Gundam Fire Still

"And what about Colonel Barton's troops?"

New images were hitting the screen, not the ground-use MBTs that had aged slightly; but certain weapons that had a tank chassis but at the same time had an upper body quite similar to MS.

"The new toys developed by General Dynamics with the assistance of the Intelligence Convergence have passed acceptance by the ground forces, and this is the line of Super Abrams tanks with chassis built by the arsenal at Base Area 5 itself."

"The ones that have been out of service for a long time?"

"Yes, but apparently they still work." The speaker paused, "Our Marines are now partially equipped with this new weapon and have been training with it for several weeks. Evaluations from Earth claim that it has the capability to compete with MS in the desert and hilly terrain." Apparently, the speaker was not up to the task.

Meanwhile

Earth-Moon orbit, Archangel

Kira was leaning against the corridor's observation window, as he had done so often before, gazing out at the dark, but shimmering universe beyond. In addition to the distant stars, there was an even brighter artificial glow from the fleet's thrusters closer in.

He knew he was almost done thinking.

"You do have a talent, at least for flying MS," he remembered what Carl had said, the pilot who was much less of a joker than Mu, "but being a fighter is a different story. I can see that you hesitate when you're fighting, and that's a bad thing for a soldier, the battlefield will slowly erase that hesitation, turning the soldier into an efficient fighting machine, or erasing the soldier himself. But you're a very smart kid, and it's clear you're not going to stop thinking and just think of yourself as a combat unit. And your talents probably don't stop at one cog in the giant machine that is the army." He remembered that Carl sighed and shook his head then, "Besides, there's no shortage of Blue Perestroika extremists in the Combine."

"Well, if I go back to ORB, my school's already...."

"There's plenty for you to do at ORB," Mu grinned, as relaxed as he always was, "You programmed this airframe, and the Aurora or whatever university research facility will want you for that alone, and pilots who've had combat experience with the Combine MS are not easy to find. I heard that ORB is also developing combat MS, you'd be a treasure back there." Mu said looking around, "Good thing the two intel guys didn't hear about this, they sure wouldn't like you spilling anything about that stuff, even though the ORB guys might have known about it."

"So, will the Combine let me go?"

"The ORB is not part of the United Earths, so the emergency recruitment of civilians from neutral countries could cause diplomatic problems in itself, and with the civilians taken in already being returned to the ORB, I'm afraid the ORB would protest diplomatically if the Combined Forces tried to force you to stay, and no, Brigadier General Halbarton wouldn't do that." Mathiu, who was beginning to slowly understand the administrative system of the Union Army, answered such concerns, though her last half sentence also seemed a bit hesitant.

It was enough, however, that the civilians rescued from Heliopolis had arrived safely at Orb, and that her own friends, too, would soon be shedding their temporary uniforms. It was enough that one had seen enough of such things as war to use this time as a valuable and rare experience that allowed one to better understand the peace of one's homeland ORB.

The Archangel and these United Soldiers, who had begun to slowly get to know each other, would continue to fight, as they themselves said; these so-called, soldiers with the awareness to kill or die at any time, did not seem to be what they had once believed them to be. They would also sigh and hesitate, and their faces could be smiling amiably or coldly without showing any expression, and sometimes they would also show fear and helplessness, not much different from the people they knew. .

And Aslan, instead of meeting him on the battlefield and drawing swords again, it was better not to think about it until the war was over. He shouldn't be the kind of person who would die casually.

And that PLANT girl, the child who had been rescued from the void of the rubble belt by herself, was the daughter of an important PLANT figure, although that had no real sense of reality for myself who wasn't familiar with politics, but it was clear that the union wouldn't hurt her, and even if she was used like a vase, that was a much better fate than those teenage soldiers of Zaft.

It was too bad about the war, the teenager shook her head slightly.

Even though that joint soldier was talking about the chaotic situation that Obu seemed to be in, there would be no problem as long as the Asha representative stepped forward and brought the people together once again, right? After all, peace was always better than war, and this should be a content that everyone could understand. Besides, one was not a member of any political family, and such things were probably not something one should consider. But those fundamentalist pacifists were indeed wrong, and without adequate backing, peace was nothing more than empty words.

A sudden brightness of some sort appeared in the corner of the viewport, the silvery-white surface of the moon reflecting the sunlight slowly making its way out of the corner of the viewing window.

The lunar crater, Ptolemy, was already in sight.

"Bad news, gentlemen, the base's existing airborne bays are not sufficient to drop off a Marine unit with adequate heavy firepower and logistics." The head of logistics said worriedly, "And until then, what about braking rights?"

"Until Zaft sends a new fleet into orbit, the entire circum-Earth orbit is ours," the fleet representative said rather proudly, "Is there any possibility of letting them take care of the logistics themselves once they land?"

"Are you crazy? Solving logistical problems in the middle of the Sahara desert?"

"So, are we really so necessary to work with Eurasia?"

"Don't just think about space," Washington's representative frowned, "but also the overall war situation on the ground, and if we're going to launch a counterattack, we have to work with other forces on the ground."

"But we shouldn't risk it with an airborne unit that lacks logistical support, or the ability to support heavy firepower, and there really aren't that many drop pods left in the warehouse?"

"All the factories are fully operational repairing ships and building equipment, and almost no one paid any attention to the problems associated with the drop pods until this proposal from Eurasia was sent," the speaker suddenly looked at the terminal in his hand in silence

"No, except for Brigadier General Halbarton, who had recently stepped down from his logistics post, and who at the time presented a plan to improve the existing airborne module for MS delivery, which of course went unanswered."

"Wait, Halbarton?" Someone's eyes lit up "Halbarton's ship?"

"It and the Eighth Fleet, the new technology verification fleet, will be in port within a few hours."

"How long will it take to get those teenage soldiers down there and get the Marines' stuff up there?"

"It won't be long, sir."

------. ------. ------. --The following is the author's divider--.... ------. ------.

The next update will be late, need to organize my thoughts, above.

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0.Prologue - Meteor.

prologue meteor

North Africa, Margins of the Sahara

At first, he hadn't noticed what it was, and after watching the spectacle of that time, a few days ago, when countless points of light flickered brightly in the night sky, such ordinary stars passing overhead no longer held his attention. He wasn't quite sure what exactly had happened in the sky a few days ago, in a place that had never been quiet for too long, and he was already familiar with the different flashes of light, the machine guns that swept skyward, the rockets that cut through the air, and the missiles that flew straight upward; but on that occasion he had never seen so many flashes so high up, so many times, and he knew, through his own long experience probably could guess something. The meteor looked unimpressive by comparison this time, but he still found paper and a pen from the table that had begun to decay and was covered with a thick layer of sand and began to record what was happening in the sky.

From the air began a hissing sound, as if some sort of air was leaking, and the old man put down his pen and looked out in confusion from the sky, which was no longer enclosed by the four walls of the roof, then he ran out of the house and watched as the point of light that should have disappeared from the canopy was slowly growing larger.

This room had once been part of some larger building, but for a long time. The sand had been slowly expanding its territory here, some of the walls had collapsed, others had been blown through the windows, filling everything inside with sand, and only in this sheltered corner of the house could the hut barely be called a dwelling apart from its broken roof. The old man, who seemed to be the only living person here, walked back to his humble abode once more, leaning down and groping for something in the corner. A hidden live door was lifted, and as the old man looked up again, he had a pistol in one hand, and in the other, a small box.

Dozens of kilometers away.

The radio waves passed silently in the desert wind until they were depleted by neutron interference, but until then, the ripples had been faithfully recorded.

A not-so-familiar code came over the radio, and the young communicator flipped through the dim light, flipping through a small notebook of seemingly meaningless numbers and letters in his hands, then frowned. He'd never expected to receive such a message, but it was clear that the person receiving it didn't think so.

Diagonally straddling a duct-taped automatic rifle Seb stepped out of the narrow pit, and then he felt the cool desert evening air on his face. Whatever had been in the sky, at least it wasn't there anymore, but he trusted the eyes of his brothers on sentry duty, and the eyes of the other desert dwellers. The low building behind him could easily have been the roof of a house buried in sand, but there was almost a whole world behind that half-buried secret door, an underground building system that was no longer known when it had been built, but had always been used by the desert natives with weapons as their fortress. Behind a nearby cluster of dried plants, a pair of bright eyes blinked at him, and Seb nodded in response. There was a gesture telling him that all was well around him.

He climbed faithfully to the top of a side dune, from where he could see the vague lights of a distant town that had once been much brighter, but which had been growing thinner every day since the nuclear power plant on the Red Sea coast had been shut down. In the other direction, two figures with rifles and RPGs on their backs respectively were on routine patrol. They were both weapons much older than his own, but fortunately the dry weather and the quality of the weapons themselves made them all still usable, and even if they couldn't do damage to those MS, they were good enough to make holes in the human body like they were made to do. Farther out, the metal structures that pierced the canopy were still vaguely visible, twisted and rusted, but still towering.

It used to be part of an oil refinery of some sort, but now the desert has gradually swallowed up the buildings, but many years after it was abandoned, humans have come here again.

Oil, the black blood that runs through the industrial veins of every nation in the last generation, has made this land worth a fortune, and every ton of the viscous black liquid pumped out of the ground is made worth a fortune by the same amount of -... --- or more of the red blood exchanged. Oil wells are burned, refineries are bombed, pipelines are cut, and then the people who step on the corpses to the stage go back to rebuilding what was destroyed before. Until the earth's stores here are slowly depleted.

When the black flowing gold stopped flowing, the people from far away stopped paying attention to the land, and with it, forgot about the bodies they had dumped on it, and the thing that made those bodies - weapons.

JETFRIED. Dawken can no longer recall what else he knew about the land, and after the page in his history book was turned on the age of petrochemicals, the search for energy from shale gas to combustible ice, ending in the cornfields, never again mentioned the Middle East, once the world's hottest hotspot. But apparently, that doesn't mean that nothing is happening here. Vague bullet marks could be easily discerned on the walls of what remained of the refinery, and he cast his eyes to a patch of shadows beneath one of the buildings where, just a few days ago, in the underground garage half-buried by sand, he and his men had also found a dried, undated body in the rusted wreckage of a vehicle, and the captain of the No. 2, Cook, had recognized the weapon it was clutching in its hand, an AK-47. , a long time had passed, but the name of this weapon still thundered. Cook gave it a try, abandoning his plans to take the weapon from the dried up corpse, he had heard that the rifle could still fire long after it had been put away, but now it was buried with its nameless owner in the sand dunes a hundred meters away, and in the underground garage that had been slightly cleared of space, parked alongside the wreckage of those vehicles, was the most advanced main battle tank of the Eurasian Union.

Cook, the old weapons enthusiast who also put a shell casing he found in the desert in a storage box, said it had once belonged to a Russian-built tank - and that the Russian Federation was now part of the Eurasian Commonwealth - and that he wanted to be in the war At the end of the day, it could become a prized decoration in his living room. Jettfrid was a little envious of his mentality, having lost two BMP71s and an MBT - and their entirety - to his platoon since Suez was cut off, though he had since found a friendly force, the 4th Engineer Battalion's A bulldozer and an excavator, along with some infantry that had also gotten separated from the main force. But he still doubted how long the force behind enemy lines could hold out, and even if Zaft was stretched thin, it was still a formidable force, far greater than the combined strength of him, and those guerrilla forces around him.

But now, things were starting to change, the war machine that was temporarily dormant behind him would soon be on again, he smiled at the sky, a few more points of light were slowly growing overhead, he counted five, counting the initial one, and he knew he had a lot not to worry about.

Then he cast his eyes to the east, and he was by no means the only one who could recognize those things, and beyond the reach of his vision, the tiger in Cairo had, for a moment, probably a lot more to worry about.

"I think it's time for me to go fire up my weasel," Warrant Officer Porkapov popped up from the shadows of the building, the little girl from the Intelligence Fusion - or at least Jett Fried had always thought so, becoming more and more of an intelligence officer on the run.

"Yes, but can you identify the location?"

"I can't, but I know some people who can." Warrant Officer pointed to the east.

Jettfrid froze for a moment, then laughed, "I see, then it's time for me to get ready to start the old panther up."

suburb of Cairo