Mobile Suit Gundam Fan Fiction ❯ Seig Zeon! ❯ MS-06X Zaku Special ( Chapter 2 )

The Zeonic forward command for the defense operations on the Ukrainian Front was an ornately adorned building built in the early eighteenth century of the Old Calendar. Spires and buttresses soared outside of massive windows that offered a spectacular view of the sunrise over the streets of the city of Uman.

Lieutenant Commander Alan Grey, however, had no time to enjoy that view. This bright October day found him as many others had: ensconced in the gloom of the situation room, red-eyed and working solely on caffeine and his own iron resolve to see his job through to the end. In spite of pulling another all-night vigil over the situation maps, he was feeling somewhat pleased. The detachment under his direct command was having a surprising degree of success slowing the Feddies' advance. It wasn't stopping the advance—the enemy's numbers and blitzkrieg tactics were far too overwhelming for that—but the drive from Kiev had been much slower than the advance into the Ukraine from Poland half a month prior. That had been an unmitigated disaster and many an officer had been striped of his command because of it. One of the reasons Grey himself—of middle class birth, and an MS jockey by training—was now in command of a company's worth of fighting men, support troops, and materiel.

He was poring so intently over the map spread out on the computer screen before him (the fusion of technology and rococo architecture would have been worth a wry smile had he not thought about the seemingly anachronistic irony thereof several hundred times before) that he did not hear the footsteps behind him or even notice that someone else was in the room.

`Sir?' the ensign rustled the papers nervously in an attempt to get his superior's attention.

Grey blinked with a start and glanced away from the situation map to see one of the command centres numerous runners bearing the news.

`Reports just in from the team escorting prototype 002, sir.'

`Right,' Grey replied. `I'll take them at once. Thank you ensign, and forgive my lapse there. Much to think on, you understand.'

`It'll be more once you see how that prototype preformed, sir' the younger man—the kid couldn't be more than nineteen, sandy blonde hair and blue eyes; Weber, Grey thought, recalling his name—said with a grin.

`How do you mean?'

`Well, sir, I've been hearing all kinds of rumours flying around from my comrades in engineering. They won't stop talking about what a godsend the new weapons system is.'

Grey nodded. It was nigh-well a sign of divine providence that had allowed the higher echelons to consider the implementation of beam weaponry as soon as they had. Though not nobility, as an officer, he heard stories of how fractious the contenders for the Throne were, but for once it seemed that they had realised that lack of co-operation would do nothing but aid the Feddies, and if the Feddies won, then there would be no Throne of Zeon to fight over.

So funding had been diverted from the construction of the massive mobile armour prototypes and funnelled into upgrading the weaponry that had already proven itself. The war had already dragged on much longer than anyone had expected it would, and lives were being lost in the grapple at an alarming rate. Veteran pilots were a dwindling luxury, especially in the wake of this concentrated push on Odessa, but it was felt that even a rookie pilot would stand a fighting chance if equipped with a powerful enough weapon. And of course, there were not many weapons more powerful than a beam rifle…

Because the very nature of this refitting process demanded so much of the Duchy's economy, it was crucial that they hold the line here in Uman for should the Feddies break though at this juncture, there would be little but open steppe between them and Odessa. The prototypes sent in from labs back in Side 2 were a boon, but the problem was that they were just too few in number to really be effective. One unit could take out an entire Fed MS team, but if the Feds were sending in waves of eight teams at a sortie (which they had the numbers to do…) things became much less rosy.

`Weber,' Grey said as he began walking out of the situation room and down the window-lined hall towards his office, `send for Lieutenant Pershing as soon as she has landed and seen to her armour. I would debrief her personally.'

`Yes sir,' the ensign, who had followed him out of the room, saluted and took off down the hall in the opposite direction.

Yes, Lieutenant Alan Grey thought himself as he strode the plush carpeted floor, I would indeed be interested in hearing from you.

 

`Son of a bitch!' Lieutenant September Pershing shouted as she slid down the escape wire of her MS-06X Zaku Special. `Fuckin' Feds got Wade!'

She and her escort had been fortunate to escape the encroaching Fed salient as it extended ever southward from Kiev. They had returned to their base in the smaller Ukrainian city of Uman, which was slightly less than a hundred miles from the frontlines, but still a good hundred and fifty north of Odessa itself. The city bustled as logistics teams hurried hither and yon making ready to move people and material back and forth across the embattled steppes. Fortunately, the MS hangar network was in a largely abandoned district in the southern reaches of the urban sprawl.

Still, whilst the area was somewhat secluded from the rush of the occupied city proper, it had its own sort of traffic as the seemingly limitless number of engineers, mechanics, fighter jocks and even the occasional officer milled about on the hangar floors or catwalk networks.

Ignoring the placating words of the mechanics who swarmed over the Special, September tore off her helmet and shook her sweat-matted mane of reddish-gold hair. As she did, she stalked across the concrete floor of the cavernous hangar towards the figures of the Dom pilots who had served as her escort wing. Humbling herself and forcing the anger inside under the mask of ingrained military discipline, she saluted the two pilots—a show of great emotion for she outranked both.

`I'm so sorry,' she said keeping a tight reign on her emotions. `Yumi, Mark; if I had been a better fighter on my own, those bastards wouldn't have…Wade would still be here now.'

Yumi Tanaka shook her head slowly. `We were careless, ma'am. Our suits should have been able to handle the Feds. It was only a group of four! Three if you don't count the one that you had disabled before we got there.'

`Careless is right,' Mark Rosenfeld echoed glumly. `Not too many pilots as good as Wade Alderman, that's for sure; but even he…how can the Feds be this good, L.T.? They've only had a working MS programme for a little over a month! We should be raping those son's of whores!'

September shrugged, the material of her normal suit crinkling unpleasantly as she did so. `What they lack in experience, they make up for in superior firepower. When almost every GM packs a beam rifle, all the heavy armour in the world won't save our Doms and Zakus. I suppose that's what the Brass finally got through their thick skulls, but even still. Things like this happen—wish to fucking God they didn't, and I still feel personally responsible for this latest debacle, but…' she shook her head.

The three of them let the silence hang for a moment.

`What now, Lieutenant?' Rosenfeld asked when the whine of heavy equipment forced them to begin walking towards the pilots' quarters.

`I guess we take a breather for a little while,' September replied, unzipping the front of her normal suit to allow her sweaty undershirt to catch some of the breeze that flowed in through the open hangar doors.

The pilot's quarters was in a two story complex that took up most of the northeast corner of the hangar. That its two story height was still far below the arched corrugated roof spoke to the sheer enormity of the hangar facility. It took several minutes for them to cross the floor to get to it, but just as September was about to open the door to let herself and comrades in, an out of breath ensign ran up waving an orders form.

`Lieutenant!' he gasped, `damn, I'm glad I found you!'

September arched an eyebrow, but said nothing. Those orders bode ill for her downtime, and if this ensign was who she thought he was…

`I've orders for you to come to Lieutenant Commander Grey's office ASAP, ma'am.' The ensign—who had at last caught his breath—handed the loose sheet of off-white paper to her. `He says that you are to be debriefed.'

She snorted. I bet.

Aloud, to Mark and Yumi: `you guys go on ahead and get that R and R. It should be a few hours at least before your suits are operational again and you had a rough night. Get what rest you can before the Powers-That-Be decide to sortie us again. Meantime, I'll give my report and ask about…doing something…for Wade. The least we could do is have a private memorial or something.'

The two Dom pilots nodded and saluted before taking their leave of her.

September followed the ensign's lead towards a jeep parked just outside the hangar doors. This better not be the kind of `debriefing' you're known for, Alan, she thought with a bitter smile, I'm so not up for that this morning.

 

Alan Grey massaged the bridge of his nose with his thumb and index finger. Fuck me blind if I wouldn't trade this promotion and all the cash it entails to get out from behind this damned desk!

He was on his fourth cup of coffee since word of the planned (and now realised) Fed offensive had arrived at about midnight. As he mused, he stared down into the blackened beverage with revulsion. It was instant.

A rap on his doors drew his attention. `Come!' he called.

Ah, September. She walked in behind Weber looking the very image of martial beauty: five-eight and muscular (a real tigress in bed) with fiery red hair and eyes the same olive hue as a Zaku's carapace.

Grey could not suppress his smile.

`Thank you for your promptness, ensign Weber, you may leave now. Get some sleep, eh?'

`Sir!' the kid did a smart about face and hurried out of the office.

`So,' Grey began, looking the woman up and down, `from what I hear, you've become quite the lethal test pilot since I left.'

September averted her eyes. `Sir.'

`The formal tone? Come on September, I thought we'd moved past this.'

`Past what, you arrogant, self-righteous dick?' she snapped. `Sir.'

Grey sighed. `I've told you time and again that I never wanted this. Are you really going to bring up that tired act again?'

`Alan if you didn't want the promotion, why the fuck did you take it? Why'd you leave me and everybody else in the 12th, huh?'

`Lieutenant Pershing,' iron was palpable under the silk of his voice. He had hoped things would go better than this, but tenacity was one of her biggest faults as well as one of her greatest strengths.

`I still say you're a lying bastard, you know. Fucking have me damn near lose my rank for fraternization and then leave me at the drop of a hat. On a fucking promotion no less!'

`Are you quite finished, Lieutenant?' Grey asked, steepling his fingers before him as he leaned onto his large oak desk.

She glowered, but replied, `yes sir.'

`Thank you. As much as I still care for you September, now is most certainly not the time for a spate. Are we in agreement on at least that much?'

She looked at him long and hard. It was a look that contained a legion of emotions actively grappling against one another, each jockeying to take the foremost position in her heart and mind. He couldn't blame her for her feelings (nor could he meet her probing emerald glare), for were he in her situation, he would probably feel just as conflicted. He remembered those nights in the pilots' quarters as well as she surely did, and to have it come to such an abrupt end would have been hard on anybody—hard on him for leaving and twice as hard on her for being left.

She replied at last, in a voice totally devoid of the emotions her eyes betrayed. `I understand you, sir.'

`Good. Now as to the results of your force recon behind Federation lines?' Truly he was a masterful actor to be able to say that with a professional demeanour.

September obliged him, recounting the details of her skirmish with four GMs by an abandoned farm in the middle of the steppe. The fight had been a gruelling one, and apparently her escort wing had suffered a loss, but in the end, a trade of one Dom for four GMs (at least, she was pretty sure it had been four) was one that, in the cold detached mind of an officer, Grey found to be acceptable.

As she began her conclusion, he felt something of that old excitement creeping back into his system. September was but one of twenty Zaku Special pilots stationed across this front. Of course he realised that the few Specials in action would not necessarily turn the tide against the Federation's numerical superiority (how does a Federation officer solve a problem? Throw bodies at it until it goes away), they certainly went a long way towards preventing what would certainly have been a rout without them. And that was not even counting the elite pilots trained on less cutting-edge suit technology; Gouf and Dom type suits still remained a very real threat to even skilled GM pilots—not that there were very many skilled GM pilots as of yet.

If the Specials already deployed along this front could be used long enough to keep things from getting too intense around the HLV facility run up at Sevastopol, there stood a good chance that Komusai shuttles and standard HLV dropships could continually reinforce Zeonic positions throughout the front. Reinforce the positions with even more Specials, that is.

`That concludes my report Lieutenant Commander.' September said at last.

`Very good, Pershing.' Grey stood and walked across his office—a converted study on the building's third floor, illuminated by two grand picture windows directly behind the desk—to stand directly before her.

This time he did look into her eyes as he spoke: `If the war goes well, I'll come back to you, you know that.'

`What makes you so sure I'll be waiting?'

`I know you,' he said simply and leaned forward to kiss her.

`No,' she turned her face away from his seeking lips, `you don't. Not anymore.'

He was ruffled, but not thrown. `Very well. Would you rather I see about getting you transferred to someone else's company?'

`I—no, I wouldn't want that. I owe my escort wing too much for that. If it means suffering you and your advance and retreat tactics to serve with them, the so be it.' She looked back at him giving a ghost of a smile.

`Alright then. Good to know that that's settled. You're dismissed Lieutenant Pershing.' Grey turned to walk back to his desk.

`Sir?' her voice stopped him. `I need to ask about funerary services for my downed man.'

`Of course,' he said nonchalantly, `see the chaplain about it directly and be sure the proper paperwork is filled out.'

`Thank you, sir…Alan.'

He looked up sharply to see the expression she bore that would drive her to call him by his given name, but he saw only the door closing. She had gone.

September, September, he thought with a bemused half grin.

Grey was just about to return to work when he heard the muffled thumping of footsteps on the carpets outside. They sounded urgent.

`Sir!' Weber cried as he burst through the door not bothering to knock. `The Commandant needs you, now! The Feddies have broken through our frontline resistance!'