Gundam Wing Fan Fiction ❯ Let Slip the Gods of War ❯ Part Six: Day Terrors ( Chapter 6 )

[ X - Adult: No readers under 18. Contains Graphic Adult Themes/Extreme violence. ]

In the time since Wu Fei's call informing her that there was a potential leak in her organization, Commander Une had been busy. She called the three agents she trusted most, Zechs, Noin and Nichol, into her office and asked them to bring their tablets. [1] The search wasn't going well. In the hours since, they'd found several agents and members of the office staff and cleaning crew whose true loyalties were questionable at best and treasonous at worst.
"God damn it!" she exclaimed, slamming her fists down in frustration on the desk in front of her. "I've got another one we need to delve deeper into! How many is that so far?"
"Fifteen out of the first one hundred fifty agents we've looked at, and we've been at it for only eight hours now," an exasperated Nichol replied tiredly, looking up from his own tablet. "Only another thousand files to go."
"I'm going to order some Chinese. Anyone else want some?" Zechs said with an exhausted sigh as he stood up. A moment later, he jumped, startled, when Noin's desk phone started ringing, and then cursed at himself for losing his edge. Seeing who it was on the caller ID, she picked up the receiver and put the call on the speaker.
"Fire here," she said.
"Water here," Sally's terse voice said on the other end. "We're about a minute away. We need at least two escorts, preferably all four of you, or more if you can find anyone else you can trust. We have a tail and a serious vulnerability the enemy knows about."
At the sound of her best friend's voice, Noin breathed a silent sigh of relief. She and Sally had been friends since the Earth-Space War, and she'd been worried since the Chinese-American doctor dropped out of sight six weeks earlier.
"Roger that, Water. Hang in there, all of you, we're on our way out now," she replied decisively. "They're almost here. They've got a tail and a serious vulnerability the enemy knows about."
"Then let's go," Une said, checking her clip. The click of it slamming back home had the whole group on their feet and moving as a unit for the elevator, checking their own weapons and donning bulletproof vests as they went.
By the time they reached the ground floor, they were as ready as they were ever going to be. As they moved towards the mirrored glass doors, they fell into formation without saying a word. To their surprise, and to Zechs and Noin's relief, Hilde and Relena were standing at the welcome desk, talking to the receptionist.
"Relena, Hilde, are you girls on the clock?" Lady Une asked.
"Yes, ma'am," replied the dark-haired girl. She took in their stances with a well-trained eye. "We're here on a case."
"Are you both wearing vests?"
"Of course," Relena answered, pulling her weapon, a Walther P22-5120300, from its shoulder holster with a look of concern on her face while Hilde flashed her PPK. [2] "Our paranoid, overly-protective husbands would never let us hear the end of it if we weren't. Why? What's going on?"
Unbeknownst to the others, Hilde and Relena were there on orders; Duo and Hiiro's orders, to be precise. After six weeks on the run together, the two pairs had split up that morning after Trowa's call letting them know he'd retrieved Quatre. And knowing the girls wouldn't be happy sitting around and twiddling their thumbs, the two Gundams sent them ahead for their protection.
"Good," the Commander ordered, glancing out the window, "As of this moment, you're officially being borrowed by my office. We have some friends coming in, and they need to reach my office safely. Right now, the six of us are the only ones we can trust."
"They're here," Noin said from her place by the door.
Relena and Hilde took their places, and as the van skidded to a stop, they were surprised to see an SUV pull up behind them. Three men in black suits jumped out of the vehicle and started closing in on the van. With the slightest sign from Une, they moved.
"FREEZE!" rang out around the vehicles as Une, Noin, Zechs, Relena, Hilde and Nichol moved to surround the group, but they couldn't get into place before an EM grenade made it into the van. Sally, Duo and Hiiro managed to tumble out of the vehicle before it detonated, but the others weren't as lucky.
"I SAID FREEZE!" Une snarled as she moved to disarm the nearest assailant, her Sig Sauer pressed against the base of his skull. Nichol and Noin disarmed the other two while Hilde, Zechs and Relena moved to check on the agents in the van. The three men struggled against their captors as they started moving them into a group and towards the building.
Une handed Nichol the man she cuffed and gave him a savage smile. In her best imitation of her old "Colonel Une" tone, she said "Agent Silver, you have my permission to shoot him as many times as you see fit if he even thinks about trying to escape."
"Thank you, ma'am!" Nichol replied with his own savage look, and then shoved the two prisoners to get him moving. A moment later, he was joined by Noin, who was escorting the other thug.
"They're all unconscious," Relena said from inside the van. "Hiiro!"
Seeing her best agents lying on the ground, Lady Une jogged over to where the younger woman knelt. Hiiro moaned painfully as Relena's hand caressed his cheek, but as he opened his Prussian blue eyes, they fell on the woman he loved's worried Nile blue ones and gave her a faint smile.
"Great, they've knocked out the only doctor currently in the building," Une quipped as she helped Sally into a sitting position.
"Damn, I'd forgotten how much that fucking hurts," Hiiro grumbled, his hand gravitating to his head. "I'd hate to get that full force again. You okay, Sally?"
"Yeah," Sally moaned, shaking her head to clear it. "It's certainly not pleasant, whether you have them or not. The others are out cold."
"Good thing Cat and Tro dumped us out on the pavement when they did, or we'd be helpless, too," replied Duo as he stood up, cradling his left hand. "Come on, Sal, you can lean on Hii-kun and I'll carry one of the others. Zechs, you can grab Trowa, he's all legs. I've got Fei, and Lena, can you handle Quatre?"
"Sure thing, Duo," Relena replied, putting one of Quatre's arms around her neck as she slid her other behind his back. As light as he was now, it wasn't difficult for the pretty blonde to carry her friend.
"Duo, what's wrong with your hand?" Hilde asked, seeing his hand spasm.
"Later, okay?" Hiiro interrupted gently. "Getting Katoru and Trowa under cover would be a good idea right about now."
Once they were inside the building, Lady Une left orders with the secretary to have the van towed to the garage and the SUV towed to the impound lot. Hiiro led the way to Lady Une's office, his eyes constantly scanning for danger. The commander brought up the rear, watching their backs. Once they were safely ensconced in the conference room, Lady Une turned to the conscious agents.
"What the Hell happened out there?" she asked, toning down her voice at the sight of her exhausted agents.
"They tried to gas us and used an EM grenade to make sure we couldn't fight back," Hiiro answered while glaring at a point behind her head. "Quatre and Trowa sensed them coming and dumped us out just as the grenade landed. Their leader's a man calling himself Kronus and he worked for the scientists who created the Gundams. They ordered his death when they found out he was a danger to us, but he had friends on the inside and escaped H. We'd forgotten all about him; Quatre was the only one of us who remembered him and knew he escaped."
"How did they manage to incapacitate a van full of my best agents with nothing more than an electromagnetic pulse grenade?"
"Nanites," Quatre replied. "The scientists had been experimenting with them for decades as a way to protect pilots from the negative effects of fighting in mobile suits. The Alliance rejected the idea of using them because of costs. Months before the onset on Operation Meteor, the five of us were injected with them. It took most of the first month for them to fully integrate with our systems. Sally and Wu Fei are married, so her infection is directly connected, and unless Hiiro and Duo have been using condoms all this time, Relena and Hilde are probably infected with them, too."
The two young women looked at each other, then at their husbands. As a mobile suit pilot herself, Hilde understood the concerns the Mads might have had for their young recruits, and she'd accepted the fact that she, too, might be infected with nanites when Duo told her about them. Relena gave her husband a look that said "we'll talk about this later" more clearly than words would have.
"I have them, too," Zechs chimed in. When everyone looked at him, wondering how that could have happened, he simply added "Howard gave them to me. Noin doesn't know." [3]
"I call interrogation rights," Duo groaned as he slowly forced himself to sit up.
"Me, too," Hilde added, putting her husband's arm around her shoulders.
"Are we gonna be allowed to drop them into an active volcano first, then dip them into a vat of liquid nitrogen and hit them with twenty pound sledgehammers for good measure?" Wu Fei joked, though he made no move to sit up yet.
"I kinda doubt it, Fei."
"Damn."
"What do we know about Kronus?" Zechs asked.
"Other than he's a sadist?" Duo complained. "Not a Hell of a lot. The Mads thought he was insane enough to be a danger to us. G actually threatened to shove him out an airlock if he didn't leave immediately. He was supposed to go to J, but turned up with H a month later. The only one of us not as intimately familiar with his techniques is Trowa, though it doesn't explain why he tried to nab Trowa first."
"How is it that he doesn't know Trowa well?" wondered Une.
"Simple," admitted Trowa from his seat against the wall, "I'm not Trowa Barton, but a mechanic and back-up pilot who was in the wrong place at the right time. The real Trowa Barton was determined to follow through with the original plans for Operation Meteor, which included dropping a colony and all her citizens onto the Earth and create an everlasting nuclear winter, but he was killed to prevent it from happening. I was working on Heavyarms at the time and witnessed it. Rather than kill me, too, they let me to take his name and pilot Heavyarms. As to why they tried to kidnap me first, that's anyone's guess."
Une looked surprised by the new information. "What was your name before?"
"You already know my birth name, Triton Bloom," Trowa replied with a shrug. "The Govs at the Alliance "orphanage" only referred to me as a number, and the captain of the mercenary corp who took me in called me Nanashi. Barton called me "No-name"."
"Wait a minute," Relena murmured. "The Mads are all former Alliance scientists, right? Who's to say they didn't take some of their more useful underlings with them? If we dig through their old files, there's a chance we can find out more about this guy. Maybe get his real name or some useful information on him."
The door opened to allow Nichol and Noin in, and the black-haired woman made a beeline to Quatre and Trowa and wrapped the tow-headed younger man in a warm hug. Like Lady Une, Noin tended to treat the boys like her younger brothers, but to say that Nichol Cage didn't much like the Gundam pilots was an understatement.
Unlike Zechs, who respected the younger men not only as warriors and pilots, but as family, since Zero One was married to Zechs' younger sister, Nichol could barely tolerate being in the same room with any of them, especially Trowa, whom he'd pegged as a Gundam pilot and spy during the war. Even though seven years had passed since the war, he still didn't like or trust them. His disdain for the five wasn't to the point where he'd betray Lady Une or the Preventer Agency to the enemy, but he was never going to think of them as anything but terrorists.
"I see Winner's finally been found," the curly-haired man practically snarled. "Care to share with the rest of the class now?"
"We're looking for a man calling himself Kronus. He has a connection to the scientists that created the Gundams. He's trying to collect the pilots but we don't know why," Zechs answered.
"The father of the Greek gods," Noin said incredulously. "That bastard must think pretty highly of himself to call himself by that name."
"He called us his Gods of War," added Wu Fei, looking directly at Nichol, then turned his attention to the rest of the room. "Master O sent him away after he tried to break me. It was only a few weeks after Meilin's death."
Une watched as Sally took Wu Fei's hand to give it a discreet squeeze, and then asked "Meilin?"
"My first wife," answered Wu Fei. "She was my back-up pilot for the Shenlong, which I wasn't interested in piloting at the time. She died after a battle outside of L5-0206 nearly a year before Operation Meteor commenced."
"I was serving as the doctor of an Alliance garbage skow at the time," Sally added, remorse coloring her words, "and the late, unlamented General Septem ordered my commander to introduce a biological weapon into the colony's air supply. I argued with Septem, tried to get him to see reason and stop, but my commander went along with him."
Wu Fei had heard Sally's tale before, shortly after the Earth-Space War. He never blamed her for what happened; short of climbing into a Leo and fighting her commander and fellow officers, she was powerless to stop them. They were determined to carry out Septem's massacre and nothing was going to stop them. Nothing, that was, except for a pair of teenagers in a pair of advanced mobile suits.
"It wasn't your fault, Xîn'ài. You stood up to that bastard."
"Not enough."
Lady Une pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to fight the migraine all of this new information was giving her. "What about the rest of you? Are you the original pilots?"
"Sure am," Duo answered. "I broke out of an Alliance prison facility and stowed away on the Sweeper ship G was using. He was impressed that an untrained twelve-year-old brat could bypass his supposedly impenetrable security system and recruited me on the spot."
"Yeah," Quatre added. "I was recruited to the project when I was still twelve, against my pacifist father's wishes. Oddly enough, the day I met H was the same day that I met Rashid and the Maguanac Corps."
"Dr. J found me after Odin Lowe died during his last hit," Hiiro began. "Dekim Barton considered me a great find because, at eight years old, I already knew how to take apart and reassemble many weapons and could also fire a small rocket launcher, and was impressed by the fact that I finished Odin's job for him. Kronus was my first trainer after..."
Nichol looked impressed at Hiiro. "Odin Lowe... the assassin?"
"And my biological father," said Hiiro softly. "He promised to protect me, and he did for a while. He taught me everything he knew, from surviving in the wilderness to how to live a good life. Our last mission went badly; we were outnumbered fifty to one, and he'd been mortally wounded. He put a detonator he'd been carrying in my hand and then shoved me into an air conditioning vent with orders to get out, count to one hundred and push the button. J found me two days later." [4]
"You said that Kronus was your first trainer," questioned Zechs. "You also mentioned that Kronus was a sadist."
"Where do you think most of us learned to ignore pain?" Quatre asked, lifting an eyebrow at the other blond.
"J was just as opposed to Kronus' methods as the other Mads were, but he had added bonus of Barton breathing down his neck with his specifications for his perfect human weapon. Oddly enough, that was never me; our Trowa is closer to the "perfect soldier" Barton's ego craved."
"Bollocks," Trowa quipped. "There's no such thing as a perfect soldier, Hiiro. Even the Mads know that."
Une took a look around the room, taking in the body language of the group before she started issuing orders. "Okay, Zechs, order dinner. Relena, get yours and Hilde's boss on the line and let him know that I'm in need of your skills. Hilde, you and Nichol go down to the emergency supply closet and get some blankets and pillows. Noin, please get on the phone and let Doctor Winner and Mrs. Kurama know that their respective baby brother is safe and no, we can't tell them where they are until the threat's over."
"Quatre needs foods that are high in protein and calories, and we all need new computers," Sally said, rubbing her arms. "The tablets we had were all fried by that EM grenade."
"Nichol, grab them some new ones," Une ordered, and the curly-haired man nodded.
"We're going to need my laptop and the hand held locked in my desk drawer," Trowa said thoughtfully. "I think I've figured out how they've been tracking us. Hiiro, how up to hacking Quatre's nanites are you feeling?"
"Whoa, wait a minute!" Quatre yelped, his eyes widening. "You think they're using my nanites to track us?! That'd require them being within ten feet of us!"
"Not us, love; just you. What if Sally's been right all this time and they'd altered one of your nanites to send out a tracking signal? To that one nanite, you're a walking, talking battery with enough juice to send out a signal without anyone ever noticing it."
"So, you need your desktop and the hand held," repeated Zechs. "I'll get them after I order food."
"Just take care of the computer and hand held, I'll order the food," Une sighed, then smiled softly. "I want the nine of you to settle into the conference room. There's a private bathroom with a shower connected to this office, so we should be okay here. There'll always be at least two of us on guard."
He woke disoriented, dreams of his life before H and Rashid mixed with dreams of his life before and after the war. He felt arms wrapped around his middle, giving him an anchor to this life. He pressed back against the warm body behind him and was relieved when the arms tightened protectively and a pair of soft lips pressed against the nape of his neck.
"Good morning, sleepyhead," Trowa whispered huskily. "Are you completely awake this time?"
"Yeah. Sorry, I was disoriented for a moment," he yawned hugely before turning around to lay his head on Trowa's chest.
"H, Rashid or your father?"
"My father, mostly," Quatre replied softly. "He tried to be good to me, but I was a mistake, and he never let me forget it. He had one rule: everything had to be his way, and there was no highway option. He never told me about my mother or that I was a natural-born, and tried to make Iria swear not to, either. We fought all the time as I grew up, but it escalated after I'd met H and Rashid, and usually ended with Father hitting me. Our battles lasted for nearly two years, until I cut myself off and came to Earth. Sometimes I wonder what Father would say to me now, if he'd be proud of who I've become and everything I've helped to accomplish."
"Sounds like your father wasn't the nicest guy in the Sphere," Duo sighed from across the room. "God, I hope there's some coffee in here. I'll even settle for some of Cat's sludge right now." [5]
"Hey!" Quatre yelped indignantly.
"Ignore him, love," Trowa said soothingly. "Duo wouldn't know good coffee if it bit him in his arse."
"Yes, there's coffee," Zechs quipped from the doorway, "and breakfast. Anne's already searching the Alliance databases, and Nichol spotted three men watching the front of the building when he went for breakfast."
"What about the other exits?" Quatre asked, concerned.
"There are at least three men on each," Zechs answered. "We have local LEOs preparing to assist in taking down each group."
"That'll give us fifteen men to interrogate," Duo said with a grin. "Someone will give something up."
"Correction; fourteen men to interrogate. The ones we grabbed last night had a suicide plan. The first guy moved too quickly, though, tipping us off to the other two. We've seized the substance the other two had and know what to watch for later."
Quatre stood up and stretched. "When can we begin interrogating them?"
"Unfortunately, you two will have to be excluded from this investigation, Quatre. You were the target, and Trowa's your husband. We're going to have to follow the rules this time, boys," said Une from the doorway. "Zechs will be the lead on this one; everyone else will report to him. Any behind-the-scenes research can come from any computer in the building; the login will identify the researcher. Sally, Noin, and I are going to keep investigating our Preventers. I will not tolerate leaks in my agency."
"Quatre and I will be working on his nanites," Trowa stated while he helped himself to some pancakes and golden syrup. "I want to find that tracker and check their programming. I'll eventually need to check everyone else out, and that includes you, too, Sally."
Hiiro set a plate in front of Relena before speaking. "Relena, Wu Fei and I will start searching for Kronus' records on the old Alliance database."
"I guess that leaves me and Hilde to interrogate the prisoners," Duo quipped, giving his elfin woman a glance.
"Twenty credits says they'll have them singing in a half hour," Zechs joked.
"I've got forty that says it'll be fifteen," Nichol replied.
"Deal."
"Zechs!" Noin exclaimed, admonishing her husband as he and Nichol shook hands. "I don't believe you two!"
"Unless they're as well-trained as we were, though I doubt he had enough time to do it," said Hiiro. "I'm going to check J's virtual database, plus some of the contacts that Odin left."
"All right, then let's get to it," ordered Une with a smile before turning to Hilde and Duo. "Duo, Hilde, don't make me regret letting the two of you work together on this."
Hilde gave her a wicked grin. "Why would we do that? I was hoping that this could lead to a transfer! You guys have all the fun!"
"Ha! "Fun," she calls it," Duo grumbled.
"We'll see how this goes, first. Then we'll talk about a transfer," said Une skeptically.
Duo sat calmly in the straight backed chair, his right ankle resting on his left knee. His face was the picture of innocence, his deep blue eyes downcast as though studying the delicate-looking cup balanced between his fine-boned hands. Behind him, Hilde paced like a caged tiger, her entire form crackling in agitation. Every move she made screamed predator and she knew it. As she paced, her voice reverberated off the walls of the small interrogation room.
"We're giving you a chance to avoid life in prison, here," Hilde said sweetly. "We just want some answers."
"Go fuck yourself, ya little bitch," the man snapped, his L2 accent apparent. The dark-haired woman slammed her hands on the table, causing the man to jump as Duo spoke up.
"Hilde, calm down," he said coolly.
"What the fuck is this, good cop/bad cop?" the man sneered. "Lemme guess; Tinkerbell over here is supposed to scare me and you, little boy, are gonna to protect me? That's a laugh!"
Letting those words sink in, Duo lifted cobalt blue eyes from his coffee and allowed the older man to finally see the cold-blooded God of Death, Shinigami, hiding behind his seemingly carefree mask. When the thug realized just who this young man was, he shuddered in response; the temperature in the room seemed to drop a good twenty degrees just from the ice in Duo's stare.
"I don't think you understand, jerk-off," he replied, giving his victim a deadly grin, his voice dropping an octave. "That asshole you call your boss hurt one of my little brothers and tried to capture another one, and if there's one thing I don't like, its people hurting my family. She's here to protect you from me."
Author's Notes: I apologize for taking so long with this chapter. I had this all ready to post weeks ago, but the file had somehow become corrupted and I had fallen back on a back-up copy. On an up note, I'm still trying to get a new laptop.
Progress on my other stories: I'm a bit blocked on Chapter Six of Finding Triton, but Chapters Two of Guardian and Three of Boy are coming along and should be posted within the next two weeks. The second chapter of my GW rewrite is almost done enough to be posted, but the file for Chapter One wound up getting corrupted, so I'm rewriting it. It's a total pain in the ass, I swear.
Everything else is on hold until I can get a few of these others done and out of the way.
Annotations:
[1] One trope in post-Endless Waltz fan fiction is that everyone still uses reams of paper for files, reports, etc., even when there's almost no evidence of it in the anime and only in the WinnerCorp scene in Episode Zero. I simply replaced reams of paper files for digitized ones.
[2] Yes, it's another James Bond reference, but I chose that particular pistol for Hilde because I figure she's a Bond fan. I chose the P22-5120300 for Relena because it's lightweight (1.1 pounds at the most without the clip) and has a lighter trigger pull weight (how much weight/pressure it takes to pull the trigger), making it an easier gun for her to handle.
[3] Head canon of what happened to Zechs between Episodes 18 & 19.
[4] A capsule synopsis of most of Episode Zero, told in the first person.
[5] Refers to Turkish coffee.
Next Chapter: More information on Kronus comes to light, plans are made, and Trowa finds a way to keep the enemy from tracking Quatre.
Next, on Gundam Wing: Let Slip the Gods of War - Twilight.