Date: Late January, UC 0079
Locations: Solomon Fortress, Loum Battlefield & Zum City
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TANYA VON ZEHRTFELDT
The sky after the fire was an unholy canvas of black and crimson.
The hiss of coolant was the only sound inside the cockpit of Tanya's custom Zaku II as it docked with the Musai-class cruiser. On the main monitor, the battle for Loum still played out in tactical data and intermittent flashes of light, but the fury had subsided. It was a rout now. Green IFF tags swarmed red ones, picking off stragglers. The fight was over; this was just the accounting.
Her unit, callsign GED, had returned to the designated rendezvous point. Outside the viewport, Side 5 was no longer a bustling colony cluster. It was a tomb. Vast, skeletal frameworks of habitats drifted silently, spewing clouds of frozen atmosphere and smoke. The space between them was a junkyard of shattered warships and the glittering dust of pulverized mobile armors. And the bodies. Hundreds, thousands of them, encased in the frost of vacuum, tumbling slowly in the stellar tide.
Tanya switched her comms to a secure, internal channel, the silence she commanded a welcome reprieve from the desperate screams that had filled the public frequencies moments before. She had orchestrated much of that desperation, her unit flanking the Federation's main line at the precise moment their command structure buckled, turning a contested battle into a slaughter. A perfect, textbook maneuver. A resounding victory.
It left a sour taste in her mouth.
"We broke them today," she thought, her gaze sweeping across the field of ruin her strategy had wrought. The Federation had underestimated the mobile suit, clinging to their grand battleships as if it were still a war of naval cannons. They had paid the price for their dogma. "But what happens when they learn?"
This wasn't a final victory. It was a lesson. A brutal, hideously expensive lesson for the Earth Federation. They would analyze this defeat, study the mobile suit's effectiveness, and they would adapt. They would build their own. The technological and tactical superiority Zeon currently enjoyed was a burning fuse, and today, they had just shortened it considerably.
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LELOUCH VON ZEHRTFELDT
The air in the Zum City logistics command hub was a sterile hum, a symphony of cooling fans and the soft chime of updating data streams. It was a world away from the chaos it depicted. Here, war was an elegant ballet of icons on a holographic map, of logistics projections and telemetry readouts rendered in cool blues and decisive reds. For Lelouch von Zehrtfeld, this was his battlefield. His fingers danced across a console, rerouting energy allocations to a forward supply base, his mind a whirlwind of calculations. Every decision he made, every priority he set, could mean the difference between a triumphant advance and a silent, frozen tomb for a dozen pilots.
Beside him, Garma Zabi leaned forward in his chair, his eyes glued to a secondary screen displaying gun-camera footage. The unmistakable crimson of Char Aznable's Zaku II flashed across the display, a blur of motion that ended in the blossom of a Federation cruiser's bridge exploding.
"Incredible," Garma breathed, his voice filled with the pure, unadulterated excitement of a true believer. "The Red Comet strikes again! The Federation dogs don't stand a chance. This is our destiny, Lelouch!"
Lelouch offered a noncommittal grunt, his gaze fixed on the primary tactical display. He saw the red icons of Zeon forces pushing forward, the blue Federation icons blinking out one by one. It was, by any metric, a victory.
"Victory looks clean from here," he thought, a familiar bitterness rising in his throat. "But the stench never leaves the battlefield." He knew what those blinking lights truly represented: vaporized metal, cauterized flesh, the final, desperate screams of men swallowed by the vacuum. He saw the numbers, the resource expenditure, the casualty projections. Garma saw a glorious crusade.
A sudden alarm, sharp and intrusive, cut through the room's low hum. Lelouch's head snapped up. On the main board, a single unit designation had gone from green to a stark, ominous black. GED.
Tanya's unit.
For a moment, the entire world compressed into that single black icon. The numbers, the strategies, the cool detachment—it all shattered. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic prisoner trying to escape his chest. His breath caught, a knot of pure, primal fear tightening in his gut. His twin. Out there, in the dark, silent and alone. The carefully constructed walls of his mind, built from logic and data, crumbled into dust. He imagined her cockpit pierced, the life-support failing, her face… He couldn't finish the thought.
The moment stretched into an eternity, a void of suffocating silence. Then, just as abruptly as it had vanished, the icon flickered back to life, glowing a steady amber: 'Mission Active. Radio Silence.'
Lelouch exhaled, a shuddering breath that did little to calm the tremor in his hands. He forced his fingers back to the console, his professionalism a hastily donned mask. The panic had been real, a visceral reminder of what was truly at stake beyond strategic objectives. That momentary darkness had ignited a cold fire within him. Why were they operating under radio silence in such a heavily contested sector? Where was their support? He began digging, cross-referencing fleet movements, his search fueled by a new, chilling suspicion. He saw it then—an odd, inefficient rerouting of the 302nd Support Fleet, a squadron that should have been screening Tanya's operational area. The orders were authenticated, but the strategic logic was bafflingly flawed. Unless, of course, the strategy wasn't about fighting the Federation. He traced the authorization codes, and a name began to surface, a shadow in the data: Kycilia Zabi.
Back aboard the Musai, Tanya and her surviving squadmates stood in silence. The bay lights flickered, casting long shadows over their bloodied machines. The airlock hissed closed behind them, and Mila dropped her helmet to the deck with a dull clang. No one moved to speak. No one needed to. The name on everyone's mind—Richter—hung heavier than gravity.
Tanya finally stepped forward, her voice sharp but steady. "He did what had to be done. His sacrifice bought our lives. That debt doesn't get buried with him. It lives in every step we take forward."
Mila nodded numbly, eyes hollow. Colt said nothing, just set a hand on her shoulder.
Tanya looked back at her Zaku, blackened and scarred. A monument of survival. Of cost.
The last of the Federation's Magellan-class battleships erupted in a silent, brilliant flower of orange and white. The rout was complete.
Victory belonged to Zeon—for now.
But in the quiet corridors of Zum City and the haunted wreckage of Side 5, another war had begun.
A war of ambitions. A war of shadows.