Buster only had one main weapon at the moment, although the base's technicians had at least managed to clear away the debris that had been the beam rifle's mounting. Aiming the remaining gun was much the same as targeting a mobile armor's weapons, a combination of physical manipulation of the controls and a clear, disciplined visualisation of what she wanted to happen, and, with her previous training at that, she had no problem with it.
The first shot caught one of the GINNs just inboard of its left shoulder and overpenetrated, easily carrying away both that arm and the portside thruster mount. GINNs were only marginally flight-capable at the best of times, and depriving this one of half the thrust that held it aloft sent it for a most unceremonious swim.
She'd taken that shot because the incoming suits had forgotten to add evasive maneuvers as they closed, but would correct that error as soon as the first attack was made on them. Since she'd only have had the one easy shot, and since taking down the phase-shift armor fitted to Duel or Strike would require rather more than that, they were completely ruled out... and there had been a GINN between her and the command suit.
Then the Strike surged ahead of the pack and she was tracking it carefully, resisting the urge to just spray her fire and letting Buster's targeting systems get a firm lock - staying calm like the gunnery sargeant who had been honing her marksmanship had told her to.
The striker pack the enemy machine was using didn't match any of the planned designs; probably all three of those were still stuck in the Morgenroete facility in Aube, waiting to be shipped to Panama.
Looking at it, the first thing that she noticed were the wings; the thruster wash was in the wrong pattern for the full Aile set, but it had the same four splayed vanes and made the Strike's flight seem almost effortless compared to the awkward way its companions lumbered through the air. It had shoulder packs, too - one, with the gatling and two cooling plates, from the Launcher set and the other, heavily armored and sporting what looked like one of Duel's beam sabers charging in place of the intended Midas Messer, from the Sword. The last component - the beam carbine it was aiming her way - likely had been meant for the Aile, but could just as easily have been slated for the Duel or Aegis.
Then the targeting computer's building tone sang solid in her ears. She squeezed the trigger - and felt her blood start to run cold in her veins. The two-thirds of the lower right wing that were pinwheeling away from the reeling mobile suit was considerably more visible damage than she had expected to do, but hse had been aiming at its center of mass and that shot had been on target.
He had dodged it. This college student, this boy with no combat record of any kind had not only known - somehow - the exact moment before her squeeze and the shot's discharge, but in only four days had been able to gain enough control over his machine to evade it, a degree of mastery that a veteran pilot like Lieutenant la Flaga was still struggling towards.
This would be rather tricky...
Even braced with both of the suit's arms the big gun lost acuraccy when fired too quickly, as the 'sabots', the driver rings that let the gun's electromagnets gain purchase on the non-magnetic tungsten composite of its ammunition's clustered darts, vaporised and melted unevenly from the power fluxing through it and the undissipated heat trapped in the weapon's bore, throwing its aim and impulse off of true no matter what the wielder's skill.
A volley of four shots didn't accomplish much save to send the Strike dancing all across the sky as it avoided them, but the fifth tha followed a moment later came as it was trapped in the middle of recovering its equilibrium and missed landing squarely on its center of mass only because of her weapon's building inaccuracy. A sixth likely would have missed entirely - that or finally melted something important - and anyway the Strike's pilot picked that moment to decide that she'd spent long enough making his life interesting and tat it was about time he returned the favor.
She had fired from behind one of the base's smaller buildings, a residential block that had already been evacuated now that the alert was up, and ducked Buster down and under its cover when she saw him bring the beam rifle around. With the enemy suit moving as high and fast as he was it would only take him a moment to gain an angle to shoot over it, but that was enough time for her wepaon to cool and for her to throw Buster the body-length or two needed to be out of his crosshairs when-
Natalie cursed as vividly as only someone raised around soldiers could when Strike came back into view - he hadn't been as naive as she'd expected, and had done the same as she had. That made it a race to see which of them coudl come on target first. With Buster's weight braced against the ground and with his better targeting systems, it should have been her advantage.
It wasn't. Whether it was luck or Coordinator genetics or more of her foe's unnatural skill, Strike's shoulder cannon came on target first, battering her armor with explosive shells from the two launchers and enough gatling rounds to make her power reserves dissolve in a manner alarmingly reminiscent of a sand castle trapped under a waterfall. Buster was lying on his back where she had dropped him, aiming up at the sky, and a frantic twist and a blast from redlined thrusters tore them out of the way just in time to avoid being caught as Strike's beam rifle came up and added its voice to the fullisade.
Feet braced shoulder-width apart as they came upright and the gun braced at the hip and swinging around and up to bear on...
The GINN that crashed down across Buster's shoulders and sent them hammering to the ground came as a complete surprise, and she screamed involuntarily as the cockpit straps dug into her wounds with no warning. A split second later she had recovered and shoved it off angrily and hauled Buster to his feed a second time, then glanced at her screens to reestablish her situational awareness and try to find the Strike. Lieutenant la Flaga was in the sky, dueling with that increasingly battered-looking CGUE, and the half-wrecked machine scuttling for the shoreline as fast as its remaining limbs could drag it was the only GINN in sight.
A third of the base was on fire, dormitories and warehouses sending a hellish pall of flame-shot smoke over the entire scene. She could catch glimpses of the Duel stalking through the clear patches within the holocaust, and as she watched, Ramius's suit seemed to drop out of one of the heat-shimmers surrounding it to trade three quick blows before stepping back and vanishing again. Her own opponent wasn't in sight, but had to be buzzing around somewhere below the level where the base's remaining buildings blocked her line of sight.
She and Ramius were more than holding their own, and the GINNs were gone and that CGUE couldn't possibly last much longer... "You've lost today," she said out loud, half to herself and half to the children in the ORB suits, and didn't realize she'd hit the 'transmit' key on instinct until a deep, smooth voice replied to the words.
"Have we?" the man asked harshly, and above her the CGUE swung away from its foe to glance down across where she and Buster stood. "Capturing this place and its people might be what we want, but destroying them is more than good enough!"
"Capture or not," Lieutenant la Flaga cut in, "if you had a nuke or an FAE you would have used them... and anyway, the data is duplicated elsewhere."
"As though we'd take your word on it!" the ZAFT commander sneered, until yet another voice joined the exchange.
"Voice-stress analysis shows a seventy-two percent chance he believes it," Princess Attha told her superior. "And anyway, he's right."
"So you're just going to let us go?"
"Possibly we shouldn't," la Flaga said, and she could hear one of his infuriating devil-may-care-but-I-sure-don't grins in the words, "but destroying those suits wouldn't be worth risking these ones... even if we were certain to win."
Stalemate, and then she heard Strike's pilot - who they still didn't have a name for - speak up. "Let's go. Cut our losses."
And then it was over.
Some character stuff, next, like why Athrun's in uniform and why Cagalli's so obsessive in this timeline, then the liberation of Aube.
Ja, -n
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"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"