Zeta Gundam Fan Fiction ❯ Harbinger of Darkness ❯ Good Cop/Bad Cop ( Chapter 2 )

"Hiya Kiyone!" Mihoshi's infallible cheerfulness greeted the Titans officer as she walked into the office.

"And what are you so happy about?" she snarled as she made her way to her desk, "You left work early again yesterday, and I had to stay late to finish up the crap that you didn't do!"

"Aw, I'm sorry, Kiyone, but nine to five is just too long to stay at work! I wanted to go home and get some sleep before I went out to the club and-"

"You went to the club?" Kiyone raged. "To the club, Mihoshi?"

"Did I say club?" Mihoshi laughed sheepishly.

"Yes you did!" Kiyone slapped her hand over her forehead. "Jesus, Mihoshi! What the hell were you thinking? No, let me rephrase that: were you thinking at all?"

"I just figured that since I'm still single, and you've already got somebody, that, you know, I was entitled to a night on the town." She smiled.

Kiyone stared at her for a full minute.

"What in the hell kind of logic is that?" she erupted.

"C'mon Kiyone, cut her a break, will ya?" Johnny said from his workstation across the room. "The work got done, right? So why are you complaining?"

"Shut up, you!" she snapped, "The work got done because I sat here and slaved over it for an extra hour and a half so that this air-head could go and…and…get her freak on!" she stormed over to her desk.

"Jeez, what's with her?" Johnny asked.

"Probably `that time of the month,'" Mihoshi whispered back.

"I heard that!" Kiyone yelled.

She stared down at the mass of paperwork that had accumulated on her desk since she left the night before. Reported busts, intelligence, I.D.'s of suspected terrorists…more work than she wanted to deal with.

"God," she sighed, "why can't all the troublemakers on this colony just disappear?"

She began filling out the forms and making notes of all the suspected Zeonic sympathisers. One name that came up repeatedly was one Henry Sterling. Apparently he was either directly or indirectly connected to almost every act of sedition and terrorism perpetrated on the colony, since arriving here with his one living relative-a sister named Naomi-arrived here as refugees in the months immediately following the One Year War.

"Yo Mihoshi!" she shouted at her partner, "see if you can do a background check on Sterling, Henry, Colonist I.D. number 1-30-299-75-685."

"Okay, Kiyone!" she still sounded sickeningly cheerful. "I'm glad you're not mad at me anymore."

"Yeah, whatever," she grumbled. Then a few seconds later: "Find anything yet?"

"Oh yeah. There's a lot of stuff on this guy. He's been causing trouble for a while it seems. I'm printing off the profile and one of his propaganda leaflets."

"Propaganda leaflets?" Kiyone said, beginning to feel ill-at-ease, "What do you mean? Was he publishing anti-Federation stuff?"

"That's what it seems," she said, handing her partner a stack of papers as she walked up to her desk.

"My God! Why haven't we started looking for this guy sooner?"

"Seems as though he's only recently started to take his work to the public. See here? Up until two months ago he was writing under a pseudonym. He's never had a lot of cash, but he's a rabble-rouser and well respected in underground political circuits."

"Sounds like we've caught us a real big fish!" Kiyone said, smiling for the first time that morning. "Did you get an address? If he's been so kind as to leave us all these hints, we can still hope that his generosity holds out…"

"Nope." Mihoshi shook her head. "He's not even in Thirty Bunch anymore. Filed for a permanent change of address about a month ago."

"Well, where'd he go? If he's filed a form to move, then we can track him down easily!"

"Yeah, but isn't that out of our jurisdiction? I mean, it says here that he's gone all the way to Side Three."

"No way! You have got to be shitting me!" Side Three was the one area that the Titans did not have the right to patrol in the Earth Sphere. That area was under the direct control of the Occupation Forces.

"Sorry, Kiyone, but it looks like our big fish has gotten away." She started back too her own desk. "We can still hope that the Occupation Forces get him."

"Wait a second!" Kiyone's face brightened, "He has a sister, right? She's still here, right?"

"Oh that's right!" Mihoshi turned around and rushed back to her partner's desk. "Naomi Sterling! She's living in the 92nd residential block, apartment number G276."

"Then let's head on down there and see if we can get her to sing. If we pump enough info out of her, we can pass it along to the Occupation Forces, and still bust that mother fucker!" She stood and grabbed her blue-and-black jacket and barrette.

"Right behind you partner!"

"Wait up a second, ladies!" Johnny called out, "Be careful on the roads, some of those bastards are out there staging an anti-Federation rally."

"So?" Kiyone shrugged, "they've done that before, and on more than one occasion."

"Yeah, but never like this. This is probably going to turn into a riot."

"A riot?" Mihoshi suddenly didn't seem as eager about going out on the bust as she had before.

"Then in that case, Henry Sterling is going to have to wait." Kiyone shook her head. "Fuck! And he was going to be my ticket to Major too! Ah, well, let's get down to the MS hangar. If they want to fight dirty, then we'll be ready to go blow for blow with them."

"The MS hangar?" Mihoshi sounded dubious. "Isn't that going a bit overboard?"

"Do you think that those anarchists out there care about moderation?" Kiyone returned.

"She's right Mihoshi," Johnny nodded as he stood and grabbed his jacket. "These Zeek wannabes are pulling out all the stops this time. It's our duty as Titans officers to crush any and all acts of sedition that may upset the peace we worked so hard to attain during the One Year War."

Mihoshi followed them to the elevator, shaking her head. "If you guys say so. I just hope it turns out to be okay with the branch headquarters."

"Like you ever care about what HQ says anyway," Kiyone snorted, pushing the button for the sub-basement. "You're just mad because now you won't be able to sneak out early again."

"Hey!"

Kiyone ignored her friend's indignant protests and thoughtfully cracked her knuckles. `Now you fucks will get a taste of what the Titans are really made of…'

Antony Kaiser waved the protest sign he'd hand crafted in defiance against the Federation soldiers who formed a picket line around 30 Bunch's capitol building. His voice was added to the overpowering roar of the crowd of demonstrators.

"Independence, now!" he shouted until his throat was ragged. "Now!"

One of the soldiers climbed atop a ladder on the other side of the line. "Citizens!" he bellowed in return through a megaphone, "return to your homes in an orderly fashion! Nothing will come of this protesting!"

"Fuck you, you fascist bastard!" Antony's voice rang out against a flurry of similar degrading insults.

"I repeat," the soldier said, sounding unfazed by the verbal abuse, "cease this action at once, or prepare to face dire consequences!"

More insults rained down on the Feddie officer, and some people even threw eggs and rotten vegetables.

`Damn this is cool!' Antony thought as he was continually swept along in the ebb and flow of the crowd. To be among so many others with ideas similar to his own…it was a great feeling.

It was only too bad that it had come to this in the first place, though. He and his parents, and his younger sister and brother, had been living in Side One since before the Great War. The Federation had ruled the area, but hadn't much cared about what happened to it. Colonial representatives had continually warned the leaders in Jabrow of the threat that the Duchy of Zeon posed, but their cries had gone unheeded. "None can challenge the might of the Federation!" the ruling body had said, blinded by the arrogant delusions brought on by the illusions of primacy.

But then the War broke out.

In the first week, with the indiscriminate launches of nuclear and biological weapons, much of Side One, along with Sides Two and Four, was turned into nothing more than an irradiated shoal zone. Antony had wanted to fight, but he was only an idealistic fourteen year old kid at the time; much too young to be able to enlist.

However, as the war dragged on, and eventually came to its conclusion, his ideals were dashed on the harsh surface of reality; The Federation didn't care about what happened to Side One at all. Theirs was simply a goal of conquest, and if people suffered on account of this reckless ambition, then too bad for them. Almost no money had come for the rebuilding of the three Sides that had been devastated during the war. The Space in between them remained littered with debris and wreckage from battles over half a decade old. Even when the almighty Federation did get its rude awakening two years ago with the Delaz Fleet's Operation Stardust, the most that they did was send several hundred troops the colonies for Occupation duty.

He shivered despite the warm summer air. They also sent some of the Titans officers.

What would the Titans stationed here at 30 Bunch do about this demonstration? That was the question that burned in the back of everyone's mind, no matter how bravely they affected.

Rumours of the cruelty of the Titans spread like wildfire throughout the colonies, and 30 Bunch had a few stories of its own. After the terrorist bombed the restaurant three weeks ago, a large number of street corner politicians who got out on their soap boxes every morning to preach against the oppressive rule of the Earth, suddenly began to mysteriously vanish. No one knew where they went, but everyone knew who was responsible.

Antony shivered again.

If they wanted to, they could simply open fire on the crowd. Sure some of the "peaceful" demonstrators had brought along concealed sidearms for just such an occurrence, but what could handguns do against soldiers armed with heavy machineguns and depleted uranium bullets (another of the Federation's sidesteps around the Antarctic Treaty)?

If they did try something of that nature, Antony would feel no shame in running for his life. He had a position down at the Spaceport at the centre of the Colony shaft; if they wanted to try and track him down, he and his family could escape to a different colony.

The fact that he had already related this to them made him feel a bit more confident about standing against the greedy exploiters from Earth. Their townhouse was not far from an elevator shaft too, so escape would be even easier.

So he stood his ground, angrily waving his sign and shouting profanity in the faces of the oppressors. Hopefully it would all work out okay.