Inside the Archangel's dock, the explosion had thrown the gravity system out of balance, and things were floating everywhere.
That included human corpses.
"Because of the intense electromagnetic interference, we can't establish contact with Captain Ramius!"
"Damn it!"
The one grinding her teeth was Natarle Badgiruel.
The sudden explosion was obviously ZAFT's doing. They must have secretly infiltrated the area and planted bombs.
And the timing of that bomb had been deliberate. It was not enough to damage the Archangel itself, which made it obvious they wanted to seize the ship intact. But everyone outside the Archangel was finished.
They had chosen the perfect moment as well: just as the captain and the other key personnel of this new warship were about to board. Nearly all of them had been blown to pieces.
Natarle, on the other hand, had been relatively lucky. She had already been inside the Archangel's hangar at the time, urging the maintenance crew to prepare to receive the G equipment.
Now, she had ordered the survivors to begin powering up the Archangel immediately. They could not just sit and wait for the enemy to attack and capture the ship.
"Ensign Badgiruel, ZAFT GINNs!"
The report came in over a wired line. After the communications officer outside relayed the warning, the observed footage was transmitted inside as well.
On the screen, six ZAFT mobile suits were passing through Port 22 and entering the colony. And judging by their course, they were heading straight here.
"Just who are the traitors?"
"They've obviously been investigating us for a while to prepare something like this."
Some of the personnel erupted in anger. A few had even begun eyeing the people around them with suspicion.
Natarle knew she had to put a stop to that.
This was not the time to let suspicion explode into chaos.
Just as she was about to issue a cold, firm command, the GINNs on the screen suddenly began acting strangely.
They seemed to be wary of something. One of them even opened fire at empty air.
What was going on?
Everyone was baffled, but less than a second later, a fighter no one had ever seen suddenly revealed itself out of empty space and returned fire on the GINN that had attacked it.
In an instant, that GINN was hit by the other craft's lasers, but it did not fall apart.
Instead, its body was left covered in slash marks.
It was like a human body being cut by a blade, where the wound had not quite split through the muscle and reached the internal organs.
Even so, it was terrifying. If those lasers had not swept past so quickly, and had instead stayed on target a little longer, they probably could have cut straight through.
So the GINN that had survived the initial attack, along with the others, immediately moved to open fire.
But then something bizarre happened.
At that speed, the fighter should have shot straight past them.
Instead, it suddenly seemed to break apart, as if it could no longer withstand its own velocity.
"Wh-what?!"
"That...!"
"It transformed!"
Even Natarle muttered in astonishment.
It had not broken apart at all.
It had transformed into a humanoid form.
In that instant, the machine's speed dropped sharply, yet it displayed mobility greater than a GINN's. In a flash, it fired before the GINNs could.
The screen turned white.
When it fired, a dazzling burst of light erupted around the GINNs.
Then, as the light faded, the scene that emerged left everyone staring in disbelief.
"What kind of weapon is that, Ensign Badgiruel?" one soldier asked blankly.
"I don't know."
It was deeply unsettling.
After transforming, the machine was only around seven or eight meters tall, probably not even half a GINN's height, and the weapon it fired did not look like a beam weapon at all. It looked like it was shooting physical rounds.
At first they had thought they were flash rounds meant to blind the GINNs.
But once the light faded, the condition of the GINNs that came back into view made even Natarle swallow hard.
Of the six GINNs, one was completely intact.
The other five looked as though most of their bodies, apart from the cockpit sections, had been turned into molten iron.
That was usually something only high-energy beam weapons could do. But that transformed fighter had not fired a high-energy beam. It had fired something more like flash rounds.
So what kind of ammunition was that?
When the one remaining intact unit finally snapped out of it, another laser shot came and sliced off its weapon, almost as if the enemy were toying with it.
So the GINN panicked and fled back toward the port.
...
"Damn it, damn it. Bastard, bastard!"
"You're actually playing with us like this..."
"I'm going to kill you..."
Broken, unraveling voices kept ringing through the comm channel.
As a result, one of the personnel on the bridge could only shake his head at the masked Commander Le Creuset behind him.
Clearly, that soldier had already suffered a complete mental breakdown. He could no longer even respond to the desperate calls from his side.
But from those shattered words, they could still tell one thing: he had encountered a terrifying enemy. In almost no time at all, six GINNs had been reduced to a single survivor fleeing for his life.
"Commander Le Creuset, are we still proceeding with the mission?"
The one asking was the captain of the Vesalius, Captain Ades, speaking to the overall commander of this operation, Rau Le Creuset.
"Has anything come out?" Rau asked the GINN units standing by outside the colony in open space.
"Commander Le Creuset, we haven't observed anything."
"Nothing?"
That was wrong.
If the enemy could destroy five GINNs in an instant, there was no reason to let the one broken survivor escape.
Unless they had deliberately let one live as a warning?
No. Rau's instincts told him that was not it.
"Deactivate the heavy electromagnetic interference!"
That interference did not just affect the enemy. It affected them as well. Their radar performance had been heavily impaired, and their effective detection range had been drastically reduced.
Most of the GINNs' reports could only rely on direct observation through their optical systems.
"Understood!"
As soon as the interference was lifted, more and more targets began appearing on the warship's radar. Those were the colony's own defensive forces.
"Auror Unit is being recovered."
"Hm?"
Rau shot to his feet.
Because on the recovery monitor feed, he saw some kind of metallic device embedded in the back of that GINN.
At a glance, it was obviously not a fragment from an explosion.
It was something like a needle, deliberately fired into the unit.
"Eject the Auror Unit immediately!"
Rau barked the order on the spot.
Almost at the exact same moment, an abnormally shrill alarm echoed throughout the Vesalius.
The radar had detected a massive energy reaction.
And it was already incoming.
In the blink of an eye, the escort ship traveling ahead of the Vesalius was swallowed by an enormous beam, which also punched a two-hundred-meter-wide hole straight through the asteroid beside it.
Clearly, that needle had not been an explosive.
It had been a targeting device.
That sight sent a chill through almost everyone aboard the Vesalius. The escort ship had simply been erased.
At the same time, they were thankful that the Auror Unit had not been recovered into the Vesalius itself.
Otherwise, they would have been the ones wiped out.
"Captain Ades, inform Athrun and the others to withdraw from Heliopolis immediately!"
After issuing that order, Rau fixed his gaze on a newly popped-up image.
It was a long-range capture.
A bizarrely shaped machine was operating a device even larger than its own body, a high-energy beam weapon that looked nearly comparable in size to a mobile suit.
An anti-ship weapon, then.
Oh?
The enemy suddenly vanished.
Optical camouflage?
Interesting.
Very interesting.
So the Earth Alliance has something like this as well.
(End of Chapter)
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