Fic: Epsilon Run (Fullmetal Alchemist: Hawkeye, Mustang, Havoc, Breda, Fuery, Ed, Al; PG)
I've always loved science fiction -- but the truth is, it's not science fiction that I love, really, it's space opera. Star Wars, Star Trek, Babylon 5, Firefly, Cowboy Bebop, even the Vorkosiganverse and some of C.J. Cherryh -- the stuff that's light on the accuracy but heavy on the adventure. So when the AU prompt came up on fma_fic_contest, this leapt immediately to mind. Not just because I love space opera, but because space opera and the steampunk-y fantasy of Fullmetal Alchemist have a lot in common: they both flirt heavily with scientific terminology and plausibility but shy away from, yanno, commitment.
Anyway. This is utterly gen, and was deliberately written to be like what an actual FMA episode would be like -- if FMA was a space opera series. :D
Epsilon Run
Colonel Mustang's company receives a distress call -- coming from Alphonse Elric's AI.
Fullmetal Alchemist AU, with elements of both anime and manga. Hawkeye, Mustang, Breda, Havoc, Fuery, Ed, Al. Gen. 3300 words.
PG. No spoilers or warnings.
This was written for the fma_fic_contest prompt "AU." It won me a banner, which is below the cut.
(Banner thanks to darkblysse)
The message came, of course, when they were on much-needed leave. Leave on Aquaroya Station, too, one of the choicer locations -- indeed, Hawkeye got word of it while she was enjoying a very nice coffee and croissant (real coffee, even, imported all the way from Earth, not the synthetic stuff you usually got this far out from the Central Colonies) when her wrist communicator hummed at her.
She sighed, dusted crumbs from the corner of her mouth, and triggered her wrist button. "Hawkeye here. Go."
Fuery's voice crackled over the link. "I just got a tightbeam subspace transmission that I think you ought to hear. It's from Alphonse Elric."
A frisson went up her spine. Word from the Elric brothers was usually either very bad or very good or -- most often -- both at the same time. She looked longingly out the cafe's panoramic windows, at the half-illuminated sphere of the gas giant the station orbited and, beyond it, the icy pinpoints of the stars. Three of the moons were up; the third, an icy shade of violet, was just rising . . . "It can't wait?"
"I'd say not, sir," Fuery said. He sounded worried.
Goodbye, peaceful shore leave, she thought, but what she said was, "All right. On my way. Hawkeye out."
***
Mustang and Havoc didn't look any more happy than she did -- Havoc probably less, as he'd apparently been interrupted right in the middle of trying to pick up a cute girl from the Xing Star Empire. "I take it this is quite important, then?" Mustang asked, with the faintest edge to his voice.
"I'm afraid so," Fuery said, the picture of apology. "Mostly I think it'll speak for itself, but I wanted to make it clear... Alphonse didn't send this via the standard ansible connection. It appears to have been transmitted via subspace tightband directly from his own AI uplink. Which must've taken some hacking; his processors shouldn't be capable of that, or at least not standard."
"We all know Alphonse's AI isn't standard," Hawkeye said, drily. For one thing, standard AI was just a very well-programmed computer; Alphonse's AI was a human being's mind (and perhaps soul, if you believed in that sort of thing) uploaded into a heavy-labor android's memory. A fact known to perhaps a total of ten people -- and a fact that no one would be likely to believe unless they met Alphonse.
"Why would he -- " Havoc began.
"Only if he couldn't get access to an ansible," Mustang said, his expression hardening. "Which means, at bare minimum, that they've been separated from their flyer. -- All right, Fuery, play the recording."
There was a faint hiss, and then the distinct, slightly tinny but definitely boyish voice of Alphonse. "I've got to make this short, I don't have the power to transmit a long message. Ed and I are being held on Epsilon Five. We're not sure by who, but they took our flyer, they've got Ed cornered, we're stuck on-planet -- we need help, Colonel. Don't believe what they say about Epsilon. It's a cover. What's actually here -- it's a lot worse. Alphonse out."
"...What do they say about Epsilon?" Havoc asked when the line crackled to silence.
"It's always been an open secret," Mustang said. "Government embarrassment. They were testing a new nanotech there, it got out of hand, they quarantined the entire moon."
"Only apparently not," Hawkeye said.
"It makes sense," Mustang said. "You want to hide a real secret, make up a fake secret that's not too hard to find out. Most people will get through the first level and feel very clever and stop."
"So I take it our leave is over?" Havoc asked with a sigh.
"Our leave," Mustang said, "is definitely over."
***
They'd been following Ed Elric, one way or another, ever since the first time he'd slouched into Mustang's office on Central Station. Whether it was just tracking his progress, or helping him out -- or chasing him down -- things had been... lively ever since that day.
When Ed had first (sort of) joined them, Mustang, per usual, hadn't really briefed them except to say that a new and promising psionicist was joining the Independent Trade Fleet, that Admiral Bradley had been impressed with him, and that he had been put in charge of keeping the new contractor in line. That had been normal enough. What was unusual was having the door swing open to admit an android and a child.
No, not a child, Hawkeye realized after a moment -- an adolescent, and a surprisingly self-possessed one, although her initial confusion had been understandable because he was quite short. And not... quite... an android, because though the figure that followed in the young man's wake had every appearance of being one of the heavy-labor androids that were a common sight in the Central Colonies, he didn't move like one. He moved more smoothly, for one thing, but even more odd was the fact that he kept swiveling his glowing-eyed head, looking around him in apparent curiosity. AIs of that caliber had no curiosity to speak of.
"Edward Elric," Mustang said, and Hawkeye managed by dint of great self-control not to gape. This boy was the prodigy?
Havoc didn't quite succeed in hiding his ajar mouth. Elric slouched into a chair. Mustang continued, "I understood your brother would be joining you."
The voice that came out of the android's mouth was even more of a shock than the prodigy psionicist's youth. It wasn't the flat-affect voice of the simpleminded AI that usually animated heavy-labor androids; it was a young boy's voice, a little tinny and electronicized but distinctly human and full of personality and sounding a little abashed. "That's me, sir."
"I see," Mustang said. "I had heard... well, never mind." He focused his sharp gaze on Edward. "Rumor has it that you're really something with the psionics -- specifically, the morphokinesis."
"Yeah?"
"Perhaps a demonstration would be in order," Mustang said, his gaze flicking to the looks of disbelief on Havoc and Breda's faces. He studied his desk a moment, then picked up an ugly glass paperweight and held it out to Edward. "We're short a mug; if you'd like a cup of coffee . . . ."
"Don't much care for coffee," Edward said, but he took the paperweight and studied it with a look that Hawkeye would come to know well: torn between the desire to disobey and the desire to show off. Demonstrating his skill won. The glass began to deform in his hands. That in and of itself wasn't unusual: morphokinesis, the changing of the shapes of things, was a fairly common psionic power -- much more common than, for instance, the Colonel's pyrokinesis. But that was where all ordinariness stopped. A normal morphokinetic would have taken an hour or more to reshape something of the mass and density of the paperweight, but it was molding in Ed's hands as rapidly as if it were melting candlewax. And more -- it was slowly coloring, going from a clear block of glass to opaque white. In less than a minute, the paperweight was a mug, decorated for some reason with a gryphon in flight, and, by all appearances, made of ceramic.
"You changed its makeup," Hawkeye said softly. She hadn't meant to speak, but she was so startled she couldn't help it. "That's -- I don't believe I've ever heard of that being done."
"You know psionics?" Edward said, turning to look at her, and she noticed for the first time that he had unusual golden eyes. Of course, gene therapy could do that, but --
"I'm not a psionicist like you or Colonel Mustang, but my father was a psionicist and a researcher," she said. "And I've never heard of anyone changing the state of an item. Just the form."
"Glass -- at least, that kind of glass -- is just a form of borosilicate. Rearrange the molecules and adjust the bonding and you've got ceramic. It's just morphokinesis on a very small level, that's all." For all that he'd been apparently willing to show his stuff, he didn't sound all that proud of his achievement.
"It's certainly unusual," she hazarded.
"Yeah, that's me," Edward said, with a little twisted smile. "Unusual." He leaned forward and set the mug on the edge of Roy's desk. The movement pulled back his sleeve, and she could see in the inch of space between sleeve and glove the glitter of something else that made him unusual; the distinctive wire-and-plates look of cybernetics.
Over the next few months, she would find out precisely how unusual Edward and his brother Alphonse were -- that Edward was a part-cyborg out of necessity, having lost both arm and leg in some unnamed accident; that Alphonse wasn't a highly sophisticated AI but an actual human mind uploaded in exigency into an android's memory. And that Edward seemed, almost by accident, to turn up conspiracies and enemies wherever he went.
She hoped he'd pull himself through this time as he always had before.
***
The landing on Epsilon Five was uneventful, eerily so -- even though Fuery at the comm station kept sending out his usual polite hail the entire time. But no, nothing. Just the deep untroubled green of the planet's temperate zone coming nearer and nearer, until it began to distinguish itself into the lighter green of plains the darker green of forests, the murky olive green of the swamp that, according to Fuery, Alphonse's signal had originated in. And then it distinguished itself even more during the gutwrenching final slide of approach, when suddenly the blur of greenery became trees, algae-covered pools, nests of fern and vine -- and then the ship settled to earth.
"What's the plan, boss?" Havoc asked as they emerged into the swimmingly-humid air of the planet. Strange things sang in the trees, and insects buzzed and hummed around them.
"We'll go to the last known location," he said. "And we'll work out from there."
Hawkeye pulled her disruptor pistol, and out of the corner of her eye she could see Havoc and Breda doing the same. Mustang, of course, neither needed a weapon nor carried one; Hawkeye wasn't sure whether this climate was a blessing to a pyrokinetic, or a curse. Nearly everything was damp... but because of that, there was no way they'd accidentally light a wildfire that would cut them off from the ship (not to mention do massive ecosystem damage).
They were half a mile from the ship when Hawkeye heard the cry: a tormented animal howl, followed by the violent crashing of some large shape through the brush. She barely had enough time to shout, "Get back!" and wheel to aim her gun at the foliage before the... thing emerged.
Her first fleeting thought when she saw it was that it must be injured; its uneven loping stride looked very much like a limp. Her second was that she'd better watch out for the fangs, but even more so for the ominously dripping claws on its forefeet. And then it was on them, and there was no more time to think about anything but the detached mental frame of aim, fire, fall back, aim, fire again.
The thing -- it looked something like a cross between a serpent and a badger, only enormously larger, nearly the size of a rhinoceros or a rhenshin -- was more resistant to disruptor fire than anything she'd encountered before. She ducked the swipe of a giant clawed paw, fell back to get out of the way, swung around to try to flank it and fired -- and saw out of the corner of her eye the flash that presaged one of Mustang's pyrokinetic attacks. The clearing blazed white-hot and then seared out red, and still, somehow, the creature kept coming, covered though it was in burns.
She saw Havoc pop a flash grenade and shout, "Eyes!", and she turned half away and pressed the heels of her hands over her closed eyes to block out the worst of the blinding flash. She counted to three, every muscle in her body ready for attack during that helpless second of blindness, and then opened them again. The flash grenade had done what none of their other attacks had managed, which was to say stalled the creature; it staggered, light-blind, and in that moment she aimed the disruptor firmly at the place where its spine met its skull and pulled the trigger.
The creature fell with a gust of expelled air. She fired again, directly into its skull through the vulnerable portal of its eyes. To be sure. There was no such thing as 'too safe.'
"Goddamn," Havoc said, and Mustang -- laughed.
"You can say that again," he said.
Breda -- brave man -- had gone over to the side of the dead creature, and was examining it. "Sir," he said. "This -- isn't a natural creature. It's a made thing."
"Mm?" Mustang said.
"Here." He pointed to the creature's legs, and sure enough, just as Hawkeye had half-noticed, there was something wrong with them. Only the limp wasn't due to an injury: the right front leg didn't quite match the others, as if it had belonged to another animal. The paw on that leg was a different shape, and the leg itself wasn't quite the right length.
"Alien fauna often looks odd -- " Mustang began, but Breda shook his head.
"I know," he said. "But I studied xenobiology at the academy, and I'm telling you: this isn't a weird alien critter. It's been made by someone."
Mustang grimaced, but didn't argue. Despite Breda's carefully-cultivated rough exterior, he was one of the most intelligent men Hawkeye had known; if he said he was confident, he was confident. Plus, once he'd pointed it out, it was easy to see. Alien biology was often peculiar, but it generally looked as though it was all of a piece. Even the heavily-furred trilaterally-symmetrical bodies of the Drachman species looked and moved more naturally than this thing had.
"A made creature," Mustang said, "a genetically engineered monster, straight out of the brush at us and not scared away even by fire. I'd bet you he was sent."
"There's one good thing, then," Havoc said, looking up from checking the charge on his disruptor.
"What, dare I ask?"
"We can presumably follow his path back to his master. And look." He gestured to the track of crushed bracken. "He left us a nice, clear path."
Two hours through the brush was wearying, even with the water and rations they'd brought; Hawkeye could feel her uniform clinging to her back with sweat. Breda called back intermittently to the ship, to check with Fuery and make sure their escape route was clear; otherwise they walked in silence, to conserve breath, until they came up over the rise and saw the compound.
Hawkeye immediately flattened herself behind a tree to keep from being seen... but it was clear from a moment's observation that no one was going to see them. Everyone seemed to be... occupied. Alphonse was disarming a combatant; she could vaguely hear the plaintive strains of his boyish voice, floating across the distance, insisting 'I'd rather not hurt you, just hold still, please -- '
"Looks like the Elric bomb has already detonated," Havoc said wryly. "Aren't you getting tired of showing up after all the excitement and doing cleanup, Colonel?"
Mustang only smiled, a thin smile to himself.
Edward, when they found him, was somewhat less than grateful. "What're you doing here, Colonel?" he demanded, his eyes narrowed. "I've got everything under control, thank you very much."
"You're welcome," Mustang said mildly, which only made Ed bristle more. "At any rate, it wasn't my idea to come."
"What th'hell do you mean?"
"Your brother sent a distress call." Mustang spread his hands. "We were simply coming... to your rescue."
It was a phrase calculated for maximum anger, and Hawkeye would have sworn that Ed levitated a few inches off the ground. Fortunately for all involved, Ed didn't seem to be sure whether he was more angry at Mustang for being an interfering jerk or at Alphonse for making the call. "We were managing just fine by ourselves, you didn't need to involve them -- "
"Brother," Al said wearily, "the scientists blew up our flyer. How exactly were you planning on getting out of here?"
" -- I would have figured something -- "
"Edward," Mustang interrupted. "All that aside, would you care to explain what happened here?"
Ed's glare was quite an eloquent answer, Hawkeye thought.
"Let me rephrase," Mustang said. "Would you rather explain now, or in a full document submitted to me by ansible of not less than ten thousand words?"
"Bastard," Ed muttered.
"With citations," Mustang added.
"All right, fine," Ed said. "You fight really dirty, you know that? I was following up some research about... well, genetic engineering. That was what lead me here first."
"We ran into one of the 'experiments' on the way in," Havoc said. "Damn near eviscerated us."
Ed winced. "I thought I'd got them all. -- Anyway, so I was looking into that, but I found out that what they were doing wasn't -- the genetic experiments were just a sideline. They were trying to find ways to enhance psionic ability, or even create it in people born without it."
Mustang caught his breath. Hawkeye felt her expression tighten. That would be -- even with the limitations they had, psionicists were valued highly, not least because no one could tell why some people could be psionicists and others couldn't, or why some people were stronger than others. If you could control that . . . .
" -- which would be... dicey enough on its own," Ed went on, "but the worst part was the way they were doing it." His expression had gone flat, his eyes shadowed.
"What were they doing, Ed?" Mustang asked, almost gently.
"Well," Ed said, "everyone knows there are certain chemicals the body generates during psionic exercise. They were...." He swallowed. "Murdering weak psionicists, processing their bodies somehow and injecting their refined... fluids into stronger psionicists."
Hawkeye's stomach turned, and she swallowed. "Where are they now?" she asked.
"Gone," Ed said, angrily. "I mean, we've got some here -- Al's still tying 'em up -- but they're all, like, lab assistants. Not the brains in charge. They... got away. And with our flyer destroyed, we couldn't chase."
"Who were they?" Mustang asked. "We need names."
Ed shook his head sharply. "I don't know who the lead guy was, but the head scientist was a man named Tucker."
"Tucker," Mustang said contemplatively. "Tucker."
***
"What d'you look so pleased for?" Havoc demanded. The five of them were sitting in a bar in the dubious comfort of Briggs Station, on the edge of Drachman space. Not nearly as nice a leave as Aquaroya, but at least the Drachman waiter brought the drinks coming regularly enough. "I've got bug bites on my -- "
"Tucker," Mustang said. "That's exactly the information I was hoping he'd get."
"You knew," Havoc said, and barked a laugh. "You knew he was going to -- honestly, boss, you could've given us some warning our vacation was going to be cut short."
"Edward's a clever young man. If any of you had acted strangely -- "
"Still," Havoc said, scratching his upper arm with a mutinous glare.
"If I'd tried to send him to figure out what was going on on Epsilon Five, he would have wriggled out of it. All I could do was point him in the right direction."
"And pull some strings," Hawkeye said softly.
"And pull some strings," Mustang confirmed.
"One of these days," Hawkeye said, "he's going to figure out you're manipulating him. And he's going to -- "
"Go thermonuclear," Havoc supplied.
Mustang laughed, but Hawkeye shook her head. "No," she said. "He'll run. He won't come back for direction, or for help. He'll run."
Mustang raised his glass of bourbon and regarded the view of the starfield through it. "Then we need to hope," he said, "that when that time comes, he's ready to run in the right direction."
***
Note: Poor Falman got cut; I didn't have it in me to keep track of one more character. This was a blast to write, in a very not-serious-at-all way; I hope you enjoyed it.
Anyway. This is utterly gen, and was deliberately written to be like what an actual FMA episode would be like -- if FMA was a space opera series. :D
Epsilon Run
Colonel Mustang's company receives a distress call -- coming from Alphonse Elric's AI.
Fullmetal Alchemist AU, with elements of both anime and manga. Hawkeye, Mustang, Breda, Havoc, Fuery, Ed, Al. Gen. 3300 words.
PG. No spoilers or warnings.
This was written for the fma_fic_contest prompt "AU." It won me a banner, which is below the cut.
(Banner thanks to darkblysse)
The message came, of course, when they were on much-needed leave. Leave on Aquaroya Station, too, one of the choicer locations -- indeed, Hawkeye got word of it while she was enjoying a very nice coffee and croissant (real coffee, even, imported all the way from Earth, not the synthetic stuff you usually got this far out from the Central Colonies) when her wrist communicator hummed at her.
She sighed, dusted crumbs from the corner of her mouth, and triggered her wrist button. "Hawkeye here. Go."
Fuery's voice crackled over the link. "I just got a tightbeam subspace transmission that I think you ought to hear. It's from Alphonse Elric."
A frisson went up her spine. Word from the Elric brothers was usually either very bad or very good or -- most often -- both at the same time. She looked longingly out the cafe's panoramic windows, at the half-illuminated sphere of the gas giant the station orbited and, beyond it, the icy pinpoints of the stars. Three of the moons were up; the third, an icy shade of violet, was just rising . . . "It can't wait?"
"I'd say not, sir," Fuery said. He sounded worried.
Goodbye, peaceful shore leave, she thought, but what she said was, "All right. On my way. Hawkeye out."
***
Mustang and Havoc didn't look any more happy than she did -- Havoc probably less, as he'd apparently been interrupted right in the middle of trying to pick up a cute girl from the Xing Star Empire. "I take it this is quite important, then?" Mustang asked, with the faintest edge to his voice.
"I'm afraid so," Fuery said, the picture of apology. "Mostly I think it'll speak for itself, but I wanted to make it clear... Alphonse didn't send this via the standard ansible connection. It appears to have been transmitted via subspace tightband directly from his own AI uplink. Which must've taken some hacking; his processors shouldn't be capable of that, or at least not standard."
"We all know Alphonse's AI isn't standard," Hawkeye said, drily. For one thing, standard AI was just a very well-programmed computer; Alphonse's AI was a human being's mind (and perhaps soul, if you believed in that sort of thing) uploaded into a heavy-labor android's memory. A fact known to perhaps a total of ten people -- and a fact that no one would be likely to believe unless they met Alphonse.
"Why would he -- " Havoc began.
"Only if he couldn't get access to an ansible," Mustang said, his expression hardening. "Which means, at bare minimum, that they've been separated from their flyer. -- All right, Fuery, play the recording."
There was a faint hiss, and then the distinct, slightly tinny but definitely boyish voice of Alphonse. "I've got to make this short, I don't have the power to transmit a long message. Ed and I are being held on Epsilon Five. We're not sure by who, but they took our flyer, they've got Ed cornered, we're stuck on-planet -- we need help, Colonel. Don't believe what they say about Epsilon. It's a cover. What's actually here -- it's a lot worse. Alphonse out."
"...What do they say about Epsilon?" Havoc asked when the line crackled to silence.
"It's always been an open secret," Mustang said. "Government embarrassment. They were testing a new nanotech there, it got out of hand, they quarantined the entire moon."
"Only apparently not," Hawkeye said.
"It makes sense," Mustang said. "You want to hide a real secret, make up a fake secret that's not too hard to find out. Most people will get through the first level and feel very clever and stop."
"So I take it our leave is over?" Havoc asked with a sigh.
"Our leave," Mustang said, "is definitely over."
***
They'd been following Ed Elric, one way or another, ever since the first time he'd slouched into Mustang's office on Central Station. Whether it was just tracking his progress, or helping him out -- or chasing him down -- things had been... lively ever since that day.
When Ed had first (sort of) joined them, Mustang, per usual, hadn't really briefed them except to say that a new and promising psionicist was joining the Independent Trade Fleet, that Admiral Bradley had been impressed with him, and that he had been put in charge of keeping the new contractor in line. That had been normal enough. What was unusual was having the door swing open to admit an android and a child.
No, not a child, Hawkeye realized after a moment -- an adolescent, and a surprisingly self-possessed one, although her initial confusion had been understandable because he was quite short. And not... quite... an android, because though the figure that followed in the young man's wake had every appearance of being one of the heavy-labor androids that were a common sight in the Central Colonies, he didn't move like one. He moved more smoothly, for one thing, but even more odd was the fact that he kept swiveling his glowing-eyed head, looking around him in apparent curiosity. AIs of that caliber had no curiosity to speak of.
"Edward Elric," Mustang said, and Hawkeye managed by dint of great self-control not to gape. This boy was the prodigy?
Havoc didn't quite succeed in hiding his ajar mouth. Elric slouched into a chair. Mustang continued, "I understood your brother would be joining you."
The voice that came out of the android's mouth was even more of a shock than the prodigy psionicist's youth. It wasn't the flat-affect voice of the simpleminded AI that usually animated heavy-labor androids; it was a young boy's voice, a little tinny and electronicized but distinctly human and full of personality and sounding a little abashed. "That's me, sir."
"I see," Mustang said. "I had heard... well, never mind." He focused his sharp gaze on Edward. "Rumor has it that you're really something with the psionics -- specifically, the morphokinesis."
"Yeah?"
"Perhaps a demonstration would be in order," Mustang said, his gaze flicking to the looks of disbelief on Havoc and Breda's faces. He studied his desk a moment, then picked up an ugly glass paperweight and held it out to Edward. "We're short a mug; if you'd like a cup of coffee . . . ."
"Don't much care for coffee," Edward said, but he took the paperweight and studied it with a look that Hawkeye would come to know well: torn between the desire to disobey and the desire to show off. Demonstrating his skill won. The glass began to deform in his hands. That in and of itself wasn't unusual: morphokinesis, the changing of the shapes of things, was a fairly common psionic power -- much more common than, for instance, the Colonel's pyrokinesis. But that was where all ordinariness stopped. A normal morphokinetic would have taken an hour or more to reshape something of the mass and density of the paperweight, but it was molding in Ed's hands as rapidly as if it were melting candlewax. And more -- it was slowly coloring, going from a clear block of glass to opaque white. In less than a minute, the paperweight was a mug, decorated for some reason with a gryphon in flight, and, by all appearances, made of ceramic.
"You changed its makeup," Hawkeye said softly. She hadn't meant to speak, but she was so startled she couldn't help it. "That's -- I don't believe I've ever heard of that being done."
"You know psionics?" Edward said, turning to look at her, and she noticed for the first time that he had unusual golden eyes. Of course, gene therapy could do that, but --
"I'm not a psionicist like you or Colonel Mustang, but my father was a psionicist and a researcher," she said. "And I've never heard of anyone changing the state of an item. Just the form."
"Glass -- at least, that kind of glass -- is just a form of borosilicate. Rearrange the molecules and adjust the bonding and you've got ceramic. It's just morphokinesis on a very small level, that's all." For all that he'd been apparently willing to show his stuff, he didn't sound all that proud of his achievement.
"It's certainly unusual," she hazarded.
"Yeah, that's me," Edward said, with a little twisted smile. "Unusual." He leaned forward and set the mug on the edge of Roy's desk. The movement pulled back his sleeve, and she could see in the inch of space between sleeve and glove the glitter of something else that made him unusual; the distinctive wire-and-plates look of cybernetics.
Over the next few months, she would find out precisely how unusual Edward and his brother Alphonse were -- that Edward was a part-cyborg out of necessity, having lost both arm and leg in some unnamed accident; that Alphonse wasn't a highly sophisticated AI but an actual human mind uploaded in exigency into an android's memory. And that Edward seemed, almost by accident, to turn up conspiracies and enemies wherever he went.
She hoped he'd pull himself through this time as he always had before.
***
The landing on Epsilon Five was uneventful, eerily so -- even though Fuery at the comm station kept sending out his usual polite hail the entire time. But no, nothing. Just the deep untroubled green of the planet's temperate zone coming nearer and nearer, until it began to distinguish itself into the lighter green of plains the darker green of forests, the murky olive green of the swamp that, according to Fuery, Alphonse's signal had originated in. And then it distinguished itself even more during the gutwrenching final slide of approach, when suddenly the blur of greenery became trees, algae-covered pools, nests of fern and vine -- and then the ship settled to earth.
"What's the plan, boss?" Havoc asked as they emerged into the swimmingly-humid air of the planet. Strange things sang in the trees, and insects buzzed and hummed around them.
"We'll go to the last known location," he said. "And we'll work out from there."
Hawkeye pulled her disruptor pistol, and out of the corner of her eye she could see Havoc and Breda doing the same. Mustang, of course, neither needed a weapon nor carried one; Hawkeye wasn't sure whether this climate was a blessing to a pyrokinetic, or a curse. Nearly everything was damp... but because of that, there was no way they'd accidentally light a wildfire that would cut them off from the ship (not to mention do massive ecosystem damage).
They were half a mile from the ship when Hawkeye heard the cry: a tormented animal howl, followed by the violent crashing of some large shape through the brush. She barely had enough time to shout, "Get back!" and wheel to aim her gun at the foliage before the... thing emerged.
Her first fleeting thought when she saw it was that it must be injured; its uneven loping stride looked very much like a limp. Her second was that she'd better watch out for the fangs, but even more so for the ominously dripping claws on its forefeet. And then it was on them, and there was no more time to think about anything but the detached mental frame of aim, fire, fall back, aim, fire again.
The thing -- it looked something like a cross between a serpent and a badger, only enormously larger, nearly the size of a rhinoceros or a rhenshin -- was more resistant to disruptor fire than anything she'd encountered before. She ducked the swipe of a giant clawed paw, fell back to get out of the way, swung around to try to flank it and fired -- and saw out of the corner of her eye the flash that presaged one of Mustang's pyrokinetic attacks. The clearing blazed white-hot and then seared out red, and still, somehow, the creature kept coming, covered though it was in burns.
She saw Havoc pop a flash grenade and shout, "Eyes!", and she turned half away and pressed the heels of her hands over her closed eyes to block out the worst of the blinding flash. She counted to three, every muscle in her body ready for attack during that helpless second of blindness, and then opened them again. The flash grenade had done what none of their other attacks had managed, which was to say stalled the creature; it staggered, light-blind, and in that moment she aimed the disruptor firmly at the place where its spine met its skull and pulled the trigger.
The creature fell with a gust of expelled air. She fired again, directly into its skull through the vulnerable portal of its eyes. To be sure. There was no such thing as 'too safe.'
"Goddamn," Havoc said, and Mustang -- laughed.
"You can say that again," he said.
Breda -- brave man -- had gone over to the side of the dead creature, and was examining it. "Sir," he said. "This -- isn't a natural creature. It's a made thing."
"Mm?" Mustang said.
"Here." He pointed to the creature's legs, and sure enough, just as Hawkeye had half-noticed, there was something wrong with them. Only the limp wasn't due to an injury: the right front leg didn't quite match the others, as if it had belonged to another animal. The paw on that leg was a different shape, and the leg itself wasn't quite the right length.
"Alien fauna often looks odd -- " Mustang began, but Breda shook his head.
"I know," he said. "But I studied xenobiology at the academy, and I'm telling you: this isn't a weird alien critter. It's been made by someone."
Mustang grimaced, but didn't argue. Despite Breda's carefully-cultivated rough exterior, he was one of the most intelligent men Hawkeye had known; if he said he was confident, he was confident. Plus, once he'd pointed it out, it was easy to see. Alien biology was often peculiar, but it generally looked as though it was all of a piece. Even the heavily-furred trilaterally-symmetrical bodies of the Drachman species looked and moved more naturally than this thing had.
"A made creature," Mustang said, "a genetically engineered monster, straight out of the brush at us and not scared away even by fire. I'd bet you he was sent."
"There's one good thing, then," Havoc said, looking up from checking the charge on his disruptor.
"What, dare I ask?"
"We can presumably follow his path back to his master. And look." He gestured to the track of crushed bracken. "He left us a nice, clear path."
Two hours through the brush was wearying, even with the water and rations they'd brought; Hawkeye could feel her uniform clinging to her back with sweat. Breda called back intermittently to the ship, to check with Fuery and make sure their escape route was clear; otherwise they walked in silence, to conserve breath, until they came up over the rise and saw the compound.
Hawkeye immediately flattened herself behind a tree to keep from being seen... but it was clear from a moment's observation that no one was going to see them. Everyone seemed to be... occupied. Alphonse was disarming a combatant; she could vaguely hear the plaintive strains of his boyish voice, floating across the distance, insisting 'I'd rather not hurt you, just hold still, please -- '
"Looks like the Elric bomb has already detonated," Havoc said wryly. "Aren't you getting tired of showing up after all the excitement and doing cleanup, Colonel?"
Mustang only smiled, a thin smile to himself.
Edward, when they found him, was somewhat less than grateful. "What're you doing here, Colonel?" he demanded, his eyes narrowed. "I've got everything under control, thank you very much."
"You're welcome," Mustang said mildly, which only made Ed bristle more. "At any rate, it wasn't my idea to come."
"What th'hell do you mean?"
"Your brother sent a distress call." Mustang spread his hands. "We were simply coming... to your rescue."
It was a phrase calculated for maximum anger, and Hawkeye would have sworn that Ed levitated a few inches off the ground. Fortunately for all involved, Ed didn't seem to be sure whether he was more angry at Mustang for being an interfering jerk or at Alphonse for making the call. "We were managing just fine by ourselves, you didn't need to involve them -- "
"Brother," Al said wearily, "the scientists blew up our flyer. How exactly were you planning on getting out of here?"
" -- I would have figured something -- "
"Edward," Mustang interrupted. "All that aside, would you care to explain what happened here?"
Ed's glare was quite an eloquent answer, Hawkeye thought.
"Let me rephrase," Mustang said. "Would you rather explain now, or in a full document submitted to me by ansible of not less than ten thousand words?"
"Bastard," Ed muttered.
"With citations," Mustang added.
"All right, fine," Ed said. "You fight really dirty, you know that? I was following up some research about... well, genetic engineering. That was what lead me here first."
"We ran into one of the 'experiments' on the way in," Havoc said. "Damn near eviscerated us."
Ed winced. "I thought I'd got them all. -- Anyway, so I was looking into that, but I found out that what they were doing wasn't -- the genetic experiments were just a sideline. They were trying to find ways to enhance psionic ability, or even create it in people born without it."
Mustang caught his breath. Hawkeye felt her expression tighten. That would be -- even with the limitations they had, psionicists were valued highly, not least because no one could tell why some people could be psionicists and others couldn't, or why some people were stronger than others. If you could control that . . . .
" -- which would be... dicey enough on its own," Ed went on, "but the worst part was the way they were doing it." His expression had gone flat, his eyes shadowed.
"What were they doing, Ed?" Mustang asked, almost gently.
"Well," Ed said, "everyone knows there are certain chemicals the body generates during psionic exercise. They were...." He swallowed. "Murdering weak psionicists, processing their bodies somehow and injecting their refined... fluids into stronger psionicists."
Hawkeye's stomach turned, and she swallowed. "Where are they now?" she asked.
"Gone," Ed said, angrily. "I mean, we've got some here -- Al's still tying 'em up -- but they're all, like, lab assistants. Not the brains in charge. They... got away. And with our flyer destroyed, we couldn't chase."
"Who were they?" Mustang asked. "We need names."
Ed shook his head sharply. "I don't know who the lead guy was, but the head scientist was a man named Tucker."
"Tucker," Mustang said contemplatively. "Tucker."
***
"What d'you look so pleased for?" Havoc demanded. The five of them were sitting in a bar in the dubious comfort of Briggs Station, on the edge of Drachman space. Not nearly as nice a leave as Aquaroya, but at least the Drachman waiter brought the drinks coming regularly enough. "I've got bug bites on my -- "
"Tucker," Mustang said. "That's exactly the information I was hoping he'd get."
"You knew," Havoc said, and barked a laugh. "You knew he was going to -- honestly, boss, you could've given us some warning our vacation was going to be cut short."
"Edward's a clever young man. If any of you had acted strangely -- "
"Still," Havoc said, scratching his upper arm with a mutinous glare.
"If I'd tried to send him to figure out what was going on on Epsilon Five, he would have wriggled out of it. All I could do was point him in the right direction."
"And pull some strings," Hawkeye said softly.
"And pull some strings," Mustang confirmed.
"One of these days," Hawkeye said, "he's going to figure out you're manipulating him. And he's going to -- "
"Go thermonuclear," Havoc supplied.
Mustang laughed, but Hawkeye shook her head. "No," she said. "He'll run. He won't come back for direction, or for help. He'll run."
Mustang raised his glass of bourbon and regarded the view of the starfield through it. "Then we need to hope," he said, "that when that time comes, he's ready to run in the right direction."
***
Note: Poor Falman got cut; I didn't have it in me to keep track of one more character. This was a blast to write, in a very not-serious-at-all way; I hope you enjoyed it.