Gundam Fire Still

"People say you're the strongest driver of the Adjusters. Is that true?"

"...I don't know. I can't have fought all the Adjusters." The mercenary seemed to hesitate for a moment before answering.

"Have you lost any fights with the Adjusters so far?"

"No."

"That's good enough."

"So, to begin?"

"No, it's already started."

The AstRAY Blue Machine piloted by the mercenary moved before the words were spoken.

7. the enemy within

It took a little while for the battle to end, the blue mercenaries circling the town, which had been prepositioned with a handful of traps, before explosions and smoke erupted around one of the buildings. A few outward green particle beams and jet smoke left behind by missiles indicated that they were fighting quite intensely. The final battle was set in stone as the blue AstRAY system pointed its beam rifle at one of its opponents at unavoidable close range, but the other managed to get around his back with a long blade that knocked it to the ground with a crash while saving its own companion from a lockdown.

"It's almost time to stop, the odds are stacked against us."

"Cut, Union Bastard, you should have warned me, they have two machines." The tone of the mercenary who had fallen to the ground and was gasping fiercely for breath didn't show much anger, "Are you still thankful you didn't let them take me out?"

"It's your about-face, I didn't know that." Carl looked relaxed, "I'm just glad I didn't screw up too much Union Army property."

"You Union Army, that's some kind of plan, isn't it?" The mercenary struggled to maneuver the plane to stand, the two long black and red blades as motionless as statues.

"No comment, you'll have to ask your intelligence support for that."

"So it looks like there's going to be business again on the side of the Combine lately."

"Come along then, socius two." The Union officer ignored the probing from the mercenaries.

The two teams slowly disappeared in both directions of the town, and there were a few more bullet holes in the town that had been deserted due to the war.

"Nah, guys, I have a question, and it doesn't matter if you don't answer it, which is, ah, what would you do if you saw naturals attacking each other? What would you do if a natural man ordered you to kill another natural man?"

==========================

Rewind slightly to the last night, and at the base's main gate, a truck slowly pulled up. It was a common sealed transport truck, usually used to transport food or drinks, but this one didn't have the logo of a certain beer company painted on it like its counterparts. The base sentry rolled his eyes, then stuck his head out the window, this truck had arrived right on time.

"Password!"

"Forbidden! (FORBIDDEN) "The driver of the truck poked his head out as well and greeted the sentry.

The sentry turned back and pressed the button, the several layers of barrier walls that had been placed at the entrance to the base to prevent the use of large vehicles for terrorist attacks slowly sank into the ground, and the truck followed its usual path towards a warehouse on the side of the canteen in the middle of the base. In the moment the view from the warehouse was obscured by the turning truck, a shadow flashed out from the combination of the front of the truck and the cargo bay, then disappeared into the darkness behind the truck.

At the same time, no one noticed that on an airfield that was already in darkness, with only a few small runway lights on, the cabin of the two Atlantic Federal transports that had been detained was missing a few people who had been mechanics or communicators.

The van drove into the open warehouse and then stopped, and just as the warehouse door slowly closed, several soldiers who were already waiting there opened the warehouse nimbly. They unloaded the foam boxes of frozen food and crates of fresh vegetables and dragged them aside, then one of them entered the deepest part of the warehouse and pulled open a secret door in what appeared to be the warehouse wall, from which two metallic suitcases emerged.

He weighed the weight a little, it seemed to feel as it always did, just like every soldier here, and he was curious as to what was in there, but his superiors had warned everyone not to be too curious. He carried the box in both hands and wandered towards the exit of the cargo bay.

The moment he stepped off the compartment and onto the ground again, he first felt a hint of something wrong, then before he could look around, something held his head. He skimmed slightly with his peripheral vision to confirm that it was indeed a gun, held in the hands of a man in an unknown jumpsuit, his brain reacted and then realized that what was supposed to happen had finally happened.

"Put the case down," an irresistible male voice said briefly.

Slowly, as if it contained fragile items or bombs, he lowered the case, then raised his hand above his head before he was ordered to do so.

He'd imagined this happening a long time ago, this warehouse was the gateway to that secret world underground, and the entire base was taboo enough about what lay beneath it to arouse curiosity. Enough to make a prickly-headed soldier or two try to go down there and find out what was going on, not knowing if it was fact or just a base legend that no one had ever seen those brave souls again.

There had always been someone in the circle of soldiers working around that mysterious underground facility who thought that, that one day someone would come for what was there. And he was just a gatekeeper, a porter, a most worthless and easily dead guy.

He swiveled his eyes a little to look around, the door to the warehouse had been shut tight, the emergency lights were glowing a dim yellow, and he could see the body of the soldier he'd been unloading with collapsing between those crates. A figure dressed in black was dragging those fallen bodies to a more sheltered corner.

There was no blood on the ground, which was a good sign, and he looked over his shoulder a little to see the black-clad man pointing a gun at him, the outfit covering half the man's face with some sort of optical or electronic device that looked to be some sort of advanced device. Then a third man in black appeared, pointing a gun at the driver's head, and moved slowly towards the area.

He knew that this warehouse was kept secret to keep what was down there a secret and that no one would pass by or do anything out of curiosity, the doors and walls were so soundproof that they wouldn't be heard outside with an excavator inside. There were concealment posts on top of the warehouse, but they wouldn't be paying attention to what was going on inside it either. And themselves? No gun himself, as the lab coats down there didn't want to see weapons in their labs, and they had their own set of non-uniformed security personnel. Simply put, his remaining options were limited.

"Tell us what's going on down there," the man didn't lower his gun, but spoke up, it was as flat and emotionless as expected "No need to tell us where the door is, tell us something more valuable."

"All right, let me sit down and talk."

The soldier plopped down on the floor and then spoke.

"They have their own security detail? Tell me about their equipment."

"Don't know, some kind of unknown assault rifle, wearing body armor, they have helmets but don't wear them very often. No, I don't know where they live."

"What do you think?" One black-clad infiltrator asked another.

"I don't think he knows any more than that, we'll find out when we get down there."

"Right." The black-clad man quickly knocked the man out with a palm strike to the back of the neck, then began dragging the body into the cargo bay of the minivan while another accomplice dealt with the driver by the same means.

"Done on time." The man looked at the time displayed on the terminal.

"That's right, long time no see, Spook." The other man's voice was low, but it didn't affect the other man's ability to hear it.

"You too, Sledgehammer. Hiding under the driver's seat shouldn't affect your fighting ability, should it?"

"It's a miracle that you old man was able to feel your way over from the airport without being discovered."

After a slight exchange of information between the two groups hidden in the transport plane that the Intelligence Fusion had gotten and the two groups that had infiltrated with the aid of the truck, and after checking their targets, one fiddled with the emergency fire alarm on the warehouse wall, a door to the underground lab opened with a mechanical sound after a hidden button was pressed and the code entered on a pop-up keypad.

==== This is the same time divider ====.

It was late at night on the shores of the Marmara Sea in Turkey, and the west coast of the North American continent was only just being covered by night, the gradually darkening sky hidden from view as a dozen low-visibility painted military helicopters buzzed in from the unlit tarmac. Marines checked their weapons in silence in the cockpit, and aboard the lead aircraft, their commander was speaking to a special commissioner from the capital.

"So it seems that the President has made up his mind?"

"Exactly."

"As it turns out, he can make the right call in important situations."

The oligarchic visitor to the capital nodded, then looked over his shoulder at the lights belonging to the city on the distant horizon, which were rather dimmed by the lack of power due to neutron interference. He knew the current young president had a good relationship with the Marine Corps commander. It had been a low intensity conflict in Central Asia many years ago, when the young man as a diplomat and a group of employees had been trapped by local militants, and it had been a covert operation by a marine unit that had finally rescued them, or at least that was what the official documents now said. But both men here know that what that group of diplomats went on to do was not a normal, stageable diplomatic operation, but rather an attempt to orchestrate some sort of event on the ground, and it's almost a miracle that the current president was able to get out of that black operation in one piece.

But in a stormy wartime, it's good to have a president who's been part of a covert operation. The previous president died in the Moonface bombing, the Consortium forces have taken advantage of the situation to try to manipulate it, and the loss of the battlefield has left people on edge. In this situation, the unknown background of the temporarily sworn-in former Vice President could have allowed him to make some different choices.

It's not easy for a president with roots in the White House to play chess with a representative of a conglomerate and a guy who's been paid off by the conglomerate, but a hand that's held a gun remembers how to lift off the board. Whether that's right or not, only the future will tell.

"It has reached its intended location."

"oK, open comms," the commissioner from Washington tapped into the communications panel, "Team has taken off and is about to begin operations, final confirmation of action code."

"Operation number x129-03, code e.I., confirm code, Swordfish, repeat, confirm code, Swordfish."

"Commander?"