wasn’t moving. The grappler’s anchor had displaced his left eye, digging into the eye socket pushing the organ out, twisting and spraying blood, as it hung suspended at the end of the soldier’s optic nerve bundle. The only thing that told Duo that the man was still alive was the unfocused right eye, trying frantically to follow his movements.
Duo calmly removed the man’s helmet and let it glide to the floor, pulling the wire that was laced through the aperture with it. Duo looked at the man callously. The soldier was moving his lips, but there was not sound, his lungs could no longer exhale. He was already dead; his body just hadn’t caught on yet.
Duo looped the wire around the man’s neck and stepped unsympathetically on his damaged skull. Duo grabbed hold of a length of wire, winding it around his good hand and jerked hard. There was a wet pop as a fine red mist jetted out; the man’s head flopped off. It soared to the end of the gory wire propelled by the man’s jet of blood. The head bobbed, bouncing wildly in the semi-weightlessness. The newly freed body started into a vigorous new wave of convulsions as Duo watched the head’s shocked expression fade and slacken with sick satisfaction. Watching until the head just hung limply and was certain that the damned thing had died.
A small voice crackled to life inside the helmet, “Archer, report!”
Duo knew he didn’t have much time before Archer’s unit came to investigate. In a straight fight, with the state of his right arm, he was little more than doomed. He snatched his arm and pain again flooded his body; he ignored it and began feeling for breaks. He worked his way up, starting at his wrist. When he was done it satisfied him to note that the arm itself was not broken; but it was just dislocated at the shoulder. His hand was another story. He had snapped at least three bones in the excitement prior to the soldier’s arrival.
Duo moved to the cargo bay entrance at the end of the hall, spun on his heel and used his left arm to hold his right in place. He bolted towards the cockpit and at the last second twisted his right side forward. The world lurched and there was a sickening pop. Agony cascaded through his body, as his right shoulder found its torturous way back into place. Duo floated back dazed, waiting for the pain to break. The voice crackled to life again, demanding something from the now headless Archer, but Duo couldn’t bring himself to care. He was more concerned with the blinding pain that still racked him.
Soft lyrics drifted through the cramped compartments of the small cabin of the freighter. The sound bounced off of the metal walls, acoustically perfect, a happy accident that this model suffered from; any sound could carry through the halls of the freighter. As if to make up for it, the bulkheads were soundproof; however, Duo rarely closed any of them since he almost never had any crew. It didn’t matter that he chose to listen to the rich sound created by the dichotomy of his intercom and the metal of his hull. In fact, when he was out on a salvage mission it was rare for him not to have music playing.
The ship had been a “gift” given to him from the sweepers before they had disbanded at the end of the Oz conflict. It was a small matter to forge the paperwork for the ship and disappear, in the ensuing chaos that marked the forming of the Earth Sphere Unified Nation; and as they honored any previous credentials, Duo had taken off with the ship, and a brand new pilot’s license without a hitch. This all paved the way for his brand new salvage company.
He hadn’t known if he agreed with Relena Peacecraft’s approach to peace at the end of the conflict, but he certainly didn’t want the mobile suit wreckage floating around the colonies used to build a resistance force, and God knows there was enough of it. He chose to begin his salvage company to do his small part to make sure that the more dangerous stuff stayed out of the hands of the more dangerous people.
Duo had draped himself sideways and naked save for an older pair of boxers over the fold-down armrests of the captain’s chair staring blankly at the ceiling. He had launched from L4 two days ago and was en-route to a salvage site that he commonly frequented on his way back from the large quarterly auctions held in the L4 colonies. He had done well this quarter, selling all of the salvage he had brought to the auction at well over the market price. However, he couldn’t seem to muster any excitement over the sales since he had almost entirely sold illegal mobile suit weapons. While it was true that it was a closed auction, he was able to pick his bidders very carefully, run an almost unwarrantedly strict background check on each one, and unload all of the guns keeping the ammo in his cargo bay.
He had promised himself that he would not sell the weapons he collected at the beginning of the venture, but if he had to break that promise, he sure as shit wouldn’t sell the ammo to the damned things. Certainly couldn’t make it too easy on the bastards. He actually had many storage units filled with weapons and partially intact suits from the war in discrete locations around the colonies. The ex-Gundam Pilot didn’t want to contribute to another conflict, no matter how small; but as a salvager he couldn’t bring himself to destroy the units. However, the salvage business that had blossomed after the war was slowing down.
He and his wife, Hilde, were seeing the mechanical salvage stay in their storage longer, and the bills were starting to look more and more daunting. It was Hilde who pointed out that there was always a market for weapons. As the CFO of his small firm, she knew of most of the salvage that he had tucked away. She started urging him to sell them off a few months ago, after the contracts started drying up. Duo remembered a particularly bitter fight where she had demanded that he liquidate his full stockpile. He had spent two nights sleeping on the ship. It had almost spelled the end of their relationship; however, theirs was a marriage of convenience allowing them to dodge taxes. Duo was still convinced that fact alone was what saved their marriage. Even with that thought, he wasn’t sure it was worth keeping the relationship intact, but he knew he couldn’t leave Hilde. His marriage to her was the only thing that helped him reconcile with his faith after the war.
The war. Every time he thought of it uncomfortable images floated though his mind. He had been young during the war, too young. All of the pilots had been, and always together especially at the end; their stay on Peacemillion came to mind, along with worrisome memories. Memories he had spent years trying to forget; memories that stirred something troubling in his loins.
Memories of tussled dark chocolate hair, and unbelievably blue eyes, that he found himself lost in too often for comfort. Duo was shocked that the extraordinary pilot had allowed him to touch his chiseled flesh. True it was just two teens in over their heads blowing off steam after the problems of much older men came to rest on their shoulders; that didn’t change how Duo felt about the other pilot. After the war Duo had cut and run, going as far as taking a new name, James Elliot Monad. He told himself it was to escape a boring desk job in the Preventers or worse a pity position in the Winner Corporation. He knew the real reason though. No matter what he told himself, he couldn’t handle a “No” from those perfect lips in lightly accented English.
Slight Asian features swirled through his mind fogging his senses pulling him back to the memories that plagued him. There was a husky male voice whispering in his ear. Duo couldn’t make it out around the pleasant tickling of other youth’s breath; there was a distinct possibility that the sweet noise wasn’t even English, but Duo didn’t care as long as the voice kept murmuring. Heat rose somewhere lower than his waist, and an intense urgency swept over. Duo turned to kiss the other youth; electricity flowed over his skin upon contact. Passion spread thickly over his loins and the urgency built into something more…something primal. Hands were running through his hair, splitting the plaits of his braid. The thick locks fell limply around his face, but all Duo cared about was the contact of his skin with the other young man.
The proximity alarm shrieked its one piercing note, filling the cabin with unpleasant reverberations. Terrified, Duo shot out of his seat, smashing his crown on the low cabin ceiling. The colors drained out Duo’s vision, while the noises seemed sluggish as he floated listlessly in the micro gravity. It took several seconds for the world to put itself into proper focus; the first color Duo saw was red. Small rivulets of blood streamed out of his head twisting wildly with a strange weight in their lazy fall to the steel hull, but the sound of the proximity alarm took precedence. He slammed the emergency bulkhead seal and flipped on the external monitor. A small cathode ray tube set in the left corner of the front viewing port fuzzed to life and in it floated the carcass of a cargo vessel. It was half a nautical mile away, careening toward him at nearly 150 knots. Dread washed over the American at the sight of what was surely his death.
He snatched the yolk, and twisted. The roll gauge screamed as he flipped the belly of the freighter up. The cabin was safe, but at the expense of his cargo bay. Cold fear gripped Duo as he realized what he had done. All of the mobile suit ammo was in the cargo bay. All it would take was one round to go off… and sayonara bucko.
Duo’s grip on the plastic handholds tightened, he pressed the yolk into the con and floored the pedal for the bow booster. The stern of the vessel shot beneath the body as the freighter flipped just in time. It started with the rasping of metal plates scraping against one another. Duo didn’t let off the accelerator as the horrendous noise washed over him, shaking him violently in his seat. It was all he could do to stop himself from flying across the cabin and becoming very well acquainted with the wall. The scraping quickly built into a crescendo of cacophonous crashing, finally ending in a resounding shudder that actually did throw Duo from his seat. He held onto the yolk, knowing that loosing his grip now meant certain death. He swung wildly about the cockpit, his legs colliding heavily with the console.
The main impact was over scant moments after the affair had started; now all he had to worry about was trailing debris. He had been lucky up until this point and nothing had compromised the cockpit, but luck couldn’t last forever. The shaking of his flight deck slowed as the secondary collisions of the cargo ship’s scrap peppered the hull, resonating through the freighter’s frame. On the hull integrity’s compact panel, it’s single button flashed urgently as a hidden speaker buzzed informing Duo of the emergency. He drifted slowly toward the floor, exhausted, still gripping the yolk with adrenaline infused strength, but now, that small yellow-lit button occupied all of his attention. He had to know what sections were compromised. He had to know if he could get to his normal suit.
Duo hated environment suits, they reminded him of the war, and so they spent almost all of their time strapped down in a survival station located at the back of the ship. When he had obtained the ship each compartment had a survival station, but Duo hated looking at the suits, and so he consolidated them to the back of the ship, in the cargo bay. He did however leave the extra air tanks, flares, and grapple wrist-guns in all of the small alcoves.
Duo made his way, still floating, over to the compact panel, and pressed the flashing button; immediately a folding instrument panel swung violently open, snapping into the extended position with a loud crack that echoed throughout the cockpit. Duo flinched; he was not prepared for what he saw. Each compartment had it’s own LED, and in the event that the compartment ruptured, their corresponding light would automatically switch on. All of the LEDs were alight including the cockpit; the damned thing had shorted. If he set off toward the normal suit storage, he had no way of knowing if the door in front of him had air. He cursed loudly at the console and slammed an open palm onto the exposed surface, he felt something give, and the steel bend. The LED’s fizzled and slowly faded out.
“Damn it!” he muttered and looked away from the console. By chance he looked port. His heart stopped. A large piece of debris had dislodged from the back of the ship, and was flying straight at the flight deck viewing portal. Duo pushed off of the co-pilot’s panel so hard he heard something tear. He was launching toward the survival station. Slamming hard into the alcove, he scrambled for the wrist-gun, his fingers momentarily lost and batting uselessly at the restraints. It took several seconds to get the object free, seconds he didn’t have. Frantically he tried to get to the air-locked bulkhead, snatching at the release. As he laid his hand on it, a mighty sound filled the room around him.
It started with a crystalline crash. Daring one look, he pulled the lever. There was a prolonged cracking noise and Duo watched in horror as a tiny chip, in milliseconds, spider webbed throughout the triple paned glass…and then the aperture just stopped being there at all. There was a terrible high-pitched whistle as all of the air in the room tried to stuff itself out of a two-foot hole.
The strong current wrenched on his braid, flapping it harshly, and tearing at his scalp. Duo pulled the lever, terrified that all he would find on the other side was a wall from the other ship’s hull, or worse vacuum. Duo held fast to the handle as the door opened, with the invisible howling hands tearing at him, and hollow sounds of alarms in the rapidly thinning air. Before the ex-Gundam Pilot knew it, more invisible hands started pushing him toward the void that had been a window. He crowed loudly. There was air on the other side.
He wasted no time in firing the wrist-gun at the far wall; the emergency override was already trying to shut the door again. His feet could no longer hold traction, and he hung suspended by the wrist cannon’s wire. The grappler whined loudly against the tug of the vacuum, it pulled him halfway out of the room before he started seeing smoke shoot out of the small winding motor. The wind grabbed hold of his underwear, making the soft fabric slide down his thighs. He was three quarters of the way into the hall with the bulkhead half closed, when the wrist-gun started shooting pink flame out of its side, grinding to a halt.
Duo’s legs were still trailing into the cockpit; he reached up on the braided tri-filament wire, hauling his way out of the doorway. Duo pulled free of the threshold and wrapped some of the slack around his hand to hold him fast incase the air should get too thin for him to hold himself. Something rocked the hull again and Duo felt the wire slice open his palm as he slipped a few precious centimeters toward the still open bulkhead.
The current finally tore his garment off, while his blood splattered heavily on his face, stinging him where it stuck. Globules of it rolled around his face, resting in any recess it could find, the majority of it found its way into his mouth or came to rest uncomfortably in his eyes. He squinted his eyes shut, praying for the flight deck entry to seal so he could rub the bothersome stuff out of his eyes. Duo felt metal brush his toes and he knew he was almost safe.
“Just a little longer,” he whispered to himself as he felt the bulkhead glide smoothly beneath his feet. The roar of rushing air was abruptly cut off. The taut cable slackened, and Duo felt himself float lazily toward the deck. He reached up and wiped at the blood on his face with his good hand streaking it down his cheek. The air was so thin it felt as though some one was holding a blanket over his face. He didn’t care. It was better than decompression.
The American continued to work the blood out of his eyes. When he could see again, he lay near the metal plating of the corridor’s deck in the stifling silence and stared blankly at the ceiling trying not to panic in the thin air. A loud clunk made him jump. He was floating nine centimeters above the hull and could still feel the vibration shake the cabin.
Frantically he scrambled for the next airlock, not even thinking to pray that there was air on the other side. There was a mechanical whine followed by another thud, the cabin pressure indicator light flashed and Duo felt cool air wash over him. He giggled at himself hysterically. The ex-pilot realized that if he had any chance of surviving this incident he was going to need a normal suit.
Duo floated naked in the hall waiting for the air pressure to normalize, he wanted a few easy breaths before he did anything. Feeling a little too relaxed in the cool breaths the ventilator blew over him, a pleasant buzz filled his head. His grip slackened in the micro gravity, still gliding toward the steel bulkheads. It vaguely occurred to him, that he might have a concussion, but his eyelids were so heavy. It felt like leaden weights were attached to his eyelids, irresistibly pulling them shut. A small snore escaped his lips before his eyes had fully closed. He was unconscious. Duo finally came to rest on the steel floor of the hall, lying absolutely still except for his slight breaths that were much too shallow.
A crash rattled the entire ship, harshly throwing the sleeping American into the wall. Still attached to the hull via the wire that had dug into his hand, he bobbed furiously at the end of it, slamming periodically against into the wall. The lights dimmed and flickered. The air ventilator halted momentarily, clattering back to life in a fashion that if Duo had been awake, would have made him very uncomfortable. Another collision…and the hall shook harder.
Duo’s limp sprawling body impacted heavily into the bulkhead of the galley on the adjacent wall to the cockpit. By chance his right arm slid under the release latch, catching the grappler’s wire. The American rebounded off of the door, flailing wildly, while his limp body hit the end of the slack hard. A very unpleasant crunch echoed throughout the hall and Duo’s right arm hung oddly, as though barely attached.
Soon the hull stopped shaking and the American’s furious movement slowed. The fluorescent bulbs flickered and died. It took the emergency lights several seconds to engage. Small red LED’s laid into the floor of the hall snapped on and several red light bulbs set into the corners of the hall’s ceiling flickered to life with a soft buzz. The new light threw strange and harsh shadows over the silhouette of the still swaying young man.
“Lion, this is Archer. I have a positive ID on the target.”
Duo started awake to the sound of a human voice speaking above his head. He tried to stifle the physical reaction he had to the new stimuli rousing him out of sleep, an old habit from the war, an effort that was not entirely successful. Hearing a change in the other person’s voice, he knew he had been discovered. Before he could undo the glue that held his eyelids shut a heavy blow landed just beneath his rib cage.
Duo’s eyes had no trouble flying open after that. His eyes locked on the insignia embroidered into the fabric of the man’s normal suit…OZ. If he were able to catch his breath, he would have gasped, hard. Oz had been officially disbanded for 5 years now and all of the soldiers imprisoned with the end of the X18999 incident…or so every one had thought. Yet here they were knocking the wind out of him. Duo took advantage of the temporary paralysis; using all of the self-control he could muster, he sprawled limply. Another blow landed painfully in his ribs and to Duo’s pleasure the paralysis didn’t allow him react.
Duo slammed into the wall, rebounding harshly and flailing wildly. The slack caught, stopping the American by his damaged right arm. There was an almost inhuman sound that filled the hall as the taut wire swung him wildly back toward the wall. It wasn’t until the American smashed into the steel and the metal started reverberating the sound back at him, did he realized that it was his voice he was hearing. The pain came crashing in, filling his skull with nothing else. It took Duo several seconds to realize that something was digging painfully into the bottom of his chest; the item was suspended between him and the wall. Duo, again, went limp and shifted his left arm under his chest as quickly as he could shimmy the damned thing, hoping for a weapon.
His hand clasped around soft leather. There was a sinking feeling in his stomach as he realized what the object was; the wrist cannon. He could do more damage to the OZ solder with the cotton side of a Q-tip. Duo grabbed the object furious, hoping to damage it more than it had frustrated him. There was a soft clunk from the other side of the hall. The wire jerked.
Duo loosened his grip on the cannon elated; he had by chance pressed the release. He tried pulling on the wire with his right hand; his arm didn’t so much as sway. The effort rewarded him with white fire shooting through his arm. The pain was fantastic, almost unreal. He heard the soldier shout something at him as more pain filled his right side. The man was digging his heel into Duo’s shoulder. The ex-Gundam pilot rolled under the man just as the sound of a gunshot echoed through the hall. Duo wasn’t sure if he had been shot, but he didn’t care.
Flashing his eyes open, he inventoried the man who was pointing a small pistol at him. The soldier’s visor was open, staring down at him with wild eyes. The normal suit he wore only had one mention of OZ; all other brandings were of the Romerfeller’s lion insignia.
Duo snarled at the man reaching up with his left hand. He tore at the wire, sending waves of kinetic force through the thin material. The small metal spike tore out of the bulkhead, rebounding heavily through the air. The soldier snapped towards the small sound and watched the anchor fly at him in terror. It landed with a crunch inside the open visor; the man curled backward. Screaming in a primal way, the now injured soldier fired off a couple of misaimed shots that ricocheted loudly off of the hall’s metal.
Duo felt something strike his vindictive side and snatched the grappler. He deployed the anchoring pins; they snapped out filling the hall with a sickeningly wet crack. The man convulsed wildly. Duo picked himself up, painfully trailing his useless right arm and walked over to the galley door. He freed the wire from the release hatch and stumbled toward the OZ soldier. The low pull of micro gravity was the only thing that kept Duo upright as he tripped clumsily over his own feet.
When he reached the soldier, the man wasn’t moving. The grappler’s anchor had displaced his left eye, digging into the eye socket pushing the organ out, twisting and spraying blood, as it hung suspended at the end of the soldier’s optic nerve bundle. The only thing that told Duo that the man was still alive was the unfocused right eye, trying frantically to follow his movements.
Duo calmly removed the man’s helmet and let it glide to the floor, pulling the wire that was laced through the aperture with it. Duo looked at the man callously. The soldier was moving his lips, but there was not sound, his lungs could no longer exhale. He was already dead; his body just hadn’t caught on yet.
Duo looped the wire around the man’s neck and stepped unsympathetically on his damaged skull. Duo grabbed hold of a length of wire, winding it around his good hand and jerked hard. There was a wet pop as a fine red mist jetted out; the man’s head flopped off. It soared to the end of the gory wire propelled by the man’s jet of blood. The head bobbed, bouncing wildly in the semi-weightlessness. The newly freed body started into a vigorous new wave of convulsions as Duo watched the head’s shocked expression fade and slacken with sick satisfaction. Watching until the head just hung limply and was certain that the damned thing had died.
A small voice crackled to life inside the helmet, “Archer, report!”
Duo knew he didn’t have much time before Archer’s unit came to investigate. In a straight fight, with the state of his right arm, he was little more than doomed. He snatched his arm and pain again flooded his body; he ignored it and began feeling for breaks. He worked his way up, starting at his wrist. When he was done it satisfied him to note that the arm itself was not broken; but it was just dislocated at the shoulder. His hand was another story. He had snapped at least three bones in the excitement prior to the soldier’s arrival.
Duo moved to the cargo bay entrance at the end of the hall, spun on his heel and used his left arm to hold his right in place. He bolted towards the cockpit and at the last second twisted his right side forward. The world lurched and there was a sickening pop. Agony cascaded through his body, as his right shoulder found its torturous way back into place. Duo floated back dazed, waiting for the pain to break. The voice crackled to life again, demanding something from the now headless Archer, but Duo couldn’t bring himself to care. He was more concerned with the blinding pain that still racked him.