At the Archangel's dock.
"Propellant has been loaded to ninety percent."
Hearing that report from the surviving engineers, the tension in Natarle Badgiruel's heart eased just a little.
It meant the Archangel was now capable of departing.
She looked at the screen ahead of her. A massive transport vehicle was driving this way.
As the camera zoomed in further, she could make out a familiar figure in the cab: her nemesis, Captain Murrue Ramius.
The fact that Murrue was still alive let Natarle breathe a little easier, but the information being reported to her filled her with gloom.
The Earth Alliance's G weapons numbered five in total. The enemy had stolen three, destroyed one, and left only one intact.
That was disastrous.
On top of that, there was another piece of news that might be even worse.
That strange fighter, while not belonging to ZAFT, did not seem to belong to the Earth Alliance either.
The reason was simple: that fighter had also attacked an Earth Alliance squad, destroying three mobile armors and a number of tanks.
That made Natarle feel even worse.
Once the heavy electromagnetic interference had disappeared, the Archangel had detected two ZAFT warships as well. Right after that came a sudden high-energy attack that instantly obliterated one of them.
And with the interference gone, the Archangel had also been able to detect the source of the weapon that had fired it.
More precisely, the Archangel's radar had scanned the source of the fired energy. It had not been visible on-screen, because the Archangel was still inside the colony and could not see it directly.
But the colony itself possessed some defensive systems, including reflective traps.
Once the interference ended, those surveillance feeds became available to her side. What they showed was that strange transformable mobile armor-fighter, in humanoid mode, operating what looked like an enlarged laser rifle about the size of a Gundam, and firing an attack that even the Archangel would never have been able to withstand.
That output far exceeded one of the weapons equipped to the G units, the 320mm Hyper Impulse Cannon.
That weapon could destroy a ZAFT warship in a single shot, yes, but it could not come close to practically vaporizing an entire ship.
Her rough estimate was that the weapon's power was at least fifty times greater than that of the 320mm Hyper Impulse Cannon Agni.
That already put it on par with the Archangel's main gun, the positron cannon, firing at full power.
"Ensign Badgiruel!!!"
A voice suddenly rang out in extreme alarm, and a new image appeared on the screen, causing Natarle's face to stiffen.
There were four of those special aircraft on the display, the same transformable type.
The lead unit was in humanoid form, while the other three remained in fighter mode, escorting it as they flew this way.
What made the situation even more troublesome was that there were two women riding on the lead unit.
Both of them were extremely troublesome people.
"Th-there's no mistaking it. That's Lacus Clyne, isn't it?"
"So it really is a ZAFT fighter."
"That can't be right. If it were ZAFT's, why would it attack ZAFT?"
The crew were confused.
Natarle was confused too.
"The blonde one... she looks kind of familiar."
"Princess Cagalli Yula Athha of Orb," Natarle said flatly, identifying her at once.
How had those two ended up together?
And from the look of it, neither of them was being held hostage.
Wait...
"Could that fighter belong to Orb?"
One crewman voiced exactly what Natarle herself had been thinking.
If that were true, then it would make sense.
Both the Earth forces and ZAFT forces had been making a mess on neutral Orb's territory, so it would be perfectly natural for Orb's armed forces to attack them.
"Ensign Badgiruel, what do we do?"
One of the crew asked in a tense voice, implicitly asking whether they should point the Archangel's weapons at the approaching craft.
"Don't do anything stupid, Ensign Badgiruel!"
That was a transmission from Murrue. Now that she was close enough, she had naturally seen what was happening too.
"I know!"
Of course Natarle would not do something as foolish as reveal hostile intent and confront the other side with weapons in a situation like this.
Leaving aside the fact that the enemy was not making an overtly aggressive approach, if they fired first, who could say whether there were more fighters out there using optical camouflage?
Who could say whether some other terrifying oversized laser cannon was already aimed at them?
So they could only watch as the craft entered through the dock's half-open hatch, with the lead unit descending to land.
Then it was time to go out and meet them.
"Why are Earth military personnel here? Just like the ZAFT military, are you here to steal Orb's property too?"
The accusation that greeted her head-on left Natarle, who had just been about to speak, momentarily stunned.
Then she understood.
Of course. Princess Cagalli of Orb did not know the full story. She assumed the Archangel and the G weapons belonged to Orb.
"Princess Cagalli Yula Athha, these do not belong to Orb. This is an Earth Alliance warship. Please-"
"Sorry, but this does belong to Orb. It was clearly built here in Orb. Are Earth Alliance soldiers really shameless enough to tell a lie like that?"
Cagalli cut her off without hesitation.
"Princess Cagalli, perhaps we should speak privately..."
"Whatever you have to say, say it here."
Interrupted again, Natarle's expression darkened slightly.
Say it here?
In front of PLANT's princess?
"Ensign Natarle Badgiruel, correct?"
The songstress spoke up.
"You want to tell Miss Cagalli that this is a new battleship jointly developed in secret by the Earth Alliance and Orb, don't you?"
"It seems Her Highness the Princess of PLANT knows quite a lot about us."
Natarle's tone remained calm, but the sarcasm in it was unmistakable.
Then again, it made sense.
Given how thoroughly ZAFT had targeted this place, a great deal of information had obviously leaked already. It was hardly surprising that this princess would know it as well.
"I wouldn't know. The new warship Archangel, and the G weapons, the Gundams, are all..."
As the Princess of PLANT continued speaking, Natarle's expression grew darker and darker.
She understood now.
Inside the Earth Alliance itself, very few people even knew about the construction of the Archangel and the G units. Hardly anyone knew they belonged to the Earth Alliance.
And worse, that information could not be made public.
Because they had been built on a neutral satellite.
If they forcibly insisted that these were Earth Alliance assets, then what they would be telling the outside world was this: the Earth Alliance had secretly infiltrated and taken control of Heliopolis.
That would be an extremely disgraceful act, one that would earn the hostility of neutral nations.
Even many of the nations currently aligned with the Earth Alliance would likely be shaken by it.
So this princess's plan was to forcibly assign ownership of the Archangel and the G weapons to Orb, turning them into Orb property.
Most likely, Princess Cagalli Yula Athha had been persuaded by Princess Lacus and brought here precisely for that reason - to use her status as Orb's princess to seize the Archangel and the G weapons by force.
How despicable.
And just then -
Bang!
The sudden gunshot was like tossing a spark into a storehouse full of explosives.
Everything ignited.
The sound had come so abruptly it was like thunder exploding right beside their ears.
It nearly stopped their hearts.
By now, everyone aboard the Archangel understood what the other side wanted.
There was no way they could hand over the Archangel.
The instant their intentions became clear, the atmosphere became oppressively tense.
It was as if the air itself had filled with gunpowder, waiting only for a spark.
And that spark had just appeared.
A sudden gunshot.
No one knew who had fired it, but it could easily make both sides think the other had struck first, triggering a fatal misjudgment and an immediate bloodbath.
At the same time, in Natarle's field of vision, the man who had been standing beside Lacus Clyne - the pilot who had come down from that humanoid fighter - abruptly moved.
He had originally been standing slightly behind Lacus and Cagalli, between the two of them.
Then, in an instant, he seemed to flash right in front of Lacus.
More importantly, his hand looked as if it had intercepted something in midair.
Natarle's pupils widened.
From her angle, she could actually see that there was something in his palm.
It was a deformed lump of metal.
A bullet, twisted out of shape by a high-speed impact, had been stopped dead in his hand.
The reason it had not penetrated him was obvious. The combat suit he wore clearly had bulletproof properties.
But to actually perceive the bullet and get a hand in front of it in time...
That was not something a human being should be able to do.
Natarle had no time to dwell on it.
A sharp, tearing sound split the air and snapped her back to herself as multiple laser beams fired from the hovering fighter behind him.
Most of the beams shot into the area behind her, but two struck places still within her line of sight: the blind, shadowed corners on either side of the hatch leading out of the warship.
As those two lasers hit, the flash illuminated two armed men holding guns, both of them appearing ready to fire rocket launchers.
Too bad for them.
Before they could pull the trigger, the lasers sliced through the launchers and severed their bodies at the same time.
But that was only the beginning.
Natarle's eyes had barely registered those two being killed - less than half a second ago, perhaps not even a tenth of a second - when the man in the combat suit, who should still have remained within the corner of her vision, seemed to vanish into thin air.
By the time she focused on him, she felt a rush of air brush past one side of her face.
Something had just shot past her at incredible speed, stirring the air as it went.
She sensed it immediately.
Something was behind her.
So she spun around at once and saw a blurred figure disappearing, so fleeting it almost felt like a hallucination.
And where that blurred figure vanished, a second lieutenant like herself entered her sight.
He had drawn his pistol and was in the act of raising it to a ninety-degree angle.
Then he froze.
In the next second, after what looked like the blink of an eye, the hand holding the pistol suddenly split cleanly in two, gun and all.
No.
His body split diagonally in two as well.
Once the severed halves shifted apart, blood burst out and sprayed all over Natarle.
At that moment, her pupils trembled.
She did not understand what had just happened.
Then more dull thuds of bodies, or pieces of bodies, hitting the ground snapped her back to reality. She realized it was not just one person who had been cut apart, but three, all of them among the people who had come down from the Archangel.
The crowd finally reacted and stumbled away in terror, as if trying to avoid some invisible monster.
That movement opened a path directly in front of Natarle, allowing her to see the man in the combat suit standing before a soldier who was also holding a rifle.
That soldier stared at him in pure horror.
He stared at the arm raised slightly above his head.
In that hand was a short blade.
In the next instant, at a speed the naked eye could barely follow, that blade came down.
Then the man in the combat suit turned around and faced Natarle, calmly stepping toward her.
When he took that first step, the tiny motion it produced was enough for the soldier behind him to split cleanly into two.
At that moment, fear began racing through every inch of Natarle's body.
Especially when he passed right beside her.
It felt as if all strength was draining out of her.
"F-for the sake of our blue and pure world, die with us, monster!"
That voice was full of terror and madness.
Natarle turned toward it and saw that it was one of the maintenance crew. The man had thrown open his coat, revealing explosives strapped across his entire upper body, and was rushing forward.
Bang!
That was not the sound of an explosion.
It was a deep gunshot, like the report of a heavy sniper rifle.
The instant the sound reached her ears, Natarle saw the crazed maintenance worker seem to flash with light, and then vanish.
Not literally vanish into nothing, but disappear amid tiny sparks, as though his body had been instantly vaporized by unimaginable heat.
It really did seem to be heat-induced vaporization, because the floor where he had been standing was glowing red, as if the metal itself had nearly melted.
She simply could not understand exactly how it had happened.
And before the shock of this suicidal ambush could deepen the terror already spreading through her, Natarle mechanically turned her head toward the source of the shot.
There he was.
The man who had just walked past her.
He was holding an unfamiliar firearm, and a faint wisp of smoke seemed to be drifting from its muzzle.
It was with that gun that he had erased a man with a single casual shot.
"All right. You can announce it now, Miss Cagalli."
"Huh?"
Cagalli, who had been scared nearly witless, still had not recovered from Kain's reminder.
How much time had passed since that first sudden gunshot?
Probably not even as long as it took an ordinary person to draw a single natural breath.
And yet in that instant, every hostile threat that had burst into action had already been eliminated.
The fighter taking out targets, that she could at least understand.
But Kain's own movements made her swallow hard.
No human being should be able to move that fast.
And he had cut people in half.
Human muscle, human bone, the clothes they wore, even their guns - all of it had been sliced cleanly apart like tofu.
How terrifying did his strength have to be to do that?
At that moment, Cagalli finally started to understand why the people who had tried to attack Lacus earlier had screamed so miserably, so full of terror.
Because the women called 2B and A2 were not human either.
They must have been cut to pieces.
Back then, while riding on the motorcycle, she had glimpsed some strangely mangled remains. She had thought part of the bodies were merely hidden by weeds.
Clearly, they had really been dismembered.
Right.
Lacus had joked with her earlier, saying he belonged to the third category.
Th-this couldn't actually be true... could it?
(End of Chapter)
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