World on Fire: Chapter 6, The Wind-Curved Sandhills
Trowa was falling back into the familiar controls of Heavyarms, trying to get used to the new equipment that his Gundam was now sporting. Along with Duo, he had been sent out to gather whatever data they could in the surrounding area. Heero and Quatre had decided they would be of more use staying behind at the base, analysing the incoming data.
“Shit.” Duo's cursing came in over the radio. “I've nearly dropped the stuff twice now. This isn't the easiest equipment to handle, you know.”
Trowa couldn't help but agree, though he would never have admitted that he was having trouble with keeping a grip on the sensors. “Just make sure you don't drop it, we can't afford any damage.” He responded, wincing as he did. He didn't want to be too cold, he actually liked his fellow pilot. Last night they had even managed to get past the awkwardness of the previous day by 'borrowing' a bottle of vodka and getting drunk in a quiet corner of the hanger. Hopefully Duo was oblivious that Trowa had dragged a passed-out Duo to the bed he shared with Quatre, arranging them delicately so Duo was spooning up against the soundly sleeping blond. He'd barely been able to contain his snickers when Quatre had ranted in the morning to a hungover Duo about alcohol and waking up with morning wood poking you in the back. That last one nearly killed him - or gotten him killed, maybe - he really could be a git sometimes.
“Yeah, kinda figured that one out for myself. Thanks.” Duo had been in a shitty mood all morning and trying to stifle his laughter at it was just making the American even moodier. At least in the privacy of his cockpit he was able to snigger at every annoyed remark that came across. “Alright, I've gone far enough I think. I'll set up the equipment here.”
Trowa nodded shortly, heedless of the fact that the other boy would not be able to see the gesture. Carefully he lowered his suit down to one knee, letting the equipment drop slowly down to the ground. From what had been explained to him, all he needed to do was plant the various boxes into the ground. From there they would deploy and start digging up soil samples and pick up radar and communications, all of which could be relayed back to the base.
“Hey, Trowa? Got something weird over here.”
“Yeah, what is it?” He continued his work, though his curiosity had piqued. Duo's voice had gone from annoyingly petulant to serious.
“Picking up something on active radar. Looks like a suit, but it's not moving.”
Trowa broke away from his work on the ground, quickly glancing at the electronic map to check Duo's last position. “On my way, radio silence until then.” This was certainly far more interesting than watching the sensors deploy and quite possibly more important.
Fortunately Duo was not far away and a brief ten minute flight brought him within sight of the other Gundam. Settling into a slow fall, Trowa was keeping as low as possible as he approached in an attempt to avoid any radar coming from the fallen suit. He had reached the other suit, crouched behind the small burnt-out remains of a church, before he could finally even detect the object as a small dip in the radar scan. It was a wonder that Duo had managed to even spot it at all.
Gesturing to Duo with the massive gatling gun, Trowa moved as quietly as he could in the massive robot, keeping cover behind the charred buildings as they approached. As they got closer, Trowa was able to see a visual on the suit, a gently smoking wreck that had slammed into the side of a small cliff.
"That thing's not getting up in a hurry." Duo commented, apparently he was also in visual range.
"We should take it back, it could have parts we could use." Trowa replied as they reached their destination, standing on either side of the wreck.
“Looks like a standard Leo.” Duo remarked, spotting the familiar configuration of the Alliance's mainstay mobile suit. “Cockpit's still sealed.”
“Good.” Trowa bent his suit down, examining the wreck for any easy way to drag it out of there. Everything they found was just raising more questions. This Leo, crashed into the side of a cliff yet left unmarred by the fire that raged the surrounding countryside. The convenience of the Maguanacs just happening to have a functional decontamination chamber just before the country is struck with a mysterious nuclear blast. His fellow pilots were especially a mystery, as varied as they were in temperament and behaviour.
It was a question that bothered Trowa as they struggled to drag the awkward weight of the Leo back to the base. His own selection as a pilot had been as random and haphazard as it could possibly be. So how had his fellow pilots acquired their dubious distinction as terrorists from the colonies? Were they fighting for some cause, or like him were they just along for the ride? Quatre seemed the most likely candidate for some righteous creed, the boy just seemed like he was made for a holy crusade against injustice and tyranny. Duo... well, he could always just ask Duo what he was fighting for, in a few days the boy had become the closest thing to a friend that Trowa could remember.
Heero, now Heero was different. There were times that Trowa could see part of himself in Heero, the aloofness and determination. Yet like any good puzzle as soon as he thought he had Heero figured out, he would pull into a completely contradicting behaviour. For every time his cold, calculating exterior would lull him into thinking the boy ran entirely on logic and reason, Heero would take a gut feeling or idea and just run with it, flying into the face of sense with reckless abandon. It had started to make Trowa wonder if the boy was doing it just to toy with him.
“Hey Tro, you awake in there?” Duo's call snapped him out of his musing, in time to notice that they had arrived back at the entrance to the base. He had been running on autopilot the whole time, barely noticing what his hands were doing as they had dragged the suit along.
“Yeah, I'm here. What are we going to do about that?” Trowa asked, nodding back the way they came.
“About what?” Confused, Duo hadn't even noticed the turn of Heavyarms' head.
“That.” Trowa turned the torso of his suit around, raising the robotic arm to point at the line of sand dug up by the Leo as it scraped along the ground. A line leading right to the hidden entrance of the Maguanac base.
“Well, shit.”
*
It turned out that the tracks were not such a problem for the Maguanacs, they had set their base up in an area so prone to sandstorms that even when one was not blasting through the area the wind would cover any tracks they could make in under an hour. Trowa could almost believe that this place was the origin of the “shifting sands of the desert” cliché. Once the wind was pointed out to him, he could even see that the shape of the surrounding dunes had changed in the short period they had been living there.
“What are you looking at, Trowa?” The voice of Quatre called from behind him, the only other noise in the small office.
“Just sand, it seems.” Trowa broke his gaze from the monitor and turned to face the other boy. It may have just been sand, but the subtle movements and shifts that he was now beginning to see was fascinating to him. On the colonies, everything was artificial in some way. Even the trees and grass that had been transplanted from Earth rarely varied, they were just background moving in the same predictable way, day in, day out. Here, the sand shifted and moved like it had a mind of his own. He'd never noticed it before on the colonies because the background just didn't change. On Earth, it was like staring at the tiniest twitching of a toe on a living, breathing being that was so massive he could not comprehend it. Looking at the sands move and twitch at the behest of a mind that was beyond him, he could see why so many regarded the Earth as a living thing, so fragile and yet so powerful at the same time.
No wonder the denizens of Earth were so adamant in their belief of God. There was something so ineffable, so powerful and beyond comprehension. Something that demanded worship, respect and nurture. Something that gave birth to the entire human race.
And we planned to kill it.
“... still not sure, but we're going to extract him. If it is him, you realise what this means, right?” Apparently his attention had drifted off in his musings. Trowa shook his head, he didn't realise what anything that Quatre had said meant.
“Well, I know he's not that high up in the Alliance, but Rashid reckons that Zechs Merquise is close to Khushrenada. We'll have to take on OZ, so with Zechs as a prisoner we have a much bigger advantage!” Trowa just stared blankly at Quatre for a few moments longer, still catching up with the mental shift of gears.
“What does it matter?” Trowa finally asked, receiving a few blinks and a blank stare as Quatre's own mind was thrown for a loop. “You said yourself; our best guess is that the blasts have spread into much of Western Europe. When the dust clears, if there's still an OZ or an Alliance, will they even be relevant?”
Quatre grabbed one of the office chairs from a nearby terminal, sliding it over and straddling the back in one smooth motion to sit down next to Trowa. “All we have are guesses.” Both the blond's voice and face were much softer now, leaning close enough to Trowa that he could see worry lines around the other boys' eyes. “But if we have Merquise, we have an advantage. Information, leverage, it all helps us.”
Trowa turned his head to the side, breaking the earnest gaze. There was a passion there, a drive that he could comprehend, yet not share. “It’s pointless now. We have no mission; if we can even help the people already here I’d be surprised.” Trowa stood up, heading to the door in a contemplative slump. He turned as he reached the door, regarding the other boy in the chair. Quatre was watching him go, an impatient look on his face as if he were just on the verge of replying but couldn’t find the words to do so. Lowering his head, Trowa pushed the door open and walked away.
*
Trowa pushed the door to their shared room open carefully, wary of startling his oftentimes skittish roommates. Peering inside, he found the usual scene. Heero was at the table, too many documents and folders to name scattered across its rough wooden surface. He was either too distracted or just didn't care enough to acknowledge Trowa's entrance. Quatre he had left behind in the control room and Duo was nowhere to be found, probably off annoying the base security by trying to sneak into restricted areas.
Sitting down at the table, he picked up one of the folders, scanning the title and drawing an annoyed glance from the Japanese boy opposite. Satellite data. Briefly flicking through the pages, he saw it was pages upon pages of raw data, angles and inclinations from the results of orbital LIDAR scans. Flicking through another folder, he found the same thing, data that was of no use to anyone without a computer to pass it through.
“What do you have all this for?” Trowa threw the folder on a nearby pile, turning his attention back to Heero in time to see the other boy sketching down a ruler on a large piece of graph paper. “What, is doing LIDAR and RADAR scans by hand a hobby of yours?”
Heero glanced up at the sarcastic tone, dropping the pen back down to the table to concentrate his full frowning powers on to Trowa. “The data produces an error when we try to process it. I’m trying to see if the data is valid.”
“Got anything?”
“Not much, really.” Heero twisted the graph paper as Trowa moved around behind him. There were a few numbers scattered over the page, but it was mostly filled with carefully drawn X’s. “The X’s are null results, when it doesn’t hit anything. This is...” Heero grabbed another folder sitting next to him, flicking it open briefly to get a number from the page, “Colony 322, L2 cluster. Or at least where it should be. It’s mostly just blank space now.”
“So the colony has been destroyed?”
“Or moved.” Heero shrugged, turning the paper back. “No way to tell without a computer image. But the data is fine.”
Trowa shrugged, flipping through the incoherent numbers of another random folder as if the answer could leap out from the pages if they were turned fast enough. “Did Quatre tell you about the guy we found?”
Heero nodded silently, busy filing the assorted papers back in their appropriate folders. “Zechs Merquise. Could be valuable to the mission.” He roughly snatched the folder out of Trowa’s hands, placing it finally on top of the sorted pile.
“You think we still have a mission too?” After holding on to air for a few confused moments, Trowa let his hands drop back down to his sides.
“We always have a mission.”
“Wish I could believe you.” Trowa shoved his hands into his jean pockets, leaning against the back of the couch in an effort to act nonchalant. “I’ve been through war before, a lot of battles. This just doesn’t feel the same. I just... I feel like this is so much bigger than us.”
“It’s the same.” Finished with organising his folders, Heero grabbed the stack and moved to the door. Stopping just past Trowa, he turned to subtly sniff the air. “Have you been drinking?”
Trowa pinched his thumb and forefinger in front of his face, spreading them just slightly as Heero rolled his eyes. “Little bit.”
Heero said nothing, just turned and left the room.
*
It didn’t take long for Duo to return, apparently having once again been discovered by Maguanac security. Trowa stood up from his position on the couch, giving the other boy a short nod of greeting.
“Have you heard anything more about this Merquise we picked up?”
Duo shook his head. “Only who he was.”
“We should probably find out about him.” Trowa nodded, opening his mouth to continue when Duo suddenly lunged forward, shoving him violently backwards. His mind barely had time to register he was being attacked before he landed on the solitary bed with a short bounce and the faint sound of wood cracking.
“What the hell?” He only just managed to get the words out before Duo pounced on top of him, pinning his wrists down with a wicked grin.
“Don’t start something you don’t intend to finish, Trowa.” Duo leaned down to kiss him full on the mouth, a slow and gentle exploration of his lips that spoke of the other boy’s lack of experience. It occurred to Trowa then that he would easily be able to shove Duo off, but he just couldn’t see why he would want to.
Duo pulled back from the kiss, looking at Trowa with a puzzled expression on his face. “Have you been drinking?”
“Shit.” Duo's cursing came in over the radio. “I've nearly dropped the stuff twice now. This isn't the easiest equipment to handle, you know.”
Trowa couldn't help but agree, though he would never have admitted that he was having trouble with keeping a grip on the sensors. “Just make sure you don't drop it, we can't afford any damage.” He responded, wincing as he did. He didn't want to be too cold, he actually liked his fellow pilot. Last night they had even managed to get past the awkwardness of the previous day by 'borrowing' a bottle of vodka and getting drunk in a quiet corner of the hanger. Hopefully Duo was oblivious that Trowa had dragged a passed-out Duo to the bed he shared with Quatre, arranging them delicately so Duo was spooning up against the soundly sleeping blond. He'd barely been able to contain his snickers when Quatre had ranted in the morning to a hungover Duo about alcohol and waking up with morning wood poking you in the back. That last one nearly killed him - or gotten him killed, maybe - he really could be a git sometimes.
“Yeah, kinda figured that one out for myself. Thanks.” Duo had been in a shitty mood all morning and trying to stifle his laughter at it was just making the American even moodier. At least in the privacy of his cockpit he was able to snigger at every annoyed remark that came across. “Alright, I've gone far enough I think. I'll set up the equipment here.”
Trowa nodded shortly, heedless of the fact that the other boy would not be able to see the gesture. Carefully he lowered his suit down to one knee, letting the equipment drop slowly down to the ground. From what had been explained to him, all he needed to do was plant the various boxes into the ground. From there they would deploy and start digging up soil samples and pick up radar and communications, all of which could be relayed back to the base.
“Hey, Trowa? Got something weird over here.”
“Yeah, what is it?” He continued his work, though his curiosity had piqued. Duo's voice had gone from annoyingly petulant to serious.
“Picking up something on active radar. Looks like a suit, but it's not moving.”
Trowa broke away from his work on the ground, quickly glancing at the electronic map to check Duo's last position. “On my way, radio silence until then.” This was certainly far more interesting than watching the sensors deploy and quite possibly more important.
Fortunately Duo was not far away and a brief ten minute flight brought him within sight of the other Gundam. Settling into a slow fall, Trowa was keeping as low as possible as he approached in an attempt to avoid any radar coming from the fallen suit. He had reached the other suit, crouched behind the small burnt-out remains of a church, before he could finally even detect the object as a small dip in the radar scan. It was a wonder that Duo had managed to even spot it at all.
Gesturing to Duo with the massive gatling gun, Trowa moved as quietly as he could in the massive robot, keeping cover behind the charred buildings as they approached. As they got closer, Trowa was able to see a visual on the suit, a gently smoking wreck that had slammed into the side of a small cliff.
"That thing's not getting up in a hurry." Duo commented, apparently he was also in visual range.
"We should take it back, it could have parts we could use." Trowa replied as they reached their destination, standing on either side of the wreck.
“Looks like a standard Leo.” Duo remarked, spotting the familiar configuration of the Alliance's mainstay mobile suit. “Cockpit's still sealed.”
“Good.” Trowa bent his suit down, examining the wreck for any easy way to drag it out of there. Everything they found was just raising more questions. This Leo, crashed into the side of a cliff yet left unmarred by the fire that raged the surrounding countryside. The convenience of the Maguanacs just happening to have a functional decontamination chamber just before the country is struck with a mysterious nuclear blast. His fellow pilots were especially a mystery, as varied as they were in temperament and behaviour.
It was a question that bothered Trowa as they struggled to drag the awkward weight of the Leo back to the base. His own selection as a pilot had been as random and haphazard as it could possibly be. So how had his fellow pilots acquired their dubious distinction as terrorists from the colonies? Were they fighting for some cause, or like him were they just along for the ride? Quatre seemed the most likely candidate for some righteous creed, the boy just seemed like he was made for a holy crusade against injustice and tyranny. Duo... well, he could always just ask Duo what he was fighting for, in a few days the boy had become the closest thing to a friend that Trowa could remember.
Heero, now Heero was different. There were times that Trowa could see part of himself in Heero, the aloofness and determination. Yet like any good puzzle as soon as he thought he had Heero figured out, he would pull into a completely contradicting behaviour. For every time his cold, calculating exterior would lull him into thinking the boy ran entirely on logic and reason, Heero would take a gut feeling or idea and just run with it, flying into the face of sense with reckless abandon. It had started to make Trowa wonder if the boy was doing it just to toy with him.
“Hey Tro, you awake in there?” Duo's call snapped him out of his musing, in time to notice that they had arrived back at the entrance to the base. He had been running on autopilot the whole time, barely noticing what his hands were doing as they had dragged the suit along.
“Yeah, I'm here. What are we going to do about that?” Trowa asked, nodding back the way they came.
“About what?” Confused, Duo hadn't even noticed the turn of Heavyarms' head.
“That.” Trowa turned the torso of his suit around, raising the robotic arm to point at the line of sand dug up by the Leo as it scraped along the ground. A line leading right to the hidden entrance of the Maguanac base.
“Well, shit.”
*
It turned out that the tracks were not such a problem for the Maguanacs, they had set their base up in an area so prone to sandstorms that even when one was not blasting through the area the wind would cover any tracks they could make in under an hour. Trowa could almost believe that this place was the origin of the “shifting sands of the desert” cliché. Once the wind was pointed out to him, he could even see that the shape of the surrounding dunes had changed in the short period they had been living there.
“What are you looking at, Trowa?” The voice of Quatre called from behind him, the only other noise in the small office.
“Just sand, it seems.” Trowa broke his gaze from the monitor and turned to face the other boy. It may have just been sand, but the subtle movements and shifts that he was now beginning to see was fascinating to him. On the colonies, everything was artificial in some way. Even the trees and grass that had been transplanted from Earth rarely varied, they were just background moving in the same predictable way, day in, day out. Here, the sand shifted and moved like it had a mind of his own. He'd never noticed it before on the colonies because the background just didn't change. On Earth, it was like staring at the tiniest twitching of a toe on a living, breathing being that was so massive he could not comprehend it. Looking at the sands move and twitch at the behest of a mind that was beyond him, he could see why so many regarded the Earth as a living thing, so fragile and yet so powerful at the same time.
No wonder the denizens of Earth were so adamant in their belief of God. There was something so ineffable, so powerful and beyond comprehension. Something that demanded worship, respect and nurture. Something that gave birth to the entire human race.
And we planned to kill it.
“... still not sure, but we're going to extract him. If it is him, you realise what this means, right?” Apparently his attention had drifted off in his musings. Trowa shook his head, he didn't realise what anything that Quatre had said meant.
“Well, I know he's not that high up in the Alliance, but Rashid reckons that Zechs Merquise is close to Khushrenada. We'll have to take on OZ, so with Zechs as a prisoner we have a much bigger advantage!” Trowa just stared blankly at Quatre for a few moments longer, still catching up with the mental shift of gears.
“What does it matter?” Trowa finally asked, receiving a few blinks and a blank stare as Quatre's own mind was thrown for a loop. “You said yourself; our best guess is that the blasts have spread into much of Western Europe. When the dust clears, if there's still an OZ or an Alliance, will they even be relevant?”
Quatre grabbed one of the office chairs from a nearby terminal, sliding it over and straddling the back in one smooth motion to sit down next to Trowa. “All we have are guesses.” Both the blond's voice and face were much softer now, leaning close enough to Trowa that he could see worry lines around the other boys' eyes. “But if we have Merquise, we have an advantage. Information, leverage, it all helps us.”
Trowa turned his head to the side, breaking the earnest gaze. There was a passion there, a drive that he could comprehend, yet not share. “It’s pointless now. We have no mission; if we can even help the people already here I’d be surprised.” Trowa stood up, heading to the door in a contemplative slump. He turned as he reached the door, regarding the other boy in the chair. Quatre was watching him go, an impatient look on his face as if he were just on the verge of replying but couldn’t find the words to do so. Lowering his head, Trowa pushed the door open and walked away.
*
Trowa pushed the door to their shared room open carefully, wary of startling his oftentimes skittish roommates. Peering inside, he found the usual scene. Heero was at the table, too many documents and folders to name scattered across its rough wooden surface. He was either too distracted or just didn't care enough to acknowledge Trowa's entrance. Quatre he had left behind in the control room and Duo was nowhere to be found, probably off annoying the base security by trying to sneak into restricted areas.
Sitting down at the table, he picked up one of the folders, scanning the title and drawing an annoyed glance from the Japanese boy opposite. Satellite data. Briefly flicking through the pages, he saw it was pages upon pages of raw data, angles and inclinations from the results of orbital LIDAR scans. Flicking through another folder, he found the same thing, data that was of no use to anyone without a computer to pass it through.
“What do you have all this for?” Trowa threw the folder on a nearby pile, turning his attention back to Heero in time to see the other boy sketching down a ruler on a large piece of graph paper. “What, is doing LIDAR and RADAR scans by hand a hobby of yours?”
Heero glanced up at the sarcastic tone, dropping the pen back down to the table to concentrate his full frowning powers on to Trowa. “The data produces an error when we try to process it. I’m trying to see if the data is valid.”
“Got anything?”
“Not much, really.” Heero twisted the graph paper as Trowa moved around behind him. There were a few numbers scattered over the page, but it was mostly filled with carefully drawn X’s. “The X’s are null results, when it doesn’t hit anything. This is...” Heero grabbed another folder sitting next to him, flicking it open briefly to get a number from the page, “Colony 322, L2 cluster. Or at least where it should be. It’s mostly just blank space now.”
“So the colony has been destroyed?”
“Or moved.” Heero shrugged, turning the paper back. “No way to tell without a computer image. But the data is fine.”
Trowa shrugged, flipping through the incoherent numbers of another random folder as if the answer could leap out from the pages if they were turned fast enough. “Did Quatre tell you about the guy we found?”
Heero nodded silently, busy filing the assorted papers back in their appropriate folders. “Zechs Merquise. Could be valuable to the mission.” He roughly snatched the folder out of Trowa’s hands, placing it finally on top of the sorted pile.
“You think we still have a mission too?” After holding on to air for a few confused moments, Trowa let his hands drop back down to his sides.
“We always have a mission.”
“Wish I could believe you.” Trowa shoved his hands into his jean pockets, leaning against the back of the couch in an effort to act nonchalant. “I’ve been through war before, a lot of battles. This just doesn’t feel the same. I just... I feel like this is so much bigger than us.”
“It’s the same.” Finished with organising his folders, Heero grabbed the stack and moved to the door. Stopping just past Trowa, he turned to subtly sniff the air. “Have you been drinking?”
Trowa pinched his thumb and forefinger in front of his face, spreading them just slightly as Heero rolled his eyes. “Little bit.”
Heero said nothing, just turned and left the room.
*
It didn’t take long for Duo to return, apparently having once again been discovered by Maguanac security. Trowa stood up from his position on the couch, giving the other boy a short nod of greeting.
“Have you heard anything more about this Merquise we picked up?”
Duo shook his head. “Only who he was.”
“We should probably find out about him.” Trowa nodded, opening his mouth to continue when Duo suddenly lunged forward, shoving him violently backwards. His mind barely had time to register he was being attacked before he landed on the solitary bed with a short bounce and the faint sound of wood cracking.
“What the hell?” He only just managed to get the words out before Duo pounced on top of him, pinning his wrists down with a wicked grin.
“Don’t start something you don’t intend to finish, Trowa.” Duo leaned down to kiss him full on the mouth, a slow and gentle exploration of his lips that spoke of the other boy’s lack of experience. It occurred to Trowa then that he would easily be able to shove Duo off, but he just couldn’t see why he would want to.
Duo pulled back from the kiss, looking at Trowa with a puzzled expression on his face. “Have you been drinking?”