2022-11-26: The Fallen Star
- Log: 2022-11-26: The Fallen Star
- Cast: Riika Sheder
- Where: Side 4 Shoal Zone
- Date: U.C. 0096 11 26
- Summary: Riika wakes up somewhere she didn't expect. Takes place during the end of, and immediately after, The Descending Star.
Riika flew.
She flew as well as she'd ever flown before, even given that she was in her experimental GuAIZ with many of its control surfaces damaged or destroyed. She had one leg, and structural damage everywhere, but she actually managed to keep control of the GuAIZ despite its best efforts, weaving through and around the debris. She actually feels, for a moment, she might get away, despite the fact that her cockpit is mostly lit by red warnings at this point. She actually has some of the junk mapped from her scouting mission.
Until something strikes her. Several somethings, causing her to throttle the Phase Shift Armour, fire the thrusters again. She nearly slams into something as something else hits the GuAIZ's good arm, shredding it and forcing her down. Her recovery is interrupted when a gravitational blast smashes the GuAIZ, and Riika tumbles.
She recovers, but only by inches, a piece of space garbage zipping mere inches from the faceplate of the GuAIZ -
Bullets hit something high up in the back of the GuAIZ, near where the prototype flight lifter connects to the machine. Riika loses control entirely as the thrusters on the lifter misfire, sending her in a wild spin that nothing she can do can stop. Her mobile suit impacts something, hard, with a bright bright white flash.
And then Riika didn't know anything more.
...
...
...
...
Until she did, coming to consciousness with a sudden spike of pain. Riika peeled open her eyes to see a black cockpit. Completely black. No power at all, to anything. Which means no air circulation, but wearing a sealed normal suit with external air, that was not a problem she had to be concerned about for a little while at least. Her whole body hurt with varying degrees of urgency, but that was another problem she could compartmentalize. She'd always had a very high pain tolerance. She'd been thrown around her cockpit with enough force she wasn't entirely in her seat anymore, and her left hand refused to bend all its fingers properly, but she could ignore it. At least her visor was still in place and working. She thought so, anyway. It was hard to tell when it didn't show her any more than anything else.
She reached for the controls one-handed to see if she could get anything on, and then realized something.
Nobody was shooting at her. While Riika was blind and deaf to the outside world in an inactive mobile suit, she'd notice if she suddenly died (or she wouldn't, but then it would stop being a concern nonetheless). Rau was not leading ZAFT troops to kill her. Either she'd gone somewhere he couldn't reach, or he already thought she was dead, and either way, she'd like to have him keep thinking that.
So instead, Riika settled down for a time, and waited.
She didn't have a clock either, but she estimated she'd waited twenty minutes and nothing had happened, plus she didn't know how much time she was missing in the first place. So Riika finally ran a startup procedure, running entirely on battery power; they wouldn't see her Minovsky engine starting up if she simply did not start it up. She could do it in the dark (and, indeed, would have to; she didn't have any lights).
It took a bit extra time to improvise and then work through the nonstandard procedure, but eventually Riika got at least some systems on. Emergency lighting flickered on, dim, though the panoramic view was offline. The only thing Riika was really interested in was the machine status.
It was bad. Really bad.
Judging by the self-diagnostics (which were much better than the usual, thanks to the experimental GuAIZ being wired up for self-scanning specifically because it was an experimental unit meant to be piloted by a technician - that is, her), she shouldn't be alive. The GuAIZ had half an arm and no legs, and was showing significant shoulder damage - based on the joint response, Riika's best guess was that it was impaled on something. She didn't even bother checking the weapons; power was a bigger concern.
Her on-suit battery - the new, experimental, long-range one - was down to seven percent. If she'd had the original battery installed it would be dead. The secondary battery mounted in the lifter didn't have a reading. It wasn't reading zero; it simply was not there at all. The internal power systems were damaged from a surge, and she was lucky to get as much as she was out of the emergency backups. She was also rotating slowly, and not accelerating, though she couldn't tell what her actual speed was.
The good news is that seven percent looked very bad, but in a situation like this, it wasn't the limiting factor. The battery was meant to be able to run a Phase Shift system or help power the beam cannon; in combat she could go through seven percent in under a minute. But running the MS at minimum with no thrusters, no weapons, no armour field, no cameras - absolutely nothing except life support and the most bare bones of computer use - meant that seven percent would last for long enough, and if it ran out because she wasn't getting an accurate reading, she could last a while longer in just her normal suit. She was more worried about the surge damage.
Over the next half hour, in the dark, trying to ignore her broken hand, Riika reconstructed what must have happened.
She'd gone out of control after being hit by something (she couldn't access the recordings to see what) and slammed into a chunk of space debris. Which had been, as some of the Frontier pieces were, electrically charged. The surge had coursed through the MS and blown out the lifter, exploding its battery and sending shrapnel into the back of the suit, which had caused an engine shutdown, blown out all her cameras, damaged a few other systems for good measure, and knocked her out from the force of the explosion. One of the systems it had damaged was the self-report sensors; Riika had to keep filtering to find the good, usable readings, and there were a few that she didn't entirely trust but had no way to confirm or deny.
A chill went down Riika's spine when she realized how close she had been to death. If the engine had shut down a different way, she would be dead. It was good that she hadn't tried to fire it up and had run entirely off battery power, because that probably would have killed her too. If the shrapnel had gone further up, instead of the blast violently detaching the lifter and effectively shoving her away, she would be dead. If she'd just hit her head too hard in the explosion, she'd be dead (or still unconscious, which amounted to the same thing). If Rau or someone had fired a few more rounds, she would also be dead. It was a minor miracle that she'd gotten the computer to boot up and take even semi-accurate readings at all if it had taken electrical damage.
But instead Riika was only probably going to die. Her MS was stuck to a piece of debris in the Frontier shoal zone. She had no food, no real power source, limited water, and limited air. Her life expectancy was 24 to 36 hours, provided all the readouts on air were accurate and nothing decided to explode, short, or both, nobody came by to finish the job, and no more drifting debris hit her. It couldn't be more than 48 because she didn't have much potable water and she couldn't drink any of it if she couldn't take her helmet off. Realistically, she gave herself much less than that. If, in an engineering lab, she'd been asked what the life expectancy of someone in this situation had been, she would have said zero. They wouldn't have survived this long.
And she was a traitor to ZAFT.
Honestly, that hurt worse than her body. She'd never meant to go against ZAFT. She believed in the PLANTs. The way the Federation treated them was abominable and she wanted independence and safety, even though she'd never found it in herself to hate or fear Naturals.
But Rau le Creuset... she'd threatened him, she realized. She hadn't consciously decided to; she'd only wanted to know what had happened at JOSH-A. And in that he'd seen the threat, and he'd removed her. Which means that G-Hound officer was right. Which hurt, too, but in a different way. He'd gotten her squad killed deliberately. He'd tried to get her killed.
He was working toward... something. Riika didn't know what, or why, but he had known about the MIDAS bomb in JOSH-A. He'd set it, to catch both ZAFT and Federation troops, and had pinned the blame on her once she'd seen it. And now he wanted her dead. Which means she knew something that could interfere, or could do something. Why would he take the risk otherwise?
It was a shame she had absolutely no idea what that might be.
It certainly wasn't her testimony. If she'd come out and said that she thought he was a traitor, or even suspicious, well, he was considered a lot more trustworthy than she was, and she had no proof. That's why she hadn't said it to the kill squad. Rau would simply have killed them, too, if any of them seemed likely to believe her, and she couldn't put that on her conscience. She could wind her mind in circles just thinking about it.
No, Riika told herself, firmly. You can't think about that here. You can't go into despair. She'd get out of this situation, and she'd do... something. But if she didn't manage to get out of this situation, any of her other plans wouldn't matter. She'd live, and *then* she'd stop Rau. But first she'd have to live. She was probably going to die, but 'probably' didn't have to mean 'definitely' and she certainly didn't have to just sit here, doing nothing.
You have a gift, she told herself: it's your mind. So think!
It had taken a depressing amount of time - over an hour! - and a collection of tools most pilots didn't carry, but most pilots weren't also mobile suit technicians and mechanics.
Riika had tried to get her suit's radio online, but it wouldn't. She could get power to it (miracle of miracles) and she could turn it on and transmit, but she couldn't control the signal out to be anything more than static; something in the electronic guts of the machine was broken.
She'd taken the emergency beacon from her kit. All it did was signal to anyone passing in space that the person with the beacon needed urgent help. It didn't signal her as ZAFT, though the ruins of the suit and her pilot suit would, which might cause problems if the Federation found her first - but that was a problem for later, as if she didn't get detected in the first place it wouldn't matter.
The emergency beacon was made for situations like this, but it wasn't powerful enough. In the shoal zone, it wouldn't penetrate if she was in one of the electrical anomalies, and people might ignore it anyway because the shoal zone was full of rubble.
So what she'd done is patch it, slowly and laboriously - in the barely-lit cockpit, with one working hand - into the GuAIZ's radio transmitter. It was more powerful, more feature-complete than any tiny emergency beacon. All she needed the beacon for was to provide the controlled signal that her suit wouldn't.
Riika had frozen up at one point when she felt a tremor go through the suit, heard a thump; her heart had practically jumped out of her chest. Whatever piece of debris the GuAIZ's shoulder was impaled by had hit something else, but it didn't appear to have caused any further damage to the suit. She still had to wait ten minutes to check that and to calm down enough that she felt comfortable continuing. She would only have one chance at this.
What she'd done was crude. She hadn't made something so primitive in years. It looked awful, half the electronics hanging into the cockpit, supported only by electrical tape and microgravity. But - as best she could tell - it would work, and she felt a moment's pride, despite literally everything about today. She had no way to test it. She'd have to trust she'd done it right, though she'd gone over it twice and wasn't sure she could focus well enough to do it a third time. Her body and mind were really starting to drag. She'd been in two battles and then a space debris impact. She felt burned out from the adrenaline crash, and the pain was worse than it had been.
With a bit of trepidation, Riika reached for the activation trigger. It was out of her hands now. All she could do was wait, and hope, and be alone with her thoughts. She closed her eyes, breathing out, though she would never sleep at a time like this.
Outside, in the shoals, a new SOS signal sprung to life.