Quote:*innocent smile* ^_^
Tease. Hmm... counts Gundams, frowns. Athrun? Sorta gotta wonder where he is.
Anyway, a large part of why I handled that cliff the way I did was that it gives me an excuse for a POV shift.
Cagalli Yula Attha was having a day. As though, as though having her plan to matchmake her best friend with the classmate who worked as a secretary at Morganroete ruined weren't enough. As though fighting for her life against a giant pink mobile suit, using a piece of machinery that was far more complicated than any device had a right to be, wasn't enough. As though having her homeland invaded and plunged into what would all too likely be a war to the knife weren't enough, now some inconsiderate schlub had decided to drop a roof on her!
Really. Some days it didn't pay to get out of bed.
Ah, well. At least this nightmare wasn't her fault, unlike all too many of the others.
If she'd had time she probably would have started a bit of a brood about that, but the beam saber that tried to spit her suit through the cockpit - not to mention her personal, precious, all-too-fragile body - demanded enough attention that she couldn't spare the concentration. Besides, the adrenaline kept the proper emotional state for something like that well out of reach.
Whichever of the three Federation officers was piloting the pink suit, she was fast enough and cunning enough that the distracting rain of concrete, gravel, and steel girders was a relief rather than an inconvenience. The massive armored titans they were piloting were too strong and too well-protected to be seriously inconvenienced by mere debris, but the cloud of dust blocked their optical and infrared sensors, and the tangle of shattered metal that had been the roofing girders scattered radar into uselessness.
In the narrow breathing space before the scattered... junk settled, Cagalli took a deep breath and tried to think of a plan. The her opponent and the suit Kira had... be honest, girl, stolen, seemed to be the 'generalists' of the range of designs represented by Morganroete's five secret prototypes. The brown one was obviously some sort of sniper or fire support model and her own machine was an uncompromising close-combat design. Who knew what the black one was meant for - wherever it had gotten to - but it seemed to be at just as much of a disadvantage in the very close quarters of the hanger bay as its gunnery-focused companion.
Of course, that should have given her an advantage over the pink thing, but the flexibility it lost by having its weapons fixed to its limbs like that was more than made up for by the fact that it carried a full four of them. The empty bracket along its right leg looked tailor-made to carry some sort of long-arm, and given what her own suit didn't have in the way of ranged weapons, she had no intention of finding out if that was all it had been intended to be equipped with.
She was still scrambling, and had almost run out of time, when a brilliant ray of sea-green slashed through the clearing dust and sent molten droplets spraying away from the armor protecting her opponent's shoulder joints.
It was as good an opportunity as she was going to get, and she lunged. The leading blade was parried with a sweep of the other suit's arm, but the other, damaged limb was too slow to catch her other weapon before it could follow the first's path - and carve cleanly through the stronger limb. The pink machine launched itself up and away with a flare of the... wings, she guessed... on its hips, and then alarms screamed boldly at her as a shot slammed into her suit's side and turned several sections of the damage display - the ones that equated to the left arm, and a considerable chunk of the power cell array - a brilliant, dangerous red. Forward and up and spinning as she flew was the fastest evasion she could make, and it brought her attacker into view.
The brown suit had lost one of its guns while her attention was occupied, and the wreckage still dangled from its connecting armature, but the other was fully intact and quickly coming around to track her.
She might or might not have been able to evade the shot, but a second - less blinding, since there was less dust hanging in the air now - blue-green flare saved her the trouble and traced a glowing trench across her attacker's entire torso. It pivoted towards the new threat as her machine came back to earth; with half her attention on that struggle and most of the rest tracking where the remaining potential threats were the landing was rough to say the least, but not too rough to keep the burst from the cannons in her unit's head from distracting the cannon-wielding mobile suit for the critical moment it took the ORB suit to close with it.
Her rescuer was the most common of the three designs favored by her nation's military, what was called the Phobos, an agile, relatively light machine designed for what was still called 'dogfighting' even after it had ceased to have anything to do with canines. With an optical laser that was almost unhindered by seawater and a crush depth of more than two hundred meters, it was as much a danger to shipping as to any land-based target, and capable of shrugging off many weapons that would cripple or destroy lighter suits like ZAFT's GINN and its derivatives.
It landed almost directly in front of the brown suit, too far in and over for it to bring that lethal gun around in time, and raised the blunt shape of its laser for a crippling shot. "Look out!" she shouted involuntarily, but if the pilot heard her it made no difference as the protective paneling sealing the other prototype's shoulder-mounted missile launchers snapped up and unleashed a full dozen seeking warheads.
ORB suits were tough, they had to be, but the Phobos, at least, wasn't that tough. One arm was wrecked entirely, and most of its armor was shattered. With a bit more luck, or in a more threatening environment, its pilot might have been able to escape - the machine was still mobile, after all, if only barely - but as it was the missiles provided more than enough breathing space for the gunner suit to bring its main weapon to bear and put a cluster of flachettes through its victim's center of mass.
The explosion as the breached power batteries cooked off was almost an anticlimax.
"All Black elements, White Six here. Break off and retreat to Point Baker immediately, repeat, break off and rendevous at Point Baker. White elements, provide cover. White Six out."
And then the three captured suits were running and Cagalli realized it was almost over.
"ORB prototype suits, this is Admiral Corvis, ORB Central Command," the radio said after a moment, in a voice she recognized as belonging to who it said it did. "Whoever you are, we owe you a debt of gratidude for keeping those suits out of the Federation's hands, but unfortunately they seem to be in the process of staging a full scale invasion to cover the theft - in short, there's no time to get you clear. I'm going to have to ask you to take those suits and get them aboard the carrier ZAFT's le Crueset Team is operating from. Can you do that?"
After a moment to brace herself, she hit the key to open the same channel from her side. "Aube is falling?" she read between the lines. "Isn't there anything we can do to stop that?" She grabbed hold of the part of her brain yammering that she was about to get herself killed and stuffed it into a box. It needed doing and there was no time to worry.
"Not with just the First Division against the entire Federation Pacific Fleet," he answered dryly.
"Understood," she said crisply. "We're on our way."
Next on the agenda, some background and politics.
Ja, -n
===============================================
"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"