2022-11-18: The Ascending Star
- Cutscene: The Ascending Star
- Cast: Riika Sheder
- Where: Various
- Date: 0096-11-08 through 0096-11-15
- Summary: Riika investigates, gets new orders - and gets in over her head, though she doesn't yet realize it.
00:47 NOVEMBER 8, UC 0096
ZAFT CARRIER SHIP 'PLENDL', SOMEWHERE IN THE PACIFIC
PERSONAL QUARTERS
In the grey-blackness of non-vision, Riika rolled out of bed. There was no point in staying in it. She'd been lying down in it for over two hours and nothing had happened yet; if she'd been able to see, she would have spent it staring at the ceiling, or the wall. Running entirely on automatic, she pulled on a plain long shirt she'd left lying around for that purpose and only then reached for her glasses, setting them on her face and pushing them up, letting them connect with a faint click that she felt more than heard.
Vision returned, though she still couldn't see all that much, since it was dark in the tiny pilot's quarters: the lit numbers of an electronic clock provided most of the light, along with a green spot over by the tablet monitor because she'd left it on but with a blanked screen. She blinked, which didn't interrupt her vision, and turned the lights on. If she couldn't sleep, she may as well be productive.
Riika hadn't slept well since the attack on JOSH-A, several days ago.
She hadn't been hurt badly... physically, anyway. Some bruises, from being thrown around in her cockpit on the mad escape, but they were already mostly healed. But she couldn't get Operation Spitbreak out of her head.
Even phrasing it that way seemed... inadequate. So many people had died, despite - or, in some cases from Federation soldiers that hadn't believed her, possibly because of - her warning. It wasn't helped by the mixed reaction in ZAFT; the troops appreciated the warning, but she'd heard, and not subtly, that they would have preferred that she hadn't made it to the Federation, too. She felt responsible, pulled both ways.
It felt miserable.
Tomorrow she was supposed to return to space as part of a regrouping. Maybe she could ask to be transferred back away from the front lines, to do what she'd originally wanted to do: testing, mechanical and engineering work, not fighting. But no, that wouldn't fix anything. It would be running away, and she'd be a coward if she did that. Plus, her sense of duty wouldn't allow it. She owed the people of PLANT more than that.
So, instead, she'd take on some other work. Getting the tablet out of its idle mode, the screen returned to her, and Riika began to type extremely rapidly. Maybe she could figure out what really happened down in JOSH-A instead. What was Rau doing down there? It made her... nervous, really, is probably the best word.
The advantage in flying a test unit is that it had more recording devices per cubic meter than anything short of a dedicated scanning MS. Sure, a lot of them were recording things about the GuAIZ, but a lot of them weren't, or picked up other things in passing. Maybe she could assemble a better view if she just kept at it...
19:23 NOVEMBER 14, UC 0096
ZAFT MECHANICAL SUPPORT SHIP 'ZUSE', EARTH SPHERE SPACE
WORK TERMINAL
On returning to space, Riika had been transferred to an engineering ship, the Zuse. She'd worked on it before, and the people there knew her. It had more advanced field repair equipment than the average battleship, and functioned as support for some of the exotic or difficult-to-repair units in the field - which is why she was there, as her experimental GuAIZ needed some special equipment to repair the Phase Shift Armour that wasn't available on most battleships yet.
She liked it there. It was comfortable. It was the kind of place that, if she hadn't volunteered for the front lines after Bloody Valentine, she would have spent her military career, before transferring to one of the permanent facilities in the PLANTs proper, like the Integrated Design Bureau.
But she hadn't had a whole lot of time to enjoy it. She'd had to help with repairs on her GuAIZ and a number of other units. It had been days before she could get back to her personal project. She'd looked through all the recordings of the battle at JOSH-A, and knowing that she was looking into it helped her sleep at night. She wasn't sure if it was just the distraction, though she'd always felt better when she had something to do and a plan to do it. But what she had wasn't enough.
That's why, after her shift, she was back at it. She'd requisitioned some other guncam recordings and was now sorting through them. She had a pretty good idea of what had happened down there. She probably had one of the most complete views of the battle, after the destruction of so many recordings.
Riika had also found out, almost in passing, that she'd made ace during that battle. When she had mentioned it to another mechanic, she'd woken up the next day to find a new logo painted on the GuAIZ, even though as a test unit it wasn't really supposed to have one. She was pretty sure that 'figuring out if I made ace' is what a lot of the other crew thought she was doing all the guncam research for, given she'd been teased once about being so interested in that. Such is life.
She pushed herself away from her monitor with a sigh, reflexively blanking it - she didn't want anyone else to see what she was looking at. All the information had made Rau le Creuset's actions less explicable, not more. She'd found plenty of views of him slipping away, and then her own recordings when she'd found him. He'd definitely seen her, but... she still had no idea what he was doing. Or why.
There was another step she could do. Technically, it wasn't things she was supposed to be looking into. And surely she wouldn't find anything. Nobody in ZAFT would have anything to do with a bomb like that and not warn the troops.
...right?
She added a quick addition to her set of downloaded files: the publically (well, 'public' for a military officer) available notes on Rau le Creuset. She rarely leaned on her authority as a red-uniformed pilot for anything beyond a reasonable ability to pick her posting, but she did have a few extra access rights for secure files. Most of them were engineering-related, but looking into Rau le Creuset's background and operations was one of the other times it could be useful.
08:00 NOVEMBER 15, UC 0096
ZAFT MECHANICAL SUPPORT SHIP 'ZUSE', NEAR LUNAR SPACE
PERSONAL QUARTERS
Riika's console suddenly let out a 'ding'.
It woke her up - not that she wasn't on the edge of waking up anyway, though she'd had a late shift yesterday and only had had about five hours of sleep. That particular sound always got her attention, because she'd set it up to ring at her when she had new orders.
Sliding out of bed and retrieving her glasses in the same motion, Riika padded over to her console so she could turn the screen on and see what her new orders were.
...
She was being deployed again, she saw, frowning slightly. The Zuse was currently between ZAFT territory at L4 and the Moon, and she was supposed to rendezvous with another ship and several other pilots tomorrow to begin a scouting trip into the shoal zone at L1, on the Earth side of the Moon. On checking the pilots, she found that she'd worked with all of them at one point or another, though never all at once; at least she knew all of them.
It was a dangerous place, ever since the One Year War. Nearly destroyed then, repairs and redevelopment had been erratic at best, and ZAFT command was apparently deciding whether they could feasibly use it as a strike zone against Lunar targets. But that meant someone had to go in there, map the ruins and scrap, and find an approach route that was both safe for ships and out of view of the few Federation presences inside the Frontier Side. She might be at it for as long as a week.
Riika didn't often get tapped for scouting duty because it wasn't her forte, so it was a little unusual, but nothing she couldn't handle. And she did have the new long-range batteries to test... the GuAIZ would still drain them fast in combat, but at least at standard power draw they'd give it the same kind of operation time as the other MSs she'd be with. She set up the material she still had to look at to download to her personal computer while she dressed, then set out to prepare for the new operation.