Archive: http://www.fanworkrecs.com
Disclaimers: I don't own the characters from Gundam Wing, I just play with them for non-profit fun until they run screaming back to their creators.
Warnings: AU - AAAAAAAAAAAU. Some yaoi, lemon, violence, language. You should be a legal adult to read this. Open-mindedness helps, too.
Pairings: all over the map; Duo-centric. yaoi and het.
Author's Notes: A huge helping of "suspension of disbelief" would be appropriate before you read this. I'm sure J or G could explain the science behind it, but they're kinda dead right now...
Part 6 ~ Mess (cont'd)
Wheat straightened, breathing hard - whether from exertion or excitement, Duo did not want to know. "Can't it wait?" the gang leader growled.
Duo eyed the quivering Preventer. "Well, no, actually, it can't."
Wheat kicked Trowa in the belly, hard, and then pushed himself towards Duo, flicking off the stunner. He glanced at one of his men and jerked his head towards his prisoner, saying "Keep an eye on him."
Duo buckled himself into the seat in front of the terminal and pulled up the relevant vid-file. "OK. These are the last few frames of the final log."
He pointed to the floor of a corridor. "See these big tiles - three on each side? Those are pressure plates. Some will be active, and stepping on them will trigger a trap. Now this field scanner," he hefted the electronic gizmo, "can detect which plates are active, and show us which ones to avoid."
Wheat's eyes narrowed. "Yeah, so? The last team used one of those."
Duo scrolled the video forward a couple of frames. "OK... See that little sticky-outie thing on the wall? And there's another one on the other side of the corridor, see? Those are generating overlapping electromagnetic fields - probably randomly fluctuating ones - to confuse the scanner, so it won't be able to tell which plates are functioning. Which, by the way, is why your last team got cut to pieces."
Duo leaned back in his seat and said, with complete truth, "Without knowing which tiles are active, the only way to get through that corridor is the old-fashioned way."
Wheat looked annoyed, but he asked anyway. "And that is?"
"Take some expendable guy," he nodded at Trowa, "and make him walk down the corridor. If he makes it, we'll know which plates are safe. If he doesn't, then we'll know to take the other side of the hall."
"And even if he does make it..."
"...we can always kill him anyway," Duo finished, shrugging.
Wheat smiled, slowly. "I like the idea of making his death work for us."
"The only thing is... he'll have to be awake enough to follow directions, and he can't be so injured that he can't walk straight. We can take him to pieces once we get through the security system, but until then it might be a good idea to lay off him." Duo fell quiet, hoping his suggestion would be accepted.
Wheat turned and kicked off the seat, crossing back to Trowa. He slid the business end of the baton under the Preventer's cheek to lift his head. "Well, my faithful lieutenant, it looks like you've got one last little job to do for me."
Trowa gave no sign of having heard, his gaze vacant and unfocussed. His head slipped off the baton, his hair floating haphazardly around his face.
Duo followed Wheat more slowly, frowning as if deep in thought. "He sure doesn't say much. How did you figure out he was a Preventer?"
Wheat used the stunner to flip Trowa's head over to face them. "He walked in while I was taking a call arranging the details of this trip. My buyer recognized his voice - she described him to a T."
Duo tried not to let his utter relief show - Wheat knew nothing of the conversation in the shower. "You trust her?" he asked casually.
Wheat snorted. "Of course not! But she has enough contacts in the government to make it likely that she's right, and I won't take the chance that she isn't."
Duo grunted, wishing he could ask who the mysterious female buyer was without making Wheat suspicious. Instead of prying, he turned back to the gear bags. "Well, I'd better check out the rest of this equipment."
"Make it fast." Wheat turned and began to pull himself forward. "We'll be at the transfer point soon."
Duo bent to his task. He tethered the gear bags to cargo cleats in the floor near Trowa, then unzipped the first one and began pulling the contents out one by one.
"Hey, back offa him!" Twister's guard said from his comfortable seat.
Duo glanced derisively at Trowa, who was staring blearily at the carpeting. "He's stunned and chained down, and this is stealth equipment, not weapons. What's he gonna do, kick a scanner at my head?"
The guard frowned, but settled back down again.
Duo carefully checked over each and every gizmo, flicking switches and rotating dials. As he gradually worked his way through, he put the working equipment into one gear bag, and the broken or unneeded bits into the other. By the time he was nearly finished with the second bag, the green eyes were focussing again.
Duo had found the receiver for a comlink among the gear - evidently Wheat hadn't trusted his teams with the transmitting half. Now he pulled it out of the bag, making sure it passed through Tro's field of vision, and hooked it into his ear, clipping the tuner to his waistband.
Looking down into one of the bags, he put one hand up to scratch at his temple, covering the side of his face closest to Trowa's guard. "Frequency," he whispered, barely above a breath. Then he flicked his eyes up at Trowa, hoping the movement of his hand would cover the direction of his gaze.
"One-oh-three-four-two-point-six." Trowa's lips barely moved, but the numbers were clear enough.
Duo casually re-tuned his receiver to the Preventer's frequency Trowa had been assigned. The band was quiet.
Duo bit his lip. If the Preventers knew that Trowa was in trouble, they would be talking as they planned an attack. The quiet band meant that they still thought Trowa's infiltration was going well - Heero must not have seen Duo's braid and hand signal in the pod.
It was time for a more obvious - and risky - signal.
He picked up the other piece of equipment he had noted - the TED, or transient electromagnetic device. A TED created a burst of energy, like static, only stronger. Thieves had been using them to fry delicate electronics from a distance for over two hundred years. [1]
Duo was interested in the TED for another reason - it worked in the radio wave band. He couldn't use it to transmit his voice - it could only disrupt radio transmissions - but he could still communicate.
He twirled the frequency dial precisely. Then, as if he were continuing with his equipment tests, he aimed the TED aft and began flicking the power switch on and off with one hand, while twisting nonessential dials with the other. On. Off. On-off. On. Off. On-off. On-off...
Good old Morse code. Morse wasn't commonly used nowadays, but Quatre had known it and had taught the other gundam pilots during the war.
'01 - SOS - 03.' He kept the message short and used the abbreviated form for the numerals, because he wasn't sure how long he'd be able to get away with this.
He started to repeat the message, but before he was even halfway through, one of the pilots came aft, looking annoyed. "What the bloody hell are you doing? You're mucking up our radio signal and the tail controls are going haywire!"
"Oh, sorry!" Duo smiled disarmingly. "I was testing all the equipment I might need."
The pilot snorted, but didn't start spouting accusations, to Duo's great relief. As long as the pilots thought they had heard random static bursts, he was safe.
He switched off the TED and shoved it into his 'useful' gear bag, trying to keep the smile from stretching into a grin - the receiver in his ear was already crackling. "All agents, this is Steel," Wufei's voice said urgently. "Cloud needs immediate assistance - repeat - immediate assistance."
Wheat appeared behind the exasperated pilot. "Get back up front, Hansen, you're needed." He glanced at Duo. "Get your gear, we're switching to a runabout."
Duo nodded and hefted his bag. He slowly floated over join the group gathering by the circular ship-to-ship hatch. Well, at least the Preventers knew Tro was in trouble and needed a bailout. But if they still thought he was back on L2, they would run to the rescue in the wrong direction... C'mon 'Fei, trace the signal...
"Monsoon here," said an unfamiliar voice through the receiver. "There's no sign of trouble here at the L2 site." The agent's tone suggested Wufei was imagining things. "However, we will signal Cloud and request a status report."
There was a metallic clang, and the shuttle lurched briefly. Spider twirled the circular latch and opened the sealed door of the shuttle, revealing an extended transfer tube leading out to another hatch. He launched himself into the tube even as the door at the other end was opening, and scrambled across into the runabout.
Duo watched Spider absently. Monsoon obviously didn't know enough to take Wufei's word. And if he even suspected that an experienced agent had signalled for help, he shouldn't be wasting time asking for status updates. Wufei would roast Monsoon's liver in his mission report. And if Trowa didn't make it out alive, that roasting might not be merely verbal...
Two goons grabbed Trowa and dragged him across. Trowa did his best to delay them, shoving them off course and then hooking a foot around a strut, but a quick jolt from the stunner dislodged him.
Now Heero's voice spoke into Duo's ear. "Frost here. The distress call came from the target shuttle - we are accelerating to intercept. ETA 12 minutes." Duo fought to keep the relieved grin off his face. It wouldn't be long now. He looked around, casually checking the gang members in front of him for weapons that he might be able to steal.
"Now just a damn minute! Frost! Steel!" Monsoon was saying loudly, sounding annoyed. "Abort the interception - the drop hasn't been made, the buyer isn't in sight!! Repeat, abort interception!!"
Hansen came speeding back from the cockpit, a panicked look on his face. "Mr. Wheat, sir!" He pulled himself to a stop near his boss and continued in an undertone. "There's a fast blip headed straight for us. There aren't many ships with that kind of speed, sir, and it's too big to be a rich man's toy."
Wheat turned to his crew. "Preventers!! Hustle!!!" People swore and started leaping through the tube. Duo lingered at the tail of the rapidly-departing group, wanting to both stretch out the transfer time and listen to the conversation behind him.
"As soon as the runabout's clear," Wheat was instructing his pilot swiftly, "head straight for the asteroid field, top speed. Get behind cover and eject the gundanium. Thread the field - get as far away as you can. When you're boarded, just sit tight, keep your mouths shut and wait for my lawyers - got it?"
Duo was startled. Gundanium!?! He had heard something about someone hoarding gundanium, hadn't he...??
"FROST!! I am in charge of this mission and I am ORDERING you to ABORT!!!!" Monsoon bellowed in Duo's ear. The teasing wisp of memory fled.
"Noted," Heero replied coldly. "05 and 03 - switch to alternate frequency."
Duo couldn't delay any longer without causing suspicion. He pulled himself through the tube and into the cramped runabout, listening to Monsoon threaten and bluster the entire time.
He was just buckling himself in when acceleration hit - Wheat's pilots weren't wasting any time. Not that it would do them any good. With Heero piloting, the shuttle would be quickly caught and boarded. A runabout just wouldn't have the speed to get out of range before the Preventer ship pounced on it, too.
And speaking of Preventers, Monsoon finally seemed to have realized that Frost and Steel were no longer listening. Duo grinned to himself, and flipped his receiver to the band the gundam pilots had ended up using during the war.
"...tion team is ready," Wufei's voice said. "Forced entry grapple function reads 100%."
"Understood," Heero replied. "ETA 2 minutes."
Duo heard the implacable tone under the even words and smiled slightly. Heero sounded furious.
"03 - We're almost there, just..." There was a slight crack in the smooth timbre of Heero's voice, a tight roughness Duo could not identify.
"...just hang on, love."
End Page 21
Note:
[1] This is a real device! Special thanks to my mom, who found the information for me right when I needed it.
(:./wingnut/alter21)
