Gundam Fire Still

He adjusted the angle and field of view of his front recorder, knowing that headquarters could sync up what he was seeing.

"See for yourselves, I'll need reinforcements," just before his stopped car, the large green lawn belonging to the golf course began to open slowly, revealing the steel-backed, massive hollow structure beneath. Hundreds of square meters of grass sank into the ground as far as they could, then panned out to the sides and disappeared, while in the vast space below, recognizable enough to the human eye were the steel support structure and the floor of the large pit, with several shuttles pointing to the head of the sky.

"What, what's going on here?" The companion let out a stumbling question in shock.

"The hidden spaceport, that's probably what it is." Isaac grabbed the communicator and got out of the car, "Headquarters, you should see it too, we need backup, and maybe even military help."

White smoke was already billowing up below, followed by the deafening roar of rockets, Isaac took two steps backwards, even though the shuttle was still beneath the deep well, he could still feel the terrible pressure. Even though it was just an ordinary small civilian shuttle, it was still the result of human ingenuity and industrial power, containing power great enough to carry people into the universe. Then the already deafening roar rose up a notch again, and a powerful wind pressure greeted him as white smoke began to envelop the entire cave entrance.

Isaac took a few steps back again, crouching his body halfway behind the vehicle to avoid the impact, the vehicle and the ground vibrated from the impact, and the giant object that had broken through the white smoke was above his field of vision, he eyed the farther and farther away, trailing ion tail flames and jets of smoke, and then squinting his eyes, he noticed not one, but two points of light high in the sky.

"Can we shoot them down?"

"I don't think so, it's Ezral on one of them, but we don't know about the other one."

"And what's with this secret air port? It doesn't look like it could have been built in a few weeks by any means."

"Yes, we need to investigate this one; as for the other one, it could be this one up there," came a picture over the comm from HQ of a man holding up his terminal and taking pictures of a somewhat familiar small building in front of him, and the agent recalled for a few seconds, then remembered that this was where they had put the PLAnt princess under house arrest.

"Congressman Jim . Rahel, who mysteriously disappeared this morning and was last seen by us yesterday evening, was photographing the small building where the federal government places PLAnt civilians under house arrest. Ezral will be pursued, mostly by the department in charge of the universe, and your next task is to investigate this man."

Sprawl - United Chapter

Moonface City. Copernicus.

Mikhail. Shakrev is slowly pacing among the dense array of computer desks and servers, a room of about 60 square meters on the top floor of an old building that was originally designed as a conference room, and apparently the cluttered rows of desks and computers suggest that this is now far enough away from its function as a conference room.

In the center of the room was a long electronic tabletop, a rotating model of the Earth and a satellite map of Washington floating above it as a three-dimensional projection, and at the base of the tabletop was a narrow trail of blood that ran downward, a dark mark on the floor where it ended giving the impression that there had been a body, which there had been.

Thirty minutes ago, this suburban building on the outskirts of the ring was the base of some organization, and most of the locals were well aware that this so-called company was a gang organization whose main business was to trap contraband into Moonface, sell contraband in back alleys, janitorial services for some brightly lit entertainment center, and the like, in keeping with the traditional tropes of Copernicus City's image as an extra-legal place.

The dense electronic signals emitted from the top floor and the bank-grade data encryption of the network made it clear to intelligence officers from Earth that the underworld jobs were just a front, and that the depth of intelligence involved must be far greater than that of a small underworld.

And so Mikhail of the Intelligence Convergence arrived with his counterparts, crammed into an electric van commonly used by the Moonface Triad.

Copernicus, a semi-independent strip of land with a history older than Earth Unity, had long since become a lawless land - and a haven for intelligence activities - due to the prevailing liberalism and lack of order-keepers. A vast, well-established intelligence network is constantly exchanging and swallowing information and data from different sources and to different destinations. To make matters worse, the system is de-centralized, like Earth's former terrorist syndicate, with no single node at the center, just interconnected organizations, each small organization linking to the others, and all of them doing the same thing. It's like a giant spider's web, with countless spiders sitting on it, flicking their threads to exchange information, and each spider can be replaced or killed, but you can't dismantle the web.

"It just can't be done, we need it for now." Mikhail explained so to his men as he stared at the image the small drone had taken from the building's perimeter, "Earth is temporarily unoccupied and has no intention of ending the chaos on the moon's surface, and in other corners of the universe at the same time. The Combine is well aware of the presence of mercenaries, waste merchants, smuggling or pirate groups developing in the rubble belt and small colonial satellites, some of which have no small ambitions," he made a grabbing gesture to the sky, "but they are nothing compared to PLAnt."

Mikhail and his men had arrived on the lunar surface twelve hours earlier, and originally most of the intelligence capabilities of the entire Earth United in Copernicus had come from Blue Perestroika's channels on the lunar surface, but when Earth had taken on the LoGos, it was clear that those Perestroika-branded intelligence nodes were no longer trusted. So the Eastern European, pulled up to the universe from a remote base in Turkey, had to conduct a quick operation to hit a nail of his own, and the Intelligence Convergence chose to transfer him to the Moonface, apparently because he could do it.

The operation was barely a firefight, and under the cover of combined disabling weapons and smoke grenades, the assault team, not wearing military-grade shields, still managed to quickly suppress all the floors below the top floor. The only threat came from the top floor, the group's intelligence center, where a heavily armored soldier, pre-detected by the drones' infrared scans, was patrolling, probably an Adjuster with heavy equipment that would probably make him immune to shock grenades and disabling gases. And at the same time the team had to do their best to protect the computer and server arrays on the top floor, since the intelligence there was part of the purpose of their trip, so too much firefighting had to be avoided.

Mikhail's team took care of him, though, and the low-visibility drone hovering outside the window marked the adversary with a non-visible wavelength laser, then, as the door opened, an armor-piercing slug of smart rifle ammunition, pre-programmed by the computer system, was guided by that laser spot of light through a metal door that had just been opened a crack that could fit through a bullet, into a heavy composite helmet, and finally The result was the bloodstain that stretched under the countertop in the middle of that room. At that moment, the door had not been opened enough to see out from the inside, but the remaining members, who had been alerted, resisted immediately with automatic weapons, knowing full well that this was no ordinary gang war, and that attacking the stronghold of an intelligence peddler without being alerted in advance was a sign of the seriousness of the situation. But their first round of fire did little more than make a few bullet holes in the door and hit the bulletproof glass. Then the flash shock bombs and smart machine gun towers thrown in through the door silenced the rest of the counterattack.

Now Mikhail was perplexedly examining the map of Washington that had been projected out in 3-D, a file that the stronghold had been viewed many times recently, apparently related to their recent business, and he could guess that some of the markers were the strongholds of certain groups in Washington, but he realized that he had underestimated the number of active bulls and goblins on the moon's surface, the large number of, different markers indicating that now staring at the The capital of the Atlantic Federation is not the same as before, with only two old enemies in East Asia and Eurasia, but a large number of, scheming, organizations generated by the massive and uncontrolled exploitation of the universe. The vast amount of data here still needed to be analyzed by someone, meanwhile the other intelligence peddlers on the moon's surface would notice a change of ownership here, which was no big deal, and very few of them, would be able to realize who was behind it, and realize they had to make a choice.

"Chief, classified contact from HQ." His adjutant came over with the communicator.

"This is Grey Goose, the operation is complete."

"Good, I know you need personnel and will be replenished soon, but there is a new mission." It came just as he expected, it was the voice of Dan, the head of the Intelligence Unity Department in the Moonface.

"A new mission?"

"Two guys in Washington have slipped up into space, heading for the moon's surface, you'll have to keep an eye on them."

"Ha, the Feds have a leak?" Mikhail looked a little gleeful, "Is it the Perestroika? When did it arrive?"

"One is, one isn't. Arrived at the moon an hour ago, if they hadn't taken a detour. The one in Persian Daisy is little Ezral, but the other one, just keep an eye on him and don't touch him."

"What's that again?"

"A very delicate situation, Mischa, someone will be there soon to give you the specifics."

"Well, I have a situation for you that you should be interested in," he opened the terminal and snapped the map, then passed it on to his superiors "You seem to have a few holes in your Washington set up that could cause trouble if several agencies on Earth aren't paying attention. "

"Hell, they did run into trouble, if you'd shown me this earlier, the guys on Earth wouldn't have missed those two." Dan on the other side of the microphone visibly sighed, this late image had marked the long hidden shuttle launch site, the one that had been set up under the Union's nose was almost disposable as there was no real landing or re-launch function, but the ground side was worried if there was anything like it still hidden nearby.

"Chief, there's a bit of an emergency on the net." The adjutant interrupted the Eastern European's report by pointing to a terminal on the wall, then tapped to broadcast a video of a battleship on the Moonface public net, a ship that was rising off the outside of the crater. A marker on the side of the page indicated that the video was being played at a rapid pace, and the people of the Moonface were following the event with great enthusiasm.

"Dan, are you still there? I don't think we'll have to spend any more time looking for Ezral." Roy said into the comm, squinting at the not-clear internet video of the slowly rising ship with an indistinct mark on its side that clearly wasn't Earth United or Zaft.

"What's going on? You found Ezral?"

"He's not trying to hide at all, sir, you can check out the video site on the Moonface, I think you remember that Perestroika has several junkyards and repair yards on the Moonface for contraband shipments, but they're way out of our league on this one."

The webcam was synced to the big screen, and after being processed by military-grade image restoration software, the Joint Forces intelligence officer present took a breath of cold air, the blurred mark on the ship's side was the logo of the Blue Perestroika organization, and the ship seemed to lift its bow as if it were nothing to the filmer below, then the main engine emitted a jet of light that would have blinded the watcher.

"Damn," Shakrev could hear his own officer across the microphone pounding the table.

"I'm not sure if Ezral is up there, but mostly yes, according to his flamboyant personality."

"I'll have to leave that to the military, hopefully they still have ships that are reliable and have enough combat power at the same time. Then you'll be on the lookout for a second target next, in addition to investigating the actions of those Perestroika strongholds."

For the inhabitants of the Moonface, nothing happened this night, and the slightly more informed could know that there was a commonplace, one society swallowing up another; but for the peddlers on the Intelligence Ocean, it was a new force, and one with great combat power, joining their game.

For the time being, the Intelligence Unity intended to play this game with them.

Within a few days, this point of the Intelligence Convergence had been able to get a lot of information with the legacy channels of the entrenched peddler, barely bringing the Combined Forces' intelligence gathering in Copernicus up to 80% of the level it had been at before the purge of Perestroika began, and part of the information also confirmed that the Combined Forces had made the right choice for the Perestroika investigation operation, and he could prove that a significant portion of the information had been withheld and never reached the Combined Forces' analysis department.

Mikhail ticked off a few pieces of information on the terminal, sending them to his headquarters in Ptolemy, then to Earth's analysis department, one of which had information on an organized intelligence acquisition campaign, and could confirm that someone was acquiring information on all of the United Earth Force's ms, both those beginning mass production and those in testing, and that some of the information on the already available x-series had been acquired by that unknown buyer. The Combine needed to be vigilant about this, whether the buyer was from Zaft or from some mercenary pirate sort of group; another report was a bit older, a partial record of smuggling channels controlled by the Blue Perestroika from before the war had started until six months ago, as the current Earth Combine was interested in the Blue Perestroika ship and what it might have to offer. And in the third report, the Intelligence Unity had located the hideout of a suspicious character, and while that hideout had been consistently occupied with rent payments, and neighbors could confirm that people had been in and out of it in the past, the intelligence indicated that the person now living inside had appeared at a time that coincided with the time the ground had asked them to investigate the man in space, a man who hadn't appeared on Copernicus' recent regular entry records. The reports from some of the stalkers also indicated that the man was not very familiar with lunar life, and that his habits could be mimicked, but the difference in the way he moved in low gravity could still be seen to be broken.

"......... Therefore, the occupant of this hideaway is the missing Atlantic Federation citizen Jim . The likelihood is high that Rahel."

Dan. Fritz scoffed at the wording of the report, which he also knew was an abdication of responsibility on the part of the front man, a battle-decisive Eastern European who clearly wasn't going to turn granny. This cautious writing was clearly indicating that since your rear valued this man so highly, and at the same time had such a delicate attitude, you might as well leave the decision directly to the rear. Dan knew the other side meant that he could confirm that this was the target, but the report confirming the target was best left to Dan, the superior, to write.

"Chief, urgent report from the orbital observatory, PLAnt has a ship out of port, and it's not quite normal."

"Not quite normal?" Dan dropped the half-written order, then turned to the comms man who walked in, "What does that mean?"

"PLAnt's larger ships generally wait for the satellite to rotate to an angle where the port is facing outward, rather than towards Earth, before leaving port (small shuttles or ms not included) to avoid our optical observations, or at least make it difficult for us to distinguish numbers and types. But this time the ship apparently went out of port without waiting for the right angle, and this emergency departure was judged by the observatory to be an event of concern." Along came a few pictures that came in after the communications relay.

Although it looked like nothing more than a blur, Dan thought of several possibilities for a moment before he turned his gaze aside once more to the report on the Jim Rahl senator. Senator Rahal's report.

Sprawl - PLANT Chapter

PLAnt, April

SIEGEL. Klein is waiting for one message, in fact it may well be two.

Several Kleinian Adjusters - a few young men he didn't know - had now stepped aboard a small, camouflaged shuttle to spy on the patch of Urantia that had been cordoned off by Patrick's trusted unit.

They would transmit a real-time recording of what their shuttle could capture to a small relay device placed in the outer wall of the satellite, which would in turn transmit the message to another similar device in the inner wall of the satellite, which, after a few turns, appeared on the terminal he was placing on his desk. That was the first message.

But the shuttle would probably be destroyed without warning, and the staging device on the outer wall of the satellite would pick up the abrupt, abnormal termination of the transmission, continuing the bad news without emotion, and then it would be programmed to self-destruct, its core and antenna would fuse, and the shell and unrecognizable metal fragments would float out into space. The self-destruct signal would then be passed on to the next node, until the last, which would be the second message.

Much of the madness of war lay in the fact that it let young men die early, and he knew it well enough to do the same thing he was letting those young men do now, but he had no choice.