Gundam Fire Still

Borgman's pace slowed a fraction, he knew that the latest intel mentioned that the other side had ms with nuclear energy aboard, if he could find a sample of that energy on the ms they landed here....

But he picked up the pace to catch up, now was not the time to scatter the action.

In fact, the search was easier than they'd expected, and they soon found bullet marks on a structure that looked like it had once been a bench, the tell-tale signs of two men shooting at each other.

"One of the firing points was at the entrance to the Institute, while the other was hiding behind this bunker, a small amount of dripping blood indicates that the latter was shot."

"Hell, a natural and an adjuster shooting at each other, it's definitely our people who will suffer." The Captain frowned, "Then what?"

"Into that building now, both of them."

"Shxt," the Captain cursed quietly, he made a gesture of searching forward, but complained inwardly to the impertinent ms pilot, the opponent was an adjuster, you're injured again, and you have the nerve to just go in after him, a madman wouldn't be so eager to die, ms pilots' lives are expensive!

"That's right, we need to hurry, if you want to find your people alive." The PLAnt commander had a cold, tanned face.

The footsteps of a small team of a dozen people couldn't be masked, especially when the feet were hard metal structures, but the neat footsteps didn't mask the male voice that came from inside the facility.

-- "-- Do you know what this place is for? Mu!"

Sure enough, the guy knew something, and Borgman's heart thrilled.

Then there were sparks of gunfire flashing across the passage ahead, and the Union soldiers could barely see the silhouette of a flashing figure on a distant platform, the foremost PLAnt soldier already firing a suppressing rain of bullets from his assault rifle into the high ground.

Displayed in front of him was a patio-like circular atrium, the artificial sunlight from the colonial satellites was slanting through the windows at the top, bits of glass and metal were scattered on the floor, and the lighting systems throughout the building did not seem to be working, but the humming sounds of mechanical operation could still be faintly heard inside the facility.

The figure high above faded away, his voice no longer present, and behind what appeared to be a sculptural bunker in front of them, the Combine found the pilot they were looking for.

"All right? Major?"

"Just grazed by debris, no big deal." Mu nodded, and then the Joint Forces medics caught up from the rear and sprayed the agent and the organic foam gel used to close the wound onto his wound, a step that incidentally also restored the seal of the spacesuit.

"Damn, that guy." Under the pain, Mu let out a meaningless curse before reluctantly rising to his feet, "Borgman, this is the place, right, where you'll be investigating."

"That's right, so Captain, I need to search the area for some documents."

"No problem, we'll assist."

On the other side of the room, Baltfelut nodded, "He seems to know the area well, Rau. Lou. Kruiser, the guy never mentioned his past. I, on the other hand, happen to have enough suspicions about him."

After leaving a few men to guard the entry door, the rest of the group quickly searched the rooms immediately adjacent to this atrium, each room with wide open doors and empty shelves and drawers, their only reward being a diagram of the facility pinned to the wall. Either the people here were fully prepared to leave and not return, or, someone had already swept the place, and Borgman hoped it was the former, not the latter.

"As we knew before, this institute, like many of the institutes attacked by Perestroika, is dedicated to genetic and genetic engineering research. The owner here, who is also the chief scientist, is Dr. Ring, who has been working on making human genetic adjustments more effective, but at that time, on the one hand, the adjusters were sophisticated enough that numerous adjusters were born and then proved themselves successful, and his research was considered useless, and on the other hand, the wave of opposition to Blue Perestroika intensified. Both combined, he lost much of his funding and almost lost the ability to continue running this lab." Borgman, though acting like the rest of the team in a bent, low bullet-area position, was talking freely with his mouth full, and the gun-armed, alert squad walked slowly past the bullet-ridden, double-helixed sculpture and up the stairs.

"Hmm, maybe it contains the key to solving PLAnt's fertility problem," Baltefelut snickered quietly, "It's not just the Naturals who are short-sighted, ah, but the Adjuster as well."

"But he eventually gained access to a source of funding in some way, that source being the Major's father, Mr. Frada, but with that came taking on a certain commission from him." Borgman continued, "but we don't know what it was, only that it was some sort of thing worth a large sum of money, and at the same time it could not be made public."

"And this doctor, as far as we know, the purpose wasn't pure, he was already heavily in debt for that project of his, while at the same time being so tight-lipped about it that even the military, even the military, didn't know what he was doing in the last period."

Borgman rummaged through an office, looking at the sign still visible in the doorway, obviously the room of one of the lab's top executives. The contents of the office were shown in the cone of light from the flashlight, the only things in the massive space were bookshelves from the floor to the ceiling, a spacious desk, and a computer. There was no way to know if it was originally tidy or not, as now all that was left of the shelves here was ash and black charred carbonized marks.

"This is one of the rooms that was attacked and set on fire by the Perestroika, what a shame, all this information."

Borgman tried tapping on the computer, which lit up again after years of silence, and plugged a data cable into it and began cracking the codes within it. A moment later, the control interface appeared on the now dusty screen, but Borgman frowned.

"Hell, someone must have cleaned this up and deleted too much stuff."

Borgman opened the terminal he was holding and rummaged through it for the last damage survey, then compared it to the map of the facility he'd seen downstairs earlier, then pulled up a few charts from the computer that were barely restored.

"What's this?"

"Diagrams of ventilation systems, all ventilation systems in biology labs have to be specially made, Ring is a professional, he wouldn't be unaware of that."

He compared several diagrams, and then noticed a large number of ventilation ducts and alarm systems in a large area that had been marked as a kitchen by the first floor schematic. It was a gray area, an area that hadn't been marked on the building's structural plans that Dr. Ring had provided to the federal government for filing.

"This is it, we need to hurry."

Then the team that began to move heard a voice, a ghostly male voice from the top of the corridor, the same male voice from before spoke once more.

-- "Come, come, come as you will, to this place of origin, Mu,"

Fear had almost gripped the people in the corridor if they hadn't realised the source of the sound, and a sound that rang without warning in a dark corridor could indeed be terrifying, making one wonder if there was a ghost from the past hidden here. The cone-shaped pillars of illumination couldn't be found in front of or behind the corridor, and the status meters of several of the men's combat uniforms showed an accelerated heartbeat. But ghosts don't speak after all, and after an instant of silence, a curse spoke the truth.

"Damn it's the radio system, and it's powered!"

-- "You should, you should have, been well acquainted with this place."

-- "And of course all of you, naturals and adjusters, are welcome to meet here."

"Hell, that fellow, is he crazy?" The Union captain gritted his teeth and said, "But fortunately we can find out where he is, there's only one place in this building to send a broadcast, right?"

"He didn't do that in Zaft, did he?" The soldier from PLAnt looked confused.

"Damn, he knows this place so well, it's like he's lived here."

A chill crept up Borgman's spine as he realized what he had found, he looked back and locked eyes with Mu, he saw the same, something akin to fear in his gaze.

-- "What a shame there's still a main character, one who should be on this stage, who isn't here," continued the calm, but frantic, male voice over the radio system.

After recognizing that it was nothing more than a broadcast, the soldiers racing down the corridor didn't care what he was saying, they weren't slowing down or letting down their guard, they were just advancing and then opening one thick security door after another in front of them.

"Highest level of biosecurity, we're in place." Borgman said as if by way of introduction. Behind the open doors, the sound of machinery that had been running faintly became noticeable with a bang, and in the darkened halls, the electronic displays on the numerous containers were still running, flashing a blue, creepy fluorescence.

Most of this lab was dead, but here, it was still alive.

-- "If I'm not mistaken, no, there's absolutely no mistaking that, the actor who should have appeared, the one who should have appeared in this starting place, Kira. Yamato-kun."

The voice from this broadcast didn't just reach the ears of the mixed team of people from the United Army and PLAnt that were listening inside this facility, there were others listening outside of this facility.

On the flat land outside the Institute, Aslan. Sara was gawking, he could clearly recognize the voice as belonging to Captain Kreuzer, the incoherent words seemed to be communicating something to someone in the facility, or had he gone insane?

But that wasn't something he needed to be interested in, because until the end, he heard the name, the name of a familiar friend, the name of an old friend who he knew very well would never simply die on the battlefield.

Is he around?

No, this was not something he should be thinking about, the teenager's brain had been flooded with enough in a few minutes to overturn his previous perceptions of the world. He began to run, running to his plane, turning on the throat radio at the same time.

"Itzhak, Tiago, retreat, immediately, away from this satellite and back to the ship."

"Is that, Captain Kreuzer's voice?"

"Yes, but leave it alone, don't listen, don't delay, and get out of here." Aslan realized that he had used the tone of a tough order in a rare way.

As he stepped into the cockpit again, the man many were talking about, Kira . Yamato was making his entrance.

19. The Story of a Teenager - Its V - Choice (above)

The Obu Self-Defense Force's 1st Mecha Battalion, Kira. Lieutenant Colonel Yamato, is running under the artificial sunlight of an abandoned colonial satellite, running towards the same research facility.