Chapter Text
Something ugly sleeps within the hold of the Garencieres.
Mineva Lao Zabi has been kept apart from much of the world, but she knows of ugliness. The feeling reminds her of a nuclear warhead she once saw, after asking Haman about the barbaric tools of authority.
The warhead had been small, deceptively so. No more than a meter across, and with a shiny, burnished surface that made it appear more like a kitchen appliance than such a dreadful instrument.
And then she touched it, and felt the coldness of its skin and the pressure of all the fuses and explosives and fissiles and hydrogen fuel, and recoiled with instinctual horror. Within that mundane metal casing, thousands of future deaths waited patiently to be delivered.
Possibility has a weight. It deforms spacetime just the same way as mass, and you can feel it.
Mineva can feel it now, rumbling with sheathed-knife menace.
“Princess,” says the Ple unit, Lieutenant Marida Cruz, “We’re about to enter combat. You need to be wearing a normal suit.” She proffers the suit. It’s bulky and clumsy and will make Mineva look like a soldier.
“You needn’t do this, Lieutenant,” replies Mineva. “Neither you nor the Box’s Key should be so cheaply spent.”
The Lieutenant blinks and inclines her head in a curious way. “That is not relevant, Your Grace.” She proffers the suit again, and Mineva takes it. Subtlety was not a quality desired of the Ple germline.
“Can’t you feel it?” asks Mineva as she puts on the suit. She’s not sure why she asks, but she needs to push back somehow. “The Unicorn is a monster.”
“The Unicorn Gundam is a weapon,” the Lieutenant says, speaking matter-of-factly as though to a child. Mineva bristles at this. “It is a mobile suit that responds to my inputs, and I am a class of combat unit known as a ‘pilot’. Nothing more needs be said, Princess.”
Mineva shakes her head, the gesture made clumsy in a puppet-pantomime way by the confining helmet. “That’s not the meaning of `monster’ I meant!” she protests. “Doing this will kill you, Lieutenant Marida!”
The Lieutenant hesitates fractionally at the mention of her name. As though sensing this, the shipnet crackles with the voice of the Garencieres’ master, Suberoa Zinnerman.
“Your Grace,” he says, “We can debate ethics later. Lieutenant Cruz, scramble. We have bandits and vampires inbound.”
“Yes, Master,” comes the clockwork response, and a not-quite-audible noise from Zinnerman betrays his discomfort.
“Lieutenant,” says Mineva, not sure how to continue, but desperate to protest the Lieutenant’s descent into the monster’s heart.
“We’ll talk later, Your Grace,” says the Lieutenant, “I promise I’ll be back,” and then she’s gone. The stateroom’s door slams shut behind her, locking from the outside with a none-too-subtle click.
Mineva can imagine the Lieutenant’s progress through the narrow, mazelike corridors of the Garencieres’ habitation block, pausing in the cargo bay airlock, then kicking out across the dizzying void of the hangar towards her machine. Not towards the Kshatriya, the squat thing that clings beetlelike to the metallic innards of its host, but towards the Unicorn. The Key. The monster. Its jaws yawn wide and swallow her, and Marida Cruz is annihilated, subsumed entirely by her proxy, weapon, and trap.
The shipnet crackles again. “Marida Cruz, Unicorn Gundam. Deploying.”
There is a brief, busy series of mechanical noises as the Garencieres deploys her vicious cargo, and then the Lieutenant is gone, accelerating into the night in a cloud of superheated propellant.
For a brief moment, Mineva is perfectly, completely alone. The shipnet is silent. The air is heavy with anticipation, and the metal walls threaten to buckle under the weight of possibility.
“Maneuvering,” buzzes the voice of the helmsman, Gilboa Sant, over the shipnet. “Brace, brace.”
Mineva feels the intention of the acceleration before it happens. Above her on the bridge, Sant inputs an aggressive burn, and Garencieres answers. The roar of the main engines rattles the thin metal walls, and the rockets’ fury jars Mineva’s bones through her handhold.
“Grandslam vampires,” calls Zinnerman over the rocket’s thunder, and Mineva supposes this must mean something very important indeed. She braces with another hand as Sant inputs another maneuver, and Garencieres reverberates in a groan of structural agony as her thrusters shunt her onto a new course.
Then, a flash of emotion. It’s the knife-sharp, burning taste of sudden fear, wreathed with the Lieutenant’s green fire. Diamonds, home plate sixty by minus five. Fireball.
“All hands!” barks Zinnerman, “Brace for beam fire!”
Mineva goes cold with terror. The Lieutenant can stop mobile suits and missiles. The Unicorn can hold back anything with a warhead or a pilot. But neither of them can stop a particle beam. Garencieres is about to die.
The engine’s roar becomes a full-throated howl as Sant’s panic spins the big, half-ton turbopumps up to redline. Gravity rams down on Mineva’s body as the ship spears upwards.
I promised Tikva I’d come home, the ship is whispering. A father always comes home.
The air Mineva is sucking with panicked, desperate gasps goes sour and metallic with the not-quite-real taste of Minovsky particles, and then suddenly the ship is screaming.
Everything goes dark.
#
It’s silent aboard the Garencieres.
There is a soft click, and then the pitch blackness breaks, disrupted by the feeble light of a battery-operated emergency lamp. The brutal force of the engines is gone, as is their rumble and roar.
No announcement from the bridge. The shipnet must be down.
The realization makes Mineva look to the door. She tries it. It’s unlocked, but Mineva still struggles to open it, grunting with exertion against the belt drive that operated it when the power was on.
The corridor outside is just as dark, lit with the same dingy night vision-friendly red as the stateroom. Mineva keys the lights on her helmet, and shadows jump and cavort like hungry ghosts.
She doesn’t hesitate or pause to think, because she cannot. Time is a luxury that has been stolen from her, just as her agency and secrecy have too. She has no plan, save for a few choice items.
Item the first: Full Frontal cannot be trusted with any bargaining chip he is given, least of all the Box’s Key.
Item the second: The Earth Federation will bend the resources of an entire planet to the task of retrieving the Key.
Item the third: If Mineva remains aboard this ship, she will never be allowed to leave the Republic of Zeon again, and she will become a helpless puppet like her mother. The thought sickens her.
Before she realizes it, she’s at the airlock leading to the hangar. She’s spent at least two minutes getting here, and Zeon crews train to achieve better than three hundred seconds in restarting from a scram. The power’s out, but it doesn’t slow her progress into the airlock—there’s a pneumatic backup. The door shoots back into its hollow when she operates the valve, and slams shut with a screech of high-pressure gas once she’s inside.
The next door is even faster—no failsafe against venting the lock is in place when the power is out. When she hits the valve, it slides smoothly out of the way, the torrent of escaping air tumbling her into the vast darkness of the hangar. Red emergency lights do nothing to dispel the cavelike gloom of the massive space, and Mineva is only able to see the distant walls and their arching structural ribs and trusses because of a slash of light that cuts across one wall. For a moment her gut twists as she fears the ship itself has been holed, but no—one of the side doors is open, and the bulky green form of one of the ships’ Geara Zulus occupies it, still working as an ersatz turret despite the power outage.
There’s a sickening moment of vulnerability as Mineva passes through that angle of sunlight, feeling like a blinking beacon in the darkness, but the Geara Zulu doesn’t respond. She’s safe.
Then the lights blink on. Which means the power is on. Which means the airlock is screaming an alarm up on the bridge, and the shipnet is back up.
The shipnet clicks in Mineva’s helmet. “Tomura,” says Zinnerman’s gravelly voice, “Check the second interior airlock, it’s throwing an alarm.”
“Roger,” replies Tomura’s disembodied voice. “Do you think it’s the Princess?”
Mineva curses silently, while Zinnerman does so out loud. “If it is, find her.”
They will not find her, Mineva knows, because she’s already at the Kshatriya’s cockpit hatch. Far above her, at the forward end of the cargo bay, she can see movement—the airlock door is closing, and behind a porthole is an indistinct shape that might be Tomura, or any of the other crewmembers. She keys the hatch release and slips inside the hulking mobile suit, ducking out of sight before someone thinks to check the cargo bay.
“Ivan,” buzzes the shipnet, “Get outside and get a bearing on the Unicorn. And secure that door.”
Zinnerman must be talking about the big mobile suit-sized door the Geara Zulu is standing in. Mineva is running out of options.
The Lieutenant’s words come to mind unbidden. I am a class of combat unit known as a ‘pilot.’
If Mineva’s briefings are to be believed, she is huddled within the cockpit of one of the most powerful single mobile suits the Sleeves have yet fielded.
There is a chicken-and-egg problem Mineva’s tutors occasionally half-jokingly probed her with, a sort of chummy, half-serious koan: Which is more important: The soldier, or his ideology? Of course, like much of what Mineva has been taught, it’s a cheap, bastardized form of Deikun’s original writings. The original text, she thinks, is far more elegant: A soldier is an instrument that transforms ideology into physical phenomena. This is the rationale of the vanguard: All its members are soldiers, agents that promulgate the ideology that motivates them. By this process, material effects are wrought from immaterial causes.
Mineva has an ideology. She has spent quiet years perfecting it. Until now, she has had no opportunity to realize it, save for the crumbs of authority doled out to her by her Neo Zeon minders. If she delays any longer, it will be torn out of her hands forever.
In this moment, perhaps for an hour, perhaps for the rest of her life, Mineva Lao Zabi must be a soldier. She closes the Kshatriya’s main breaker, lines up the batteries on its central bus, and tells the microscopic sun sleeping inside its heart to wake up.
The panoramic monitor flickers into life, and the heads-down displays run through their self-checks, but Mineva notices none of it. She’s choking, retching as the asteroid-heavy weight of possibility suddenly crushes down on her. Something has changed, something huge. She has crossed a catastrophe, an inflection point, and her gut twists as the strange attractors of history grind past one another like tectonic plates.
“Unauthorized reactor ignition!” barks the shipnet. “Kshatriya, secure your drive and identify! Ivan, get the fuck back here!”
The Kshatriya hums a soft tone in Mineva’s ears—the reactor is hot. It’s cramped here in the ship, where her wings can’t spread, and she’ll be burning through coolant until she can get out in open space where the hungry cosmic background will suck up her excess heat. She nudges the travel pedal, triggering a proximity alarm and a context prompt: The transport locks are still engaged. The touch of a button clears that, and then the Kshatriya is free.
A video window springs into existence in Mineva’s peripheral vision. It’s Zinnerman, and he’s fucking pissed.
“Princess!” he barks. “Secure your drive! Get out of there!”
“No.”
Mineva is horrified to realize that Zinnerman’s scowl can deepen further, and he rips the headset off, clenching its mic in one fist while he barks orders somewhere else. She can read his lips: Tell Ivan to secure this fucking ship.
Zinnerman won’t let her go, but Mineva figures that’s okay. Tomura has local control of the cargo bay doors.
“Tomura!” she roars through the Kshatriya’s radio and exterior speakers, “Open the aft hatch!”
A zoom window appears over Tomura’s fuzzy, terrified face behind the loadmaster’s window. He shakes his head.
Mineva grits her teeth in frustration. Zinnerman’s problem is that his men are too damn loyal. Mineva needs to convince him, and she’s losing time. But what can she even say? What of this matters to an enlisted mechanic?
Mineva’s mind races furiously, and the Kshatriya responds the only way it can. A wing binder twitches, and a single funnel squirts out from its storage well, squirming this way and that as it maneuvers around the crowding bulk of the Kshatriya’s body, lining its barrel up on the loadmaster cubicle. A last-second sting of horror at the realization that she just deployed a weapon is the only thing that keeps the funnel from annihilating Tomura and the corridor around him.
“Opening the aft hatch, aye,” responds Tomura, with barely restrained terror. Beneath Mineva, amber warning lights flash as the ship’s transom begins dropping away from her. Suddenly, the cargo bay twists around her, and there’s a bone-jarring thud as the Kshatriya slams into a wall—Zinnerman is maneuvering the ship, trying to prevent Mineva from leaving. Mineva needs to hold herself steady, stop relying on thrusters and inertia to stay centered in the bay, and as soon as the thought comes to her, it has come true. The Kshatriya’s wing binders have twitched again, their tiny, spiderlike arms reaching to grasp the walls of the cargo bay, slowly shuffling her towards the opening below.
“Princess!” shouts Zinnerman, “You’ll die out there!”
He really is scared for her, she can tell. It gives Mineva pause, but only for a moment. She continues shuffling insect-fashion out of the cargo bay’s stifling confines.
“I won’t,” she says, “Kshatriya won’t let me,” and is horrified to find she really believes it. A nudge of the right hand controller fires a thruster, and Mineva nudges further from the Garencieres. She’s free.
“Get Marida back here and-“ Zinnerman’s growled command is cut off as the Kshatriya automatically switches from the shipnet to a Neo Zeon combat channel. Out here it’s chaos. In the quiet of the briefly-disabled ship, the situation had seemed so calm, but space is alight with beams and rocket plumes, a thousand and one new stars glittering in the dark as humans and machines struggle to stay alive.
Where is the Key? Look, there—a blue streak of superheated gas, zigzagging its way across the battlefield. It turns here and jogs there, evading missile and beam alike, and then there’s a knifelike stab of unleashed potential as its main weapon fires. A midnight-dark violet beam slices across the battlefield, and deaths are made real in its path.
If Mineva were on a legitimate mission, this is the point at which she would announce Mineva Lao Zabi, Kshatriya, deploying! and be entered into Neo Zeon’s C2 matrix, but there is nothing legitimate about this.
The Kshatriya does not care.
She floors the travel pedal and the suit’s quiet heartbeat ramps up to a smooth, thundering blast of rocket power, and suddenly the seat is punching her in the back, ramming the breath out of her, crushing down upon her chest as the Kshatriya accelerates at maximum wartime power.
She will find the Key.
She will rip it out of the grasp of both Frontal and Londo Bell.
She will make her ideology real.
Mineva Lao Zabi is a soldier, and she can never take it back. Kshatriya continues accelerating, threatening to outrun history itself.