02-Jan-2006
Title: Launch 3/?
Author: TB
Archive: GWA
Category: Action, yaoi
Pairing: 4x3
Disclaimer: The characters and storyline of Gundam Wing are used here
without permission. I do not profit by their use.
Rating: PG13
Spoilers: The story takes place three years after EW and will reference
it and the series.
Notes: This story was influenced by reruns of seaQuest: DSV. It is
not a
crossover with that series. I am not a marine biologist, but I live
with one, so any mistakes are her fault.
The party had been going since seven, though Quatre had been one of the few to arrive unfashionably on time. By nine the deck and pavilion on the beach were packed. Quatre kept a strict schedule at parties: juice until ten, no more than three beers or two champagnes, a single plate of hors d'oeuvres eaten no less than three hours before his projected bedtime. The aim was always to be in bed before midnight, though he managed it less and less lately. He made it to nine fifteen and his second champagne before he found any of the IEO crew. Mostyn and Ehrlich had taken a station near the raw bar.
Mostyn let out a loud roar of greeting when Quatre drifted into their circle, and Quatre abruptly found himself being pounded on the back so hard he stumbled. 'And here's the man of the hour!' their captain all but shouted. 'How's the party, my friend?'
'Going well so far,' Quatre replied agreeably. 'Are you seeing any of it from over here?'
'We're staying out of the way,' Ehrlich said. She swirled the contents of a bloody mary with a flowery stick of celery. 'Too many politicians.'
'Some of my best friends are politicians,' Quatre told her mildly.
Her face underwent a series of expressions. Embarrassment. Pissed off. Settled in chagrin.
Mostyn was called away by an older man Quatre thought might be the communications officer. Quatre took a sip of his champagne and thought about eating an oyster, though he'd already had his plate.
Ehrlich said, 'I wish I could say you keep catching me on bad days. But the truth is just– most the time I'm pretty much a bitch.'
She startled him into a grin. 'Fair enough,' he answered. He toasted her with a little gesture of his champagne. 'That's a great dress.' It was. A a-line flare from low on the waist to the knees, bare arms and little straps over the collar bones. It was a sparkly ocean blue.
'I like your suit.' She reached for the oyster he'd been looking at, swallowing it off the half-shell without chewing the meat. 'Are you Muslim?'
'My father was,' he said. 'According to tradition, that makes me Muslim as well.'
She ate another oyster, letting it slip down her throat, and tossed the shell into the well-disguised disposal buckets at the back of the table. 'You don't look much like an Arab. At all, really.'
'My great-grandmother was a white woman.' He gave in to the impulse, and reached for his own oyster. It was cool and lemony on his tongue, and he chewed just a little before swallowing. He fingered the barnacles on the shell rather than tossing it away. 'Some of her children could pass. That made a big difference in those days.'
'Pass,' Ehrlich repeated. 'What, you mean pass as white?'
He affirmed with a nod. 'My grandfather went a step further and used genetic templating with his children. So did my father.' He tugged a lock of his blond hair. 'Westernised our name as well.'
She was staring at him. 'Isn't that extreme?'
'You tell me,' he grinned. 'My great-grandfather was a service engineer. I inherited a conglomerate when I turned fifteen.'
Ehrlich looked sceptical, and finished her bloody mary with a deep draw. 'You,' she said, 'are why most people don't understand colonials.'
'Colonials are exactly the same as people born on Earth,' he told her. 'We just have to try harder than you do.' Feeling that was enough of a sally for the evening, he softened it with a sly smile, and won a small upturn of her lips in response. He set his half-full glass on the table, and offered her his arm. 'Can I convince you to dance before the speeches start?'
She contemplated him for a minute, drawing out the silence before nodding her assent. She slipped her hand about his elbow, but she was the one who led the way onto the dance floor in the middle of the pavilion. Quatre was glad her heels were small, but she still stood half a foot taller than him. When they reached a little pocket of space on the oak boards, he faced her, gently taking her hard waist for the duration of the song.
He passed Ehrlich off to Jack Kent, the helmsman, and danced two rounds with Rani Gongryp, the Chief of Staff for the senior Kashmir senator. He yielded Rani to a middle-aged ESA lieutenant he didn't know, and spent fifteen minutes fending off pointed commentary from Geert de Wilde, the VP of a rival company producing computer motherboards. After that, it was a relief to hear the screech of microphones being keyed to life on the small stage on the deck. It was his cue to make his way to the platform.
He managed to slip up behind it, caught the attention of an aide, and let her attach a lapel mic to his jacket. A light breeze had kicked up while he sweated on the dance floor, and the stage was in a good position to benefit from it. He turned himself toward it, giving only half an ear to the mention of his name.
He heard it perhaps five minutes later, on the tail of polite applause. 'We're privileged to hear from an important financier tonight,' the speaker was saying. 'The Winner family have long been friends of scientific exploration and discovery, but this beautiful ship you see docked behind you represents the single largest donation to a non-profit venture in recent history. And not only has Mr Winner personally shepherded this ship into existence, he has joined the crew for their maiden voyage. Please join me now in welcoming Quatre Raberba Winner of WEI Enterprises!'
Quatre left the wing, switching on his mic with one hand and reaching for the extended hand of the speaker, who turned out to be Antony Ferdoli, a young man not much older than Quatre, who served on the Senate committee for Energy and Natural Resources. Quatre once again found his shoulder and back under attack by enthusiasm, and escaped very quickly to the slender oak podium flanked by lovely Spanish arrangements of spring flowers. A very large crowd of expectant, cheerfully tipsy, and moderately bored faces turned up to meet his arrival.
'Thank you,' Quatre said, and winced as his voice boomed out into the pavilion. He lowered the volume on his mic with a little twist of a knob, an action so familiar he could do it blind. 'It is my very great pleasure to see so many well-wishers here to support the crew of the IEO. Many of you have contributed your money, your technology, your effort and your sweat to tomorrow's launch.' He glanced down to his wrist, and sighed at the digital flash that read '10.22.' He had a long way to go.
He spread his hands along the ridged edge of the podium. 'I was born in the L4 cluster,' he told the crowd. 'I had a vague impression of Earth from textbooks, from pictures, from video casts. I hadn't ever met anyone from Earth. My father talked with great pride about the sovereignty of the colonies. Our self-sufficiency. It didn't mean a lot to me. Until the war started. I was fifteen when the fighting started. It was also the first time I saw Earth. To understate it, I was stunned. I landed in Africa. I had never... I don't know if I can convey what it was like to see a natural tree. Hills. A sky. But what really got to me was the ocean. Water isn't exactly plentiful in any of the colonies. I'd seen a fountain in L5 once and thought I'd seen more water than I'd ever see again. To see an ocean, it was... it was seeing the difference between Earth and the colonies. Seeing what we've lost by going into space.'
He began to wish he'd made notes. Though he had plenty of practice making speeches off the cuff, the champagne had lightened his head just enough that his sentences were threatening to swallow him.
'A man named Milargo Kemmerling sent me a fax two years ago. Speculation on an amphibious exploration team. I said I was interested. I was more interested when I got the first proposal– a fully outfitted ship with a crew of scientists. I offered to back the project. I felt that it was in line with WEI's general philosophy. If I'd known precisely what I was in for, I might have run in the other direction.' That got him a mild and knowing laugh from certain quarters. 'We almost went under when we lost General and McKinsey. We almost went under again when the Senate reduced our budget by three hundred thousand. I can tell you very honestly that we absolutely would have gone to ground if one man had not been ridiculously dedicated and ruthlessly persistent. The man who has been named captain of the IEO, a man I hope I can call my friend. Hughes Mostyn took three flights to meet with me last year, when the IEO, as yet unnamed, was about to become very expensive scrap metal. He put a figure in front of me and he said, This is what it's going to take to get this done. I want you to do it.'
He could see Hughes in the crowd, back again by the raw bar. He thought the older man might be laughing.
'I'm ashamed to say that I reacted like a businessman,' Quatre went on. 'I told him I had shareholders to answer to. A board of impatient directors. I had a lot of people to whom I was responsible and I couldn't make a top-down directive like that.' He shrugged, though the audience wouldn't know he was only imitating Mostyn. 'He could have yelled at me. He could have talked at me for days, giving me every reason for supporting the project through the tough times. He could have offered my company incentives. All he actually offered me was a round trip on a submarine.'
His feet were starting to hurt, but his audience was listening with every appearance of enjoying the story. He tried to lean a little, subtly, and propped himself on an elbow.
'He took me to the Galapagos Rift. I've spent– a definite minimum of time on open water. None beneath it. It was the first time I had ever seen the Rose Garden Junior hydrothermal vent. I could not believe that life like that could exist. The black corals– the tubeworms on the vent sites. The mussels and clams growing like lace along on pillow lava. It was– it was so breathtaking. I remember staring with my mouth open and thinking– this is proof of Allah's existence.' Despite himself, his throat felt tight, and he gave himself a breath to speak normally. 'Those were the most beautiful and amazing hours of my life. I made that top-down directive as soon as we surfaced.
'It's been nearly a year between that day and tonight. Tomorrow at 0748 we launch the largest ship on the longest mission of exploration in Earth's history. We have five decks of scientific laboratories, cutting-edge communications and research equipment, three deep-submergence vehicles designed specifically for this ship, roving wireless satellites which will broadcast video and sonar feed. But what I find most wonderful about this ship is that there is not a single weapon in its specifications. This ship, ladies and gentlemen, is a ship of peace. We wouldn't have been able to build this ship ten years ago. Not even five. But it gives me hope and renews my faith that this year, we have a ship dedicated solely to discovering the mysterious and the unknown, not the threatening or subversive or dangerous.'
He looked again at his watch during a wave of spontaneous applause and some lusty cheers. He'd been talking for about a half an hour. His throat was dry. A glass of water sat on the top shelf beneath the board of the podium, but he made it a policy to avoid open containers sitting in public access. There was no actual reason not to cut off early and send everyone home happy.
He came to his conclusion for the crowd. 'We're here to celebrate something unique,' he said. 'If it's as successful as I expect it to be, it won't be unique for long. I hope all of you will track our progress in the coming year. We will broadcast live every month so that all the world and the colonies can share in our discoveries. This is a universal enterprise. It will be the making of a universal history. I wanted to end by quoting American president John Kennedy. In AD 1962 he said, 'All of us have in our blood the same exact percentage of salt that exists in the ocean, and therefore we have salt in our blood, our sweat, and our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea– whether to sail or to watch it– we are going back from whence we came.' Good night, and thank you.' He pressed his hand to his chest and bowed slightly, and left the podium to louder applause than he'd had when he started. He found he was sweating, and his heart was beating hard and fast. He'd been more anxious than he realised.
He put on his best smile, and plunged back into the crowd with every intention of getting another flute of champagne, schedule be damned.
End Part 3
(:./erin/launch3)
