Gundam Fire Still

What I heard was a familiar voice, Federal Senator Jim . Rahlton relaxed slightly and leaned back into the back of his chair. He had hurriedly left the safe house only to realize as he arrived at that address that he had changed into the wrong suit, he had changed out of the one he had worn when he had fled to the moon's surface and then into another when he had entered the safe house, which in itself was the right choice, but he had no time to make up for that mistake when he realized he was going to be on the outskirts of the city wearing a stupid suit. He sighed, hoping that this mistake wouldn't get some of the people who would kill him too close to catching up.

"It's okay, Jim, I know it wasn't easy coming to see us." Seeming to hear the sigh, the man in the front seat said so.

"No, Mosaic, it's even harder for you in this, they wouldn't count me a traitor yet, but you're different. I've even left them messages to try and prove I'm not a traitor. I'm sorry if this has attracted trackers."

He knew the driver, Mosa had been his neighbor, only five years younger, his parents were more into advanced technology and his own parents were conservative, so the kid next door was born as an adjuster, but the two families had maintained a good relationship, such things were not uncommon in the wealthy communities of North America, those with more or less technical and social common sense were not prone to merely Turned against his neighbors because of the genetic adjustment. Although Mosa did not join the Adjuster's independence movement, with the Perestroika ideology and the consequent spread of terror and violence on Earth, he eventually chose to settle in PLAnt for safety reasons. It may have been because of him that Jim . Rahel had met a number of Adjusters in his career, and then came into contact with certain friendly sources of information, but he hadn't expected that it would be an acquaintance who came to connect with him this time.

"It's okay, Jim, we're not coming back after we leave. In PLAnt, we've probably been called traitors. But we didn't betray the Adjusters or the humans, and we know enough to know that."

"But, Mosaic, are your people contacting me because of you?"

"If you're asking about the fact that I sold you out to the PLAnt intelligence agency as a weak member of the Naturals, no."

Mosa read Jim's dark accusation. "But, indeed, I added you to a list, a list of joint officers we can confirm, non-Blue Perestroika inclined, who would not slaughter the Adjusters, and on top of that was the current President, Commander of the Pacific Fleet, and so on."

"So.... I take it this list was not provided to the current PLAnt administration?" Jim asked a slow question.

"Of course not, old Sarah's gone crazy, you know, he's wanted for treason against Siegel. Klein, I thought he'd only do it in secret, but he's announced it directly and publicly, demanding that he be put on death row."

"So old Klein is your leader?"

"Nominally, yes, but we are not the Kleinites as that is commonly called." Mosa replied a little hesitantly, "Attention, sit tight."

With a rattling noise, the motorized vehicle drove over some sort of obstacle into a dumping ground, the same scene more often seen on the outskirts of Copernicus, where large piles of metal and plastic were piled up, and since there was no need to do anything with the trash because there was so much land on the Moonface, the big-spending Moonface inhabitants would just have to pile it all up here and then someone else would have to scour it for anything that might be of value. This, of course, was the nearest hiding place, and only a short time ago, the Blue Perestroika's men had hidden a warship in a dump on the other side of the ring. A small realization rose in his mind that these PLAnt snitches were apparently hiding something here as well.

Jim. Rahel turned his head backwards and was sure he saw a flash of light, it could have been the reflection of a telescope or scope, or it could have been the flash of a gunshot, he wasn't sure, but both meant danger.

"There's someone behind us." He voiced a warning.

"It's okay, it'll be safe soon."

After a sharp jolt, the light from the windows suddenly disappeared and the electric car appeared to be heading into the interior of the mountain of garbage, he could see a door closing behind him, then another, then lights coming on around it.

Jim sucked in a breath and after a second of flinching he realised where it was, or rather he recognised the door in front of him, it was the small shuttle door to the cockpit, he looked back and saw the same shuttle tailgate he had expected to see. He sucked in a breath, but he knew he couldn't turn back. Himself had thought they would be meeting in some secret place on the Moonface, but it was clear that they didn't trust the safety of the Moonface either.

"Sit tight and check your seat belts." Mosa said back, then turned to the communications panel in front of him, "On board, condition normal, launch immediately."

Over the loud roar he could feel himself, the vehicle, and the entire shuttle vibrating, for the second time in a few days, the same awful shaking that he had felt when he had left the HsD seemed to linger in the memory of his own ass and thigh muscles.

"If you're not Kleinites, what should I call you?" Over the roar of the engines, he shouted out.

"We, call 'terminal'."

It wasn't Mosaic who answered him, but another man in the communications loop, and then the pressure of pressing his entire body into the seat was telling him that he was leaving the moon.

"So where are we going?"

"Mendel."

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

Mikhail . Shakrev was staring at the moving figure in his narrow field of view scope, and he didn't have to look up to know by the diminishing vibrations beneath his feet that the target he was staring at was leaving the planet, and at the same time, leaving his own surveillance range. This seemed to be the second time in recent memory that the man had left the surface of a planet, the last time, it was the ground sector that had chased and lost him, and this time, once again, he watched him leave.

The surveillance mission was gone, but there was still one thing he could track, and that was the underbelly of the men who were in his own scope.

He had been tracking the councillor for some time, but that kind of information could easily leak out on the moon's surface, and he wasn't surprised that there were others watching him as well, and this other group had arrived only slightly later than he had, and they weren't like the sneaky stalking of the usual organization's spies, this group was faster and rougher, with an obvious military background.

They had already had a few skirmishes with their own people, both sides using compact assault rifles with silencers and obviously prepared professionals, and while their own people had smart ammunition to assist them, their opponents' agility and reactions still caused casualties. It was clear that the opponents were adjusters, not only adept at dodging bullets but also well trained and sharply accurate shots, but from the moment they hadn't noticed the one hidden on the hill of trash that kept giving self

The small drones that they themselves delivered battlefield information judging by the level of information technology and electronic reconnaissance that they needed to improve, which happened to be the Zaft Army's shortcoming. From what they could see in their own scopes, a missile launcher they were assembling, and a sniper rifle that one of the men on the side was unloading from his body, it looked like they weren't going to leave anyone alive on this trip, they were here to kill, and now that their target had run off with the shuttle, either they were counting on taking a gamble by hitting the shuttle with a missile, or these weapons were going to be used against themselves that they ran into on these roads. Mikhail wasn't going to let them get away with it though, he pressed a button on the terminal on his arm and the squad closest to the target began to withdraw while the drone that had been silently filming the battlefield was activated, it had a small missile roughly equal in power to a 50kg bomb as a hard strike in addition to its optical and infrared reconnaissance equipment, he chose that opponent on the electronic map Mounting the missile launcher's grid point as a target, the drone then initiated the launch sequence. The missile trailing an inconspicuous trail of flames was still spotted by the keen adjusters before it reached its target, and they immediately dispersed, even as someone was firing an assault rifle at the subsonic missile, unaware that munitions exploding in the air posed a greater threat to personnel on the ground?

The next to fire was Roy's sniper rifle and his men's snipers, he missed the Zaft soldier who was adjusting his sniper rifle as the latter dodged the bullet with a nimble roll, but this sniper fire from the flank held that adjuster squad in check and kept the missile from exploding when it hit the ground, while others remained in its blast range. Eventually the team disappeared, dragging the wounded with them, and Roy and his men went up to examine the half-destroyed missile launcher and confirmed that it had come from Zaft.

Why a special team belonging to the Zaft would show up and try to kill whoever was in that vehicle is obviously a question that has something to do with the Combined Forces' interest in the suspiciously missing Councilman Jim Rahl. Rahel apparently had something to do with it as well. But that wasn't a matter he needed to bother with, and it was enough to just throw those conclusions all together to the people sitting in their offices, along with a message they'd found in that safe house. The handwriting of that message indicated that it came from the congressman himself, except for the first sentence in which he guessed that his own people would search his house, and the rest of the message was a few unintelligible code words.

The old-fashioned tactic of using a paper carrier along with a code had worked wonders instead, and the electronic deciphering device he had at hand could deal with all sorts of electronic locks and codes, but was useless against nonsense written on paper.

========.

Earth, the deputy director of the HsD CIA, along with his liaison officer at the Intelligence Unity, looked at the picture on the screen, the owner of the note, Jim, who had just disappeared from the moon's surface. Rahel didn't explicitly say to whom it was left, but it was the latest from the man himself, as far as United Earth could get. The Deputy Director smiled after a moment's blank stare at the text, knowing that it was normal for the Moonface's tracking captain not to recognize this. He was using the usual code words used by older diplomats, and Jim was having years of diplomatic experience on his resume.

"What does this mean?" The liaison officer for the Intelligence Fusion looked confused, he could tell from his expression that the Deputy Director had read it, even as the Deputy Director smiled, an expression with nostalgia that was a rarity for the old man.

"His second sentence, a code word I haven't seen in a long time, is what it means for a diplomat to have a secret meeting with an informer or defector from another country when he's not in his own country. Now it's been a long time since we used these code words, but many years ago when we were recruiting people to serve us in Eurasia and East Asia, no one in the Bureau didn't recognize them. The word originally meant a nuclear bomb."

"'I'm going to meet with a snitch from Russia who is deploying new nuclear bombs against us in Siberia', in direct translation, that's what it means." The Deputy Director smiled a rare smile, "I think that gives you an idea of what he's warning about."

"If I remember correctly, there's a team at the Intelligence Convergence that analyzes new weapons Zaft might use, and predicts the emP they'll use? we'll have to talk to that team."

1. the sword in the head

Fred. Young didn't like his new office in the HsD, and to his Alaskan counterpart, saying goodbye to the bitter cold north and being transferred to the HsD and then promoted from an average analyst who could be transferred anywhere to a team leader leading a group was obviously a good thing; but it also meant that he had to learn to get used to the HsD's old offices in need of renovation and more traffic. Compared to the battlefields he had been in, the peace and stability of the HsD hid behind a different type of trouble.

Unlike the sufficiently quiet technology and intelligence buildings in Alaska, where everyone could concentrate on their own work and person-to-person discussions were more factual; even the Intelligence Community was not immune to the politics of the capital's hustle and bustle. There are always people from Congress, from the White House, from the Pentagon office who come to you to explain some topic they have a problem with - and always hoping to hear an answer that fits their imagination, has been modified, or is only partially stated, and this is most troublesome for technical people who are not used to selectively explaining issues.

Of course, it's a different story when the visitor is an equally experienced professional, because both parties know that the actual problem is not going to change with the way you phrase it. The senior CIA man in front of him with the cup of coffee, Harry. Morganstein was obviously one of those professionals, and the middle-aged, bearded man he'd heard about, known for having the black material of quite a few people in the HsD, had come all the way from Langley's headquarters obviously not to bullshit. Yang was worried for a brief moment whether his messy desk and office were unsuitable to receive such a big man, but he was relieved when he looked at the disposable plastic cup he was holding from the automatic coffee machine downstairs.

The bearded man cleared his throat, "Like I said before, I need to be given some information on the strategic weapons Zaft may be using, we all know very well that the large emP system they are using in Alaska is just a tactical weapon, and just the tactical weapon alone is causing us enough problems."

"So the strategic weaponry they may be using is more cause for concern." A new voice came from behind him, then appeared an unknown officer, obviously from the DOD system, this one also a visitor with an appointment, and the intent was exactly the same as the previous one.

"That's right, gentlemen, if you'll follow me, I think there will be plenty of chairs in the small discussion room to allow us to sit down and talk, it's not a subject that can be covered in two or three sentences." Jan stood up, then squeezed through the narrow, gap between the backs of the chairs and the wall, his not-so-spacious and simultaneously paper-strewn office wasn't big enough for all three of them to sit down.

"But before we do that we can discuss the simplest kind," Jan pointed to a poster on the wall behind him. The poster, depicting a dinosaur panicking under the glow of a meteor in the sky, was obviously well suited to be placed in the hallway of a university astronomy department, or paleontology department, rather than in the office of a military intelligence agency.

"One of the easiest ways to do that is to throw rocks at the earth,"

He said as he walked out the door, the major from the Ministry of Defense frowning as he glanced at the poster of the meteorite that cut through the atmosphere before following him.

"It's efficient and low-cost, and they could easily find the right size meteorites in space, load them with thrusters, set their orbits, and have them come towards Earth. They don't even need to put in thrusters that are too powerful, because the Earth is at the bottom of the gravity well, and with a little push to get them out of orbit, they'll come right at us."

"And then let Earth's humans go extinct just like the dinosaurs?"

"I think a person who studies dinosaurs would tell you that dinosaurs didn't go extinct solely because of an asteroid impact, but because of a combination of many causes, but my answer is, yes, we can do no better than dinosaurs if something like that happens."

"I think the 'Hubbles' are already watching them, and those orbital observatories have enough resolution to spot the motions pushing the asteroid."

"Yes, we have 'Hubble' in orbit, and that's an advantage."

"That's true though," Jan opened the door to the small seminar room, then dragged in some chairs and used his own fingerprints to tap the terminal on the wall, "but, Major,"

"Major Wells, this is." The CIA uncle reminded him of the correct name.

"Well, Major Wells, I'm sure you also remember the last worst leak, Halbarton's G-Series, and that one happened to have a valuable technology that provided optical and electromagnetic cloaking."

"The mirage system," the Major slapped the armrest with resentment, "is a hell of a thing."

"But it's not that simple, is it?" Morganstein narrowed his eyes, "The mirage system is expensive, and to use this technology would equate to a significant increase in cost. And it's not always an option for them."