Child Soldiers
by KuriQuinn

“What do you mean, the Vice Foreign Minister’s been assassinated!”

“Exactly what I said,” Shayne replied, taking a loud sip of coffee. Even outside, the scent reached me at a faster and stronger rate than normal. “Our informants have told us that OZ has claimed responsibility for the act, even though to the public they’re chief advocate has gone on television and on the military channels to say it was a rebel colonist or some other rot – excellent cover considering anti-colonist sentiment is running rampant right about now. The Dutchner Association isn’t exactly helping the image – they’ve increased production of arms since that assassination.”

“Why am I not surprised,” I sighed loudly, leaning back against the outer wall of the carrier. The night was crisp and from what I could hear inside, most of the mechanic were finishing up their work and turning in. Duo was gone; he had left for a mission earlier that day and not returned yet, which led me to believe that it was either a complicated task that he had been assigned to or he had been killed.

“Tobias Dutchner is refusing to comment on it, but there are certain L3 colonists that are questioning his motives and alliance – a lot of them are also blaming him for the decrepit state of the colonies. They say he spends too many resources trying to locate that Adler kid than keep up peace or the appearance of peace on the colonies,” Shayne stared up at the overcast sky. I couldn’t see her expression, but the tone in her voice suggested some underlying motive.

I pretended I couldn’t pick up on it and instead glanced out into the darkness ahead of me. Everything was pitch black, an empty nothingness that I was used to. The air smelled heavy, like fog and even without my eyes I could tell that the weather was the calm after the storm. For the first time in months I had been caught off-guard by the blind spell and needed an hour or two to collect myself.

Shayne was obviously not in the mood to beat around the bush. “Since Darlian’s assassination I think it’s a good idea if you put some more effort into this whole operation – specifically when it comes to the DA.”

I shot a practiced piercing look in her direction. “Why’s that?”

“Well, you know how these people operate, I’m sure,” she replied smoothly and I could hear her shifting slightly from her position. “Which is why you’re better suited than all the others for this particular mission. And besides – you were the one that decided to come here all by yourself without a plan. I figure, now you have an actual reason to be on Earth.”

I was not in the mood for Shayne’s mocking. “Gee, thanks.”

“No problem – which is why some of those parts in there are for you. I’m sure you can figure out where they go all by your self, right Red Riding Hood?” there was a grin in her voice and I listened to her standing up. “Sibs is getting everything ready for you so you don’t have to spend too much time on everything – it would be best for you if you get that heap fixed within the week. We need you operational.”

“There you go with that we stuff again,” I grumbled, standing up with practiced ease and pretending to look around. “You still have yet to tell me which we you’re talking about.”

“Ah-ah-ah, that’s need-to-know,” Shayne chided, “And you don’t need to know.” She started walking back into the hangar and I followed, my mind recreating the path I usually took around the carrier to keep me from running into anything. “Back to what I was just saying – you’ll receive your first mission in week, and how juicy it is depends on how far you’ve gotten with the piece of crap you call a gundam.”

“Hold on a second,” I called after her, stopping suddenly, “How do you know what mission I’ll be getting? And why do you sound like you’re not going to be around here?”

“Smart girl,” I heard her shift up ahead and presumably look in my direction, “Since the Darlian Assassination, my position’s changed a little. I need to do a little recon work and figure out what everyone’s next move is going to be – talking to the higher-ups would probably be a plan too. Now stop with the bloody questions – I’m your superior for now and I don’t need you challenging me at every turn.”

“I take orders from no one,” I told her hotly.

She laughed bitterly, “That changes today, Red Riding Hood – and lose the sunglasses at night, it’s just creepy, mate.”

And I heard her walk away, muttering about idiotic kids that didn’t know their place.

I was too tired to go after her to argue and my head felt as though someone had just blown it open with a remote detonator. I had left my drugs at St-Gabriel’s and the stuff located in the med bay was not even strong enough to heal menstrual cramps, let alone the massive migraines that I suffered from. All I could do for now was put up with it in silence until I could procure some strong painkillers.

Since arriving on the carrier, I slept in Hades cockpit. There were no rooms here for anyone who wasn’t a mechanic and if there were, I wasn’t about to merit one. A lot of the mechanics resented my presence and I had a feeling one or two of them might have been colonists or at least been on the colonies and recognized me. Sleeping in a hangar is not the most comfortable sleep, nor the most restful – but it was better than nothing.

The next morning Shayne was gone. I knew this not because my sight had returned, but because she usually searched me out and loudly, sometimes physically dragging me out of my suit. Instead of the loud and annoying older girl, Duo had returned and I could hear him doggedly yelling orders to the mechanics who were overseeing the repairs to his suit below.

Before I got ready to jump down and go find him, my fingers brushed against something that hadn’t been in there before.

Curious and slightly startled, considering I should have awoken at the slightest indication that there was someone in my suit, I ran my fingers over the flat, rectangular object. Within moments I could tell that the leather-bound object was a book, which confused me even more. Bound books were rare these days, a precious commodity since the world’s literature and information had been converted to the internet for preservation and because of the toll they took on the environment. Only someone very rich or very influential could come by a book, especially one such as this. It was old; I could smell the sour mildew of the pages and feel the parched, waxy texture of the insides of the cover. It was hardcover, which was even rarer in books of antiquity.

And then I received the greatest shock of all; as I ran my fingers over the pages in wonder, the tips hit across bumped and raised surfaces – Braille.

I was so stunned that I pulled back, the book toppling to the floor of my consol.

‘Who could…?’

I knew immediately it was Shayne, for the simple reason that no one else could have possibly known about my handicap, other than Heero – and for all I knew, Heero could be dead. I knew that J’s people hadn’t publicized my blindness, considering if they had I would have had to worry more about people coming after me. So how in the name of whatever power was above us did that girl find out?

Absently I reached down for the book again, running my fingers over the leather cover in amazement; ‘Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm.’

Children’s and House-tales by the Grimm brothers. It was even in German.

How can one person just know so much? I was trembling now as I turned the pages, feeling the letters raised up to meet me. I had never owned something like this; just something so normal and childish, but human all at the same time. These were children’s stories and fairytales that I had never even bothered to care about learning.

The first page prickled at my fingers as I read them, almost able to see the words in my head: ‘Rotkäppchen’.

Little Red Riding Hood.

I almost laughed.

I completely forgot about everything reading the book of fairytales. I was so drawn into them I almost didn’t hear Duo calling for me or crawling up the suit to come get me, nearly showing off the Braille fairytale book in the process.

When I finally left the cockpit of Hades and set foot on the floor, I heard him start his way over and half-laughingly, half-bitterly comment, “You’re still here?”

I stuck out my tongue in the direction of his voice and pretended to yawn, as though just waking up. “You’re still alive?”

He snorted. “Touché – anyway, hurry up and get your gear together. We’ve got a mission.”

I jumped, staring in surprise in his direction. “What?”

“You heard me, kiddo,” he said loudly, his footsteps and more silent tones indicating that he was walking away from me. “Recon mission – you and me. Quality time, huh?”

“Don’t you mean, which one of us is going to end up dead first?” I yelled back at him.

(-)

The rain and sleet slapped at my already worn face, whipping it raw. I wondered if perhaps my skin wasn’t bleeding from the abuse it was receiving from the elements on top of the wounds I’d gotten five days ago when we first arrived in the forested mountain area where we had been stationed.

The Kaidan supplement base was rumored to be under OZ control as well as a current stronghold for certain members of the Dutchner Association. Duo and I had received information that currently a band of guerrilla warriors were laying siege to the place but the battle remained a stalemate. Strategically, Kaidan was not a place of great importance to the organization that we were working for, but they did hold key information as to where other high ranking OZ officials were and we would need them to flush out the rest of the organization.

The plan was for Duo to infiltrate the building and hook bugs into the system, allowing me to hack into it by remote access and gain whatever information we needed to know. He was then to lay the charges that I would detonate from afar. The plan was, in theory, gold.

Except for the fact that we didn’t like each other and that I knew from experience how wrong everything could go from one little miscalculation or unprecedented factor.

“Go over it again.”

“Come on,” he groaned at me, looking back through the sleet. His long hair was pulled back and stuffed under his cap to keep it from getting wet, but I knew that the flimsy material was nothing to keep Duo’s precious locks safe from the elements. Again a wondered why he didn’t just cut his hair, but kept myself from asking – every time he did he gave me a different story anyhow, it wasn’t worth the bother.

“Just do it,” even though I had always been the slacker, the operative that was less inclined to stick to the mission parameters, Heero’s meticulousness had rubbed off on me – apparently so had his surliness, because Duo was glowering and mumbling things about me that didn’t sound very friendly at the moment. “Look, do you want to be out here another three hours if this doesn’t go as planned? Or if we screw it up, do you want whoever’s running the show to send us on an even worse mission? Like black-fly season in Canada?”

He snorted, shaking his head at me and then sighed, “You’re annoying, you know that?”

“You’re not the first to tell me that – game plan.”

“Fine – twenty minutes to hack the computer,” he recited impatiently, wrapping his arms around himself to keep warm. Even though we had been provided with clothing and stolen some OZ officers khaki uniforms, we were far from warm. “Thirty-five minutes and twenty-three seconds to lay the charges. Ten minutes to get the hell out of there before you blow them.”

I nodded, ignoring his attitude and trying to come up with any scenarios that might end up changing the mission parameters. “With the computers and remote systems bugged, we can return and move at will to sabotage other parts of the complex later. They’ll think all we did was try to get rid of the development wing – they shouldn’t even check the files for tampering.”

Duo grumbled. “I still think it’d be a lot easier to just go in with our suits and serve up some OZ sashimi. The place is going to be swarming with troops once we start blowing things up – and you said shouldn’t check, as in there might be a way for them to?”

“You’re not listening,” I sighed, leaning back against the rock which was digging into my back, “Safeguard one: the charges are a diversion to distract from the real goal. Safeguard two: said charges are being laid all the way across the facility, remember? Safeguard three – I don’t need to tell you to leave false entries in case they do check their system, do I?”

I looked up to notice that he was mocking me, fashioning his fingers into a bunch and moving them in time with my lips. I stopped talking and stared at him until he clued into the fact that I’d noticed and put his hands down, grinning sheepishly.

I continued to stare at him for the longest time and then out of nowhere, I don’t even remember why I did it, I reached out and struck him. The blow landed on the side of his face because he just managed to move out of the way. He swore and picked himself up, throwing himself at me and before were knew it, the two of us were rolling around on the ground, beating whatever part of the other person that we came in contact with.

Twice we slipped on the mud and rocks and nearly went tumbling down the drop, but it didn’t stop either of us. Even though I was the better fighter, he was stubborn, refusing to give in. It was five minutes into our mission plans that we finally came to our senses, glaring at each other, out of breath.

“We have to move quickly,” I told him, ignoring the split lip and throbbing bruises on my face.

“Yeah,” he nodded, spitting out some blood and what I think was a tooth. He sent me an unimpressed grin. “I’ll beat the crap out of you later.”

After that mission, we worked better with one another. I don’t know if it was because we had assessed each other’s abilities and come down with neither of us being a threat or if we had unconsciously worked through the barrier that eight years had created. All I know was that we kind of agreed to disagree. There were nor references to anything that had happened in the past, our “business” relationship was just that; the ‘here-and-now’ type.

Sometimes Duo came close to talking about what life had been like for him on the streets; he would stop himself before he actually did, as though referring to it might invite questions or cause him to ask me about my past. I still don’t know what I would have done if he came straight out and asked me where the hell I’d been after leaving L2.

What I did realize about Duo after a few weeks of living with him and being his unofficial partner was how definitely he had changed since I had last seen him. It was a little scary, considering at first when I’d met up with him he had seemed to be that same person, just older and more mature. But when I watched how he battled or the guarded way that he joked around with the mechanics on Howard’s ship, I realized that the little boy I knew from so long ago was dead; a ghost.

What threw people off was his cavalier, laid-back attitude. The disarming smile and wide, innocent looking eyes that made you think upon first impression, ‘wow, this guy’s really nice’ and just taking them for face value. I think I was one of the few people that could look into Duo’s eyes, really look and see through the disarming wide-eyed, pseudo smile and understand the complete and utter hatred that broiled beneath their surface. It was enough to give me nightmares and memories of my own half-life, my own incomplete existence.

Sometimes, Duo terrified me. It was just the way he went about his days, easily and calm, collected; sipping a coffee or eating a chocolate bar, singing loud, off-key rock music or playing video games in the rec. room of the carrier, as though there was no war going on outside. He treated it as though it was just another job he had to do. He was able to completely separate his life and feelings towards certain things; almost as though there were two completely different personalities behind the jester’s mask. The fun, fake cheerful Duo on the outside and the bitter, horrifying murderer that he became on the battlefield.

Both sides scared me – I didn’t understand the jester; the concept of ‘having fun’ was just a façade to myself, a jargon or verbal cliché I used to try to sound more normal. The murderer was so akin to me, such a parallel and maybe more, considering he had lost so much, that I shivered to think what might happen if this boy ever became my enemy – a feat that considering the war we fought, could happen at any second, whenever the puppeteers pulling our strings decided on whim to change us.

Maybe he sensed my uncertainty or my recoil, because after a while he started approaching me more, treating me like more than a mission partner. I’m not saying our relationship went beyond that, but he had me participating in activities that couldn’t even be linked to our missions. He called it ‘being pals’. I called it nerve racking.

It was exactly the case of him coercing me into playing card games with him or his virtual games. He would say that he was bored and demand that I entertain him or keep him occupied. I knew he was stubborn and would probably keep on at me until he got his way and usually gave in almost immediately, unless I was busy with Hades or the one time that I experienced a particularly nasty blind spell. I told him I had a massive migraine and couldn’t go into the light, which was partially the truth - he gloated at me the entire week about how he hadn’t been sick a day in his life.

Eventually, though, I began playing the games by myself, when I wasn’t reading the book of Fairy Tales that Shayne had left me. The first story I read had been about Little Red Riding Hood, of course – I finally understood why Shayne constantly called me that. Other than that, though, the story had little resemblance to my life and I found it boring and dull. I did, however, like the stories of Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Ravens. The idea of the down-trodden or bewitched girl making it through and showing the world appealed to me. I didn’t take to the romance though, finding it silly and stupid. Obviously these stories had been written centuries ago in a time where something like ‘love’ still existed.

If there were love in our world, there would never have been any war, I decided. And I would never have been put through everything I had lived through so far.

“New mission.”

“Uh huh,” I replied, squinting at the petite view screen that displayed a turbo-modified race car burning up the track. My fingers whizzed over the controls, intent on finding the perfect rhythm to make the on-screen car go faster without jeopardizing precision and path, twisting the joy-stick in various directions as I did. I was a seconds away from beating Duo’s high score.

The view screen switched off.

“What the hell!” I demanded, looking up. Duo stood near the view screen, holding the socket-plug in his hands and smirking at me with amusement.

“It’s for you.”

I glared and he handed me over a portable view-screen, which I grabbed rather jerkily and stared down at. For a moment I couldn’t make out the flurry of neon-green code running past my eyes. After taking a moment to make my brain stop focusing on car games and on the fate of the war, the message became clear.

‘Infiltrate Alliance Production Facility. Copy all data located on mainframe. Terminate facility.”

A bunch of co-ordinates and provisos were located underneath, but I ignored them for the moment. Looking up at Duo angrily, I demanded, “What kind of shitty, girl-guide mission is that?”

“One that they want you to do, obviously,” Duo smirked. “What? They got you cleaning toilets, little girl?”

“Better than kissing ass, little boy,” I shot back. “I’m going to need a plane. Possibly a speeder, if you’ve got one.”

“Hey, you helped to steal my parts, what makes you think I’m going to lend you a plane too?”

“Because you’re a nice person and if you don’t I’ll kill you and take it anyway?”

“Sure, go ahead and try.”

“I’m not kidding.”

“Neither am I.”

We stared at each other, long and hard.

“I’ll go get the plane for you,” he said with a sigh.

“Great – I’m going to go take a shower.”

He paused in front of the door, turned and looked at me incredulously. “Isn’t there some kind of defeating purpose in showering before a mission?”

“Are you joking?” I asked wryly, “According to Shayne, there’s an entire force of OZ that can tell there’s a spy around based on scent.”

He snorted.

“Hope you didn’t use all of the cold water,” I said lightly, more of a jest than anything else as I headed in the direction of the showers.

“I didn’t. But I did use the three minutes of lukewarm water the malfunctioning water heater around here produces.”

I winced. “Jerk.”

(-)

I felt like killing whoever had sent the mission by the time I got back to the hanger. The mission she’d sent me on had posed no danger, other than the fact he’d known it was a nuclear facility and I’d almost actually blown it up. I mean, I was all for colonial independence and stuff like that, but causing a nuclear war while we were in the middle of an arms war was not something on my mind. In the end, all I did was slip in undetected, make a copy of the relevant information and send the missiles packing on a one-way trip to the middle of the ocean.

“Bastards…gonna give ‘em a piece of my mind,” I snarled as I jumped out of the cockpit of the plane and landed on hard ground. The engineers sent me weird glances but I ignored them as I approached my suit. Duo’s voice interrupted me and he lifted himself downward on the cable-lift.

“New parts arrived while you were gone. I took the liberty of helping you out a bit,” he grinned. “Even though technically you already stole from me…”

“Shut up, Maxwell, I have people maim and destroy,” I replied, yanking the cable out of his hand and letting myself be lifted up towards the cockpit.

“A ‘thank you’ would have been enough!” he called up after me, before muttering something under his breath and disappearing back into the hanger.

In reality, I was extremely grateful to Duo, but at the moment, the rebel alliances were annoying me. Did they think that because I wasn’t part of the original mission that they could trick me into doing their dirty work and then claiming they had no relationship to me? I didn’t know anyone who was in on it, other than Shayne, and she didn’t seem like the type to send me on a nuclear war inducing mission just for money. Maybe send me off as a sacrifice for money, but never anything that would kill more people than myself.

The only person I could even think of that might have had something to do with the mission was Dr. J, however far behind me I had thought his influence had been. Although I couldn’t reach him directly, I sent a rather colorful message as well as a few specifically chosen computer viruses to keep his hands full for a few hours.

I didn’t see Duo for the rest of the day, and fell asleep in my console at around two-thirty the next morning, only to be awoken at five with an incessant beeping surrounding me. It looked as though J had managed to debug the system and tried to send me a reciprocal virus.

The next mission that I was sent on stands out in my mind, not only because it was the last mission before disaster reared its ugly head, but because it was the first time I was reunited with Heero again after helping him steal the parts to Duo’s Gundam. The target was an OZ supplies base in the North Pacific, a large facility that exported to most of the other small bases on the coast.

It was also the first time that I was expected to take up the flight controls of my second-rate gundam as though I was part of the group. Hades was not yet a work of art, still showing tell-tale signs of attack, but her parts were newer and the repairmen and mechanics working on her made the work load lighter and better. Duo had convinced some of his guys to take a look or two at my suit when I wasn’t around, and although I pretended to hate the idea of someone messing around with my suit, I couldn’t help but feel grateful for the help and thankful for the added safety these mechanics provided me with.

I arrived at the base, and was immediately met with resistance from the Leo corps that was on patrol. They opened fire immediately, and I pulled out Hades’ thermal triton, watching with a grim smirk as the thermal fire exploded from the outlets.

I readied myself into an attack stance, the thermal fire blackening the ground beneath me. The Leos kept coming, the shots from their rifles not even making dents in Hades despite their growing proximity. With a few commands and flicks of the clutch, Hades was gliding at breakneck speed above the ground, jamming the trident through the first Leo and ripping through the side of it to catch the one nearby, the explosion of metal and electronics lighting up the screen shield before me. I could hear screams of pain and terror as the pilots of the other suits went to their deaths in a fiery blaze.

My hand trembled only slightly as I flicked off my com-link and continued to sweep the place free of the attacking Leos, the screech of metal being ripped apart the only sound in my ears. Smoke and sulfer were in the air, permeating their way through my battered Gundam. The air-pressure system was damaged, I thought absently. I’d have to fix it before we went into space again.

If we went into space again, I reminded myself.

The last Leo tried to self-destruct and bring me down with it, but the explosive heat only singed the outer coverings. The fool’s coward sacrifice hadn’t done anything to help his cause.

I looked up suddenly, hearing the approaching roar of an engine. Through the rising smoke I squinted and saw the familiar shape of the Wing Gundam, its beam saber ready for battle. I flicked my com-link back on.

“What the hell are you doing here? This is my mission!”

Static. A pause. Then,

“Negative. I was instructed to act as back-up for this mission.”

Heero’s cold, no-nonsense voice made me boil over in anger and I slammed my fists down on the console.

“Damn it, I will never be a good enough operative for anyone to leave me alone, will I?” I yelled at him. “I could have done this on my own!”

"Hey, I guess we’re on the same mission," another voice on the com-link said and I realized that Duo had appeared and had both Heero and I on wide-beam com. He had appeared quickly and silently and probably had been able to hear my little outburst, much to my dismay at not being able to sense anything on the radar. “You could have waited up for me.”

“Fucking hyper jammers,” I muttered. “I didn’t see you, so I should have known you were there, Duo…”

“Nice hardware,” he appeared suddenly on the small view-screen in the corner of my window. He grinned. “What? Don’t want to say hello to an old buddy?”

He swung his long beam scythe, destroying an enemy mobile suit. His style was not unlike my own with his sweeping strokes, although I it was just that. I usually had to jab my trident through the enemy, while he made nice, clean arcs.

A sudden volley of fire began again and it looked as though the OZ forces had sent out all their standby mobile suits. Heero jetted forward, making quick work of them with his beam saber, although his thrusts and parries were obviously analytically thought out. As soon as all suits were completely terminated, he turned to Deathscythe. Wing seemed to stop for a moment in a contemplative way.

"Hey, man!" Duo’s voice was full of teasing, prodding humor.

"Target: Lock on," we both heard Heero muttered, and Wing was suddenly aiming at Deathscythe. Duo did a double take and then shrugged. The view screen disappeared.

"So, we have to fight this out after all!" he said, grim determination edging through his voice.

"Oh, would you two just whip ‘em out already?" I rolled my eyes and backed Hades away from the two other Gundams. "You’ve been like this since you met, what is it, a guy thing?" There was no answer. "I get dibs on the winner," I grumbled finally. I suddenly noticed a stealthily approaching mobile suit. "Duo, watch ou---!"

What I was about to say was cut off at the sound of an explosion as Heero fired. Duo began to freak out verbally, thinking that Heero was targeting him, but when the mobile suit behind him fell over, he calmed down a little.

"Now we’re even," Heero said flatly, and then, to the surprise of everyone, began to laugh out loud in a maniacal cackle. Wing suddenly shot into the air and transformed into its fighter mode, disappearing into the clouds.

"Damn, you got me!" Duo cried.

“I hate when he does that.” I pulled Hades back, pulling my trident back into its safety hatch behind me. “Show off. Always thinks he’s better than everyone else…friggen icicle…”

“Are you talking to yourself, Squirt?”

“Stop calling me that!”

Eh, this chapter angered me. I am also currently in a bad mood and don’t care about the crappiness. Tomorrow when I regain my interest in humanity and the lovely world of grammar, syntax and good storylines I might fix it.

Then again, the way things are going, maybe not.

KQ