Mobile Suit Gundam Fan Fiction ❯ Seig Zeon! ❯ When things go from Bad to Worse ( Prologue )

Seig Zeon!

 

 

Disclaimer: I don't own Gundam. T'would be badass if I did…maybe then I could see about getting Silent Requiem published.

Bah, who am I kidding!

Gundam belongs to far better people than I. Namely the good folks at Bandai and Sunrise. Gundam is in their hands. All is Right with the World.

 

 

Michiko Hakane gripped the unforgiving steel of the chain link fence behind which she found herself held captive. Her fingers, always slender, now looked like little more than skin covered bones after what seemed an eternity as a prisoner of war, though the trickles of blood that spilled from the myriad scratches thereon confirmed that life indeed still pulsed within her gaunt, grimy frame.

Like the other soldiers—former soldiers—in the camp she watched anxiously as the guards slopped pasty gruel into communal tins from which they would be forced to eat. Any meal at all their captors deigned to bestow upon them was always cause for restlessness amongst the prisoners, even if there was little certainty of actually getting any nourishment when all the slop was in a single trough. It ultimately turned into something of a feeding frenzy, like so many starved barracuda snapping at a hunk of beef thrown in the water before them. Only the strong and the quick would get close to enough to eat whilst the weak languished further malnourishment from their own inability to wrestle their way towards even a spoonful (more often than not a handful—decidedly unhygienic, but when they were all dying anyway…) of the slop.

Michiko sighed. Life in Detention Block 0186 was nothing if not the most calculatedly meagre existence the captors would allow. She was sure that this shit violated the Antarctic Treaty in at least half-a-dozen ways, but that was the kind of thing you dared not say to the people holding your one means of survival.

Hell, she thought as she watched the three uniformed guards approach the fence, each a halved MS shell casing full of gruel in hand, but this is what you get to do when you've all but won the fucking war.

`Chow time, you Earther sons `a whores!' One of the guards shouted. Not that he needed to get anyone's attention; every pale, sallow, scarred face in 0186 was pressed fiercely against the fence watching him and his comrades as they sauntered up in their freshly pressed olive drab uniforms. No, he didn't need to shout at all. The fucker just did it to get off on feeling superior to them and something so petulant as strident name-calling was good enough for that end.

Still, as they slid the casing/troughs under special openings in the fence (openings not quite large enough for a man or even a woman to slip through; openings also guarded the clock round by assault rifle-toting guards), the soldiers of the rebellious Duchy of Zeon laughed and jeered as their wards fought tooth and nail for whatever meagre portions they could secure. Michiko had hated them for that at first. The way they carried themselves with airs of superiority simply because they were the children of aristocracy and as such had been afforded the option of duty well back of the frontlines. That was the way things worked in the Duchy. Rank, birth, nobility, aristocracy…all of that horseshit that had gone out with the days of quasi-feudalism back on Earth. Here, though, in this retro-futuristic dystopia that the Duke Degin Zabi and his would-be dynasty sought to forge in the age of space warfare, beam weapons, and mobile suits, all of that actually mattered again. Bluebloods were either officers or, as was the case in 0186, non-combatant, self-righteous little pussies.

Now, though, now she didn't give two shits about the mentalities of the Zeonic overlords. Only one thing was on her mind: food.

The detention block sat on a small grassy knoll in what had probably been, at one point in time, a very lovely park. Your stereotypical space colony had number of such parks interspersed among the sundry skyscrapers and factories. This particular colony, Haozhou, was on the outer reaches of Zeonic space and had been largely evacuated of civilian personnel and now served as an industrial centre. Earlier in the war, before the fall of Odessa, Michiko and others of the prisoners had been conscripted to unload the freight shuttles just in from the Eastern European mining bases. Fortunately, the work hadn't been too physically taxing because so much of it had been automated, but it, like the tactics employed in the detention camp had been designed to demoralise them by forcing them to work for their adversaries.

Incidentally, she thought as she wrestled for a handful of the slop, it was very demoralising to keep the male and female prisoners locked up in the same camps. This was insidiously deceptive, for whilst creating the fiction of egalitarian policies in the camps in line with the letter of the Treaty, it did not take into account the bestiality that emerges from beneath the layers of civilised propriety once one is thrown into circumstantial, whimsical, and cruel captivity. More than a few of Michiko's sisters in arms had bruises and welts that were not caused by the hands of overbearing Zeonic guards. More than a few also cried themselves to sleep nights for more lasting scars that were not visible on their skin…

From time to time the guards liked to stand by and watch the once proud soldiers of the United Earth Federation squabble and fight over the dregs of a meal like so many animals. It gave them something to laugh at. Was something to break the monotony of their days. Early in Michiko's captivity (she'd been in 0186 since the assault on California Base back in…God, was it really only in March?), they had also liked to shoot off rounds amongst the scrabbling prisoners to watch them scatter. In those days they had felt on top of the world, sure that their Duchy with its massive humanoid weapons—called mobile suits—would end the war within weeks when measured against the tanks and jets of the Federation. The successes of the Invasion would have made the soldiers of any army smug. Odessa had thrown them for a loop though. That had been back in October, and for a time, even the guards had looked sullen. The propaganda about Alan `Ghost' Grey and his limited victories with the aid of beam-weapon equipped MS, against the might of the blitz had kept them haughty enough, though, and even though the radio and TV in their shed several metres away from the camps detailed losses, the stories of the Ghost got more publicity. Like they were trying to salvage something from the debacle.

And then had come the defence of the Arabian salient at the Battle of the Sand Seas…

If the stories of Grey's escapades had warranted the attention of the Zeeks, the victory in the Rub Al-Khali had totally reversed the morale balance. From then on the Zeon had been…if not necessarily in the driver's seat, certainly able to grab the wheel from time to time.

Michiko had been on the sidelines for all of it. She had been a gunner in a Federation Type-62 tank during the Invasion and had seen firsthand what mobile suits were capable of. The memory of that massive Zaku I class suit bearing down the Los Angeles freeway directly towards her tank column was forever ingrained in her mind and she still woke up gasping sometimes as it haunted her dreams.

That memory and the memory of the olive-clad infantryman dragging her across the asphalt after she had bailed from the tank just before it exploded. The shockwave from the cooking ammunition had knocked her forward and a piece of shrapnel that had ironically once been of the very armour that had defended her, struck the side of her head and knocked her out. The hackneyed-ass expression of `for you, the war is over', had been what she had groggily awakened to. She had groaned, both in physical agony and in pain caused by the hollow old line that felt like it had come from some B-grade twentieth century war drama.

But from there, she'd been shipped to a camp out in Nevada, and from there to the lovely amenities and palatial suites of camp 0186. So, she guessed, for her the war really had been over.

`All right you lousy donkey-fuckahs,' one of the guards grumbled, `hand back the trays and spoons. You know the drill.'

`The drill' was that they took the casings and counted all the spoons to make sure there would be no using them to dig an escape tunnel. If there was a missed count, three random prisoners were taken out and summarily shot and the rest had rations revoked until the utensil was returned. Calculated cruelty, but nonetheless effective.

No incident today, thank God. In the early days there had been, but people lost there nerve really damned quick in camp 0186. Michiko counted herself lucky that she had survived as long as she had.

She also counted herself lucky that she had been able to get a few bites of gruel today. The men hadn't been as bellicose as they were usually wont to be. She and a number of other women wouldn't feel quite so emaciated this evening. No, tonight was a good night for they would only go to sleep ravenous and not starving.

As Michiko walked back towards the area beneath a spreading oak that she and a few others had claimed as there own (there were no barracks in 0186; strictly communing with nature) she considered the course of the war again. Considered everything up to Odessa and how things had suddenly gone so horribly, horribly wrong. Considered how, instead of beating down the door at Solomon or Granada, the Federation had all it could do to even try and advance on them in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, or New England. From what the propaganda machines were saying, the next targets were Luna II and Jabrow itself. What had happened?

What had happened?