Revelations (Bio)

[ZeonDad]

“Damn, is this bitch ever going to get here?” Pat tastefully inquired to his older brother, who remained focused like a stone as he stared down the information displayed to him on their mobile suit’s monitor. Each brother occupied the tiny cockpit of their respective Gundam F90II’s in Type L configuration, silently adrift on floating space rocks not much larger than the machines they occupied. Pat’s machine was painted in traditional colors, while his brother had chosen the emblematic highlights of the Union flag.

“You’ve already asked three times,” Dom Hartford hissed at his younger brother. “Do you ever stop?”

“Ooooh, I wonder if she’s hot and single and ready to mingle,” Pat giggled, paying no attention to the sudden readout on his monitors.

“She’s probably a cyborg reptilian hybrid like that girl who kidnapped you,” Dom replied, before preemptively telling his brother to shut the hell up entirely.

“She’s coming!” He warned, alerted to the presence of the incoming IFF signature approximately 130 kilometers away. The faintest shimmer of particles could be seen, which normally would have been impossible, considering the distance, but the machine their target piloted was far from ordinary.

“Keep your mouth closed and focus,” Dom ordered with authority, steadying his long rifle. “Curve at 30 degrees, and don’t fire until I say so.”

“Your ass is curved at thirty degrees,” Pat acknowledged with a fuss.

[BioHazard]

Nothing but rocks.

Hanmyo checked the coordinates the Belphagor was feeding her for the third time, running them against the information Lance had supplied. According to the suit's navigational systems, she should be right on top of the facility - both literally and figuratively. But there was little to see beyond the vast field of drifting space detritus, none near to large enough to hide any variety of structure. She grit her teeth; her temper was on a short enough leash, and if a top-secret Commonwealth research base didn't show up right under her nose in about five seconds she was going to lose it. Screamer was lucky he wasn't currently within reach, but the idea of turning the suit right around and changing that reality did not at this particular moment sound entirely unreasonable to the incensed woman.

Smacking moodily at the machine's beleaguered controls, she punched the throttle up a few notches with a bit more vigor than was strictly necessary. Between the suit's native psycommu and the psycoframe elements the Commonwealth had installed, Hanmyo hardly needed to touch the thing to pilot it at all, really. But it felt good to take out her frustrations on something tangible, so long as she didn't break it too badly. It accelerated to jet a little more quickly through the void, gently maneuvering around suit-sized hunks of stone.

Unfortunately, Hanmyo's little fit also brought to mind the state of her arm - and her other cybernetic parts, as she'd later discovered. Her...condition had been steadily worsening since the meeting with Lance, with that odd liquid metal gradually expanding to encompass an ever-greater portion of her artificial limbs. But it was a bizarre thing; so far as she could tell, they were no worse for it. In fact, they had never operated quite so smoothly and in tune with her mind. She had grown so accustomed to them that she'd long forgotten the feel of the organics they replaced, but the gap in perception between they and the flesh she still possessed seemed to be shrinking by the day.

She glanced down at her left arm where it rested on the controls, clenching her fingers around the stick and observing the now strange and alien way the limb fluidly shifted under her flight suit. It was going to take some getting used to, if whatever it was didn't kill her.

[ZeonDad]

“Hey,” Pat posed his brother a question, musing to himself on yet another in a long line of unpleasant episodes. “Do you remember the other day when he told me not to speak anymore?”

“Yeah, so?” Dom answered, as he pressed a button and nonchalantly detonated any number of explosives that had been strategically placed on destroyed mobile suits, annihilated ships vessels, and space debris local to Hanmyo’s area.

“I’m starting to get the feeling he doesn’t like me.” Pat adjusted the position of his F90 II-L Type with a gentle vernier push in order to get a better shot, although it was meaningless with a target that was the equivalent of over eighty miles away. The targeting system would do all of the work, until line of sight was established, if she even made it that far.

“I don’t like you either Pat.” Dom fired his long rifle, which would, assuming Hanmyo paused to figure out what had just happened to her surroundings, come in right around the time Pat replied with a barrage of profanity that Dom gladly tuned out.

“You’re a dickhead,” Pat said, although his reflection unclear in if it was meant for his brother, or the target of his own long rifle shot moments later.

[BioHazard]

The Belphagor's systems blaring an ear-splitting proximity warning shot Hanmyo bolt-upright, the motion violent enough to make the seat's restraints bite painfully into her shoulders. Her gaze swung across the field around her with a curse as the suit rattled under the impact of debris, but she caught sight of only the smokey, fading remains of the detonations that had rippled through it a moment before. A moment passed as she caught her bearings, uncharacteristically slow to process what had happened after being shocked out of her reverie. Bits of broken rock and abandoned machinery bounced off the suit, the dull thunk of their impacts breaking the silence.

A trap, precisely at the coordinates the Lord Commander had supplied. No sign of the supposed research facility. Lance's insistence. It didn't take a Coordinator to fit the pieces of the puzzle together; this wasn't some long-forgotten boobytrap she'd happened to stumble upon, some coincidence. It was meant for her. He set me up. That son of a bitch set me up. And the thought that followed that revelation chilled her to the core, as though her blood had turned to ice, a frozen lump settling in her gut. Madeline! He has Madeli-

Move! Hanmyo's Newtype prescience screamed at her, and with a thought the Gundam's potent thrusters kicked it to one side, leaving Dom's long rifle shot to spear through empty space where it had been moments before. It was as though the action had flipped a switch in her head, with immediate results.

She would not have thought it possible to be more upset than she had been at the news of Garr's death. She was wrong.

In an instant the ice in Hanmyo's veins turned to molten iron, a bubbling mass of seething fury that permeated every corner of her being, the fear in her belly replaced with a blazing inferno. She embraced it, embraced it in a way she had long ago abandoned yet still came as naturally to her as breathing. Lance Screamer had witnessed her raw emotion unleashed, but the flames of rage that coiled around her and through her now were a different beast entirely. They were focused, directed, purposeful. In the mind's eye she would have been terrible to behold, an avatar wreathed in hellfire. This was the Hanmyo of days past, the long-forgotten Hanmyo who had made those who faced her on the battlefield quake in fear and shrink from her presence. It threatened to consume her...but it made her strong. And the old Hanmyo had prized strength above all else.

Minovsky particles arranged themselves into a locked lattice at her command even as the sensation of imminent danger rang a second time in the back of her mind, crimson phantom particles leaking from between the suit's armor panels as the psycoframe material hidden in the frame reacted and amplified her Newtype prowess. Pat's shot blossomed into a brilliant flower against the I-field that had inexplicably enveloped the machine. The Belphagor shifted rapidly in space, aligning itself with roughly the direction the blast had originated from; it needn't be a precise thing. Dual panels on the Gundam's chest swung open as it simultaneously shifted at the waist, and with nary a moment's wait the trio of sonic smasher cannons unleashed colossal beams in the direction of the brothers.

Riding a plume of bright flame as dangerously powerful engines hurtled it through space, the Gundam itself was not far behind.

[ZeonDad]

Pat cracked a squeal with glee as he madly eyed his pop-up monitor, relishing the zoomed in and heavily pixilated far off destruction. The equivalent of acres vaporized in a brilliant flash, with smaller pockets of reaction emerging from the initial mass and arcing to detonate various dormant power cells, discarded machinery, and the burnt out hulls of larger detritus. A continuous ballooning of the initial attack crawled across the more distant parts of the shoal zone like a caterpillar, before finally having reached its limit, came to an uneventful close into nothingness.

“Damn, that was cool!” Pat finally exclaimed with a stupid grin and silly laugh. “Did we do that!?”

“No, that wasn’t good at all!” Dom said with an attitude of disbelief at his lesser sibling’s lack of understanding. “That just blew up half our stuff you idiot!”

They quarreled, until the time targeting systems fully readjusted, and with a beep the readouts still showed a signature in the distance, and one closing with impressive speed at that.

“How is that possible?” Dom questioned, overriding his brother’s nonsense as he hurriedly filtered through several cycles of data readouts in skepticism, “We hit her! We hit her!”

Now it was Pat’s turn to stop and ponder the idiocy of his older brother. “Stop being such a mark, dude! It’s probably just an I-field or somethin’. Come on! Use your imagination bro! Here, I’ll show you!” More giggles as Pat tapped away at one touch screen before bringing up another, playfully tip-tapping a green universal play button. The resulting broadcast that would ensue blared and would be sure to hit any pilots in the vicinity.

Traitors! We are the resistance! Behold a phoenix rising from the ashes to burn your war machine to cinders! Marching to kick ass! Uunhh! Marching not to give up! Uunhh! I will never submit to you! Aaaarrrrrgh - WE ARE THE RESISTANCE!!!

“God Bless the Commonwealth!” Dom snorted, carelessly focused more on the spontaneous humor of the impromptu broadcast recording than the impending threat that careened towards them. “When did you set all this up?” The bumper to The Rex Jones Show, accompanied by patriotic drums, guitar solo, and stock music tempo, continued on repeat over and over, while Pat couldn’t contain his insane laughter. “I knew you’d like it brother!”

The readout offered Pat an intrusive, “Target at half distance approximation!” warning, which he summarily dismissed with a flick.

The triggering of dozens of guided micro missiles that seemingly came from everywhere towards Hanmyo’s position was in total afterthought for the brothers. But for Hanmyo, even as she covered more and more ground towards the new targets of her rage, she would still have to contend with several more traps and tricks, all the while to the booming patriotism of Rex Jones.

[BioHazard]

"Traitors! We are the resistance! Behold a phoenix rising from the ashes to burn your war machine to cinders! Marching to kick ass! Uunhh! Marching not to give up! Uunhh! I will never submit to you! Aaaarrrrrgh - WE ARE THE RESISTANCE!!!"

"What the hell is--" The bellowing Commonwealth rhetoric echoed through the cockpit of the Gundam at an incredible volume, a deafening blast of sound that caused Hanmyo to wince in physical pain before she managed to cut the broadcast on its second repeat. Bastards. The words seemed to bounce around in her skull for a few moments longer, and she gave her head a violent shake in an unsuccessful attempt to banish the cacophonous ringing in her ears.

Pat, to his credit, was either a genius or a tremendously lucky idiot. The clamor of Rex Jones' voice and the subsequent distraction had very nearly covered the sound of the Belphagor warning Hanmyo of the approaching missiles, the computer keening out a proximity warning for the second time in as many moments. No time to shoot them down, especially not since the Gundam's designers had unhelpfully deigned to omit vulcan guns.

The enormous strike claws unfolded from the Belphagor's shoulders, lashing out to sink into a suit-sized hunk of space rock as it careened past and haul it along for the ride. Hanmyo grit her teeth at the violent deceleration caused by the sudden addition of mass several times the unit's own, fighting off her body's desire to pass out as a red haze crept in from the edges of her vision. The machine's hand whipped out as a rocket-propelled module deployed from the wrist, and the superheated monofilament wire it trailed bisected the asteroid as if it were made of butter. The newly-made halves were drawn to either side of the suit by the claws, cocooning it in a stony shell as it huddled to become as small a target as possible.

The incoming detonated against the impromptu shield but their explosions failed to penetrate and reach the juicy Gundam meat within, though the vibrations transmitted through the rock rang into the suit and rattled Hanmyo's teeth in her head. The machine's velocity was greatly reduced by the new defenses, but it and its now-battered pilot were still traveling steadily in the direction of the two brothers.

[ZeonDad]

“Deploying the crash test dummies!” Pat announced as two dozen F90’s inflated and simultaneously flooded an already crowded battlefield.

“It’s too soon!” Dom replied in frustration, firing off his long rifle multiple times in Hanmyo’s general direction in an effort to flood the area with sensor disrupting minovsky particles. “Stupid moron!”

The booming anti-Union sermon of Rex Jones heated Pat’s blood as he remotely fired another salvo of missiles to barrage the area, and then maneuvered slightly to retrieve and install a four-barrel beam cannon mounted his F90’s right arm, which also had a 2-tube missile launcher attached.

“Come get some bitch!” Pat cackled maniacally, firing the long rifle held in the other hand in wild succession, hoping Hanmyo would engage him, assuming she survived the missiles and a variety of other curved and angled beams from several directions at once.

Dom knew what is brother was capable of, and it was not unusual for Pat to court death. He was, after all, simply an animal. Something rabid, not quite a man and barely a step above being put down. “Don’t fail me brother,” Dom quietly whispered to himself, hoping for the best as he refocused and again took aim.