CH 4

4. From Space to the Earth and Back Again

A raid on a space colony could have been carried out simply by seizing a single control point, but when the time came the infiltration unit, under the flag of the Principality of Zeon’s Gihren Zabi and led by Commander Char Aznable, sortied two Zaku mobile suits to conduct guerilla warfare. Their objective was to reconnoiter the Federation’s mobile suit development team and capture the new machines.

Amuro was planning to leave for school when the colony sirens sounded, but Fraw Bow rushed him into hiding in an emergency shelter. It wasn’t built to protect against air raids, but it had to make do. However, Amuro felt that they weren’t safe there, and he intended to contact his father and arrange for them to be evacuated to a Federation ship, but as soon as he dashed out of the shelter he found himself staring up at the Zaku in front of him. 

The humanoid robotic weapon had a standing height of over twenty meters, and it was built like a tank. Its actions on the battlefield were exactly like those of the giants of legend. On top of that, it was a Zaku, said to be the crown jewel of the Zeon forces, and so the machine loving boy was simultaneously terrified and inspired. 

All of the scattered memories associated with mother complexes and the like quickly evaporated. Zeon’s amazing for building something like this! What kind of functionality does it have!? What kind of system drives the limbs!? He was gripped by fear, but he couldn’t help but observe.       

However.

As soon as the giant fired off its howitzer-like rifle, empty shell casings the size of drum cans dropping to the ground, Amuro realized that this place was a war zone, and that if he stayed here it would claim his life. The smell of gunpowder reminded him of something animalistic, and he guessed instinctively that people wouldn’t be able to see anything when there was fighting using a large quantity of it.

*KA-BANG! FWOOOOOOSH!!!* A single explosion killed a dozen people, leaving the survivors to writhe on the ground, their arms and legs shredded. Of course, the Zaku wasn’t targeting flesh and blood humans, but once a place became a battlefield this was the sort of thing that happened. 

Why!?

The destructive power of the Zaku’s rifle was extremely high, and as a result its effects were indiscriminate. However, the Zaku wasn’t currently equipped with ammunition powerful enough to destroy the colony itself. Call that wisdom. It was all thanks to Char’s considerations, but that meant nothing to the people here, dead and disemboweled.   

That’s just evil, right!?

Amuro saw Fraw Bow caught by the blast wave and knocked over. At that moment, the concept of a woman with a disgusting reproductive system didn’t exist in his head. Nor did a pesky, meddlesome, sister-like pain in the ass.

The only thing on his mind was,

Why are they using weapons in a place like this!?  

He snapped, very calmly. Maybe he was angry that he could no longer see a future here. More than that, everyone was going to die if this evil wasn’t stopped. It was unforgivable. It seemed like his thinking had focused outward. 

That’s why he ran. He wasn’t sure whether or not he did it to save everyone, but he ran to the Federation mobile suit testing site to look for his father. He asked every single member of the military he came across. You guys are the reason this is happening, so why don’t we get the mobile suit development team to do something to stop it?

At last, he found his father. 

But for some reason, Tem Ray was wearing a space-use normal suit. 

“Go to the port. Evacuate to the ship!” He yelled at Amuro. 

Amuro would later learn that his father had put on that space suit because he already knew the raid was coming. He ran again, wondering what he was going to do even if he made it to the ship. Intending to find Fraw first, he then spotted the white mobile suit lying horizontally on a platform trailer.  

“…What are you sleeping here for!?” He wanted to scold it. Looking at its pose, another image flashed through his head. A picture of the Buddha entering nirvana. There was no better description of the sleeping mobile suit, its white face gracefully turned up to the sky. Amuro felt like it was being much too carefree. 

It was almost like it was mocking him. Maybe he really was thinking of scolding it. He definitely wasn’t thinking that if he got inside he would be able to hide, or fight. Climbing up the access ladder, he reached the maintenance platform. At that moment, he felt a wave of pressure from behind. Huh!?

The Federation soldiers stationed on Side 7 had fired missiles to intercept the attackers. They might have been wire-guided, but the act of using missiles inside of a colony was nothing to make light of.       

Looking into the cockpit positioned inside the belly of the white mobile suit, it was like the vacant seat was saying, “Sit here.” The blinking lights on the instrument panel were yelling, “Do something.” As he slid into the cockpit, his attention was caught by a notepad sitting on top of the console, and once he recognized that it was a printed paper manual he skimmed through it. 

With that, he had an overall understanding of the white mobile suit. If the manual had been a computer, this would have been impossible without going through each of the menu headings. In the space age however, computers were no longer thought of as an absolute must for conceptualizing things, and the usage of analog materials like this manual had come to be preferred. Without understanding the basic logic of a computer, you wouldn’t be able to understand the meaning behind a single switch. 

This was the moment that Amuro came to a distressing decision. As long as the machine was sleeping it wouldn’t be able to do anything, so the first thing it needed to do was stand. But once it stood up it would attract attention, and the machine could be what Zeon’s Zakus were currently searching for. Just as he thought that, as he continued to flip through the manual, the enemy appeared.

Doesn’t it have any internal weapons!? Amuro faltered as he looked for the answer. The Zaku’s gun bellowed in front of him. However, the white mobile suit had an automatic defense system which activated if there was a pilot on board, and there was. The mobile suit raised its left arm to block the rifle fire. It was likely that the manipulators were fitted with Chobham armor. The fireball from the explosive projectile was brushed away, while the machine’s hand remained undamaged.     

“I see!” Without waiting for the smoke to clear, Amuro raised the mobile suit up, and then maneuvered it into grabbing the beam saber attached to its backpack. The heavy metal particles, heated to several thousand degrees, extended into a streak of light, taking the shape of a sword. It cut upward through the Zaku’s waist, piercing its main engine. The Zaku exploded.

*BOOOOOM!!!* The explosion, equal to a dozen or so tons of TNT, breached the inner layers of the colony that formed the ground and kept going through the outer wall. Amuro’s own father would be sucked out into space through the hole, but Amuro was unaware of that.   

With a cry of <You bastard!>, the second enemy charged towards him. It was a fact that the mobile suit known as a Zaku had shouted at him, and Amuro panicked.

“Ah!!!” Even though the first Zaku exploded, it was a relief that it had been in an uninhabited area of the colony and not one of the residential zones, and even though the second Zaku’s ferocious yell intimidated Amuro he still had time to think. He was able to instantly throw himself into his next thought, and the next. It was something that had never happened before. I can’t let it explode! Determined, he decided that he needed to do something about the enemy pilot. With his machine crouching low to the ground, he pointed his beam saber at the enemy cockpit, thrusting forward and then pulling back.

The Zaku collapsed. 

Amuro had two mobile suit kills in his first fight. Because of that, things would only continue to get more troublesome afterwards. A Federation officer ordered the white mobile suit to be withdrawn, and both it and Amuro were then put to work helping to retrieve the parts that had been scattered around the testing site and research facility.  The recovered equipment was to be brought to the “Trojan Horse,” a Federation assault cruiser that had arrived at the colony’s port. 

“I’m just an amateur. A student. It’s true that I might have taken the liberty of getting inside and moving it, but I’d like to get out now.”

“We don’t have any other pilots. I saw you take out those Zakus. That’s an impressive achievement. Go and guard the ship! Take a beam rifle.” An awfully youthful sounding voice, pitched with excitement, gave Amuro his orders. He would only learn it later, but that voice belonged to one Bright Noah. Bright was no more than an officer cadet, but at that moment he had been made acting captain of the ship codenamed the Trojan Horse. He hadn’t had a chance to rest either, and he ignored Amuro’s pleading as he tried to carry out the mission that had been given to him.

As everything else had unfolded, Char Aznable, commander of the cruiser that had sent the two Zakus, launched on his own and approached the Trojan Horse. The captain of the Federation ship had been killed in the ensuing skirmish. 

Placed in charge of the Trojan Horse, the officer cadet Bright Noah needed to get the white mobile suit and the refugees of Side 7 away from here. Amuro didn’t really understand the circumstances that had brought the refugees aboard the Trojan Horse, but he discovered Fraw Bow wandering the port with the other survivors and helped them find their way. With things being as they were, Amuro was taken aboard the Trojan Horse and ended up returning to Earth.

From the Federation’s perspective, there was no way they could remain on Side 7 now that their new mobile suits had been seen by Zeon eyes, and so it was necessary to move them as urgently as possible.  

The Trojan Horse was called that because its silhouette looked exactly like a toy wooden horse, and while it was said that the ship’s actual name was the White Base, there was no reason behind that other than its painted white hull, a customary color for space ships. 

When the Trojan Horse re-entered the atmosphere, Bright Noah still at the helm, it was attacked by Char, who was waiting for that exact moment and had pursued them in his Zaku, which had earned the nickname “The Red Comet.” However, Amuro engaged him in the white mobile suit and the ship was able to successfully retreat. Whether it was a fluke or not, it became another one of Amuro’s achievements. 

That was why the Earth Federation left the composition of the Trojan Horse as it was, even after retrieving the data on the practical tests undergone by the white mobile suit on Side 7. At the time they escaped the Red Comet, about half of the crew were civilians, but despite that they were taken by the Federation, without consent, to continue to serve as crew members. That went for Amuro as well, who was made into an official Federation pilot. It was the sort of local conscription that took place during times of crisis.

“Please don’t joke around! I’m scared enough as it is!”

“Your compatibility with the Gundam is good. Checking aptitude is going to be an important issue going forward, even for the military.”  

“Gundam?”

“Yes, the mobile suit’s name? You didn’t know that?”

The person relaying the orders from the top was Lieutenant Matilda Ajan, commander of the Medea supply corps. Faced with the lieutenant’s exceedingly businesslike, seamless replies, Amuro was unable to object.  

The lieutenant’s figure was on the slender side, but she exuded a feminine sweetness, and even though her lips were slightly too thin for his tastes he could feel a heat deep inside his core as he listened to her voice spill out from behind a layer of red lipstick, with just a touch of pink to it. He was also aware of his erection.

That brown uniform and officer’s cap really accentuated the Lieutenant’s bob!

There was no way Amuro could object, seeing how it was love at first sight. 

“I wouldn’t joke about something like this. Amuro. Looking at your achievements—we’d call it combat experience in the military–are you aware that they’re absolutely top-notch? It’s possible that you could be an ESPer.”     

It was a knockout blow.

“Even the EFF is interested in understanding your talents, which is why we’ve been collecting your data.”

“The military is?”  

“That’s right. Otherwise you’d have been put on trial for moving the Gundam on your own.”

Now that he knew the ridiculously attractive lieutenant seemed to have taken an interest in him, Amuro was hoping that he’d get to see her on the next supply run. With that he had lost all interest in Fraw Bow or anyone else.