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Gundam Liberate - Valles - 12-25-2007
This is kind of an original Gundam setting.
It was noon at midsummer, and only a couple hundred kilometers from the tropic. The only shadows were underneath things, and they stood out razor-clear against the wisps of snow around the walls of the enemy base.
Anabelle Targia reached up and tried to rub her eyes. The action distracted her from the urge to scream at the Terrans about being so cavalier about their environmental protocols as to allow actual drifts to form, and bumping her hand into her helmet's faceplate jolted her thoughts out of that line of reasoning entirely.
"All right. Final position check and target count," the Skipper's voice said, tinny and muffled by the unpressurized cockpit and her environment suit's helmet.
She keyed the transmit button. "West gully, three tanks."
Chuck was next - the other forward. "East gully, four tanks."
"North dune, four tanks." Jesus, left center.
"North dune second, ditto." Kate, right center.
"East dune, three tanks." Lauren, the Skipper, three kilometers away with sensors tuned and missile racks ready.
"Ditto, ditto." Luke was the other half of their fire support team.
"South dune, south dune, four tanks both." Mike answered for himself and his partner - Phillepe's English was lousy even in a calm situation.
"Valley West, three waiting. We can't see dick, though." Rosita was heading the backup element.
"Rosy, you never see dick," Kate snickered, then quieted as Tim, their closest thing to an Electronic Warfare man, snapped at her about comm discipline.
"All right," Lauren said. "Luke, open the ball."
Luke's 'Gungnir' carried what Ana thought was the most impressive 'home brewed' weapon she'd ever seen or heard of, a deployable three-section coilgun that was damned near twenty meters long and twenty-five centimeters across the bore. The tank on the far side of the compound's comm bunker from her blew up spectacularly - Luke must have hit its batteries.
Ana dug her own 'Samurai's toes into the rocky soil of the gully, waited the count of three like the plan said, then launched her machine up and over the top like a sprinter coming off the blocks. Half the bank tore away under her feet under hundreds of force, but she'd expected that and kept her balance until, three steps later, she'd made it into the open and could let her jets pick her up and launch her towards the low-slung, spider-like machine that was whipping its lopsided turret around to face her.
The first shot missed cleanly - she didn't see where it went - and she fired back with the only ranged weapon their squad had been able to afford to give to a close-assault specialist, a twenty-millimeter popgun that they'd ripped from a crashed AU fighter. For what it was worth her marksmanship was on, today - the burst danced across the tank's upper hull in a spray of bursting shells and tracers - but a weapon that small was simply not enough to hurt something like an African Heavy CORE.
It fired back, a flash of laser light from the anti-missile cupola on its turret, and the treated klaster of her cockpit went black as the chemicals between its layers heated and combined. That reaction was part of the design, and she was glad of it - it certainly beat having her retinas burnt out! - but she was dodging blind, and Samurai shuddered around her as a second shot from her enemy's main gun blew apart its number three tank array.
She twisted in her seat, trying to urge the machine she was riding into a safe attitude for landing on a surface she couldn't see, but too late and too slow it started to answer - there was a faint scream of metal as the hundred-ton mobile suit came down and one ankle turned lurid red on the damage display as she shifted balance and fire the facing jets to try and force herself onto an even keel...
There was a second crack of impacting fire, and Samurai heaved and went over. Ana swore as foully as she knew how; tank array one, on the left shoulder, was black - completely gone - and the battery pack, her fighting lifeblood, was flashing red from what had to be shrapnel damage. In a couple of minutes the trapped electrical energy would raise the superconductor's internal temperature enough that it would stop working properly and the entire thing would melt down and release itself in a single magnesium-bright flare of light and head.
The cockpit glass was clearing; she saw a bright spark and a dim flash through it as the tank's missile defense system cut down a shot from Chuck's panzerfaust. A second flash a moment later was the right shape and place to be a muzzle blast from its gun.
She could still move. She still had her blade. And it was only just barely outside her reach...
Action followed realization without a pause for intent, as Samurai came up from where it had sprawled face first into the Martian dust, drove forward one step as it rose, two, then lunged and struck swinging up and across as the turret swung around to face her. There was the faintest shock of contact as the tip of the sword grazed the gun's muzzle, and then the it fired.
There was a sharp, earsplitting crack that whiplashed through Samurai's bones as the hypersonic tungsten dart twisted under the force of its uneven release from the shortened barrel and speared its freak-chance way directly against the main bearing of her mobile suit's left shoulder. That structure had been pieced together from an assortment of atoms and small molecules into a fantastic, interlocking crystalline block of covalent and other chemical bonds. It was quite impossible for such to be broken by any conventional force... but the industrial grade monomolecules that made up the rebel mobile suits' underlying structure hadn't been mean to stand up to shocks quite so sharp. The propogating kinetic energy of the impact unraveled the chemical tensions holding the shoulder molecule together, and, since they had been quite demanding to create in the first place, inevitably released much of that binding energy at the same time that it dissolved the thing into a far less dense state.
Put simply, the shoulder joint exploded violently. She fought for her footing as a full fifth of her damage display went abruptly and utterly black, a grim contrast from the still-flashing battery marker and a terrifying testiment to the way the strike sent the bottom three quarters of the arm spinning away.
No matter. She was right-handed anyway.
Crouching where she was made the next shot skim by the now-cleared cockpit glass so closely she could see the incandescent contrail from the corner of her eye, almost within reach of her actual hand rather than her mobile suit's.
Her enemy's driver threw the heavy into full reverse, sending rooster tails of dust and gravel out from underneath all four of its wide-splayed wheels as that deadly gun tracked down... and she sprang, hurling herself up and out of the line of fire and making the next shot a clean miss before she came down with all of the dying Samurai's weight behind the sword-point that aimed to skewer the Terran's turret.
And just like that, with a ginding screech of failing metal and a faint puff of condensing water vapor from a breached crew compartment, it was over. Samurai kept falling, tumbled to one side as its center of mass fell to one side of the twin supports of the sword-blade and its remaining leg as the steel brackets holding the other ankle to the shin-strut sheared completely away at the landing's final insult.
Ana rode that last ride to the ground, hit the cockpit seal with one hand and her seat restraints with the other - swore again as the last proved too soon and let her loose to crack her head against the console with enough force to star her vision even with the helmet - snatched the survival kit from under her feet as she vaulted free of the machine - and ran like the very tortures of hell were on her heels.
Ten steps, twenty, thirty... and then the terawatts of stored power in Samurai's battery tore themselves free of human restraint and a wall of cutting white snatched her off her feet and swallowed all her vision.
---===GUNDAM LIBERATE 101===---
Her back hurt. Her knees hurt. Her arms hurt. Her shoulders hurt. Her neck hurt Her head hurt. Her lip hurt. Her breasts hurt.
For a few moments, Ana lay where she'd fallen full-length in the sand and thought, 'owwwwwwwww...'
Then she rolled over, sat up, and looked around. The tank she'd fought had survived Samurai's death and dragged itself free, so both its driver and commander were likely still alive, but without a turret it was toothless and probably the only reason its crew hadn't bailed was reluctance to leave its fire-control circuits for capture... not that it would have mattered, since as far as she knew there was no one on the planet who knew how to break their security interlocks.
Besides Samurai she could see the wrecks of Molly Girl, Number 68, Mako Maker... six mobile suits out of twelve dead, probably half with their pilots injured or killed too, and the strobe-flash and popcorn crackle as Lauren's missiles were cut out of the air behind her made it all-too-clear that at least one of the tanks was still active and fighting.
Getting out of the open suddenly struck her as a very good idea.
Their briefing, such as it was, had said that African standard operating procedure would've put the garrison troops in the outbuildings and left the core structures to the boffins. The odds were decent that no one in there would have anything heavier than a Personal Defense Weapon, and it'd been proven many times over that armored heavy work-suits like she was wearing were actually better able to resist light gunfire than their military counterparts, even if they did tend to shatter or melt when faced with heavier weapons.
The survival kit was only a couple of paces away. She scooped it up as she ran and slung it across her neck.
Every airlock on Mars had an absolute, hardwired emergency override that could be activated by exactly the same three-button code. She pressed herself flat against the wall beside the door and drew the pistol strapped to her thigh, then hit those buttons and spun to spring through the door with gun ready.
As expected, it was empty.
So was the hallway beyond it, until she got to the bend and about tripped over three men in plainclothes - without any airmasks at their belts, the idiots - hurrying towards her with arms full of loaded folders. "Freeze!" she snapped, then, after they'd skidded to wide-eyed halts, motioned at a convenient door. "In there."
They filed through nervously and she looked in after them. An office. Good enough. The phone wouldn't matter; security would've noticed her entrance so there was no point concealing it. Either they had bigger worries or they didn't. She hit the fireman's override on the door and locked them in and moved on.
732, 734, 736... the man they'd been sent for worked in 750, she remembered, which meant that he would be right over on the far side of that cross-hallwa-
She'd had the gun ready as she moved along the hall, of course, and by the time she'd really registed the four security men who'd run into view the concious, idle part of her brain was more busy being startled at the recoil of the pistol in her hands. One of them let go of his weapon to try and catch his falling friend; a second just gaped. The last spun and raised his gun.
She shot him, too, twice, then the concerned one, also twice, then emptied the last three shots in the magazine into the poor bastard who was only now starting to figure out what was happening to them.
A moment later she'd reloaded and was knocking on door number seven hundred and fifty.
"Ah," said the man inside. "Good. You're here. Follow me. You'll need this." And he handed her a post-it, of all the silly things, and then brushed past her and strode off down the hallway.
"Sir?" Ana said, blinking helplessly at his back. "Doctor Ngumba, the suit locker is back that way!"
He glanced over his shoulder at her and smiled, but his eyes were terribly sad. "And if I had any intention of surviving the day, I would take your advice. But instead, in a few moments you will have what your people will need if they are to succeed, and those who have made themselves our enemies will send me to see my Maya again."
When they had reached the formidably-secured door at the end of the hallway, he put his eye to the retinal scanner and said, "Don't be so shocked, girl, and don't mourn this traitor. I look forward to my release."
"I'm still sorry," she said. Then she straightened and took a deep breath - a habit she'd picked up as part of her 'comforting' repetoir at twelve, when a neighbor's son had told her the gesture never failed to make his day better, the louse - and asked, "What am I looking for, anyway? And what will I need?"
"Maya Ngumba," he said as the door hissed open. "The code. For that."
It was crystal clear what he meant. The mobile suit in the hanger took up nearly the entire space even kneeling, and at that was slimmer than any of the rebellion's converted construction frames. Where her poor departed Samurai and all the rest had thin girderwork strapping an endless rats' nest of cabling, power cells, fuel tanks, rocket engines, and other componentry to their skeletons, this machine was sleek and balanced looking, with razor sharp edges and long, pristine planes of armor. Compacted as it was, height was hard to gauge, but she thought that it might have been taller than a Rat, but slimmer.
"...wow," she said.
"Global Utility Nanomechanical Direct Active Mainenance. GUNDAM. The pinnacle of modern military nanotechnology. With that, your people will be-"
"NO!" cried a voice, and there was a gunshot. Ana's guide stopped in midsentance, coughed up a bit of blood, and smiled... then fell.
She turned to face the direction the pained cry had come from, and saw a tall, lean man standing there in a military pressure suit with a pistol hanging useless in his hand. "Why?" she could hear him say, quietly enough that he probably didn't even realize he'd spoken.
Training older than that she'd taken to become a guerilla demanded that she speak. "He said... that he wanted to see his Maya again. That the Empire had made themselves his enemies."
"Maya? His daughter? But..." the man in the suit shook his head and squared his shoulders and raised his gun to point at her. "It doesn't matter. I have my duty. I'll stop you."
"No you won't," she said, and fired from the hip in the same instant that he pulled the trigger.
By chance or design, both bullets found their target's faceplace, one low and to one side and the other right between the eyes. Ana watched in horror, completely unaware of the sting from her cut cheek as an entire inch-wide band of klaster shattered and spiderwebbed over his eyes and sent its wearer to his knees with a shriek of pure agony as the spalling from it cut them to ribbons.
For a split second she hesitated, while he clutched at his faceplace and sobbed involuntarily, and then the fireman's training had its way again and she rushed over to sieze one wrist and jam an ampule from her belt against its medical port. He resisted for a moment, then slumped unconcious as the powerful painkiller did its work.
Then Anabelle Targia stood, turned, and walked to meet her new partner.
...what, are you people going to make me beg? Comments, please? ^_^
===============================================
"Reseeestunce ees fiutil. Yoo weeel bee Useemooletud. Borg Borg Borg."
===========
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."
Liberate 102 - Valles - 01-10-2008
Major Christiaan Boshoff, Ph.D, sat in his cramped-but-comfortable seat and reminded himself that the physician had insisted that his eyes were no longer bleeding and that any trickling he thought he felt was strictly psychosomatic.
It didn't really help, of course, but it was something to do while he waited besides rail once again at the ghost of one of the men he had respected most in all the world. If only Doctor Ngumba had just told him, told anyone, said something... but the old man hadn't, and now he was dead and there was nothing to be done but try and see to it that his work ended up in the right hands.
And if that idiot who'd taken over from the late Colonel Sebe wouldn't see it, then Boshoff's own people - who were some of the best the entire damned human race had to offer! - could, and they'd pulled together magnificently to find a way to do something about it.
Chris had never been prouder to work with them, let alone be permitted to claim to lead them, but he'd overruled the motion to draw straws to do the actual dirty work. When the Imperial Army's power blocs started to move to squash this insolent independence, they'd find only a single staff officer who'd gotten too big for his britches and ordered his subordinates into compliance, rather than a full unit mutiny or some similar pretext for a crackdown.
Assuming that their guesses at the insurgents' route was right, and that things went as planned... if not, then his worries would be over rather sooner...
* * * * * * *
Maximum endurance five hundred hours life support and ten hours combat consumption with six km/s delta V... "Christ," said Anabelle Targia, "This thing's a monster."
"What's that?" Tim asked, poking his head out of his bunk at the far end of the no-longer-quite-so-crowded pilots' quarters.
She let her face drop into the book, since her neck was starting to get a crick from reading lying down. "That Gundam whatsit they sent us for. Once they mass-produce those things we'll get completely eaten. It's better than a Rat in every way."
He rolled into the aisle and walked up to perch on what had been Marie's bed, across the isle from Ana's. "Like how?"
She sat up, too - it was that or display herself like some pinup, really - and told him. "It's faster, smarter, literally stronger, tougher... and it's got some kind of special system that I think must have been giving the research guys fits. They haven't even written any real documentation for it."
"Or you just didn't find it." Tim was always entirely too prone to pointing out flaws and errors in the world around him. Besides the fact that he was usually right, his saving grace was that he wasn't any kinder to himself.
She shook her head. "Doctor Ngumba put everything into this. I think he must have given us a complete copy of that place's mainframe, somehow. Along with all his own work."
His ears perked up almost visibly. "A complete copy?"
"Yeah. No encryption, just basic internal passwords. But as far's I can tell without tangling with those, it's got everything - research work, personal files, security calls and responses... everything."
Then something exploded in the distance. Meeting Tim's eyes told her that he'd heard it too, and then they were both rushing to drag on their suits.
The Martian Liberation Army's standard combat pressure suit was almost unaltered from the construction-worker's type that had been produced by the tens of thousands to protect the laborers responsible for the Valles Tent. As such, it had been designed primarily to protect its wearers from industrial accidents at an affordable cost. It had four main layers - an inner layer of durable but comfortable fabric, a thicker padded middle one composed of heat-trapping fibers, and a kevlar-based outer layer that could stop most sorts of flying debris, including small-caliber bullets. Even with all of that, it still would have been a tight-fitted enough garmet to make a pretty embarrassing spectacle of its wearer if not for the final layer of precisely shaped composite plates that lay over most of its owners' vitals.
Its bathroom arrangements had also been designed for comfort over long periods, rather than comfort in - or even ability to be - made quickly. Making the flying jump across the gap to their transport's second car was a challenge under that circumstance, but, unfortunately, one she had practice at.
The field train was an essentially unmodified civilian cargo-mover. The pilot's quarters - such as they were - were a simple pressure canister attached to the flank of the 'prime mover' in the #1 position, which used liquid hydrogen and oxygen passed to it by the 'tender' at #2 to generate electricity that was then wired to the motors of those two and the cargo trucks, #3-#8. While technically rated to carry up to three hundred tons each, the cargo trucks had only carried two mobile suits each on their way out. Besides leaving room for maintenance gear and such, it'd been intended to make sure that they'd have carrying capacity free to cart off salvage.
There hadn't turned out to be that much of that, but the lighter loading had made the cross-country journey easier, so the spare trucks had been kept.
The machine she'd named for its purpose - 'to liberate the colonies from the burden of Earth's past hatreds and vendettas,' as the blogger'd had it - crouched low on the front half of the first truck. Now that she knew what to look for she could check and be sure at a glance that the thruster verniers, sensor plates, and gunports all looked clear and in working order. Tim sprinted past as she caught herself on the boarding hoist and Adoph, the head mechanic, shimmied out between two of the venitian-blind plates framing either side of suit's waist. "Soldier boy thinks he's fine," he said, jerking a thumb up at the massive war machine looming over them, "And far's I can tell he's right. You watch your pretty ass, though, lady - I can't make heads or tails of half his innards and I just do not trust a Terran to handle dust right."
"I'll be careful," she promised, and hit the key and hung on as the winch yanked her off her feet and up to the cockpit ledge. In this position she had to squeeze up along the short ladder in a narrow access way to reach the front and main opening of the cockpit sphere - as designed, it was stable and level with the ground, completely insulated from the attitude of the machine it was mounted to. Ana'd memorized the override to that function - it might be useful for pilot comfort, but in a fight the disconnect between her inner ear and the feedback she'd be getting from her suit would be nauseating, at best.
She laid the back of her helmet against the headrest and strapped herself down, then gritted her teeth and hit the little recessed button on the side of the cockpit console for a combat start. There was a quiet 'click' as she slid the connection home to link her pressure suit's electronic's to the mobile suit's, then the expected surge of unpleasant sensory white noise as the MS computer synchronized with and started to take inputs from her braintop. When her vision had cleared and she could let her breath out again, they had edited the mobile suit's cockpit out of her field of view and replaced it with a detailed construction of what was being fed in from the two main cameras. Combined with the force-sensor feedback from the chassis, the illusion that she was suddenly twelve meters tall and kneeling bent-over on the front of a child's toy wagon was almost irresistable.
---------------------------------
Ana shifted, raised herself - her suit - a little, then hopped carefully off of the cargo truck. Her care didn't really help - the force needed to lift eighty tons even a couple of meters into the air bottomed the truck's shocks out with a bang that made her chest and tailbone hurt in sympathy.
After a moment, the mobile suit's computer blatted at her and highlighted something up in the sky in red. She squinted and it zoomed in - a diaphanous flying wing with a single driving fan and a bug-faced sensor pod was orbiting several thousand meters up. She didn't recognize the specific model, but what it was in general was clear enough: an unmanned reconnaissance drone.
It was out of range of her gatlings and the rifle wasn't accurate enough, but... Toggling the sensors to check radio wavelengths caught the clear, laser-straight 'searchlights' of its controlling and reporting transmissions. "Observer at 3800 meters altitude; estimated control unit bearing two-eighty-eight," she reported over the tactical frequency, and started into motion to keep from being left behind where she stood.
Not a moment too soon, it turned out, as a hypersonic dart of heavy metal alloy burst through an intervening sand dune and traced a nearly perfectly flat incandescent trail right through the space she'd been standing in a moment before. "Correction," she said dryly, and had to pause to swallow her heart again. "Two-eighty-five."
"Boot in two," said Lauren, almost overlapped by Luke's curt 'Four minutes.' "Buy us some time."
"Rodger," Ana said, and launched herself up the dune in a long flat leap that was mostly rocket driven. Behind her, something blew up in one of the salvaged Rats as another shot burst through the earth beneath her.
Once the crest of the dune was past she tweaked the angle of the jets, focusing them entirely into forward motion. Gravity, of course, promptly had its way, but she let the legs take the shock - let Liberate pivot around his leading foot and start to lean forward - and pushed off again as hard as she could, bouncing back into the air in a headlong, hurtling run that would have been guaranteed to break her neck if she'd tried it with her own body.
One more shot snapped past her through the thin Martian air, and then she came over the last rise just in time to see her foe aiming straight at her.
"Oof!" she said as the straps punished her shoulders. One of the three main rocket engines buried deep in the heart of Liberate's chest showed lurid red, and the batteries and fuel feeds surrounding it likewise. The fuel feed for the nearer of the other two rockets was golden, damaged, but the cockpit was unbreached and the machine's interal compartmenting had kept most of the power supply and all four limbs in perfect working order.
In Samurai making that diagnosis would have taken several seconds of looking at her cockpit screen, but Liberate's computer fed its reports directly into her implants - guessing its damage was as easy and as instant as feeling a cut or a bruise on her own body.
For a wonder, though, the attacker wasn't one of the standard tanks the terrans used. For that matter, it was more than a bit of a shock that there was only the one of them...
The basic chassis was easy enough to recognize; the four-wheeled armored dune-buggy layout of an African heavy core tank, but it had a bizarre rack thing ont he bustle and a long, heavy gun fixed to its topside rather than the usual turret. The gun might not have been placed to track well, but it had plenty of power, as much or more than the standard tank gun, as the red and yellow on her damage display made crystal clear.
She hit the ground, tumbled forwards and came up into a run to the right... and of course forwards. Liberate kicked ass but he didn't have any weapons that could penetrate a tank's armor - nothing but the sword she'd pulled from Samurai's wreck.
The African twisted and reversed with the usual clouds of thrown dust around all four wheels as it spun its entire hull to track, aim, fire once and miss clean twenty meters ahead, fire again and come three meters from her trailing heel...
Ana twisted mid-run, throwing one foot out in front of her and driving the other dep into the sand under her center of mass, scraping to a halt and gouging deep trenches into the sandy topsoil as the African fired again...
...and missed wide as the abrupt change in speed threw its aim completely.
Liberate's interior roared and shook as she spun the throttles on its rockets wide open and threw his eighty-ton bulk high into the air, seemingly wide open to that deadly gun as it elevated to follow her...
...then cutting the engines and dropping into freefall the very split-second that the reload cycle completed and let it fire again so that she could duck under the hasty shot and run five precious ten-meter steps closer before dodging as near to ninety degrees to the right out of the way of one more shot before she was taking that last step, hunkering slightly and bringing the blade up from the low guard into a flashing thrust...
...that missed, she missed, impossibly, as her enemy snapped into the start of a turn then revved forward and rear wheels against each other and skidded its entire mass sideways a short, critical distance before cutting two of them out of the circuit and twisting it inside its own length to bring that hideous gun to bear again.
She threw herself flat and felt her blood chill despite her racing heart at the sharp 'klang!' as the hyperpenetrator skipped off the armor sheet covering Liberate's back. There wasn't time for the terror, though, and she rolled into a forward kippup and flipped up into the air in a move she'd never have attempted with her own flesh - and came down squarely in front of the muzzle of that horrible gun as the African rolled away in full reverse.
Her - Liberate's - hands were a bare instant faster than the gun's loading cycle, and the sword swept across the length of the heavy railgun just in time for its capacitors to begin dumping their charge and short out through the conductive monocrystal of its blade in a spectacular flare of actinic light.
Ana sat, perched in the cockpit, leaning forwards on the edge of the seat with her weight on her arms and the control joysticks. Then, just as she had been taught, she took a deep, slow breath and sheathed the blade.
A quick mental command sent a short data burst under her old fireman's code - still valid thanks to certain freinds in low places in Mariner City - and the enemy machine's surviving computers sent a familiar block of structural, environmental and biometric data.
Breathing, heart rate... adult male in good health, enough air and power that he'd stay that way until inevitable rescue mission arrived. "Lead, Five," she radioed, and brought up the electronic warfare menu to make sure her next words were correct. "Target silent, no more in sight. Want me to grab the chassis and drag it back?"
"No, return to base, we haven't got room."
"Figured. On my way back."
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===============================================
"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."