Author: Jei

Warnings: Submitted to gwyaoi's 2004 OTP novella challenge. Heero POV. Yes, the whole bloody thing is one long sustained Heero POV. Hope you like him. Also, random technobabble of the fictitious sort. And of course, don't go into this thinking it'll be 946kb of lemony goodness, or even action-packed adventure.

Pairings: What do you think is my OTP? Although, if you think too hard about it, you'll find this OTP has a little... twist.

Rating: PG-13

Cheesy summary: After five years of being blissfully unaccounted for, Heero Yuy finds himself called back into service when the Preventers report that something highly classified has been stolen from their custody. Reunited with his former teammates, he must hunt down the missing hardware, but just who is behind the theft, what is the ultimate goal, and what price will he have to pay?

Disclaimer: Standard disclaimers apply.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Axiomatic

Part 1

If there was one thing I'd always liked about Lady Une -- now General Une -- it was her refreshing bluntness. When I received an e-mail from her one day, it was short and to the point.

Contact me ASAP.

No unnecessary formalities, greetings, signatures. A part of me recognized the abruptness as a large part of why our arrangement worked out so well. She accepted our deal without any drama. Another part of me was amused by the thought that I was not the only person that might send a message so concise. I felt somewhat vindicated of all the chiding I received for my similar behavior, not that Une was a particularly good stick by which to measure. And yet another part of me was appreciative of the way the unsecured text message gave nothing away. Only she would send something like that to that address. No extraneous information was needed.

I glanced at the clock for confirmation of what I already knew, then proceeded to set up a secure phone line through my laptop. Within minutes, I was dialing directly to Une's office, bypassing her personal assistant to connect without the hassle of a middleman. She allowed me the same access I allowed her. All things considered, it probably seemed we were much closer than we actually were, but we were no more than two people united by our desire to preserve the peace.

As expected, she picked up the phone with little ceremony. "Une."

If I didn't know her name, I might think it nothing more than a monosyllabic grunt. "Yuy here," I answered in kind, tacking on the one superfluous word in a frail attempt at something more substantial.

"Ah. I appreciate your prompt response." The gratitude was a nod of respect.

Having nothing stopping me from doing so, I had acted as soon as her e-mail arrived at my inbox. Une did not contact me frivolously, and I respected her in turn. "You said ASAP."

"There's a problem." And that was the end of the pleasantries. "Are you available?"

"How long?" If important things were happening, it wouldn't be a question of whether or not I could be available for that period of time; realistically, it was more an issue of how many things would I need to set aside to deal with this 'problem'. Fortunately, I didn't have many things occupying my time at the moment.

"As long as it takes. Longer than usual."

Time frames also gave helpful hints as to the scope of the problem. This sounded more serious than the few other occasions Une had directly contacted me. Once she had requested some information mining of me, and I had obliged without leaving my apartment. I had done a little clandestine work on-base, but none of it had been so indefinite. This sounded like a full investigation. I didn't normally do that, and she knew it. "What do you need me for?"

"Your unique experience makes you the most qualified man to act as a consultant in this matter."

Consultant? That backed my investigation theory. Unique? It couldn't be the fact that I had been a Gundam pilot, then. She had the other four to tap as resources in that arena. 01, then? Wing was gone, my connections to the crew on L1 dissolved. What skills did I possess that at least one of the others did not? Leadership? Hardly. Assassination? Not even. A healthy disregard for my personal safety? Getting colder by the second.

A blink or two later, and a possibility sprang to mind, a distinctly unpleasant possibility, and the number of ways it could have turned into an incident of this magnitude multiplied with a blinding flash on the insides of my eyelids. If any one of those scenarios was correct... This needed to be discussed in person.

"I can be there... by one o'clock tomorrow," I stated decisively, running through flight schedules and other sundry matters in my head. I checked the online timetables to confirm my estimates, reflecting dimly what it said about my life that I had those charts bookmarked for easy access, then began the online booking process as we continued our conversation.

I guessed she was nodding approvingly on the other end of the line. She had an appreciation for efficiency that had only become more refined after she had acquired a similar appreciation for elegance. With a few more short exchanges, we worked out the details of the arrangement, but before I could bid her farewell to start working on my to-do list, she halted me with one last bit of information. "I've called in my best men to work on this. They've all had relevant experience with the matter at hand."

It didn't surprise me. It was not what I would have personally wanted, perhaps, but this was not the time to quibble over what I might have wanted for myself. "Understood," I said with soft resignation. I appreciated the advance notice, even though I think I expected it. "Yuy out."

After cutting the connection, I took a moment to take a breath and give my thoughts some time to settle into order. Immediately after, I stood from my seat and went to my closet, pulling out the duffle that had been on holiday for quite some time now. Break was over. It was time I got back to work.

*****

Walking these halls at the ripe old age of twenty-one, I felt only slightly less out of place than I did when I was sixteen. Five years of experience outside of the bubble had given me both time to get accustomed to living in my skin, and time to distance myself from all this. I no longer received quite as many odd looks for being short, slight, and young, but now I viewed all of them with a foreigner's eye. I was not used to being among uniformed men and women anymore, some of them armed, some of them traversing the corridors with that purposeful stride uncommon to the plebian streets.

I had that stride, too. Despite how long it had been, I fit in with these people.

When I arrived at the server room, I found that Une had cleared my access ahead of time, so I got to work immediately. Within minutes, I was in. There was no need for me to familiarize myself with the security protocols since I myself had installed them the previous year. I had to admit, it irked me a bit to know that someone had gotten away with a theft of this magnitude right under my protocol's nose, but that was just my competitive streak raising its ugly head. On the other hand, the focus of my work had been skewed towards attacks from the outside, not from within.

The sysadmins had provided me with a log of the blips they had first detected. They were small discrepancies, but footprints nevertheless, and in particular, footprints that might not have been left in another system. At least my work held up that far. I always knew double redundancy verification would pay off. In the time it took me to get here, the techs had narrowed down a timeframe and a window of opportunity, but had been unable to determine a source.

I started by examining the log blips. Someone had been deleting the records of their activities, up to and including the IP address of the accessing computer. I thought about the way packets were exchanged on the network, and delved a level deeper, finding and accessing the system's internal traffic logs. A bit of irritable smugness struck me when I encountered the encoding on it. I was forced to write a little script to parse out the binary data, something someone unfamiliar with the setup would have had a hard time doing, but it didn't take long, and soon enough I had the information I was seeking.

Opening up the logs the techs had given me, I compared timestamps and found the underlying packets that had transferred the data from the client to the server. Our suspect may have deleted his logs, but he couldn't have deleted the record that logged his delete request.

I had to look up each of the blips and compare them by hand, but I managed to correlate enough of the delete requests to trace them to a single MAC address. Fortunately, the server kept records of which workstations mapped to which hardware addresses; I would have hated to have had to log in to every single workstation on the subnet to check its configuration.

Agent Elster was the man I was appointed to assist, along with his junior partner Wong. As soon as I had identified the workstation from which the log modifications had come, we left for the research labs. Elster had a ground-eating stride and a grim look on his face. I had only known him for a couple of hours, so I couldn't tell if that was his normal look, or if he had taken this betrayal personally.

We stormed the department of human resources like a divine wind come to mete out justice to the unworthy. The person at the end of our search was a mousy sort of man, with wire-rimmed glasses, a bad haircut, and a slouch from poring over his data all day. He jumped when we arrived at the opening to his cubicle.

"Espinoza?" Elster snapped out.

The man nearly squeaked. Agent Elster had a commanding presence. "Uh, yes?"

"Unauthorized access to network files has been traced to your workstation." He glared accusingly at the paperpusher. Its force rivaled my own.

"Uh... What do you mean?"

I had difficulty believing that this was the man we were seeking, but Elster continued to grill him. "What were you doing accessing the system logs?"

"What?"

"Two days ago, you accessed systems that were off-limits to you from this computer, and you altered system and security data."

"What?! I did no such thing."

"Using this information, you then further bypassed security to steal Preventers property," Elster continued relentlessly. "You will now be taken into custody--"

"I have no idea what you're talking about! It wasn't me!"

"Then someone used your computer to perform those acts," I inserted, reminded of the old game of Good Cop, Bad Cop. Never really thought I would be the good cop. "If it wasn't you, then who was it?"

"I don't know," Espinoza blurted. "Maybe someone used my computer while I was at lunch or something. I don't know, but it wasn't me!"

"Does anyone know your system password besides you?" Elster demanded, reclaiming control of the interrogation.

"Of course not! I've never told anyone what my password is."

"Did you violate company protocol when you selected your password?" Agent Wong spoke up. "Did you choose something easy to guess, like your birthday, or your wife's name?"

"God, I don't even have a wife!"

I set their conversation to a lower priority in my mind as they continued to ask him about access to his system and looked around his workspace instead. It was not unreasonably cluttered. Human resources saw a lot of paperwork in order to keep track of all the personnel in the building, from janitors to Une herself. They would keep and maintain files on every paperclip requisitioned, every paycheck issued, every mission attended. Consistent with Espinoza's claim that he had no wife, there were no photographs adorning the wall of his cubicle showcasing a loving family. There was a calendar with some comic strip character on it, and a lot of sticky notes, but not much else. He had a bookcase as well, filled with binders and folders and more paper. I thought about what a horrible fire hazard this entire office must have been, even with so much of the paperwork being filed electronically. Triplicate in one form or another would never become extinct.

I zeroed in on the sticky notes. They were covered with reminders, and I got a sinking feeling. Catching sight of a row of notes stuck to the bottom of his monitor, partially obscured by a sheaf of papers, I shuffled the sheets out of the way and rolled my eyes. "Elster," I interrupted.

He finished his sentence and stared menacingly at Espinoza again before he turned his attention to me. "What?"

I plucked a note off the bottom of Espinoza's monitor and held it up for everyone to look at. "Is this your system password?" I asked him.

Espinoza stared at it for a few seconds. "...Uh, oh. Heh. Forgot about that..." He trailed off with an uneasy laugh, then glanced at Elster out of the corner of his eye and promptly cowered in his chair.

People generally thought that hacking was some sort of glorious, mystical affair, but it really wasn't. It was mostly about taking advantage of other people's stupidity. I don't know why people bleated about backdoors and loopholes when those same people usually made it so very easy to walk right in the front door. At least my security system wasn't entirely to blame. There was nothing I could do about people that had the requisite passwords to get into the system and perform legitimate operations.

"Where were you two days ago, around twenty-one-hundred hours? Nine o'clock that night?" I corrected myself. Five years, and I still used military time on occasion. I didn't slip that often anymore, though.

"Nine o'clock? Home, of course."

"Is there anyone that could corroborate that for you?"

"No, I already told you, I don't have a wife or anything!"

I didn't believe it was him, but procedure had to be followed. One look at Elster and Wong told me that they didn't believe Espinoza was a suspect anymore, either. The man didn't have the balls it would have taken to have pulled this off.

"We'll need to go over the security logs, again," Elster laid out to us. "There can't have been that many people in the building after hours. We have security cameras, maintenance workers..."

I listened to them with half an ear as I thought about the matter some more. Doing it that way would take too long. They had already checked the security cameras and found a couple of suspicious persons on tape at the proper time, but they were either cleared, or unidentifiable.

I tapped Espinoza on the shoulder and made it clear I wanted him out of his chair. He quivered and got out of my way. I sat down, took one look at his graphical setup, and opened up a command prompt instead. Our 'hacker' had not really had much in the way of hacking skills. He hadn't needed to hack past security since he had Espinoza's password, but he had needed to delete the signs of his activity, and I thought the deletion and obfuscation patterns looked familiar. They showed signs of a relatively available little application that a person could acquire on the net. Sometimes it was annoying that hacking was considered trendy in certain circles.

The application had been deleted on Espinoza's hard drive, but there were still signs of its existence on the backup snapshots. Triplicate to the rescue. The fact that the application had been on this computer didn't help us, though. It confirmed that the security breach had taken place at this workstation, but it put us no closer to finding our real suspect.

I tried tracing the source of the application. There was no internet activity on the night in question, but there was intranet activity. The file had been transferred over the Preventers network, and it had originated from the researcher workgroup. Because of the way traffic was centralized and routed through the system, I couldn't get any more precise than that.

Elster grunted contemplatively at my findings, and then we left HR to continue our investigation away from the rest of the curious department. We brought Espinoza along with us. The mousy little man trembled as if we were about to bring him in front of a Grand Inquisition, but at least he knew when to keep his mouth shut.

Once we got back to a secured office, Elster planted our paperpusher in front of a workstation and issued his commands. "Bring up the personnel files from the research division."

"All of them?" Espinoza quavered, wiping his palms across his pants. One look, and he did as he was told.

There were, of course, a lot of them. "Have any more bright ideas for narrowing this down, Yuy?"

"Has anyone failed to show up for work in the last few days?" I asked after a moment's thought.

Espinoza typed in the request, working a little more steadily now that he had someone telling him what to do. "Hmmm, yeah, we got all these guys."

I looked at the results of the search. Still more than I would have preferred. "Tentatively, I'd say we can discount the guys in the tech division. The app the perp used was amateurish." The parameter was applied, and we still had ourselves almost two dozen names. Was everyone a slacker these days?

"Who would have the motive?" Wong asked.

"Anyone. Money will motivate anyone." I could all too easily see the stolen property being sold to the highest bidder for quite the tidy sum, and from there, nothing good could possibly happen. I thought briefly about running our names through the system, but the Preventers did a full background check on anyone coming to work for their organization. None of them would have a criminal record.

As more ideas were bandied about, I took a seat in front of the terminal next to Espinoza. I always thought better when I had the system at my fingertips. Using Espinoza's username and password, I won my way into the HR database. From there, I studied the options available to me to try and retrace our perp's digital steps. What would he have needed to do to get into the weapons lab? The most obvious way to do that would have been to access his file, alter it to give himself the necessary security clearance, walk in and take Zero, and then come back to undo the changes to his record. The traces didn't indicate that he had tried anything much more devious than that.

I created a bogus account in the database, using a generic researcher's status as a template and starting from there. Choosing the most straightforward approach, I assessed my options and went about trying to legitimately alter my user's security clearance, only to be stopped by a message reading that the change would require the clearance of someone higher up in the food chain. How had the perp gotten around that? Could he have cleared himself? Or maybe he hadn't needed the clearance. Perhaps his clearance had been high enough, but simply in the wrong department. I hacked my user's data a bit to test my theory, and lo and behold, I found that no authorization was necessary to change his department, while his security level remained the same across the transfer. I would have to mention the oversight to the database maintenance department when I had the time.

"Give me researchers with a clearance level five and above... who have worked in HR before," I added. Considering the amount of time it would have taken to effect the change compared to the timing on the log blips, our thief had to have a good idea of what he was doing before he got there, plus he had to have known of the flaw in the database security checks.

"Uh, one guy," Espinoza answered in due time. "Brisbois, M. But it says here he's been on vacation for a week now."

"Damn," Elster muttered. His fingers tapped out a subtle, agitated beat against his side. "Maybe our guy's too damn cocky. Forget about guys that haven't checked in recently. Let's start over again with the researchers."

Espinoza continued to sort through the research branch, subject to Elster's and Wong's suggestions. On a hunch, I ran down Brisbois' file. He was a geopolitical analyst. How horrid for him. The photograph on file showed a constipated looking man, with his shirt buttoned up all the way and a smug twist to his smile.

I didn't like him on sight. Perhaps that was not the best reason for me to work my way into his log files, but that was what it was. "Elster," I called again.

"What?" He looked at my display as I typed in another command. "The guy that was on vacation?"

"Brisbois, Michel. If he was on vacation, then why do the records show that he checked his e-mail from his computer about ten minutes before we see the activity begin from Espinoza's workstation?"

*****

Briefing room 458 was located without difficulty, but finding it was far from the hard part. The difficulty lay with entering the room and facing the people gathered there. I was a little late, but I had cleared that with Une. The investigation was running as smoothly as could be expected so far, and I was here now to update everyone on what had been going on. We were at the point where this soon would no longer be a matter for Internal Affairs to investigate.

Perhaps I had a flair for the dramatic, for I stood outside the door and cracked it open slowly, just enough for me to listen in on what was being said inside. That way I could time my entrance. Or perhaps I just needed the time to prepare myself. The door was in the back of the room, so if I was careful, I knew that Une's captives wouldn't notice they had an eavesdropper. Une would notice from her position at the front of the room, but that was acceptable.

"--not become urgent yet," she was saying. "But we are certain the threat is imminent, and we must preempt it before it manifests."

I heard her boot heels clopping against the floor as she moved across the room, presumably to hand out the case brief folders, one of which I already held in my hands. Our team had put it together earlier that day. "Two days ago, we discovered we had a defector in our ranks. After the fact, unfortunately. He was an analyst working in R&D, and he took something with him when he left, something he should never have had access to in the first place."

"Holy shit!" I heard someone curse, and despite the foul language, the voice was welcome to my ears. I hadn't realized how much I had missed it.

"Too impatient to wait for it, I see," someone drawled lazily. A shuffling of paper followed, then a brief, stunned silence. "I second Duo's opinion."

"Zero?" That was Quatre's tone, a little deeper than it once was, and still confident, but in this case tinged with a faint tension. Apparently, Zero still haunted him. "How could an analyst have walked off with the Zero system?"

"Internal Affairs is investigating that matter quite thoroughly, I assure you," Une said. Quiet menace filled her words. I had no doubt that whoever should have prevented this would pay dearly for the mistake. Wait, was that me? No, hopefully she'd punish someone on her active payroll instead. "More important, of course, is getting the Zero system back."

"Holy shit," Duo muttered again. "Who the hell is this guy, and what the hell does he plan to do with it?"

I smiled slightly without quite knowing why. That was what the team had been assembled to find out. That, and to reclaim our stolen property, of course.

Une continued unperturbed. "To assist in this matter, I've called in the world's foremost expert on the Zero system."

"Expert?" Quatre inquired, slightly puzzled. No doubt he was thinking about the designers of the system, all of whom were presumed dead.

I judged that to be the best moment for me to enter, dramatic timing aside. Une had probably intended for me to join them with that little introduction, and who was I to disappoint? I took a breath to steel myself, schooled my expression into something professional, knocked once smartly on the door, then opened it completely and revealed myself. My eyes passed over the room briefly as everyone turned to look at me. We measured each other for a second, and then I entered and closed the door behind me.

It was the first time in five years that I had seen them, and they me. After the Barton incident, I took my leave of their company. I needed time to 'find myself', as they say, to redefine myself outside of an armed conflict, so I said my good-byes, and then I disappeared into the throngs of humanity. Anonymity had been such a beautiful thing.

We were all taller, leaner, broader across the shoulders -- some more than others -- but our attitudes hadn't changed. I could see the way we were all in deceptively relaxed poses, but ready to act at a moment's notice. It must irk mightily to have to sit through a briefing with one's back to the door. That would explain why Trowa stood leaning against the wall to one side, and why Duo sat sideways in his seat. Yes, our bodies may have filled out a little, but underneath it all, we were still the same.

Quatre was the first to react. "Heero," he said with some degree of warmth.

"Quatre," I murmured in response, adding a nod. I received cordial nods in turn from Trowa and Wufei.

Duo, on the other hand... There was something on the tip of his tongue, something unpleasant, and he restrained himself from saying it by pursing his lips. It made him look angry, and I couldn't tell if he actually was or not. It should never be assumed that what one sees on Duo's face is the truth. I didn't know what I might have done to inspire such enmity, though; I'd informed him of my leave, and he'd even agreed with my reasoning and let it go without a fuss. After a couple of seconds, he loosened up and said quite pointedly, "Been a while, Yuy."

He made it sound like an accusation, and it was true. "Aa."

"Gentlemen," Une cut in. I resisted the urge to look around and see if she was referring to us. The one word was a reprimand for us to put aside any personal matters we might have and focus on our assignment instead. I was glad for her interference. Without it, we might have carried on for a while. Better that we have time to readjust to each other's presence, and that we attend to business first as professionals.

"Yuy," Une addressed me. "What has the team found out so far?"

She ceded the floor to me, and I took her place, pinning up photos and reference materials from the file as I covered my points. "Four days ago, a political analyst by the name of Michel Brisbois took some vacation time. HR has him logged for one week. Three days ago, Brisbois, our suspect, came to the office after hours, around twenty-thirty. He used his own computer to check his e-mail and transfer a file, then walked into human resources and used the computer of Bernard Espinoza. The password was written on a note stuck on Espinoza's monitor."

Duo snorted in derisive humor.

"Indeed," I agreed. "Brisbois gained access to his own personnel files and used a loophole in the database software to alter them and grant himself a high enough security clearance to use his keycard and get into the weapons lab. The system was moved there last week for the beginning of research into its hardware components that was expected to start today. The initial delay between transfer of the system and the start of the project was caused by the sudden realization that the software engineers from the other department had nowhere to work in the weapons lab, so Zero languished for a few days in their vaults while they shuffled things around to make room. Brisbois got in and walked off with it, and kept his face off the security cameras while he did so. Afterwards, he went back to Espinoza's computer to return his records to their original state, then used a readily available amateur hacking app to clean up after himself.

"The next day, the footprints left by the app were discovered by network security. The admins analyzed the logs and narrowed down a timeframe against which they crosschecked the logs from our other systems. Similar blips began to surface until they traced the system errors down to one of the weapons labs, and they figured out just what was missing. At that point, I joined the team, and further investigation of the digital trail led us to our suspect."

It sounded so devastatingly simple when all the facts were laid out like that, and yet I was at least a little proud that the admins had discovered Zero's loss in a relatively timely fashion. It would have been embarrassing for the researchers to have simply discovered it gone one morning. I paused a moment to shift gears, then continued. "Brisbois was last seen by his neighbors three days ago. A search of his house was conducted, and signs indicate that he did indeed take that vacation of his. He told no one where he was going, and his accounts show no activity, but we did pull a few phone calls that lead us to believe he fled across the border to France. Agents are chasing down the leads now."

"Do we have a motive?" Wufei asked once it was clear I had nothing more to say about the investigation.

"Other than the obvious? No. We suspect he is working for or with someone else. His record has been clean, up to this point, with his psych eval showing nothing out of the ordinary, and he does not appear to be in severe financial straits. As a political analyst, he wouldn't have much use for the system himself. I find it unlikely it was his idea in the first place. He wouldn't know much about Zero, if anything."

"It was planned," Quatre noted aloud. "With a good deal of forethought. He had to stake out HR to find a computer he could access. He had to plan and call in the vacation. He had to find an app to alter the logs. He had to find out where Zero was. He had to know there was a research project, and that it was delayed. He had to know the locations of the security cameras. He took his time to get this right. There was no urgency."

"So we can discount things like ransom," Trowa mused.

"Or coercion," I added. "We didn't get his face on camera, but if he is the one we think he is, he didn't show many signs of hesitance. A justifiable tension for a novice, perhaps, but confidence. He didn't spend too much time messing with the database, either. He knew what he needed to do, and he did it."

Wufei tossed in his two cents. "What about his e-mail?"

"Uninformative. He got a single piece of what may or may not be spam. We're checking out the sender anyway, but the address was an account with one of the free, web-based mail services, so they probably won't have much information to give us. Other than that, he doesn't have anything personal on his drive."

"Home computer?" Duo suggested.

"He took it with him. We're getting in touch with his ISP, but if he used web-mail as well, then we'll be out of luck. It's also probable that he met his partner in some neutral forum like IRC, and they won't show records for that."

"This guy's good."

"Too good," Quatre commented, looking over Brisbois' file. "He was definitely working with someone. His profile shows him as a man with aspirations, but no ambitions. He's a follower, not a leader. He couldn't have planned something like this."

"Working for, or with?"

Quatre paused to give it a moment's thought. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised by his ability to analyze a man with nothing more than a copy of an old Preventers psychological evaluation, but I trusted his skills. I trusted them all, despite not having seen them for the last five years. "For. Brisbois thinks he's in control, but there's someone else pulling his strings. I wouldn't be surprised if they cut him loose after they get what they want."

"Do you think he's passed it off already?" I asked. That would make things more difficult.

He nodded. "If not already, then soon. Brisbois is a tool; they wouldn't let him hold on to something so valuable for a long amount of time."

I think we all stopped to hope that there wasn't some complex conspiracy behind this. Something on that scale could plunge the world back into chaos. "Une, what would we do if Zero got out?"

I shouldn't have asked, but I did. Maybe it demonstrated a lack of faith in the team's skills, but I had fought long and hard for our peace. Five years wasn't enough. I wanted more, and as always, I was willing to fight for it. I just wished I didn't have to.

Une granted me a solemn look and answered me frankly. "I don't know."

I inclined my head in acknowledgment. I was glad she hadn't handed me some spiel on how it wouldn't come to that, but the answer, the images it provoked, also made me feel sad. Sad, tired, but determined to enact that same spiel, to put a stop to this before the worst happened.

"So what do we do?" Trowa asked, turning to me as if he expected me to have an answer.

I gave him what I could, but I wondered how I had become the leader in this little enterprise. My official capacity was consultant, a title I didn't much mind. "The team from Internal Affairs is running down the Brisbois angle as we speak. That's their job, and I trust them to do it well, but soon, this won't be a matter for IA to investigate anymore. Even now, none of them really know what was stolen other than 'classified hardware'. Once they find Brisbois, we'll take over, unless it takes too long, in which case we'll step in. In the meantime, however, I'd rather look into what Zero would fetch on the black market, and/or who might be interested in acquiring Zero."

"Anything and anyone," Quatre answered grimly. "Brisbois could ask anything, and it'd be his. Zero's potential is limitless, to him and any prospective recipient. Not that I'm saying we don't need to investigate that angle, though."

Une adjusted the glasses perched on her nose with a familiar gesture. "I would like to think the Preventers would have heard if anyone had been asking about Zero in the underground, but last week I would have thought it impossible for someone to walk in and steal the Zero system so easily."

"As I recall," Duo put in, "you didn't label the box with a big sticker that said 'steal me!' because you didn't want to make it an obvious target. Maybe it backfired and people didn't realize what it was."

I was passingly amused by the frown turning down Une's lips. I wasn't certain if she was scowling because it was a good possibility, or because Maxwell had made the suggestion so flippantly. It could have been true, though. If I had known something like this would happen, I would have taken Zero myself when I disappeared, rather than trusting the government to safeguard it. According to Une, it had taken them five years to start the research on Zero because of the need to have a truly stable organization and some trustworthy staff before embarking on a project that needed to be approached with the utmost sensitivity. Apparently the Preventers had misjudged the timing. Maybe I should have supported its destruction from the beginning, no matter the waste of technology and knowledge.

"Just so we're clear," Wufei put in after a discreet cough, "can Zero be used to do anything other than start a war?"

Again, the team turned to me. "Its potential is limitless," I answered, consciously echoing Quatre's comments from moments before. "Zero is basically just an artificial intelligence system that has been programmed for use in war applications. In theory, a person could wipe those directives and reprogram it with a different set of goals. But I highly doubt our thief is interested in using Zero to predict the weather.

"On the other hand, you can't use Zero straight out of the box, so to speak. By itself, Zero is just a processor and storage media. To use Zero for any application, you need an interface. It's designed for a neural interface, which is strictly regulated these days, although technically, anything could be used for input and output. Its efficiency and practical applications would be limited in that case, though. Zero's power lies in its ability to manage and process enormous quantities of information at unrivalled speeds. Using anything other than a neural interface would severely compromise the tactical advantage of the system."

"So we should be investigating neural interfaces as well," Quatre identified immediately. "Who makes them, where you can get one, if any have gone 'missing' lately. Naturally we'll also need to look into all of the insurgent groups, potential and otherwise, weeding out the ones that don't have the necessary resources. If our suspect is selling, Zero won't be cheap."

"I'll make sure you have that information," Une promised us. The Preventers kept tabs on all such groups. It was good to know that we'd have their backing in this investigation. I wondered if that meant we had to do everything according to their procedure, as well. That could take some getting used to.

Duo rubbed the side of his nose before speaking up. "Hey, let's not be too reasonable about this. We don't know where these guys are getting their information. Wherever it is, they can't be as smart about it as our 'world's foremost expert' here." He waved lazily at me, the flip of his hand perhaps shrouding what could have been a mocking salute. "They might not know anything about neural interfaces or efficiency or reprogramming the system. They might just plug in to see what happens, and have their base go up in flames because someone goes postal. They might not be able to figure out how to use it, and toss it in the trash bin out behind their evil lair. I ain't saying not to look into interfaces and stuff, but let's not forget the other possibilities, too. These guys could be dumb as all hell."

After that admittedly wise, though inelegantly packaged, idea, we only had a little more information to go over, but most of it boiled down to research and waiting. When the meeting was over, I was tempted to follow Une out the door under the guise of checking on the IA team. We had decided that they probably shouldn't be exposed to the rest of the former pilots to minimize talk. There were a few people that knew who we had been and could recognize us on sight. Any case that warranted the attention of all five of us would certainly be high profile, a security risk to be avoided. For those that did not know who we had been, we were still quite visibly young, and not regular agents. Too many questions would be asked.

Unfortunately, I knew that running off to get an update would only be stalling the inevitable. Part of what set us apart was an unbelievable stubbornness, an implacable will to get what we wanted, and I was sure they would want to talk to me. Now that the immediate business was taken care of, I had no good reason to put this off.

Une shut the door behind her and I was left to the wolves. They turned on me with ominous deliberation. If not for the good grace of Quatre, the rest of us probably would have stared silently at each other, each being unwilling to be the first to ask.

"Heero," he said, reaching out to give me a warm handshake, one hand to grasp, one hand to cover. I found my hand rising to meet his of its own accord. Quatre simply had that air about him. No doubt he shook the hands of others several times a day, and none of them ever thought twice about it. His was not a hand to be refused. "You're looking well."

I wasn't certain how I was supposed to respond to that at first. Standard protocol for a compliment called for a denial, but that was not appropriate in this case. Gratitude, perhaps? Also inappropriate. Reciprocation, then. "As are you, Quatre."

And he did, although he hadn't quite lost the fair skin of his youth. His hair seemed a little less blond, a little more sandy. He needed to get out of the board room more often and out into the sun. Living on Earth had given me a fine appreciation of that big ball of gas in the sky.

"I don't know why I'm not surprised to see you here," he continued. He uttered it without rancor. "How did you know?"

"Une contacted me two days ago," I answered succinctly, knowing that no matter what I said, I would stir up questions.

"Contacted?" Trowa asked mildly. Still in his seat behind Trowa, Duo pressed his lips together in a thin line. "She had your contact information?"

"Only an e-mail. I left it in case, well, in case something like this happened. I had hoped it wouldn't, though." I was only somewhat relieved that I had not been called upon after a war had already begun. We had the opportunity to stop things before it came to that, if it was going to come to that. That made me a little less upset about this than I might otherwise have been.

"You left her with a way of contacting you," Duo stated evenly, quite aggressive in its mere repetition of fact.

I could just have easily left my information with them, I suppose, but I didn't. Why? I wasn't entirely certain. I had wanted a clean break, and I had gotten it, so it hadn't been the wrong decision. That probably wasn't what Duo wanted to hear, so I said nothing more than a quiet 'yes'. What else was there to say about it? It was in the past now.

"What have you been up to?" Quatre cut in, breaking the silence between us.

It seemed like so much had happened to me these last five years, but really, it boiled down to a few simple ideas. If they wanted elaboration, they could ask for it. "I traveled around Earth for while. Then I decided to go to school."

"Where?"

"HMU."

"What are you studying?" I had always wondered if Wufei would go back to a life of academics, but I think his stint with the Preventers was his journey, just as my five years had been mine.

"Computers." I answered with a small twist of my lips in accompaniment. What else would I be studying? "Plus whatever struck my fancy on the side."

"It agrees with you," Quatre said without any inquisitive lilt. Only a smile.

"It does." I quite nearly smiled back. It felt almost decadent to be able to indulge myself in leisurely learning, to want to know more about something and have nothing stop me from studying it. Such studies enabled me to ask a question of my own in return, even though I didn't think I would be surprised by any of the answers. "And all of you?"

"Business and family." It wasn't that difficult to find out what he had been up to. The division of Winner Enterprises had been a hot topic in the business world for quite some time, and naturally the man behind those changes was still in the spotlight on occasion. Quatre or someone related to him somehow was responsible for spearheading a number of beneficial reconstruction campaigns. "And like you, I suppose, on call to the Preventers, in case something like this should happen."

"Business and family," Trowa echoed in response to my question, although his business and family were far removed from the high-powered activities of Quatre. I wasn't entirely certain what Trowa referred to, but I was sure it was something down-to-earth. Back to the circus, perhaps? I remembered the nurturing, supportive atmosphere there from when I had stayed with him. It was sure to be a good place to wait out the transition from war to peace. I wondered how things might have turned out for me if I had had a business and family to return to. "And on call."

I noticed Duo rolling his eyes at Trowa's answer, but he didn't say anything as Wufei responded with a single word. "Preventers."

That, too, I had known. He was the only one of us to be working full-time with the organization. Brussels was where he was stationed, but at the time I was called in, Chang had been on a mission elsewhere. I wasn't certain if he had been called off the case to work on this, or if it had simply concluded in a timely fashion. I, too, had been confronted with the offer to work with the Preventers, but I had chosen to decline in favor of something a little more civilian. If that didn't work out for me, the Preventers would always be there. I was, in fact, listed as an inactive agent complete with rank, and had been since the end of the Barton incident.

That left only Duo. He never left many traces in the system. When all the eyes turned to him expectantly, it seemed he gave his answer grudgingly. "Oh, I've been here and there, doing this and that," he finally tossed out flippantly. "And of course, I've been on call."

Well, that was utterly uninformative, but if that was all that he wanted to give right now, then that was all I was going to get. I wouldn't be surprised to hear he really had been here and there, doing this and that, and if so, it would have taken a while to go over the matter in any detail. I would find out eventually, but now was not the time. "I'm sure we'll all have time to socialize later. Right now, all of you will need to familiarize yourself with the files you were given. Do you have office space here?"

Wufei answered. "My office is two hallways down. There is a conference room near there that is sometimes converted into cubicles for visiting agents."

From which I assumed that Wufei was the only member of our team that had a space of his own. That made sense. Though the rest were on call, the tasks they had undertaken had been too few or too light to warrant an office on the premises. Space was important in a building like this. Five years ago, it had seemed like the organization would never expand to fill the building. Now, there were offices around the world and the colonies. I slept better at night knowing that. "We can secure it, I assume."

He nodded curtly. "I do not believe there is anyone scheduled to use it at the moment."

"Number?"

"Four-ninety-two."

"We'll make that our base of operations. Head on over, settle in, and review the file. I'll go to IA and get the latest word on their end. I'll meet you at four-ninety-two, and then we can talk about the case in greater detail." I set about gathering up the materials I had laid out during the briefing, realizing only belatedly that I had nodded dismissively at them when I had finished issuing my commands. I shook my head at my behavior. This only confirmed my decision to stay out of this environment. I was backsliding all too easily.

Papers rustled and chairs scraped lightly against the floor as the others prepared to depart, but by the time Trowa and Wufei had reached the door, I felt someone's attention focused intently upon me. I looked up to respond. "Yes?"

Duo stared openly at me for three seconds before answering with a nonchalant shrug. "Nothing."

It was never 'nothing' with Duo. As far as I could recall, anyway. I supposed I would have to remember that what I knew about my comrades wasn't necessarily true anymore. "No. There's been something you've wanted to say to me ever since I walked into this room. Now's your chance."

He stood looking at me for an additional five seconds before one corner of his mouth lifted, setting his lips into an edged twist as he spoke conversationally. "You're a real bitch, you know that, Yuy?"

During the tense silence that fell in his condemnation's passing, I blinked at him. "No," I said, the first thing that came to mind. "I don't."

The silence persisted for another two seconds before he laughed, that wry quirk of his mouth still present. It looked like he was about to say something else, but he changed his mind with a shake of his head and headed towards the door without another word, brushing past the others on his way out. I watched him go, then got back to collecting my things, deciding that even if I had another five years to try and understand Duo Maxwell, I probably never would.

*****

Part 2

France. I hadn't spent much time there in my wanderings. It was a little too close to Brussels and the seats of political power for me to feel entirely comfortable there, but it was, admittedly, a beautiful country. We had no time to admire the scenery, however. IA had uncovered Brisbois' trail. From Brussels, he had taken a commuter train across the border to Calais, rented a car, and then headed southwest. Several IA agents were already on the scene conducting the search to ferret out his precise location. We would probably be expected to take them with us when we went in to apprehend our errant researcher. That would be bothersome.

No more bothersome, I suppose, than having spare time on the trip out. I was already very familiar with the details of the case, and the others had caught up easily. Our general strategy for apprehending Brisbois had already been outlined, pending further information on the exact terrain in which we would be working. Naturally, this left room for idle chatter.

It wasn't that I didn't want to talk to them. I just didn't need to know the precise details of their lives. They were well, happy, healthy. What more did I really need to know? And if I learnt about their lives, then they would have to learn about mine. I wasn't very good at storytelling. Predicting what details people would be interested in still didn't come naturally to me.

I was dwelling on possibilities I shouldn't have been dwelling on when Quatre said the inevitable. "Heero, tell us more about what you've been up to these last five years."

I didn't know what they'd been up to, really, but I didn't go asking each of them about it, now did I? But it was four against one, so they won. I put away my thoughts on Zero, somewhat glad to be rid of the dreary things. "What did you want to know? Like I said, I've mostly been in school. I qualified for my bachelor's in May, actually, but I didn't file my petition to graduate."

"Don't tell me you forgot?" Duo inserted, an amused lilt to his voice.

I shook my head. I didn't forget very many things. "No. I just wasn't sure what I wanted to do afterwards... and there were so many classes I hadn't taken yet. I thought I'd just stick around for a while. I can always file any time I want, if I change my mind."

He snorted. "Professional student, eh? Aren't those usually the types that aren't ready to face the real world?"

"I've been in the real world, thanks." And in that world where so many of the decisions I made had to be made in less than a blink of an eye, it was nice to be able to sit back and consider things at my own leisure. "And you, Duo? What was 'this and that', and where was 'here and there'?"

He did not seem especially pleased that I turned the conversation back on him. "Well, guess I haven't found my calling either, yet. Colony-hopped for a while. Did some odd jobs, met up with some old friends. Of which you weren't one, since you didn't leave us any contact information."

Okay, I was beginning to understand that this would probably be a sore point with him. I hoped that perhaps Quatre would chide him for his bluntness, but no such luck. The others seemed content to let us hash this out for ourselves, and it needed to be done to make sure this matter didn't interfere with our work, so I went ahead and hashed away. "It's not like I just disappeared one day, Duo. I let you know I was leaving."

"And then you disappeared the day after."

"I think what Duo is trying to say," Quatre stepped in diplomatically. I was almost beginning to feel sorry for the role he had to play in this group. It hadn't taken long before he decided to smooth the ruffled feathers. "Is that you didn't have to cut yourself off from us. We respected your decision to leave."

"No, I did have to." I had thought that they understood. I needed the clean break. I wanted to be thrown out into the wild to fend for myself, completely unable to turn back for shelter in the life I had known. I needed to force myself to get out there and create something new and different with my life. I wouldn't have been able to do that as effectively if I had known there was always a safe haven to which I could return.

"We weren't good enough for you anymore?"

I was beginning to wonder how many more negative ways Duo could interpret my absence. "I wasn't trying to put you all behind me. I wasn't running, or hiding, or anything. I just let you know that you probably wouldn't hear from me for a while."

"I think we figured that meant a few months, maybe a year," Wufei pointed out evenly. No accusation. Simply a statement of fact.

Trowa followed with a soft-spoken question of his own. "If this hadn't come up, would you have reestablished contact with us?" I think I liked it better when it was just me versus Duo. It was better than the four to one odds I had going now.

It took a short moment's thought to answer. "Yes. I think I was getting to that point, where I was ready."

"When you ran out of classes to take?" Duo sniped.

What was wrong with that? Although I saw it more as, when I felt I had learned everything there was to learn at the university. I had reached that point where I was settled into my life, my personality, my identity. The only thing that had stopped me from leaving the university last May had been the fact that I hadn't yet figured out what I wanted to do with all of me.

"I looked for you," he threw out. "Didn't find ya. Don't call that hiding?"

"Oh? I didn't know that."

Duo smirked at me. "I know how to hide my search strings behind a hash function, thank you very much. I didn't look all that hard, but if you'd been in the system, I woulda found you."

"I was in the system," I answered mildly.

"Changed your name, then? That's still hiding, in my book."

"In a manner of speaking."

He cast me a suspicious look. "And what's that supposed to mean?"

"Are you sure you want to know?"

"And what's that supposed to mean?"

"I don't think you'll be happy to know why your search failed."

Trowa chuckled. "Forget 'happy'. Now I'm just curious."

I think the guarded, narrowed expression of Duo's eyes meant he was curious, too, though he wouldn't admit it. Hiding and hunting was his game. I was stepping on his professional pride now, even if he hadn't been looking very hard for me, a fact which, incidentally, I didn't know what to make of. It could be that he had been respecting my wishes, or that he just hadn't cared enough, or that he was just having a little fun, or anything, really. "You were searching for 'Heero Yuy', right? You should have been searching for 'Hiro Yui'." Naturally, they gave me only a couple of blank stares since the two names were pronounced about the same, so I spelled it out for them.

Duo blinked at me incredulously. "You mean, if I'd spelled your name wrong, I would have found you?!"

Trowa gave me a nod of respect. "Clever."

"I wasn't trying to be. I just wanted to discourage casual searches. It would never have stood up against a human search pattern, but computers are literal like that. They don't know much about phonetics, so it's unlikely they'll return the misspelling in their result set unless you're using a very fuzzy pattern matching. Especially if you're running it through a good hash."

No, I hadn't meant to be clever. It just worked out that way. Truth was, I hadn't wanted to change my name at all. After years of not having a name, I didn't want to give up my name, even if it had been arbitrarily assigned to me. I had grown into it, fleshed it out and made it mine, changed it from just a code name to a person. By spelling it in a different manner, people could still address me as they had been for the two years prior that I bore the name, and that just seemed right to me. I rarely saw my name on paper, after all, but another added bonus was that it was easy enough to alter what paperwork I did have bearing my correct name.

I looked to Duo to see what he thought about the matter, but he pouted at me. "I'm not talking to you."

It was just as well. My phone rang moments later. It was IA, calling to tell me they had found our suspect.

*****

Wimereux was a pretty little place, the sort of town I had once looked at and thought, that's the sort of peace I want. And now some villain had made his temporary nest here, and I hoped we would not bring violence to this place.

We met the IA agents outside the small hotel. They had confirmed his entrance into room twenty-one earlier that evening, and surveillance indicated that he was still alone within, his attention now occupied by a dinner delivered by room service.

"Suppose we'll have to do this by the book," Duo said, eyeing the pair with us. It would be quite difficult to find anyone more straight-laced than the agents from Internal Affairs.

"How else would we do it?" Wufei asked, hopefully a hypothetical question laced with irony spoken for the benefit of our observers.

I wasn't as well-versed in procedure as he was, but I could make a few accurate guesses. Even so, it would be a handy excuse to take a back seat in the proceedings. I had been issued a service revolver for the mission, and it sat uneasily in my shoulder holster. Unfortunately, I had to admit that it was not because I was unaccustomed to packing a weapon, but because it simply was not a gun I would have chosen for myself. I preferred something a little more compact.

I wanted to hold on to my role of 'consultant' for as long as I was able. My comrades were more than capable of handling the other side of things. Since the end of the wars, I had been officially licensed to carry and use, but the last time I had pulled the trigger was when I had been aiming at Mariemeia. I wasn't ready for that not to be the last time anymore, not quite yet. I wasn't opposed to getting back into this life if circumstances dictated it, but I wasn't going to welcome it with my arms wide open.

"How many other guests are checked into this hotel?" Quatre was asking the agents, planning as always.

Agent Barney replied. "We haven't established contact with the hotel administration yet, but observation has shown the hotel to be moderately populated, maybe eighteen or so rooms checked out."

"We'll need to talk to the manager. He can open the door for us, and he can help us clear out the rooms in the surrounding area, if any. Someone will need to continue surveillance until we begin our operation."

It was clear he was referring to Barney and McCarthy, even if he didn't specify. They had a somewhat sour look on their faces. A lot of their work had gone into this, but once again, they knew all about operational security. They were aware that something classified had been taken from the Preventers, something they were not cleared to know about, and it would be a violation of opsec if we took them in with us. The case had started out in IA after security reported the log blips, and it had stayed there only as a matter of convenience when speed became crucial and our team had not yet been assembled.

They submitted with surprisingly good grace, perhaps because Quatre had been wise enough to phrase his dismissal subtly. Once they re-stationed themselves outside, we went ahead and spoke to the hotel manager. It took a little while to get through to him. He was a bird-like man, more upset by the possibility of bad publicity than by the fact that his hotel was currently harboring a fugitive from international justice. After assuring him that the more he cooperated with us, the more smoothly things would go, and the less of a stir we would cause, we secured his generous cooperation.

We quietly collected the five guests that were in the same area as Brisbois and shuffled them somewhere out of the way before we got into position. Quatre notified the two agents from IA via the commset he had borrowed from them that we were about to enter, and then we knocked on the door. Brisbois was not foregoing his creature comforts. How fortunate for us that a bottle of wine was scheduled to be delivered to his room at this time.

"It's open!" came through the door, prompting me to shake my head. Honestly, had civilians absolutely no concept of opsec? It almost made me glad I wasn't quite one of them.

Wufei was designated our point man since he was the only full-time agent among us. He threw open the door with his gun at the ready. "Preventers!" he shouted, muzzle homing in on the man in a bathrobe seated on the edge of his bed in front of a dinner cart. Brisbois started, dropping his fork into his meatloaf, but he was pinned by both his dinner and Wufei's gun, and made no effort to escape.

Trowa followed Wufei in immediately after and covered the sides of the room with his own drawn weapon. "Clear," he announced, sliding over to the bathroom, and then the closet to secure those as well. As expected, Brisbois had been alone in his room.

The rest of us entered after he gave us the sign. Duo moved forward to secure the prisoner while Quatre and I looked around the room. Brisbois said nothing as he was cuffed, frisked, and informed of the charges and his abbreviated rights, but I didn't know if that was because he was frightened or confident. The smug little smirk that had been in his profile was almost on his face now, but it quivered slightly. Perhaps he was both. Either way, we would get what we wanted out of him.

The man looked as if he had been planning on staying for a few days, a fact confirmed by the manager's registrar. A couple of shirts had been hanging in the closet, his toiletries spread out across the bathroom countertop. I spotted a case peeking out from beneath the bedskirt, and lifted it out into the open immediately. Before I even set it down on the bed to open it, I knew something was wrong. I scowled, the case still in my hand.

"Is that it?" Quatre asked, cautiously hopeful that our quest had ended here.

"It resembles the one caught on tape," I answered, laying the matte silver carrying case on the sheets. The agents had seen him bearing only the suitcase I saw against the wall by the dresser. The carrying case was about fifteen centimeters in thickness, but it could have been easily packed and concealed within the suitcase. That conclusion didn't solve our immediate problem, however. "But it's too light."

I snapped open the catches and lifted the lid to have my suspicions confirmed. The foam packing material inside held nothing. For a fleeting moment, I was furious. Did this fool not understand what he had released into the world? Did he not appreciate all of the blood, sweat and tears that had gone into bringing peace to the world, that continued to be spent protecting and nurturing it?

I closed my eyes for a brief moment, calming my anger until I no longer felt the need to grab him by the lapels and slam him against the wall. After that moment had passed, I turned to him, the motion a brief, concise jerk of the head that startled the analyst into a jumpy twitch that persisted as I pinned him with an icy glare. I wasn't going to be 'good cop' this time around. "What have you done with it?"

"I don't have it," he sneered, not bothering to deny his culpability. "You're too late!"

A shiver like a cold breath down the back of my neck seized me. I could only hope he meant that we had been too late to reclaim Zero from him, and not that we were too late to turn aside whatever nefarious plot he had up his sleeve. The fear made me want to do hasty, unadvisable things to him again, but I wisely stayed my hand.

"You've passed it off already," Duo said in my silence. In the background, Chang had claimed the commset from Winner and was informing the IA team of our status. Barton took it upon himself to begin searching the room for hidden clues.

Brisbois had clammed up, but the smug satisfaction still lingered on his lips, serving as answer enough. He had gotten over our entrance and was once again confident in the fact that he had beaten us.

"Shit," Duo muttered. "He could have done it any time, before he left Brussels, even."

My logic jumped on the puzzle. Personally, I would have done it on the train. If I had been a third party wanting to keep my hands clean, I would have waited until the merchandise had been carried out of the city to some neutral, populated area where no one kept track of the faces around them, like the commuter train Brisbois had taken. I wouldn't have done it here, in Wimereux. Then I would have arranged for something like Brisbois getting up at some pre-planned time to stretch his legs, leaving the case unattended for me to pick up or replace in passing. We would never have had to meet face to face. I could have gotten on at any stop, probably a couple before the pick-up spot, and then disembarked afterwards and headed off to absolutely anywhere. Zero was long gone.

But Brisbois was not. "Who did you give it to?" Duo asked next.

When the man again offered nothing but the annoying, self-righteous twist of his lips, Quatre attempted to reason with him, though I predicted it would get nowhere. "Do you have any idea what you've done? People may get hurt because of your actions, do you understand that? Will you be able to handle having that on your conscience?"

His smile stayed as he shook his head at us as if we were children. "You're the ones that don't understand."

"You're right. I don't understand why you'd want to do something that could plunge this world into war."

"This isn't about war or peace."

Wufei made a disdainful sound. "Money?"

Brisbois held his tongue in his own disdainful elegance. I was glad the two IA agents appeared at the door at that point, because I was certainly contemplating making him the first casualty.

"Didn't find it?" McCarthy asked, quickly taking stock of the situation with a trained eye. The empty case on the bed made things obvious enough.

"It's long gone." Wufei shot a discreet glare in Brisbois' direction.

"He is our guy, though?" Barney put in, not wanting to hear that another mistake had been made. His own training made him circle our captive and make sure the bindings had been applied properly. I didn't think it was a criticism of our skills.

"He's the right guy. He passed it off en route." IA had already confirmed that Brisbois had met with no one else and visited no other sites while in the city.

"Damn." That was an understatement. "Any idea where it is now?"

Quatre dictated our next move. "Wherever it is, we won't find it here. Let's head back to HQ. We can chat with him on the way there.

Trowa finished packing the man's belongings to bring with us as evidence, along with his laptop, indicating silently to us that he had not yet found anything of particular interest. We were about to usher Brisbois out the door when we finally squeezed another word out of him. "Ahem, pardon me, but aren't you forgetting something?" he huffed. The room's collective eyebrow rose, prompting him to sputter a little in indignation. "Some clothes would be nice!"

Ah, yes. He was still in his bathrobe. Personally, I wouldn't have minded putting him through a little embarrassment. In theory, it would make it less likely that he would flee our custody, only it probably wouldn't make him any more cooperative, and it would also attract undue attention. Trowa shrugged, popped the suitcase open and pulled out the first pair of pants that came to hand. He tossed it at Brisbois, and it landed neatly across his shoulder.

Brisbois scowled, turning around halfway and jerking his cuffed hands at us, resulting in a strange little butt wiggle. "Well?!" he demanded.

Wufei uncuffed him, mostly because it was better than dressing him ourselves. Brisbois then attempted to demand some privacy, but all seven of us glared him down. Next thing we knew, he would be insisting we let him finish his dinner. He fumbled a bit pulling on his pants beneath his fluffy robe, and when he was done, a wrinkled shirt landed on his head, courtesy of Trowa, who then snapped the suitcase shut with a professional flair. We allowed him no time to primp before we pushed him out the door.

*****

Part 3

When we were safely ensconced on a return train to Brussels, Duo and Wufei chose to keep watch over our prisoner in a private compartment. It was a duty they wouldn't have minded leaving to the two IA agents, but there was a chance that Brisbois would start talking, whether coerced or not. Unfortunately, that left the pair with us.

I drifted away from the rest of the group towards the farther end of the otherwise empty corridor outside the compartment we were guarding and stood in front of a window seat, leaning against the back of the chair in front of it. I found myself a little disturbed by my behavior, my lack of control. In the process of analyzing my reactions to Brisbois, I noticed my brief spikes in temper. Had the possibility of war flaring up really shaken me that much?

Sometimes, when I got edgy, I still had my moments of hyperawareness. On those occasions, I still had to consciously refrain from accidentally lashing out at someone that unthinkingly startled me, or got too close to me with some innocent motion. That had nothing to do with anger, just engrained response. It didn't happen often that I got angry enough to want to strike a man. I didn't like it when it did. I needed to be professional and just get Zero back. I couldn't do that if I went around gratuitously hurting the people from whom we needed cooperation.

Who said anything about gratuitous?, a little voice whispered to me. I could easily hurt a person quite strategically and still get cooperation, now couldn't I? I blocked out the litany of pressure points and little bones that sprang up in response to the thought, and chose to dwell instead on the peace.

It did mean a lot to me. No question. I would not tolerate all of the sacrifices made by so very many people on every side of the war being rendered meaningless by some fool that didn't think he had gotten enough personal benefit out of it.

That was only making me angry again. I stopped the thoughts in that line altogether, and decided to focus on our leads again. I hadn't really sunken into the facts of our case when Quatre showed up in the row in front of me, one knee on the seat.

"Heero," he said quietly, mindful of the others. There were about a dozen rows of seats between us and them, with Trowa in between, feigning a nap. "We've just gotten you back, and now you've left again."

"Sorry," I murmured, unable to be anything other than repentant when he smiled softly at me. "Just thinking."

He studied me with those too-wise eyes of his. "Is it alright? That you've been called back?"

Alright? It wasn't alright that some bastard with an agenda was threatening world peace, but I suppose it was alright that I had been called to help deal with it. I had offered, hadn't I? I nodded for him. "The vacation was nice, but I guess it couldn't last forever." There should have been a little less melancholy in that attempt at light humor.

He put an encouraging hand on my upper arm. "We'll stop it before it starts, Heero." He let that rest between us, knowing that any more of a pep talk would be lost on me, before moving on to something a little less intense. "We're glad you're back, you know, despite the circumstances. If you end up going back to your life after this, I hope we can be a part of it."

"Glad?" I repeated wryly.

"Even Duo," he reassured me, an understanding sparkle dancing around his eyes. "Granted, he may be sore that you left in the first place, but he's still glad you're back."

I snorted in agreement. The way I saw it, Duo was just making up for the five years I'd missed of experiencing his irritation in person. It would pass after he'd caught up. Provided my perception of him hadn't changed, Duo was not inspired to hate easily. "I wasn't trying to shut all of you out, you know."

"How do you mean?"

"It wasn't personal, that's all. I just... needed a vacation," I finished, falling back on my flat joke from before. "One of those vacations where you leave your cell phones and your pagers and your laptops at home."

He chuckled, scratching ruefully at his chin. It was a little strange to see the faint color variation of a shaven beard along his jaw. "I need to take more of those."

"Business keeping you on your feet?"

"Absolutely. Did you always plan it as a 'vacation'? Were you thinking of coming back?" He resisted my attempt to change the topic. Perhaps trying to out-converse Quatre was an exercise in futility.

I tried not to let all the talk of 'being back' get to me. Was this really the place I belonged? Had I been an idiot to try and leave it? No, I didn't regret my decision. I was a better person for it. On the other hand, maybe 'vacation' was putting a wrong spin on things. 'Sabbatical', perhaps. I hadn't left for fun. Was this where I inevitably belonged? I didn't know. With these people, I wouldn't be surprised. We had shared something important, and that would never go away. I hadn't thought of my absence as 'shutting them out', but it basically came down to a decision between me and them, and for the first time in a long, long time, I had the leisure and the opportunity to choose 'me'. I took it. I didn't think they would begrudge me that.

I shrugged in response to Quatre's question. "I didn't plan anything. Whatever happened, happened. And 'this' happened to happen." It was sort of reminiscent of how it was after Odin had been killed. Something had just happened that dictated the course of my life for the next few years.

"'This'," Quatre agreed with a sigh. "No offense, but I could have lived without 'this' happening."

"So could I." A 'this' having to do with something other than revolution would have been nice. "Do you think Brisbois will give it up?"

He sighed again. "I don't know. Actually, yes, I think he will, provided he has it to give. Just how long it will take, and to what depths we will have to sink for it, I don't know."

"Hopefully, not much of either." I thought about Duo and Wufei, and the chat they would be having with Brisbois. It wouldn't be anything messy here on a vehicle of public transportation, but that could change when we got back to HQ. It was unsavory to contemplate, but I think we would do what we had to in order to get the job done.

This easy train ride back to the city was deceiving. There was a clock ticking somewhere, and we didn't know how much time was left on it. We had rushed to action in tracking down Brisbois in the hopes of catching up to him before the system left his hands. Now that we had missed that window of opportunity, everything was up in the air. Despite that, the feeling of urgency didn't fade, and it inspired me to get back on task. "We'll need to pursue those ideas we had on neural interfaces. Do a more thorough check on his financials and look for a payment or something. Talk to his co-workers, check his friends or family. We have his computer; we need to check his correspondences, his contacts, his browser caches, everything."

When I slowed down enough to take a breath, Quatre's hand reached out to touch me on the arm again. "Don't make it sound like it has to be a one-person job, Heero," he chided lightly. "We have a team of incredible people known for pulling off the impossible. We'll get it done."

I felt like he was scolding me again for taking off on my own, and he was good enough that I couldn't tell if he had meant it that way or not. It wasn't clear to me why he thought I was thinking solo, anyway. I had used 'we', not 'I'. While the odds against us now weren't quite as bad as they had been during the war, I recognized the wisdom in our unity. In fact, I sort of looked forward to it.

*****

Wufei and Duo didn't get anything useful out of our thief on the ride back to headquarters. We threw Brisbois into a holding cell and let him sit there with a security camera for company while we discussed the case in an office down the hall.

"We can't just sit around waiting for him to sing," Quatre declared.

"Amen to that," Duo muttered. He had emerged from his session with Brisbois with a very disgruntled look on his face, though one that existed only out of Brisbois' sight.

Undisturbed, Quatre continued. "Une's got the information on the possible insurgent groups ready for us. We'll definitely need to take a look at that. It's the middle of the night right now, so--"

"Do we have to let him sleep?" Duo interrupted. "I mean, I hardly want to spend any more time with the little creep, but give me a little caffeine, and I'm ready to go 'til morning. A little sleep dep, and I'm sure he'll be talking in no time."

I was sorry to say that that actually sounded like an appealing notion to me. We even had enough people to tag team him so we wouldn't have to lose the sleep ourselves. Unsurprisingly, however, Wufei shot the idea down before it had time to really take root. "No."

"Aw, come on..."

He lifted a thin eyebrow and repeated himself. "No. I like the man as little as you do, Duo, but sleep deprivation is hardly humane treatment--"

"Screw 'humane', Fei. We're talking about a guy ready to screw over lots and lots of people in the name of God knows what! We still haven't even figured that out yet." Personally, I thought sleep dep was pretty humane compared to some of the other things we could have done.

"--and it would be enough to bring this entire investigation into question."

"By whom? We afraid he's going to sue us or something?"

"I know you've never really gotten along with the system, Maxwell, but--"

"Realistically speaking," Trowa cut in, his soft words directed at me, and yet somehow capable of putting a stop to their testy exchange. "How much of a hurry are we in? How long would it take to set Zero up, worst case?"

I didn't have a number prepared for him. "Hmm. Well, they'd have to recalibrate the system for its user and its purpose. The absolute shortest possible time would be about a day of hard work, if you knew what you were doing, and you didn't have very many adjustments to make. The further the new user from its previous settings -- which would be me -- the longer it will take to get useful results. The same goes with its purpose."

"Then this war will never get off the ground," Duo drawled, aiming a wry look at me. "Isn't anybody that thinks anything quite like you, Yuy."

Somehow, I didn't think he meant that as a compliment. Oh well. "There's also the little matter of our final battle. A lot of Wing's circuits got fried at the end there. Zero suffered some damage, but I'm not entirely certain of the extent. I never had the opportunity to sit down and inspect it carefully, but I would assume at least part of it will need to be fixed or reconstructed. Who knows what they might end up with if they don't realize that."

"A VR version of pong, maybe?" Pong. I was pleased that I was familiar with one of Duo's references.

Quatre asked a less flippant question. "If the memory is corrupted... if the filters are malfunctioning... It could really, really mess with someone's mind, couldn't it? And I mean that in a, even worse than it usually does, sort of way."

"Hmm, now that you mention it, yes, I suppose so."

"...Oh my."

"But only in the worst case scenario," I was quick to point out. "Garbage in, garbage out -- that's what we end up with when someone plugs in that's not suited for the system's configuration. If the input is garbled on processing, we'll still only end up with garbage out, nothing worse than what we have when the system is working properly. Not that that is mild, by any means." Yes, we were very familiar with what sort of 'garbage out' the system could produce when undamaged. "The difference is that we'll get garbage out even if we don't get garbage in. The results would be the same if a layperson connected, damaged or undamaged. On the other hand, I'd probably see a significant difference in performance."

"So, in answer to my question," Trowa mused. "Taking into consideration your estimates, we probably have, say, at least a week before we see any results of the theft pop up, and that's a conservative worst case. Longer if the system is going to exchange hands again."

"Shorter if Duo's assessment of the situation proves true. They might just be idiots and try plugging in first thing in the morning. I assure you that nothing useful will happen, but it's possible that something might happen. Even if it's just a VR version of pong taking over all of our computers," I added with a nod of my head to Duo. His eyebrows rose, but that was all. I couldn't tell what it meant. "Average case scenario, I'd say we have a couple of weeks, if our thieves are smart."

Wufei offered another scenario. "It's entirely possible that they stole nothing but a worthless bunch of silicon wafers."

That would be nice, although I might feel a bit sad for the loss. "I wouldn't get my hopes up."

"Could they do any further damage to it by accident?" Trowa asked. "If they don't know what they're doing with it, that is."

It was times like these that I really missed Zero and its ability to analyze all of the possibilities. "Hmm. If they interface with it incorrectly, they could possibly damage it further, but it wouldn't be damaged by the quality of input."

"So we have some time, to sleep if nothing else," Quatre said, looking pointedly at Duo. When the former Deathscythe pilot registered the attention, his expression transitioned into one of feigned innocence. The blond shook his head and continued. "As I recall, Zero's components aren't unique, but they are sophisticated. If they are going to repair Zero with similar parts, there are only so many avenues for them to pursue."

I wasn't completely unfamiliar with the topic. "Hardware. I'll compile a list." I suppressed the urge to yawn and scratched at the back of my neck instead.

"Write up the specs, then hand it off to one of us. You need to look into Brisbois' computer and see what you can find there." I nodded my acknowledgment, and he turned back to the group at large.

"I wanna talk to his co-workers when they come in tomorrow," Duo put in.

"Brisbois is a pompous fool." Mostly, it was a statement of fact, but there was still a faint tinge of disdain in Wufei's voice. "Do you really think he would have said anything relevant to his co-workers?"

"Brisbois is a pompous fool," Duo repeated. "And in my experience, what makes these people fools is that they open their mouths and share their idiocy with others. Guys like this like to rant. He must have said something stupid and annoying to someone."

I had to agree with his assessment, and Duo, to my knowledge, had always been good with people. Although in the last twenty-four hours, most of his pronouncements had been jaded, cynical ones involving the stupidity of mankind, I still trusted his judgment in these matters.

"Okay, then," Quatre said decisively. "We'll let Brisbois stew for the night. Maybe that will loosen his tongue. I'll talk to him in the morning. I should be able to get a good feel for him. Heero, look into his laptop and whatever other electronic records you can get your hands on. Duo, talk to his co-workers, his friends if he had any. Wufei, look into the groups Une gave us that might be interested in acquiring Zero. Trowa, start compiling lists on hardware manufacturers and neural interface research and development. And all of us..." He looked us all solemnly in the eye. "Get some sleep, and get started in the morning. We have plenty of time to lose sleep later. That's one thing we shouldn't get an early start on."

And thus was the tension broken. Remarkable. I would have to keep a closer eye on him and see if I couldn't pick out some of his distinguishable leadership characteristics. He wasn't quite done yet, though. "Heero, where are you staying?"

It took a moment for the question's relevance to register. "On the grounds. Preventer's barracks, two-thirteen."

"That sucks," Duo observed casually.

I shrugged. The barracks weren't as bad as they sounded. It was more habit than anything else that made me call them that rather than the dormitories that was its official name. The accommodations were clean, simple, and secure, and I didn't much have to worry about transportation. The dorm was a modest building capable of housing fifty or so, set near the training grounds, and used mostly for the population of Preventers or cadets that came and went on short-term bases. They were fairly empty at the moment. "They're convenient."

I told them my cell phone number, and my e-mail address as backup, the same address I had given Une, and watched as they all committed the information to memory without needing any repetition on my part. Then I asked where I could find them.

Apparently Quatre had a suite in the city, attached to some offices his family managed. I wouldn't be surprised to find out he had gone out of his way to secure a family presence in this area, just to have a legitimate excuse to be near both the political capital of the world and the paramilitary base of the Preventers. I was told Trowa was staying there as well. Wufei, naturally, had an apartment not far from the base since he worked here. It appeared to be standard practice for Duo to crash in his living room whenever he was in town. They gave me their contact information, and I, too, committed it to memory without much thought.

We agreed on a time and location for the next day, and then we dispersed. I made it back to my room feeling both tired and energized. I had been up since early morning working with the team from IA, and then there were the added experiences of meeting the guys again, breaking the Brisbois case, traveling to Wimereux and back again, and just worrying in a general sense about what would happen with Zero. I really wasn't as young as I used to be. This should have been nothing.

Perhaps I simply wasn't yet acclimated to the stresses of what used to be daily life for me. While I was in school, I rarely had so much to do that it was necessary for me to keep long hours. I had, in fact, pulled an all-nighter only once, and then only for the heck of it. I figured I was missing out on some integral part of the college experience by not catching the sunrise from the wrong end, so I tried it. It hadn't been particularly exciting.

This, on the other hand, was. Yes, there were so many bad things that could happen right now that my mind would exhaust itself if it tried to keep up with each and every one of them, but this was something I was passionate about. This was about war and peace and people's lives, and the fire inside of me for that had never gone out, despite my leave of absence. I didn't want to live this life anymore, but I also wasn't willing to let the peace fall apart just because I didn't feel up to the challenge of facing all the problems of the world every day; thus, I had left my contact information with Une. I could walk away from it, but I could never turn my back on it.

I fell into bed that night with a sense of weary accomplishment.

*****

It was a little more difficult to get out of bed the next morning than I had anticipated, and it wasn't because the beds were particularly comfortable. I made a mental note to myself to account for that before I went to sleep that night. I had been hoping that things would turn out alright, that my body wouldn't betray me, and it had worked out fine when I had first arrived. Guess I couldn't count on it to keep up with me when I was working eighteen-hour days. Luckily, I could compensate.

I did a few exercises to get my body going, then left my room eagerly, ready to start the day. The Preventers dormitory had not been built with aesthetics in mind. My room received very little in the way of light through the window, even with the curtains pulled back. In the early morning, though the sun shone bright, it held my quarters back in a state of pre-dawn gloom. I guess I'd gotten to liking my sunlight a little too much. I didn't mind darkness, but the gray that seemed to have had its life sucked out of it was a little too much for me to bear these days.

The mess hall wasn't in full operation yet, but simple breakfast items were available, so I snagged some juice and toast on the way to our makeshift office. I was the first one there, but then again, I was currently living on-site.

I took the opportunity to study everyone's desks while they were out. They had only been used for one day, but it interested me to see if I could pick out signs of personality. I couldn't quite. I had to be truthful to myself: I knew that the desk across from mine, with the blue, black, and red pens, belonged to Quatre only because I had been there yesterday to hear him request them. Maybe I would have guessed that the desk to Quatre's right was Duo's because it was closest to the whiteboard and corkboard, but I knew it to be fact already, so that threw off any supposition on what conclusions I might have drawn. So many things become clear in retrospect.

I sat down at my own desk with Brisbois' laptop and observed its exterior first. The hardware was decent, but not top of the line. There were some scratches on its surface, and a small sticky point on its front right corner where it seemed some liquid had been spilt, but no other identifying paraphernalia such as stickers or labels.

Its interior was similarly bland, although I noted with some disapproval that the LCD display also sported a few faint scratches. Turning it on, I continued my investigation of the system before I looked into the data contained on the drive. The generic software installed was probably what came with the system upon purchase. His desktop image was a reef, with brightly colored fish hovering amongst the tropical coral. That also came standard with the system.

The door opened suddenly, and I glanced up to find Duo looking back at me, equally startled. Both of us blinked it away quickly. He entered, shut the door behind him with minimal sound, and leaned against his desk. "You're here early."

"Are you surprised?" I'd always been an early riser, even when I found I needed more sleep, and especially when there were things to be done.

He snorted. "Guess not."

"Where's Wufei?" Since Duo was staying at his place, I had expected them to come in at the same time.

He gestured vaguely out the door. "Had some other stuff to do. He'll be around. I'd go off and get started on my job, but I don't think they're all in yet. That's his, right?"

I returned my attention to the laptop he was pointing at. "Yes. I've just started looking into it. He hasn't done anything fancy with his system, so there shouldn't be any particular problems with figuring it out. The only question now is what are we going to find."

*****

Quatre came back before lunch, a frown marring his face. There seemed to be a lot of that going around. Trowa questioned him first. "Didn't get anything out of him?"

Quatre shook his head. When his bangs ended up in his eyes, he shook his head again. "He knew me."

"I found some reports on his laptop," I informed him, wishing I had found them sooner. There may have been more, but my search was not yet complete. "Documenting the events surrounding Zero's first appearance."

His expression was both accepting and disturbed. "I had a hard time getting him to talk to me about anything useful. When he spoke, he just went on about..."

Duo touched his arm in a show of concern. "That bastard need a good ass-kicking?"

Quatre shook his head again. "No. It wasn't like... he had been personally affected by what I did. He seemed much more interested in... it's hard to nail down. What Zero was capable of, I guess. Kept telling me that I had no idea what Zero could really do."

"Yeah, he needs a good ass-kicking," Duo declared.

It drew a brief smile from Quatre. "Heero, I'd like you to speak with him."

"Me?" I was hardly a good talker.

"He can hardly argue that you know nothing about the Zero system."

"You want me to give him a list of my credentials, then?" My name should not have been associated with the system as Quatre's had. He had had the poor sense to introduce himself at the time of his little episode. In the few instances my own name had managed to pop up, Zero had not been an issue.

"If it comes up. And I'd like to observe. Maybe you can get a little more out of him than I could."

I nodded my acquiescence. I doubted I could get anything out of him on the basis of my conversational skills or my stunning portfolio of experiences, but I had been told that I could be quite unnerving and/or infuriating, to the point where people sometimes said things to me that they had had no intention of saying. Perhaps that remarkable talent of mine would serve well enough.

*****

Part 4

My turn. That was only fair, but I certainly didn't look forward to the experience.

If I were Brisbois, I would have been laughing at us, at the way we were playing this tag team game. None of the others had been able to break him yet, and none of us could really stand to be with the worm for more than a few hours at a time without being inspired to excess. I paid my dues after lunch, with Trowa electing to take this time as well to get to know our captive.

Our thief was still dressed in the mismatched clothing that Trowa had thrown at him as we left the hotel room. I was not particularly surprised that no one had yet bothered to inform the man that his shirt was misbuttoned. With the more than five o'clock shadow and the rumpled hair that had been run through too many times with nervous fingers, it looked like he was being worn out by us, and yet his eyes still burned with that same righteousness they had when we had first brought him in.

I hated fanatics. And I really hoped that I never looked like that after I had been through twenty-four hours in a flight suit, with only adrenaline and maybe a protein bar to fuel my body.

Trowa was leaning against the wall again, arms crossed in a deceptively casual pose. It was an interesting choice of positions, and coincidentally pointed out to me how long his legs were. He still had that lanky, acrobat's build, and probably maintained it with working for muscle tone rather than mass. I remember discussing with him once how overgrown muscles could inhibit one's freedom of movement.

Brisbois was seated in a chair at a table, facing a one-way mirror. Quatre was on the other side of the glass. I took the seat opposite Brisbois, putting my back to the window. It made me a little antsy leaving my back exposed to an unseen observer, but I dealt with it.

So far, what mostly had been exchanged were insults peppered with threats and pleas. I decided to indulge in no such thing. Instead, I just sat calmly in my seat, leaning back in a comfortable slouch with my arms across my chest, and I stared at him, trying to figure him out.

How had this man grown a backbone? His profile didn't indicate that he should have such conviction in him. I studied him until I finally recognized that light in his eyes. It was conviction, alright. Passion. Righteousness. Purpose. He showed all the signs; he was a believer. The question was, a believer in what?

"You're not in this for the money," I stated to him. It was just a repetition of what he had told us in his hotel room when we had apprehended him, and it had been confirmed by our study of his records. After looking deeply into his financials, we had found no signs of any payments or kickbacks, plus no signs that indicated he might be expecting a large payoff soon. There was still the possibility that he had some off-planet account somewhere that we had been unable to locate, but we didn't think it likely. Trowa and Wufei had also gone back to Brisbois' apartment to look things over, but didn't find any convenient mattresses stuffed with cash, nor any other suspicious evidence that the original investigators might have missed.

"Didn't I already say that?" he sneered at me.

That was annoying. I felt the need to humble him. "And you're not in this for war or for peace."

"I don't like repeating myself."

Funny. That was what he had been doing ever since his capture. "Why don't you tell me something new, then?"

"The body temperature of the arctic ground squirrel lowers to below freezing when it hibernates."

"Really? I didn't know that. That's interesting. What sort of triggers does it use to wake up again? Or is it just the shift in the weather that naturally brings it out of its hibernatory state?"

It pleased me when he grit his teeth and didn't answer, opting instead to stare a hole in the wall to his right. Pity. I wanted to know. Perhaps I'd look into the arctic ground squirrel some time, but not any time soon.

My eyes flicked to Trowa, who had a slight smile lingering around the edges of his face, and I shrugged. Looking back at Brisbois, I sorted through the possibilities and pursued another line of questioning. "Do you care?"

The question was non sequitur enough that he reflexively responded. "Huh?"

"Whether there's war or peace. Do you care one way or another?" When he didn't answer for a couple of seconds, I offered my own opinion. "I'm rather fond of the peace, myself. It's so much easier to get things done in peacetime. Of course, in your line of work, maybe a war makes things more interesting? There isn't as much geopolitical maneuvering when everyone's getting along, is there?"

"There is," he answered grudgingly. Could it be he took pride in his work? That I had touched some nerve that compelled him to share his vision? "It's just that everyone is more subtle about it. It's more interesting than war sometimes, actually."

"Even more than the last war, with Treize Khushrenada at the helm of an army? The man was nothing if not subtle." There were some days I wished I understood the good general better than I did. His death seemed a lost chance for a greater wisdom.

Brisbois eyed me suspiciously, as if wondering just what sort of trap I was trying to lead him into, but I guess there was no duplicity to be found in my expression. There was no trap. I just thought I'd literally 'chat him up', and see what I could see. Finally, he answered guardedly. "Treize Khushrenada was a fool bent upon his own destruction."

Well, it was good to know he didn't represent yet another Treize separatist faction. There had been so many of them already, it would have been passé for there to be another. "Perhaps. But he could have just eaten a bullet. He didn't. He concealed his plans from us all until his elaborate, triumphant end."

"Triumphant, indeed," Brisbois sniffed, his admiration poorly disguised by disdain. "That a man could arrange circumstances to win despite defeat is an example of brilliance unrivaled."

"That a man's death could be equal to his life?" When I had pressed my little red button, it was quite nearly, according to Brisbois, a moment of unrivaled brilliance. I did not think it would be productive to point that out, however, and kept my amusement to myself.

"Martyrdom is a long cherished institution."

He lingered a little too long on the words. So he liked martyrdom, did he? "Classical definitions of martyrdom state that the martyr must be a victim of others."

"Classical definitions are long outdated."

"And are you the victim here, Brisbois?" I asked, deciding to get to the point. Waxing any more eloquently on philosophical matters would be pointless. "Are you taking the fall for your comrades? Becoming a martyr to your cause?"

For a moment there, it looked like he was almost about to answer me before he caught himself. "Oh, very good," he said, a low chuckle shading his tone. "You don't even know what my cause is, Agent."

"Does it really matter?" I asked, knowing full well how much the cause mattered to a believer.

Sure enough, that riled him up a bit. "Of course it matters! Where would we be in this life if we didn't believe in something?"

"Seeking a little direction in this open-ended world," I responded complacently, undisturbed by his outburst. "I can relate. It can be difficult to make that transition from war to peace."

Wrong answer, apparently. He put on that scornful expression again. "You cannot relate. All you can see is still just war and peace. Can't see past the end of your own nose."

I ignored the insult. "Do you have any idea what it is you stole?"

"I know better than you do."

He had said as much to Quatre. Normally, I might find such words ominous, but not coming from him. I didn't believe him in the slightest. "Then you know how it was used for war and peace."

"I know how it has been used, but I know how else it can be used."

Good. I had appealed to his need to feel superior to me. Duo's theory was proving once again true. Arrogant fools consistently proved their foolishness with their compulsion to share it with others. "So you aren't interested in using it against others?"

"Of course not," he sniffed disdainfully. "I told you, there's more to life than war and peace. The system can be used to benefit everyone."

"I can see some of those possibilities." I didn't want to name them in case he had no idea what he was talking about. "What I don't see is why anyone interested in those possibilities would be the type to remove the system illegally from a government installation."

"The Preventers have no right to keep it from the people!" His fist came down on the tabletop for emphasis. Like any good believer, he didn't believe he was guilty of any wrongdoing.

I watched him silently as he recovered from his tiny outburst, tugging his shirt back into order and adjusting his seat. Poor man still didn't realize his shirt was never going to straighten out with the uneven buttoning. "Do you think it's better off in the hands of the people? Do you have the right to make that decision?"

"The facts speak for themselves." He spoke it forcefully, but not as loudly as his last exclamation. I resisted the urge to prompt him as to which facts he might be referring. With only a steady stare, I managed to shake him into giving me what I wanted. "Its technology far surpasses anything else available today, and what have the Preventers been doing with all that processing power? Letting it gather dust in a secured vault!"

"They had just taken it out when you decided to remove it from the labs."

"To do what? Poke and prod at it? Use it for military applications again? That is a waste of technology when it could be used to analyze the human--" He cut himself off suddenly, realizing that he had been about to tell me his secret. Damn.

I couldn't get anything more out of him after that.

We left him and rejoined Quatre on the other side of the glass. To my surprise, Duo was by his side, wielding that strangely intent expression on me again. I lifted an eyebrow in inquiry at him, then left him to chew on that for a bit as I got myself a cup of hot water from the cooler in the corner.

Holding the cup beneath my nose with both hands, I inhaled the light steam and imagined that the cup contained something other than just plain water. That, and a sip, helped to clear away some of the tension. The little white holding cell didn't get very good ventilation.

Duo finally responded to my silent question. "You made small talk with him."

He'd been watching for a while, then. He must have finished up his questioning of Brisbois' fellow analysts. I shrugged in response to his observation and took another sip of my water. "Martyrdom counts as small talk?"

"Or would you be referring to the arctic ground squirrels?" Trowa asked, once again amused.

I smiled. "I was surprised that he knew anything about them. He doesn't strike me as the sort that would have any interest in nature." Speaking of which, I turned to Quatre to see if he had a better idea of Brisbois' character. "So, did you get anything from that?"

Quatre finally turned his thoughtful gaze away from the window. "This really does have nothing to do with war or peace. He really believes what he was saying, about Zero having some other application, but I didn't get the feeling that he had a solid basis for that. Whoever it was that convinced Brisbois to steal Zero probably fed him the right lines, told him what he wanted to hear. He's not as idealistic as he sounds; there's some deeply personal reason for why he bought into the hype, but he doesn't acknowledge it. As for what the hype was, what this alternate application for Zero is... I can't say. But the people behind this fabricated a plausible story. It might even be true. They had to have had the proper background and references to make it convincing. Brisbois thinks the whole thing is legit. His supposed cause is nothing illegal. He believes he is firmly in the right, and we are wrong. If we could prove otherwise, we might be able to shake him enough to give us some more information on his contact."

"If we could prove otherwise, we would already know who his contact is and what he wants," Trowa said. Quatre shrugged ruefully in response. Brisbois wouldn't give us any basic information on finding his contact, but perhaps he would be useful if we needed more in-depth information after we figured it out on our own. On the other hand, we doubted he had any deeper information to give.

"Analyze the human... what?" Duo mused aloud. "There aren't that many words that fit in there, are there? Analyze the human... the human... The only things I can think of would be things Zero couldn't analyze, like the human condition, or the human instinct for survival, or some human emotional response... I mean, what is there about being human that a computer could analyze?"

He was right. There was very little about being human that was logical enough for a computer to process, even one as advanced as Zero. We continued to think about it as we headed back to our office. "Some component of humanity?" I proposed in due time. "Not emotional, but physical, perhaps? Like the human brain, the human genome, something quantifiable. It makes more sense that something that could 'benefit' mankind or society would be some sort of science or advance in technology."

"Well, if that were the case, Zero itself is an advance in technology," Quatre said, reminding us of what Brisbois had said. "I shudder to think of what Zero could do in the hands of the layperson."

I wasn't sure what drove me to defend the system. "He's not entirely incorrect, you know. Zero does have non-military applications. Not that I would leave it in the hands of the layperson since there are so many military or offensive applications, but still. Zero in the right hands could do a lot of things."

"Zero in the wrong hands can do a lot of things, too, and that's the problem." Trowa somehow managed to sound completely calm and ominous at the same time.

I couldn't deny that, though for some reason I wanted to. Zero was a tool, and a tool's use depended on its user. I wondered what sort of user, if any, would want to apply a computer's logic to the human condition. Even I wasn't that misguided.

An out of place movement caught my eye as we walked, and I glanced to the side to see Duo's lips moving silently, half-formed words echoing his thoughts. The faint motions weren't enunciated enough to give anything away to a lip-reader, but they were enough to indicate that his mind was chewing on some matter. Shortly before we arrived at the door to our office, he pulled a notepad out of his book and skimmed it. I caught sight of the page. A brief study of it showed me nothing but an illegible scrawl, but a more than passing study of it towards the end of the war had given me hints that it was perhaps a shorthand system designed to look like nothing more than an illegible scrawl.

Chang looked up from his desk as we filed in, a stack of folders next to his open laptop. "Find anything out?"

Quatre answered for me. "Nothing specific. He said he thought Zero would be used for human something or another before he stopped himself from finishing his sentence. Duo?"

"Gimme a sec," he muttered, plopping himself down at his desk. He pulled out a pen and scrawled another line in his notepad, set the pen down, stared at the paper for a few seconds, then picked the pen back up to draw a couple of lines and scratch a word out. Then he looked up at the rest of us and answered our question. "Well, it's unanimous. The people that talked to him agree that Brisbois is an arrogant pig."

"Find out anything new?" Wufei asked wryly.

He shrugged. "Usual suspects. Has a thing against Microware, but only because he invested right before their stock bombed. Thinks vegetarians are all new-age hippies that're just trying in vain to be trendy. Said once that all geopolitical analysts are self-absorbed ninnies that refuse to share their secrets with any of their fellow analysts, and completely failed to see how exactly he'd just described himself. Thinks he knows all sorts of things about intercolonial shipping lanes, but really doesn't."

"Somehow I doubt he took Zero to get revenge on Microware," Trowa drawled. "Or vegetarians."

"That only leaves the analysts and shipping lanes," Wufei followed up sourly. "Guess that was a fruitless exercise."

"Ah," Duo said, holding up a finger with an airy expression. "But there was one more thing someone mentioned in an aside: a rant on genetics. The guy didn't remember the details, though, just that it was weird. The vibe I got was, maybe genetic superiority? It fits with the whole human something theory, though."

"Genetic superiority," I repeated quietly, musing to myself. "Who in their right mind supports such a thing in this day and age?" One couldn't have superiority unless one had purity, and the notion of genetic purity had begun to fade before man had set up his first colony. Since then, with the waiving of national borders... unless that was it. "Could he be some sort of neo-nationalist?"

"Neo-nationalist?" Wufei ran his eyes down the lists in front of him. "We've got three groups known to run along those lines. But they're for China, Brazil, and America."

"And Brisbois' roots are in France, and Luxembourg, I believe." Damn. There went a perfectly good idea.

"What sorts of things could Zero analyze regarding genetics?" Trowa asked me.

Another question Zero would have been good at answering, and I hadn't been keeping up with biological issues. "The human genome has already been mapped to a reasonable degree. There are still some fuzzy areas, but nothing in high demand by researchers. There are some distributed projects that Zero might be useful for, regarding drug research, enzymes, catalysts, that sort of thing. Gene therapy. Running through the possibilities for binding sites and protein structures. Zero would have to be completely reconfigured, though."

"Please don't tell me the bad guys just want to find the cure for cancer," Duo groaned dramatically. "I don't know if I could bust guys like that."

"Let's pretend our guys are stupid," Trowa brought up, going back to Duo's old reminder. "What are the genetic issues present today, regardless of whether or not Zero would be any good at analyzing them?"

"Reproductive issues," Quatre suggested quietly. "Ex vitro children and the potential for tweaking them, selecting traits, eliminating defects."

That led me to another topic. "Mutations. Higher rates of mutations, deviations, or defects in the colony-born."

It went around the table to Wufei's corner. "Superiority. Mutations representing the next level of human evolution."

"Or a deviation from humanity," Trowa offered. "It could go either way." And neither of them pretty.

"Are you sure about the genetic superiority, Duo?" Quatre asked. "Let's not wander down this road unless we're sure it leads somewhere. It opens up far too many possibilities."

Duo pursed his lips and thought for a few seconds before he shrugged. "Sure? No, not at all. The guy couldn't tell me much. Hell, I know I probably would have tuned Brisbois out after the first few words, so I'm surprised we got as much as we did. But I could ask him again now that we know it's significant."

He received a curt nod from Quatre. "Do that. For now, let's stick with our other leads. Wufei, have you found anything other than three neo-nationalist groups?"

Wufei nodded similarly in response, but more in acknowledgment of the question than in answer. "Mostly, we have our run of the mill insurgent groups. The Preventers have done a decent job of putting down the more radical threats. All together, there are about forty groups that we keep tabs on. Eliminating the ones that wouldn't have the resources or conceivable cause to pull off this crime and use Zero, we end up with three likely suspects and five possibles.

"First off, we have the CFS, the Colonists for Secession." He held up the proper file folder for us to look at. "Leadership consists of a triumvirate, the only steady member being Anderson, Lindsay. They've so far been a political force, but a number of acts of violence and vandalism are suspected to be associated with their group. Their stance: that the ESUN should stay an Earth Sphere organization and let the colonies split off to found their own CSUN equivalent."

"The least they could do is find their own name," Duo muttered under his breath.

Either Wufei didn't hear the comment, or he chose to ignore it. I would have wagered on the latter. "Second, we have the American neo-nationalists. Granted, Brisbois is unlikely to be concerned about their cause, but they could have lied, and they do have the resources. Their stance is based on centuries of history -- of their nation being both powerful amongst the world leaders, and unwilling to give up that supremacy and autonomy. They have numerous acts of sabotage racked up in their name against foreign interests.

"Third, we have one of the groups from the African continent. The two largest are the MZA and the NALO. They have no world politics; they're just interested in gaining sole control over the region and its resources. Several major, bloody skirmishes have taken place on the border over the last four years."

"I can't see Brisbois working for any of those," Quatre said. "They could have lied, yes, but they would have had to have something to back the lies. The colonists and nationalists both have too narrow a goal, too specific to a particular group of people, to which Brisbois does not belong, and even if the African groups were able to disguise their profit-seeking as, say, returning territory to its rightful inhabitants, Brisbois' personality doesn't lend him to believing in causes that have nothing to do with him. He wouldn't put himself on the line for simple morality. He only thinks he's pursuing some lofty cause."

"He insists it's not about war and peace," Trowa brought up. "If it's not some military group, then what else is left? Political?"

"Zero can't affect politics," I responded, although it would have been an easy answer given Brisbois' occupation. "It's people that determine the course of politics, regardless of where the people get their information."

"Using Zero as a political analyst would make people like Brisbois obsolete," Duo said. "And if there's something he doesn't want, it's to be obsolete."

We went around the table, coming up with only more answers, and too few questions.

*****

Part 5

Duo came back with conclusive news. "It's been confirmed. Brisbois went on about human genetics. Specifically, it was last October, when there was legislation up before the World Council on tweaking the genes in unborn children for the elimination of birth defects. He was totally against it, going on about creating unnatural humans and messing up the gene pool and natural selection and all that crap. Uh, no offense to you or any of your sisters, of course, Quatre," he appended.

Quatre smiled briefly. "None taken. I hardly respect Brisbois' opinions, although in this case, I'd almost agree with him." He paused to register all of our raised eyebrows, then continued. "Not that children that are genetically manipulated are any less human than 'normal' humans, but that there do need to be limits on pre-natal manipulation. I remember that bill. For obvious reasons, I followed its progression rather closely."

"Did it pass?" I asked. I had more than an average citizen's awareness of world politics, but I didn't remember how this story had ended. It was a hot topic for a while, and then it just quietly faded out of the public's consciousness.

He shook his head. "It got stuck in a subcommittee somewhere, and then it was withdrawn and hacked to pieces, revised and reborn as several new, smaller bills. Those are still on the table for this year's session."

"Before we get any farther into this, is this even a valid concern?" Wufei asked first. "Or are we about to get sidetracked? Does it make sense that Brisbois would be following this cause, and what reason would a group have to further it?"

Good questions. Quatre beat me to the obvious answers. "The theme of genetic purity or what have you is hardly a new one in Earth history. Tinkering with the very stuff of humanity makes a lot of people unsettled. Wars have been started over racial cleansing, but those have always had large minorities as their target. Who would the target be this time?"

"The same sort of nationalism that was present then, isn't now," Trowa mused.

"Ya don't need nationalism," Duo scowled, a dark look on his face. "'Cleansing' just means getting rid of the stuff you don't want anymore. Could be anyone, any group of people."

His words disturbed me a little, bringing up vague images that lurked just on the edges of my mind. Some spark of recognition had flared inside of me. Now what was it? "Quatre... the legislation. Who advocated it? Who was against it?"

"Mostly, there was the typical array of religious and family value type groups against it, with research concerns on the other side of things. In addition to those..." His eyes went towards the ceiling as he thought about it. "The CCC was sort of on the line about it. Like me, they agreed in some regulation, but they're strongly in support of research in the matter since the occurrence of birth defects is higher in the colonies. There are also the long-term side effects of living in space, which leads into the area of what sort of adaptations we have developed to deal with that, or if we will in the future."

"Which leads to the Earth First worrying about Earth's control over the colonies." I remembered the debates. I was always concerned by any assertion by the earthbound that they should maintain dominance over the colonies.

"Which leads nicely into this whole 'genetic purity', 'genetic superiority' crap," Duo finished the thought. "Afraid that colonists will evolve beyond their roots. Bah. Don't they teach Earth kids anything about biology? Evolution takes generations, many of them, millennia even!"

"Yes, but they're concerned about active research hurrying the process along," Wufei explained. "Many people fear change."

"Enough so that they would take Zero and... I don't know." Quatre shrugged. "Unless they're interested in bringing all the colonists back to Earth, I don't see how they could possibly halt genetic variations, with or without Zero. Actually, countering it would require the tweaking to undo nature, so it makes no sense. And I can't really see anyone getting militant over it yet. There isn't a large enough population of anyone to target to make that a reasonable cause."

I sighed softly, letting it be no more than a puff of breath. We were really no closer now than we had been when we started. "Let's stop trying to guess at their causes," I proposed. "We can still follow up on the other ideas we had. Trowa, did anything interesting surface today?"

It had been his task to follow up on the components that a person would need in order to complete the system. "I looked into the four hardware manufacturers and three biotech companies involved in neural research. I've flagged all of their activity, but none of them have any history or show any signs of being involved in suspicious activities. None of them have any cause to have stolen Zero themselves."

"Great," Duo muttered. "Why do I get the feeling that whoever it is behind this is going to come at us out of the blue? I bet it's someone like Lena or something!"

Lena? I did a mental double-take at the name. 'Lena' as in 'Relena'? Or did Duo know someone else named Lena? Contextually, it made more sense for him to be speaking of the pacifist, and yet I hadn't known that the two of them were close enough to warrant nicknames. It was disconcerting to be reminded of how out of the loop I was, but I was pleased. They were both good people.

"Relena," Quatre echoed, confirming my thoughts. "Has anyone...?" His eyes flickered to me, then away. "I'll contact her. She should know."

I agreed. Though her official position had been downgraded in the years following the war, she was still a major player in world politics. Her name and image lingered in the minds of the people, and she had no intention of letting it fade. Her influence was wielded to great effect. I would have been profoundly disappointed to hear otherwise. It would be very reassuring to know that, should we fail in our mission and Zero get out in some way, the situation would be handled with her grace and elegance.

Discussion continued, but there was a very restless feeling in the room. We weren't men of words, but actions, and yet we had no actions to take yet, no enemy to strike at, no clear targets to research. I poked half-heartedly at Brisbois' laptop as I gave my report, hoping it would give me new ideas.

Brisbois' computer hadn't given me as much information as I would have liked, but not because he had been particularly intelligent about hiding his tracks. He just hadn't had access to very much information. We had been prepared for that under the assumption that Brisbois had been carefully controlled and manipulated into stealing the system for his unknown partners.

Zero itself was currently classified information, but there were a few reports that were still accessible that discussed events surrounding Zero's participation in the war. He had reports on the first appearance of Wing Zero as it threatened the colonies, of its use in the defense of Sanq, of its assault on Mariemeia's bunker. In addition to those files, I also found a text file listing numbers and directions. A bit of thought proved to me that it was the blueprint for how he had gotten through Preventers security to steal the system and then transport it out of the city.

Those were the easy files to identify. Unfortunately, Brisbois' occupation made it difficult to sort out what research was work-related and what was personal. We had cross-referenced with his work computer and his assigned duties, but the patterns were too loose to claim as solid findings, only things to keep in mind.

The man did not receive very many e-mails. Unsurprising, in retrospect, since he didn't have very many friends. There were no personal correspondences. It was passingly interesting to note that he received more junk mail touting investment schemes rather than anatomical enlargements. The lack of anything conspicuous threw me at first, until I remembered the one piece of junk mail that he had received at his work account. I found five more messages from that same sender in his personal inbox, each with an exhortatory phrase or two spouting nonsense, and a dead link -- a different one each time. I knew it couldn't be coincidence when I checked out his mail application's spam filter, and found that he had set it never to mark mail from that sender as junk. We couldn't trace the IPs to any particular location, but two of them led to public channels, and three of them came attached to ports that had probably been left opened only for some specified time.

A man like Brisbois thought he was in control, therefore he had to have a way to contact someone on the other end. Checking his cache of sent messages, I found one message bearing a similar format as the ones he had received, naming a rendezvous point in cyberspace.

"Do you think that they know Brisbois has been compromised?" I asked my partners after filling them in on my findings.

Duo followed my train of thought immediately. "And if they don't, should we try establishing contact?"

Drawing conclusions from the profile he had formed, Quatre analyzed the question almost before it had been vocalized. "Brisbois is small fry. After they got what they wanted from him, I think it unlikely that they would care to have any further communication with him. If he knows enough to give them away, they might be monitoring him, but I don't think that's the case. I think they don't know or care that he's been compromised, but on the other hand, I'm not certain they would respond to him attempting to contact them."

"Nothing to be lost from trying then, right? We won't be tipping our hand since we won't be targeting anyone in particular, just whomever's on the other end of the line."

"We could increase our chances of response by trying to convince them that we -- or rather, Brisbois," Wufei amended, "has useful information. Or perhaps he's having second thoughts? Getting pushy?"

Once again, Quatre provided valuable insight into the man's mind. "Pushy. He would have expected something, some sort of reward for delivering the goods. From listening to him... I got the feeling that... maybe it was a test. Something about the proud way he kept denying us, like it was some... trial by fire at which hat he needed to succeed in order to prove himself. They didn't give him much information, but if he delivered the system to them, then he would be brought into the fold. Something of that sort."

"We have maybe two grammatically incorrect sentences to hint vaguely at pushiness, then," I reminded them. The e-mails had only set up a location, nothing more. My teammates started exchanging the possibilities as I delved into the laptop once more, seeking out a time for contact. There didn't seem to be any information about a time in the text, so it must have been pre-arranged and regular. Having the addresses that Brisbois visited, I started looking for matches in his network history.

I had just found a second match when Wufei asked what sort of information the company would likely be willing to provide to Brisbois. Even as I searched, I was paying attention to their discussion, but I admit I wasn't thinking as hard as I should have been before I responded. "I'd kill him instead."

Only the tapping of my keys filled the air in the room for a few seconds, and even that slowed and stopped eventually as I realized what I had just proposed. I looked up from the LCD display to find four pairs of eyes on me. If there had been a mirror handy, I might have been staring at me, too. "Hypothetically speaking, of course," I appended. "If I were a really bad guy, I'd set up a meeting, and then dispose of him. To silence a possible leak....Hypothetically."

It was finally Duo that blinked first and recovered. "Riiiiight. Okay, so I guess we can push for a meeting, if it comes up. That'd probably be the best outcome. But say we can't get that. What else should we ask for?"

The discussion got going again, and I returned the bulk of my attention to the computer. The remainder of my attention, what wasn't keeping track of the others, was spent on figuring out whether I should be disturbed or not by my suggestion. It had been strictly hypothetical. A moment's thought yielded that as the obvious conclusion. It was a reasonable course of action I proposed for a ruthless enemy, not myself. And yet... perhaps it was just the 'I'd kill him' that had fallen from my lips. I hadn't spoken of killing anyone, hypothetical or otherwise, for a while now.

The next thing I could contribute to the discussion was, "Twenty-one hundred, the day after the e-mail was received. All six correspondences match that pattern."

Quatre nodded. "Alright. I think we should go for it. Even if we don't get anything out of him, we might be able to trace his network signal during the exchange and track him down that way. Nothing to lose."

They composed the sparse content of the message, with the assistance of a couple of crude jokes on Duo's part that got everyone to laughing, while I worked on securing an IP outside the Preventers firewall. The message was sent out into the ether in short order. I hoped it would pan out. Zero was out there, and we really needed a clue as to where it had gone. Everything we had so far was purely speculation, circumstantial, tenuous. I feared that it would be exactly as Duo had said, that the threat would come from some sector completely unexpected, catching us offguard and unprepared.

It irked me that there seemed to be so little that we could do. Even the one solid lead that we had required us to wait another thirty hours before we could see if it led to anything. I couldn't sit around waiting that long. I announced that I was going to go back to Brisbois' apartment to see if there was something relevant, given our new insight into the man. Duo volunteered to go with me. He had spent the morning and some of the afternoon questioning the man's co-workers; now he would see if there was anything to be found from his neighbors.

Since neither of us had transportation, not being local to the area, Duo borrowed the keys to Wufei's car with a good deal of wheedling and joking around. Perhaps we would look into going through the paperwork to acquire a vehicle from the Preventers motor pool some later time. I watched as they exchanged their good-natured barbs, not understanding where half of their references were coming from. Apparently, I had missed some sort of incident involving a motorbike, a flock of sheep, and a malicious bush. Or perhaps that was two separate incidents.

I had expected as much. The four of them had kept in contact, met up, shared stories and experiences. I knew that they would have a life together, and that I wouldn't be a part of it. I might have been very sad at being left out, if I hadn't developed a life of my own, and if that hadn't been my choice. Instead, I just soaked in their interactions, glad that they had found such companionship with each other.

Duo drove, and I climbed into the car with him, wondering what sort of companionship we had. We'd once had comfortable, comforting silences, for at least a few days towards the end of the war, during the days of attrition spent on the Peacemillion. Our group split up after the peace was won, each to our own devices, until the Barton incident brought us back together for several long, busy days.

Afterwards, I think the others decided that splitting had been a mistake. I didn't agree. Things were... 'right' between the five of us, but not within myself, and I didn't want them to be crutches for me, shoring up my weaknesses. That wasn't the way I operated. If I had a weakness, I worked on it until it was no longer a liability, at the very least. I didn't believe in kluges and cheap hacks. They had the unfortunate tendency to become permanent, and then they would inevitably come back to bite a person in the ass.

The last time I saw Duo, we were so far away from each other. I had spoken to everyone the night before, said my goodbyes, settled my affairs. A dawn departure, clean and uncluttered, seemed the way to go. I was near the gates to the embassy when I looked over my shoulder and saw Duo standing at an upstairs window. He waved. I waved back. And then I left.

I guess I couldn't really call that resolution, considering the things we didn't talk about, but at least we mutually agreed to leave it that way. They didn't need to be talked about. It was all just history. Circumstances had changed, and history had no place in the present.

Duo's voice broke through my reverie. "Enjoying the scenery?"

He must have noticed the way I was staring out the window. We were still in the city, but the streets had a very different feel to them from colonial neighborhoods. Blocks in the colonies had been laid out, zoned, and planned ahead of time along straight lines, strictly parallel and perpendicular. Earth urban planning hadn't been so regular. I diverted my gaze from the city to his profile. His cheeks had lost their roundness, giving him a stronger jawline, but his nose was the same. "I've gotten rather fond of Earth."

"See much of it?" He was making small talk with me, but it seemed like we were just going through the motions, following the ancient diversionary formula written up for two strangers in a car.

I opened the window a little to enjoy some fresh Earth air. "The first year, before I started school. And some the year before." The first year I had spent indulging my whims. The year before I had spent moving restlessly between old battlefields, driven to purge them of lingering dangers.

"Before Mariemeia."

"Before Barton," I corrected. He threw me an inquisitive glance out of the corner of his eye before he returned his attention to the streets in front of us. I explained myself. "Let's assign blame where blame is due. Mariemeia was just the figurehead for her grandfather's revolt. It was Barton's uprising."

I considered Mariemeia a Khushrenada, so I could look down upon the Bartons unequivocally. The man we knew as Trowa, of course, didn't count. Maybe it was absurd to hold a grudge in the world of hits, marks, and assassinations, but I held the Barton family to blame for Odin's death. I would not have minded killing the man responsible for that. It would have been poetic justice.

His lips thinned for a brief moment before he spoke again. "I heard you tried to kill her."

"Mariemeia?" My eyes dropped, then slid across to study the view out the front window. That was a severe deviation from the formula, but I didn't mind. I didn't want us to be strangers. "The logic behind Zechs also applied to her. Figureheads can be dangerous unless defused properly, regardless of whether or not their cause has been neutralized. The possibilities were... a threat."

He exhaled in an audible, disdainful puff. "The possibilities Zero fed you?"

"The possibilities Zero fed me." In the moments before Wing's demise. They had all been rendered obsolete by the time I got down to the control center.

"Then it was wrong." He didn't say it with any real emphasis, but it came out more strongly than his normal tone. "Mariemeia's still alive, and there haven't been any more revolts in her name."

"Zero never predicted that she would jump in front of a bullet. It wouldn't."

"So it's not the perfect analytical machine." He made it sound as if I had just proved some point.

"Of course not. Zero is a computer. The idea of self-sacrifice doesn't really fit very well into computer logic, especially when the person she was protecting was not her grandfather, but a person that had been her hostage only minutes prior to that."

He chuckled. "So I guess it can't account for the weird, random notions that humans can produce from time to time, eh?"

"No, I suppose not." Even pseudo-chaotic systems such as weather could be reasonably predicted if they followed natural, rigorous laws, but human whimsy -- or inspiration, one might say -- was very much too random to work with. Even any 'random' number a computer generated was just the result of a formulaic calculation based on very large integers. For all the knowledge a computer might gain, it would never be capable of an intuitive leap.

"I like the idea that it's fallible. Makes it a little less intimidating."

"Zero's just a computer, Duo. It does what it's told. If a computer produces strange results, it's probably user error."

"I've noticed that computer people always blame the user."

"What did you see?" I asked curiously. "When you were plugged in to the system, what did it show you?"

"I saw..." He trailed off, going introspective for a few moments. He shook his head sharply then, as if dislodging the visions. "I saw some seriously weird shit. What do you see? It seems to make sense for you, and I can't even begin to imagine what that must be like."

"...To not see crazy things?"

I won a startled laugh from him. "Yeah, sure. I see crazy things all the time, don't you? Well, no, I guess not, 'cuz that was the point, right?"

I wanted to answer his question frankly, but I had to fumble for the words to describe it. "It's... You don't really see things anymore. When you're out of sync with the system, you feel it. You see things, nothing makes sense, everything seems wrong. Notions come flying at you out of nowhere, and it's a struggle to keep up, if you can. But when you're in sync with the system... you don't feel it. If it feeds you a possibility, you feel it no more than you would... an intuitive leap. I guess the technical explanation would say something about how it calibrates its output to match the user's brainwaves. It just sort of... slides right in, and doesn't mess anything else up while it's there."

He shuddered dramatically. "Well, that's kinda freaky, don't you think?"

No, actually, I didn't. I thought it was rather clean, elegant, and maybe even a little bit beautiful. "How so?"

One of his hands released the steering wheel to scratch at his other. "I mean, think about it. Couldn't Zero just, like, take over a guy's mind? Just pop a few thoughts in there, make a person do whatever it wanted? How could a person even tell?"

"A thought from Zero feels different," I started automatically, defending the system, but I had to stop myself and consider it from another's shoes. For me, I had a choice. I recognized Zero's analyses and just took them into account when making my decisions. I didn't act automatically upon them. But that was just me. "Well... alright, it feels different to me, but I suppose it's possible that, if a person wasn't able to tell the difference, then he might get confused. But as for Zero taking over someone's mind? Zero analyzes whatever the user points it at. It doesn't make those decisions itself."

"For you," he emphasized. "You can point Zero at something in particular, but most people probably can't organize their thoughts so well. Zero will pick up on whatever it thinks you're pointing it at, and that's an important difference."

I blinked in thought, intellectually understanding what he was trying to tell me, but finding it difficult to really picture it. I'd never had that problem, myself. "Hm. I guess that's true enough." Just another example of how dangerous Zero could be in the wrong hands.

Not seeing much more left to the subject, I went back to staring out the window, a part of me devoted to getting a feel for the air between us now. We hadn't spoken about ourselves or what we had been doing for the last five years, but it seemed like a good start. Maybe that was safer, anyway. The facts of the last five years weren't important. It was who we had become because of the last five years that really mattered.

Maybe it was just the feeling of urgency I got from this entire case, but something made me just go ahead and ask him about us. I didn't look at him as I did, thinking at least to be non-confrontational about it. I didn't want to start anything major. I just wanted to know. "Duo. Why are you cross with me?"

I saw his reflection in the window glance at me reflexively, and he probably would have continued to do so if he hadn't been driving at the time. He didn't answer though, so I pretended I hadn't asked and continued watching the traffic outside, listening to the wind whistle by. It was almost two minutes later when he finally said something. "You left, man."

I responded to him with a similarly soft voice. "You said you understood."

His reflection cast another look in my direction. "I did.... But things change, I guess."

There was a strange note of finality there that stopped me from trying to explain myself, or asking him to explain. Maybe he didn't need to. We were sixteen, then; now we were twenty-one. Five of some of the most formative years of a person's life. Of course things changed. Just for the better, I hoped.

Was it true that, the more things changed, the more things stayed the same? When we got out of the car, he reached out with a hand and fluffed my hair back into place after being mussed by the wind from the window I had opened. It caught me off-guard even though I saw his hand coming. I blinked at him. He blinked back, then glanced around the neighborhood as he said gruffly, "You'd never be taken seriously with hair looking like that."

That... was a change. And yet, his fingers brought back memories of a few simple, comforting moments of time during a period of turmoil. I needed more of those. It wasn't often that a person could catch a hold of something so basic and elemental that no thought needed to be devoted to it, even after it had fled. It only needed to be tucked away into storage, preserved and treasured.

When he looked back at me to signal his readiness, he did an amusing double-take, his eyes widening as he peered at my head more closely. Reaching out once more, he snagged a lock of hair and fingered it in the sunlight. "Yuy... is your hair green?"

I reflexively tried to look at what he was holding, but that obviously didn't fare very well. I would have to trust his judgment. "Is it still? Not all of it, though, right?"

He dropped my hair to stare at me. "You know?"

"Wouldn't you be more frightened if I didn't know? I thought it would have come out by now." I shrugged. I never saw my hair in the light much, so I didn't think about it too often. I also never thought that 'my roots are showing' would be something I could say in all seriousness.

"What on earth possessed you to dye your hair?"

"A friend's twenty-first birthday. If nothing else, she has an eye for quality." I tugged my bangs in front of my eyes and inspected the coloring. It had never been a very powerful hue, but now its color had faded enough to give me subtle mossy highlights. The effect was interesting.

He paused, then scratched at his head. "Don't people usually, I don't know, go out drinking or get tattoos or something?"

"I already got one of those."

He blinked at me. I blinked back, maintaining a perfectly neutral expression. At length, he laughed uneasily. "Man, you're a trip, you know that, Yuy?"

The more things changed, indeed.

*****

We didn't find anything. We searched the apartment, and then we canvassed the neighborhood, and all we got was confirmation that Brisbois kept to himself, kept regular hours, bought a newspaper from the corner stand every morning. He was allergic to dogs. Every Tuesday, he ordered Chinese takeout, and wasn't a very good tipper. The people in the area had been friendly enough, especially with Duo to work some impressive charm and smooth-talking on them, but once again, there simply wasn't that much information to give up.

There was a surprise waiting for us when we got back to the office. Duo preceded me and entered the office, pausing for a moment when he caught sight of our guest. I nearly bumped into him before he sprang back into motion with a happy exclamation. "Lena!"

He strode into the room to approach her, leaving me suddenly exposed to the scene. I stood there in the doorway blinking dumbly at her as she returned the warm hug that Duo gave her, adding a peck on his cheek. I didn't know what to feel.

Relena. She meant a lot to me, in a strange sort of way. Seeing her again made all sorts of things swell up inside of me. For some reason, I hadn't prepared myself for this, even though I knew she generally worked in the city, and even though I had known Quatre was going to contact her. She turned towards me, making eye contact, and I could see that same sort of force hit her. We stared at each other for a few silent seconds with a similar sort of shallow breathing before I choked her name out through my stupor.

Her face lit up with a brilliant smile, even more powerful than the one I saw her wield on her unsuspecting victims in the newsfeeds. She'd always had a way of smiling at a crowd that made it feel like her smile was meant just for you. "Heero. It's been far too long since I last heard someone say my name like that."

It took me a little while to process what she meant. I didn't notice it as much anymore when the L1 colonial accent slipped into my speech. I didn't have to anymore. The realization got my brain working again, and I finished entering the room, shutting the door behind me. It registered that the others were watching us with varying expressions on their faces: indulgent, interested, intent.

What to say? "It's... been a while."

She laughed softly. "Yes. Yes, it has." She started to close the distance between us, and I met her halfway. "You're looking as handsome as ever."

Handsome? Not quite. She was making me feel sixteen again. "And you..." She looked every last centimeter of her the beautiful princess I had left, even in her business casual pant suit, her hair pulled back in a loose braid. She retained the poise and confidence that had driven me to protect her, only now it was more refined. Well, I could be, too. This little boy had learnt a few tricks over the last few years. A princess she was, though the title was renounced, and whimsy made me give her a prince in return. I took up her hand and bowed over it, my lips just barely brushing over the back of it. "You have grown only more lovely with the years."

I fulfilled my promise to her and showed her a roguish smile, winning another laugh that was almost more startled than amused. I don't know why it felt so good to see her delighted, but it did. If I could bring that look to her face with a few embellishments, then so I would. "What are you doing here?" I asked, releasing her hand.

Her smile dimmed. "Quatre told me what happened. I can help prepare for the worst-case scenario." Then she brightened again for a moment. "And then we are all going to have dinner together, and we will catch up."

Business first. Trowa pulled the chair out for her at the remaining seat in the office, the desk next to mine and in front of the door, and the rest of us seated ourselves soon after. Duo and I briefed them on what little we had found out about Brisbois, while Trowa and Quatre told us what little they had learnt from Brisbois upon further investigation. All in all, it was fairly unencouraging.

Afterwards, we discussed what few, quiet things Relena could work on to make sure that the world was ready to deal with a crisis, should our thieves precipitate a disaster. It could be just as much a disaster if panic were spread prematurely. The meeting could have gone on all night, getting progressively gloomier as time went on, and finally we had to simply declare a stop to it before we ruined our morale entirely.

As promised, she whisked us all away to a late dinner in the city. I managed to keep myself mostly out of the crossfire, dodging questions in favor of absorbing new knowledge about them. There was a lot to be learned by simply watching.

*****

When Relena heard that I was staying in a room on the base, she insisted that I take a room at the embassy. It would have been strangely reminiscent of the days following the Barton incident. I declined the invitation. It was convenient for me to stay on the base. Nevertheless, she did manage to squeeze one night out of me, just so we could spend some time in each other's company.

I followed her home, stopping outside for a moment to study the estate. It seemed different than when I had last seen it, but it hadn't actually changed. Only Duo wasn't in the window, and it was evening now, not dawn. The roses had bloomed, rather than being clipped back for the winter. I suppose the most significant difference was that I was coming, not going.

She installed us in the sitting room of her suite, kicking off her pumps to curl herself in the arm of the sofa. She propped one elbow up along the back of the sofa and watched me with the same amused delight I had seen before. I bore it silently, perched on my end of the sofa, until she finally spoke. "You look good, Heero."

"You've said that already," I pointed out dryly.

"No, I said you were handsome before. This time... You look good. Settled, I mean."

"You agree, then?" I wanted her to say yes. Her approval in this matter suddenly meant a lot to me. "That leaving wasn't such a bad idea?"

"Not if you've come back to us with such... with such a confidence in yourself. You were so..."

I saved her the trouble of trying to find diplomatic words. "Unsure? Uncomfortable? Unsettled?"

Her laugh was very pleasant to my ears, no longer girlish, but still quite feminine. "Well, you're certainly more open now, that's for sure."

Open? No. I had always been open with her. I just had more answers now. "If I've done anything over these last few years, it's gotten to know myself better."

"And if that's the case, then how could your leaving have been a bad idea?" Her expression softened with understanding. "Have they been giving you a hard time about it?"

Perhaps that was why I so suddenly craved her approval. Or why I was so willing to talk to her. We'd always been rather alike in the paths our thoughts could travel. "No... but... You really think it was the right thing?" She had reduced me to that lost sixteen year old again, seeking counsel from one no less young and lost than I.

A simple smile reassured me, as it always had. "Don't you?"

I nodded firmly. "Absolutely. I'm... just not certain they think the same, and... it saddens me."

"Are you sure? They're all happy you're back, Heero."

"Happy I'm back... Back, like I went astray for a little while, but now I've learnt the errors of my ways and come home." I forestalled her protests. "They don't say anything of the sort, of course. But if that's the impression I get, it hardly matters if they say anything, now does it?"

She bit the inside of her lip a little in thought, an old habit it comforted me to see. How easily we had fallen back into our old pattern with each other. "They've just missed you is all, Heero. It was never so hard as when we'd gathered, but we couldn't say 'all of us' because we were missing someone."

"I'm sorry," I felt obliged to apologize. "But I had--"

She shushed me before I could finish my sentence. "I know. I agreed, remember? And you kept your promise; you came back with a smile on your face." She reached towards me, then stopped herself, giving me an odd little look. "Do I get to hug you?"

I blinked at the sudden question, but apparently I managed to look amenable to it since she clamored across the sofa to wrap her arms around me sideways and squeeze. It felt good, enough so that I brought my hands up to rest on the arm she had draped across my chest. I hadn't been hugged like that since I had bid her good-bye.

We enjoyed it for a few long seconds before she disengaged and grinned impishly at me. "I would have hugged you when I first saw you, but you took my hand first and bowed over it! Now where in the world did you learn such a thing?"

I smiled back at her. "You can learn a lot in school."

"I didn't know they still taught classes in courtly manners."

"Drama class, actually. Emphasis in improv."

She laughed in her startlement. "Drama? Why, I had no idea you had an interest in such a thing."

I shrugged dismissively. "I figured if I wanted to learn how to act normal, I'd better learn how to act normal." That had taken care of the 'acting' part of things. Taking a few classes in psychology had helped me to better understand the 'normal' side of things.

I could tell she didn't quite know what to make of that. I thought it a reasonable course of action, but I suppose I could see how a person might be disturbed by the notion of literally 'acting' normal. She recovered with her typical grace and aplomb. "Is kissing a lady's hand 'normal'?"

"I thought it was appropriate for the situation. Would you have preferred a hug like the one you gave Duo?"

"If I were to be hugged by you, I would hope it to be one with your own signature on it, not just an imitation," she answered haughtily.

And speaking of Duo... "You two seem to be good friends."

"Hmm?" She batted her lashes mischievously at me. "Jealous?"

I shook my head. "Of course not. Just... unexpected, I guess. You two never spent much time together before I left."

"And then you left, and we spent time together." She threw me an arch look that I couldn't interpret. It disappeared before I could figure it out. "He's a good man."

"He is," I agreed with a slight smile, thinking back on the times we had spent together. Nothing like the times now. Maybe it wasn't my place to ask, or her place to get involved, but I asked anyway. "Do you know why he's unhappy with me?" When I saw a conflicted look on her face, I took it back. "Never mind. It's between us, I guess." No easy answers for me, not at the price of putting her on the spot and dividing her loyalties.

She agreed reluctantly. "It is... but... he's just thrown by your sudden return. He'll get over it."

That didn't seem exactly right, considering what he had said to me during the ride to Brisbois' apartment. 'Things change.' Had they changed so much we could no longer be friends? That would be regrettable. "He'll get over it... but things will be different."

"As well they should be. You're two different people now."

Had I really changed so much? I still had all the same things inside of me that had always been there. They'd just been rearranged a little. I wondered if that was the case with Duo. It was hard to tell.

*****

Part 6

I felt more rested the next morning than I had the previous, and once again, it had nothing to do with my accommodations. I had warned Relena the night before that I would most likely leave before she woke, and I made good on that, catching an early morning shuttle bus to the Preventers HQ. Before heading to the office, I stopped by my quarters to get some fresh clothing. When I got in, I found Duo had beaten me there this time.

"You're earlier than I would have expected," he greeted me over a mug of coffee. It was liberally laced with cream, and I suspected sugar as well.

"Same time as yesterday," I answered, settling myself into my chair. I glanced at the surface of my desk and found a distressing lack of material. There was only Brisbois' laptop, and we had already done all we could with that. What to do in the fourteen hours until a scheduled contact that might not even happen?

"So what are the plans today, chief?"

I was caught offguard by the appellation. It took me a moment to remember that it was used slangily on some of the colonies as a generic name. I told him only what I had already thought up myself. "We need to pursue other leads while waiting for our contact tonight."

He eyed the stack of files on Trowa's and Wufei's desks distastefully. "When I read the brief, I didn't expect the mission to end up so... researchy."

I shrugged, a resigned edge to the action. "What else can we do? We don't even have a target yet, especially since Brisbois turned out to be..."

"Useless small fry?"

"...A dead end," I offered instead. "Were you looking forward to something more... 'actiony'?"

He paused, then shrugged noncommittally. "You sound like you weren't."

I didn't feel like countering his evasions. "I might have been, a few years ago. Now... I guess I'm used to peace and quiet."

"You haven't gone soft, I hope?" he asked, arching an eyebrow at me.

"If or when the action comes, I'll be ready for it." I hadn't changed that much. "I just don't look forward to it. I've spent my restless energy and settled in."

"'Restless'," he echoed contemplatively, turning away from me to ponder the word. "Yeah, that's about right."

"Hm?"

My curious sound made him start a bit, as if he'd been unaware of speaking aloud. He started to shake his head dismissively, but paused, lips remaining poised to speak. After a few seconds, he stood down, shoulders slumping slightly as he released his breath. "It's funny, ya know?" He was quiet, introspective, using a tone I recalled from fleeting, painfully honest moments. "I've had five, no, six years to settle down, when that's all I wanted... and I haven't."

He had just looked at me to say something more when the door opened, and the unspoken words fled before Wufei had even entered the room. Our Preventer partner nodded briskly to me with my name as greeting as he entered and seated himself at the desk he had claimed as his own.

I didn't get to find out what else Duo might have said. Inconsequential small talk was made on the price of intercolonial travel until Quatre and Trowa got in. The biggest plans of the day naturally revolved around the hoped-for communication with Brisbois' contact. Deciding that Trowa would handle the matter, we established that he and Quatre would spend the day with Brisbois and his personal affects to gain a better understanding of the character he would be impersonating.

In the meantime, Wufei would continue to use Preventers contacts to look into the various militant groups that he had identified the previous day. We were expecting to receive word back from local agents updating our information later that morning. A list of people that had any knowledge about the Zero system had also been compiled. They would be checked out in case one of them was involved or was about to be involved in the matter.

Duo was going to split off from the group to use his own contacts to gather information on the case. None of us said anything overt, but it was understood that he would have ties to the black market -- actually, the 'brown' market, as I believe Howard used to refer to it. He liked to characterize the Sweepers as merely slipping through the cracks and flying beneath the radar rather than the outright defiance of laws and regulations. I was assigned to accompany Duo on his quest since I had a better working knowledge of just what he should be looking for.

We didn't want to wander all that far, but this wasn't really business one could or should conduct in the middle of Preventers Headquarters. We borrowed Wufei's office, leaving the lights mostly off in an attempt to disguise the fact that it was a government office. I jumped through all the hoops necessary to establish a secure line of video communication outside of the Preventers network, and then Duo commandeered my place in front of the console to complete the transaction with the packet checksum pattern that would assure the people on the other end of the line that we knew who they were and what we were doing.

I stood out of the line of sight as Duo connected the call. The screen flickered, then resolved into an image of a sandy beach at sunset, complete with palm trees and umbrella. I raised an eyebrow, but apparently Duo had been expecting something of the sort. He confidently keyed in a sequence twelve digits long, then sat back to wait again, fingers tapping out a rhythm lightly over the keypad. After a seven second delay, the display flickered again, and a familiar face appeared on the screen in its place.

"Hey, kiddo. You're a week overdue." Judging from the background, I guessed Howard was on one of his ships. From the lack of latency, he must have been earthbound. He looked well, now that the stress of seeing his mechanical children repeatedly take a beating was past.

Duo grinned and shrugged. "Yeah, well, you know, things came up. Sorry 'bout that."

"Better be something important, otherwise I'll make you regret missing out on margarita night."

He coughed discreetly. "Heh, we got ourselves a little surprise, is what it is, and not in a good way, I'm afraid."

Howard snorted with concern. "What, that bastard Yuy finally make an appearance or something?"

Duo choked, though I was unsure if it was on embarrassment or amusement. I saved him the trouble of an answer, leaning over so I was in the camera's field of view. "Howard," I greeted blandly, a faint smile tilting the corner of my mouth up as I waved casually.

The man was motionless for a second, then he tipped his head forward and pulled his sunglasses down with a finger on the bridge. I'd never noticed he had gray eyes. "Well, I'll be damned," he said finally, pushing his eyewear back up.

Duo had recovered by this point and regained control of the conversation. "Yes, well, surprising though this may be, that's not the real surprise. Heero Yuy doesn't just show up without a reason, you know."

Had there been a hint of bitterness there? I wasn't sure. We'd gone for quite a few hours without exchanging barbs, but then again, we either hadn't been together for most of those hours, or we'd been working. So much for the hope that the hostility had just vanished without direct confrontation, but I would deal with that another day.

Howard's brows rose above his glasses. "We have a situation?"

"Yup. Some hardware's been stolen from the Preventers. Computer hardware."

He scratched at his goatee shrewdly. "What sort of hardware are we talking about here?"

"The kind that I used," I answered. The security on the line was tight; I knew that for a fact. But there was no such thing as perfect security. I preferred to avoid the overt answers if possible. That, or I was superstitious, as if speaking its name would bring evil upon us. I tended towards the former.

From his hiss of indrawn breath, I assumed he figured it out rather easily. "Da-amn. Do we know who?"

I retreated to the background to let Duo do the talking. "Yeah, we got the ass that walked away with it, but he passed it off before that, and we don't know who to. You heard anything, old man?"

"Hmm, nothing specific comes to mind... when was this?"

"Four days ago."

"Well, nothing's happened so far, so I guess that's a good sign." He was taking things rather calmly, but he had also taken the ramming of his ship into another rather calmly as well. A man after my own heart, perhaps.

Duo jerked his thumb over his shoulder at me. "This guy tells me that anyone worth his salt is going to have to fix it up a bit first since it got fried, then he'd have to tweak it to fit, so it'd take a little while for it surface."

"Damaged, eh?" Howard scratched at his chin again. "What kind again?"

Duo glanced up at me to answer, so I did. Howard was familiar with the system, so indepth explanations weren't necessary. "My systems overloaded with the last blast of my beam cannon. While I was in the air." The impact when I landed, and I use the term lightly, had been less than pleasant. Wing, Zero and I had received quite a jarring. It had taken a bit of effort to walk a straight line after that.

He frowned, muttering as his mind reviewed the system, going through the components to estimate damage. "Hm, that would have... and then that would have gone... which would take out that... and then... so in the end... It's not everyone that'd be able to fix that sort of damage. And not everyone that'd supply those parts."

"We're looking into things on our end," Duo answered, trailing the sentence off open-endedly.

The old mechanic grunted contemplatively. "I'd certainly never get involved in anything that reeked of this. You might try talking to Jorge. He's local, deals in electronics. I'll give you his info."

"Can we trust him?"

"More or less. I wouldn't get too chummy with him, but he's a decent guy. I've done a bit of business with him. Gets a bit weird sometimes, but doesn't do anything too-too shady."

"What can he tell us?"

"I doubt you'd want to ask straight up about it, but if it's on the market, he'll know. Don't know why someone'd go through the trouble of stealing it just to sell it, though. You should be able to get a feel for the availability of the stuff you'd need, anyway. I'll call ahead and vouch for you so you can cut through all the cloak and dagger crap he likes to pull."

He gave us the information, we thanked him, and then he sobered. "I know you can't tell me everything, kids, but tell me true --how do you think this is gonna go down?"

Duo shifted uneasily in his seat, but he met the question honestly as always. "I dunno, man. Things aren't pointing to your run-of-the-mill world war scheme. Not sure why, but my gut's thinking quiet and ugly."

Nothing in my mind decided to contradict that assessment, but I didn't like leaving things with those as the final words. I leaned over Duo's shoulder again to add something a little more confident. "We'll find it, Howard. All of us are on it. They can't hide from us for long."

I couldn't tell what he was thinking behind those sunglasses of his, but he studied us for a few seconds before nodding. "I'll keep an ear to the ground, let you know... you guys give me a call if you need anything, or when this is all over. No need to keep me in suspense, you know."

Duo laughed shortly, said his farewells, and then disconnected the call. He leaned back in his chair studying the information that Howard had passed us. When he looked back up to me, I asked a question on a completely unrelated note. "Since when did I become a bastard in Howard's book?"

When he shrugged on his jacket with only a snort as acknowledgment of my words, I figured he wouldn't be answering. Ah, well. Perhaps I could find out another day.

Jorge's place was about a twenty minute drive down the highway. The establishment was in the backrooms of an electronics repair store. Its exterior gave the impression of a completely legitimate business, but speaking the passphrases that Howard had given us won us access to the real source of the profits.

We met the man in a small office, a buffer zone between the two businesses. Jorge himself was a middle-aged, twitchy sort of man, wearing a suit that even I recognized as being several decades out of fashion. We didn't shake hands as we seated ourselves at a desk. As agreed, I fell into a support role while Duo took point.

Jorge started us off. "Howard recommends you highly." He made it a point of steepling his fingers quite obviously, his face turned slightly downwards so he could look at us with a more mysterious air.

"And he you," Duo responded easily. "He tells us you're the man to go to for this."

"Yes, 'this'. He didn't mention what you're looking for."

"I should hope not," Duo sniffed. "Howard's opinion means a good deal for good reasons."

Jorge smiled thinly. "True, true. But to business. How can I help you?"

"We're looking for a little hardware, from the higher end of the spectrum."

"Nothing is too high for my reach."

"We're going to want the highest you can go. Preferably something that doesn't fill up an entire room. If you don't have a pre-built system, we'll be looking for components to assemble one ourselves."

"Well, I have some lovely Pemberton four point eights...."

Duo snorted derisively. "Please. I could go to the front of your store and buy those."

"Ah, but could you buy three of them networked together for an array functionally equivalent to a thirteen point eight?"

"Yes," I answered bluntly. In my role as the tech geek, it wasn't expected that I be polite and well-mannered. "In fact, I could buy two Alton four point fours, mount them on the Rockford twenty-three sixty board tweaked to twenty-five hundred, and get similar performance for lower cost." With or without Howard's support, it was expected that we would have to go through a test or two to prove that we really knew our stuff.

"We're looking for something a little more powerful than a simple desktop machine," Duo inserted firmly. Flatly, even. If we hadn't been in a relatively undercover situation, I might have glanced apologetically at him for stealing his show. Then again, this was what I was here for. Duo knew all the components on the market today, but I was more in tune with to what creative uses one could put them, and a little more besides.

Jorge hummed appreciatively. "Ah, a true business machine, then? Could I interest you in Callie eighty-five hundred?"

I made a note to myself to inform Une of what was on the market these days. The Callies were used in military applications, typically to calculate missile trajectories. "If we're going with Callies, why stop at the eighty-five when the eleven-k-two does a better job?" The latter was often used to calculate trajectory and propulsion for space in real-time.

"Those are harder to come by."

"Nothing is too high for your reach," Duo reminded him dryly.

He tsked at us. "I didn't say I couldn't get one. Just that it's harder to come by." The arch look he gave us adequately conveyed the price hike to us. Luckily, we weren't really interested in buying.

"The cooling systems on the ten-k-ups are unreliable. And the Callies are insufficient, in any case."

"Insufficient? I can also offer the necessary hardware to tie, say, four of them together? Eight? The cabinet's about a hundred fifty centimeters--"

I shook my head in the negative, holding out for something better. I finally named something that Zero could use. "What about raw components? Five gigahertz LSI chips, about two dozen of them."

Jorge coughed delicately. "You do realize you're talking more than a hundred gigaflops of--"

"You should be able to get them installed on six processor nodes following the contiguous data pattern. One box, water-cooled, copper interconnections. Two hundred fifty-six megabits fully pipelined, twenty forty-eight way banking..." Now I was quoting specs that had nothing to do with Zero, but were intriguing nevertheless.

He held up a hand. "Wait. There's only one person I know that would set up a computer that way."

Something tapped against my foot. Duo was asking me if I had just blown our cover. With my own foot, I signaled back that everything was all right. "There's no reason Hatchett should be the only one, is there?"

Jorge stroked his chin thoughtfully, studying us intently without responding to my rhetorical question. At length, he spoke. "I may have what you're looking for."

That was troubling. We had no intentions of closing a deal, unless the plan was to remove the components from the market to prevent the thieves from acquiring them. Duo moved his foot against mine again, claiming the lead. "All of it?"

"I have everything you need. Let's talk shop, shall we?" he invited, standing and gesturing towards the back storeroom.

I started to get up, but Duo's foot landed on mine as he stood. Slipping out from between the chairs, he put a hand down upon my shoulder, casually pressing me down into my seat as he smiled amicably at Jorge. "Let's talk shop."

The businessman didn't blink as he led the way into the back, shutting the door behind him and leaving me alone in his office. I would have protested had we not been in a professional situation. Did Duo expect me to rummage around in his office while they were gone? I glanced around. The file cabinets in the corner had no locks. I suspected they held the records for his legitimate business. It was unlikely that he would store any sensitive information in a place so easily accessible.

His wall clock was five minutes fast. He had a large calendar on the wall as well, compliments of his insurance company. I noted the name out of habit, even though I doubted they had anything to do with the matter. He had failed to mark off the last three days. There were some scheduled pickups scribbled into a few of the squares, but they all seemed innocent enough. I committed the memos to memory anyway. I got up to stretch my legs and take a look at the other side of the desk. I found nothing special.

By the time they came back, I was back in my seat, having worked my way through half the electronics magazine Jorge had had on his desk. I tossed it aside as they entered, Jorge laughing ruefully over something Duo had said as if they were old friends. Our farewells were made with smiles and handshakes. We left empty-handed. I was informed that Jorge had been mistaken about being able to meet our needs.

Duo waited until we were back in the car and several blocks away en route to the highway before he decided to fill me in. "He didn't seem to know anything about it," he started without preamble, breaking the silence that had persisted since our departure. "He wasn't holding back on me, and he seems like the kind of guy that would know. He really is a major player. I schmoozed him up a bit, got him to talk. I got that his stuff comes from a lot of sources, 'lost' shipments, salvage, underpaid employees, so we might want to check into those connections as well. Asked him if we had any competition for his inventory. He said no."

I welcomed the distraction that work provided. Leaving me alone with my thoughts for too long tended to be an unwise idea. Mission details were pleasantly straightforward. "Is that just because we acted too early? Or is it truly unlikely that our thieves will go through these channels?"

"Can't tell you for sure, of course, but I'm not sure they could get what you need from him. He had about a dozen fives on hand, said it would take him a couple of weeks if we wanted another dozen. Hard to keep all his stock current and stuff, I guess. He's lucky Moore's Law bottomed out quite a few years back. Offered us some fours instead, and some other crap to sweeten the deal. I wouldn't have taken it, even if we had been interested. How many of them do you really think a person would need?"

He flitted from subject to subject without any real segue, yet I kept up with what he was talking about. "Zero is a network of five hundred twelve LSIs, custom manufactured to an ingenuous layering design that cut the size down dramatically enough for it to fit in a mobile suit computer compartment."

He gave a low whistle. "That many? Must have cost Quatre a pretty penny getting that thing made."

I hardly thought Quatre had been thinking of financial concerns at the time. "The LSIs Jorge had would serve to replace the damaged processors sufficiently enough, but the resulting construction would probably never hold up to mobile suit standards again. Chances are, if a processor is damaged, an entire node would have to be replaced. If I had to order parts for the job without getting a chance to examine the system... I might give sixty-four as a tentative estimate."

He whistled again. "I'm beginning to wonder why anyone would want to steal this thing."

"That's if you wanted to fix it as completely as possible without having to custom manufacture the parts again. If I didn't need all of Zero's processing speed, then I could just remove the damaged nodes. The software should be able to compensate. If our perps decide not to fix the system, I think we can safely assume that there are no plans to use it in a real-time high-intensity combat situation."

"What if these guys had the designs? Could they manufacture their own chips?"

Would we have to look into chip manufacturers as well? "No. They don't have the designs."

He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. "And you're sure because...?"

"Because Quatre had his copy of the plans destroyed, and I have the only other copy." Just one of those things I didn't have any use for, but couldn't bring myself to leave behind.

"And I assume they're secure?"

I raised an eyebrow at him. I certainly hoped he asked that question in expectation of a positive answer. I had spanned them across a set of five flash disks, encrypted them myself, and then secured the data in separate locations. "Of course."

"Just asking, man. Anyway, I turned him down, but I left him a discreet way to drop us information in case he did acquire the parts. Also got him to possibly consider letting us know if anyone else was asking for them."

He must have 'schmoozed' well. I assumed he did it without breaking cover. "What did you tell him?"

"Well, I softened him up a bit, got all buddy-buddy, convinced him to help us out and let us know in advance if we were going to have any competition in our little project."

A creative use of half-truths and implications, no doubt. "And just what project was that?"

He took advantage of a straight stretch of road to take his eyes off of it for a moment and favor me with an offended look. "I have no idea. It's not like I told him outright what it was we were working on. I may have implied we were trying to break the encryption on something or another."

"A computer like that would definitely help. Did I miss out on anything else back there? Some secret Sweepers handshake or something?"

"Huh?" For some reason, I startled another glance out of him.

"Why did you have me stay behind?" If he had really had some misguided notion of me searching the office for information, he would have asked if I had found anything by now.

"Oh." I noticed his fingers tightening slightly around the steering wheel. "Yeah, I guess. I mean, not literally. But sure, there was some definite stuff to pass myself off as in the in crowd."

The scenery outside my window was approximately the same as it had been when we had come. I studied the hands in my lap instead. They were the same as they'd always been, too, and yet I occasionally managed to discover something new about them. "And you couldn't have done that if I had been standing there watching?"

"Well, gee, you don't have to go feeling like I left you at the kiddie table or something."

He was getting defensive. That meant I was getting close to something he didn't want to talk about. Too bad for him. I really needed to know what was going on between us, and if he wouldn't answer my questions, he would respond to my interpretation of the facts. I left enough silence between us for him to feel I had backed down, then I offered the conclusions I had come to while waiting. "You don't trust me."

He jumped a little in his seat, but his hands on the wheel didn't waver. It reminded me that he was a pilot that I would trust with my life. Regardless of the level of trust that he had for me. "It wasn't a matter of trust. I'm enough of a Sweeper to be able to talk shop with him. You aren't."

"I wouldn't have had to talk shop. That's what you're for."

"It was more cozy with just the two of us. We had good atmosphere going."

I remembered when it had been cozy with just the two of us. We had trusted each other, depended on each other then. It got me riled up enough to stop staring at my lap and look at him instead. "I don't see how he could trust a man who couldn't trust his own partner. You had no reason to have me stay behind. I should especially have been there if he was going to show us his hardware since that was obviously what I was there for. He was an unknown, leading you into foreign territory. I should have been there, watching your back."

"Watching my back, eh?" he repeated flatly. His hands tightened around the steering wheel again. If I hadn't seen him pilot through immeasurably high-stress situations, I might have postponed the discussion to a time when we were no longer in a moving vehicle. "You know, I did that once. Watched your back. Watched you leave, rather. Last thing I saw of you, five years ago."

He was not going to make me regret that, dammit. "Last I saw of you, you were waving back at me. Last I heard of you, you were wishing me a good journey." I took a breath, taking a moment to shift my gaze out the window before spelling it out in terms less argumentative. "I really don't understand what changed between then and now. What did I do to lose your support? Your trust?"

I hadn't expected a big, triumphant return home to arms wide open, but I hadn't expected this, either. I had avoided giving the matter too much thought before the conjecture became a reality, but I had hazily envisioned a cautious period of adjustment while we worked together. I hadn't been too far off the mark, except in this one case, and perhaps he was the one I would have least predicted as reacting negatively. Shows what I know. Was that why it stung so much? We'd gone our separate ways after the war, having parted on good terms. When we met up again one year later for the Barton incident, it went well enough. A few bumps here and there of unexpected behavior, but about par for the course. Nothing like this.

"Do you trust me?" he asked at length. Demanded, almost.

It was my immediate reaction to say yes, of course, but brutal honesty made me halt myself. Yes, I would trust him with my life... if he was interested in preserving it. "I trust your skills, your morals... but I no longer know your intentions.... Nor my ability to judge them, perhaps."

I couldn't read his reaction. A muscle in his jaw twitched, but what did that mean? What sort of answer had he expected or wanted? Whatever it was, he dwelt on the answer I gave him for a few long seconds before answering in an ambiguous tone. "Then I guess the same goes for me. I trust that you'll save the world, time and time again, this time included. There are some things in this world that just don't change."

"But you don't trust me to watch your back?" That hurt. When everything had been going to hell six years ago during the war, one of the few things we five could depend on was the fact that we could trust each other.

"You didn't trust us." It started out as a snap, but puttered out quietly, if not less intensely, keeping things at our companionable simmer.

"How?" I asked in a tentative quest for a comprehension I was beginning to fear was beyond me. "When?"

He kept his eyes firmly on the road. I followed suit, staring at the dash instead of his profile. I suppose it evened things out a bit. "You know, if you don't get it, then never mind, I guess."

That was far from resignation. It had been yet another nail in my coffin, another accusation, another defensive barb. I wasn't sure why I wouldn't let this go. We just had to work together; we didn't have to like each other. If we could just find that we'd changed, that we no longer got along, that there were parts of each other that we didn't like anymore, then fine, I would settle for that, but we couldn't even get that far. Why did we have to be like this? "No, I want to understand this, Duo. I did something to piss you off, and whatever it was, I never intended it to offend you, so I'm sorry for that. But if you would just tell what we're talking about here... then maybe I could make it better."

He snorted in dry amusement, sparing me the dramatic declaration that I couldn't. "You ever think you have a superman complex, Heero? Wanting to fix things, make them right?"

"Why would a person want to leave things wrong if he could do otherwise?" I had memories tied up with him that I considered precious; I could not, would not allow our differences now to ruin those for me. I didn't want them bittersweet, or worse yet, just plain bitter.

"It's done, Heero. Done is done."

"I don't want to do it again."

"You won't."

I found that flat statement to be entirely too ominous.

*****

Part 7

I'd seen Trowa playing other roles before, of course, but they hadn't been anything like this. Although he'd gone undercover, it'd always been as a nobody, or a person just like Trowa, only with looser morals. Brisbois, obviously, was nothing like Trowa, and yet my chameleon friend had the remarkable ability to play him. I would have to talk to him sometime about that, about playing the role appropriate to the situation, and how that affected one's perception of self.

Our contact appeared promptly at twenty-one hundred, nothing more than just a blinking cursor on the console. With the secondary computer system hooked up to the machine, I immediately began a trace of the signal, but I wasn't optimistic. Since we had been the ones to initiate this meeting, Trowa began. "Things are going well, I hope?"

We waited in tense silence for the response to appear. "Of course. We must thank you again for your part in this. You have done the world a great service."

"I hope my service isn't over yet." Trowa walked a fine line of having to come up with the proper words without really having a good idea of the facts. Had they promised Brisbois something? Did he already know what the next step in the plan was? Had they already turned him down?

"You've done well, but you should lay low for a while."

"Trying to brush him off, eh?" Duo muttered. "Not that he doesn't deserve it, but damned inconvenient."

"Nothing that can't be worked around," Trowa spoke even as he typed in his response. "At least they don't know he's been compromised."

It must have been claustrophobic for Trowa to work with four people staring over his shoulder. I read his answer. "There's no need to. They don't have a clue." Neither did Brisbois. Sad, almost, but it worked out in our favor at the moment. Later, it would probably mean that Brisbois had nothing useful to share.

"They're in quite the dither over their loss, or so I hear," the interface revealed. "They're sure to be looking for you."

"Someone should review department security," I murmured darkly to Wufei. He nodded with a frown. At least our leak hadn't been large enough for them to know that Brisbois was in our custody.

"They won't find me. Our plan was too good." As soon as he finished the sentence, Trowa went back to scrub out 'our' and replace it with 'the'. Since we didn't know for sure who had come up with the plan, even if we suspected, it was safer to go the neutral route. He sent the two sentences first, then appended another two. "I'm surprised they even know it's missing. There's a reason we did what we did."

"No cause to be cocky. Pride goeth before a fall."

"Remind me to laugh when they get cocky and their pride goeths before their fall," Duo said to no one in particular. No doubt our contact was quoting proverbs at us merely to get us off his case and giving no consideration for the possible ironies.

"The fall will be theirs," Trowa typed. He pressed 'enter', then typed some more. "What comes next?"

Time to get pushy. Would the contact push back? His tactic appeared to be stonewalling for the time being. Our prospects for getting further information out of him seemed to be decreasing rapidly. "We have nothing for you right now. Once your situation is settled, we will contact you again."

"That's not what I signed on for." A reasonable assumption. Brisbois' arrogance was too great for him to settle for being a delivery boy. He would naturally assume he had further use. "I want to help. Tell me more."

"You risk becoming a threat to our plans."

"Ooh," Duo cooed, nudging me in the ribs with his elbow. "Sounds like you might have guessed right after all. Are you getting anything out of this?"

I scrolled through the information on my screen and shook my head. "Only a few packets. I need a steadier stream of data to get a lock on his position. All I've got is truncated header crap."

"I'm still in a position to be of assistance," Trowa answered. "I'm the one that got the thing for you in the first place. Tell me what's going on."

Unfortunately, Brisbois was not a particular subtle man. We could not go haphazardly fishing for information. "You are a single cog in a machine."

"We don't need to meet. You can send me more information without risk of exposure."

"From here on out, there will only be research concerns. Your skills will not be required."

Trowa had scarcely begun to type a reply before the line was disconnected. We all stared at the blinking cursor for a few seconds before Quatre shrugged philosophically. "Well, it was worth a shot. Good work, Trowa." He patted the man on the shoulder.

Duo pushed himself away from the crowd and dropped back into the chair at his desk. "Yeah, it's not like we thought we'd be able to get anything useful out of it anyway. The guy was set on dumping Brisbois."

"We did get something," Quatre corrected him with a smile. "I'd just love to have a little chat with Brisbois tomorrow. Actually, you and Wufei would probably be the best candidates. We'll see how he reacts to knowing his co-conspirators just cut him off."

Duo grinned, and not very pleasantly. "Ooh, that sounds like fun."

*****

I'm not certain why they decided I should sit in on the session, but I did. They claimed that Brisbois had responded well to me before, but I wasn't sure how that would help us now. Duo and Wufei would have the pleasure of rubbing Brisbois' nose in his insignificance, not I.

I leaned myself in the corner of the room, much as Trowa had previously. My arms were crossed over my chest, and I wore the expression of complete disinterest that came so naturally to me as I watched the proceedings.

Things started normally enough. Someone had finally seen fit to give Brisbois a new outfit: one of incarceration. At least this one was fastened properly. Imprisonment had done little to dampen his spirits. Despite his protestations to the contrary, I thought he was rather enjoying his assumed martyrdom. Inmates at his facility were provided with basic amenities. There was absolutely no reason for him to be walking around with a scruffy chin and ruffled hair, other than that he liked the image it gave him. He was 'roughing' it in the way that city folks would bring their luxury SUVs to a campground and spend a night or two in a richly appointed cabin. Perhaps their skin would even touch flannel in a concession to their environment.

He fired off a few barbs at his interrogators. Weren't we tired of this yet? His two interrogators grinned back at him with an expectant joy. Not at all. We were just getting started.

It was almost too easy to break him. They started off with the usual questions, leading him up to his typical self-righteous fervor, and at the peak of his raving, they casually tossed the transcript of Trowa's session onto the table. He vehemently denied it, of course, called its authenticity into question, accused us of all sorts of terrible things, but they bludgeoned him into submission. I was almost beginning to suspect that they were enjoying it just a little too much.

He stared at the print on the pages dumbly as Duo cooed sweetly to him. "Come on. They've already turned their backs on you. You don't need to be loyal to them anymore."

Three seconds later, Brisbois flicked his wrist angrily and flung the sheets across the tabletop. "They didn't give me any names," he spat on vengefully. "Just called themselves a group of concerned citizens. Said they would tell me after I delivered the goods."

"Concerned about what?" Wufei asked.

Brisbois eyed him cautiously, perhaps no longer interested in loyalty to the group, but in no way dissuaded from the justice of their cause. "Genetics."

There was a smug flash across Duo's face before it slid away. His lead had proven true. "What about it?"

Brisbois' attention shifted to Duo, still standing beside him with attentive concern. His faith had been shattered, but not his arrogance. It was aptly proven in the way he looked at Duo with something that slowly grew from a neutral grimace to a sneer. "You're colony-born, aren't you?"

There was no doubt that that was an ugly accusation. Duo's expression immediately went hard. He hated it when people brought his background into question.

That was answer enough for Brisbois, who smirked triumphantly. "I can tell. It's the eyes. Eyes like yours don't happen in nature."

Well, that was guaranteed to piss Duo off. Fortunately for everyone concerned, he pursed his lips tightly together and quickly removed himself from Brisbois' immediate vicinity. I slid smoothly into his place. "What do you mean? Obviously, it happened."

"It shouldn't have," Brisbois responded immediately. "The colonies are rife with genetic mutations. It's the radiation, you know. Especially on the L2 cluster. They have the most inadequate shielding of them all."

"But how is that unnatural?" I kept my tone almost conversational, as I had the first time. As the others had observed, he had responded well to that, as disturbing as it was to me that I seemed able to speak rationally to a person like Brisbois.

"Mutations are just mistakes in the transcription process. They're things that never should have happened."

The way he made it sound as if he were explaining that to a child put me on edge, but I refused to show it. "Humans are a result of a transcription error. It's called evolution."

"An error that happened millions of years ago. Mankind has not moved beyond what it is for almost as long, and managed to conquer the earth and the stars. It's peaked, reached its pinnacle. There's nowhere left to go but down."

I wouldn't waste my breath contending the issue, trying to make him see that somewhere within the multitude of possibilities, there was room for improvement. Already we saw some. "So how does Zero fit into this? It can't stop... genetic mutations," I said, staying away from the topic of evolution.

"We don't ask it to stop mutations altogether. If it could do that, we could cure cancer, do all sorts of things. But it can analyze mutations, identify them. Mutations are insidious things. How can we keep humanity pure of the riffraff if we can't even tell the difference?" He smiled beatifically at me, as if that proved the loftiness of his cause.

If one couldn't tell the difference, then what was the point? And how did Zero really aid their cause? The analyses could have been done by anything, albeit more slowly. Did they expect Zero to distinguish between variation and mutation more readily? It was a very, very fine line to walk since all variations stemmed from mutations in the first place. What threshold would they define to separate the one from the other? I got the sinking feeling that they would use their 'group of concerned citizens' as a baseline, and alter as necessary to exclude whatever group was on their blacklist.

I couldn't follow this man's logic. I wasn't sure there was much logic to his actions. All that mattered was that he believed it, and that some person or persons had fooled him into it. "What would you do with that knowledge?"

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves," he sneered. It was probably to hide the fact that he didn't know what came next. Something genocidal, perhaps, covered in the dark cloak of racial cleansing. Segregation and discrimination were on the more positive end of the spectrum. It didn't matter. We would stop them before it became an issue.

There wasn't much more to squeeze out of him after that, to our disappointment. As we had expected, he had been nothing more than a dupe, but at least we had found out his cause. We left him to the officials of the detention center and started back to our office.

I had expected Duo to have something to say about the answers we had gotten, but he stayed silent, instead leaving Quatre to tell us what he had gotten out of watching Brisbois in action again. Nothing new, unfortunately. He already had a pretty good picture of our prisoner's character, and there wasn't much more to Brisbois to find out.

As we passed a bathroom, Duo excused himself and ducked inside, telling the rest of us to go on without him. Since there was another water cooler not far from there, I took the opportunity to refresh my cup of water before we continued down the hall. It wasn't long before the cup was emptied, and not by any circumstances under my control. I was drinking from it and listening to Wufei summarize some of the points of our investigation when we turned a corner and I quite nearly collided with another agent. I managed to duck and twist out of the way before we connected, but not without sacrificing my shirt as the depository for the contents of my raised cup.

I suppose I was glad that it was a veteran of the force and not some young, blubbering rookie. Apologies were made without an excess of fussing and stammering, and we let the man pass. Judging the condition of my shirt to be unacceptable, I also excused myself from the group to run back to the bathroom and do some damage control.

Duo was at the sinks, washing his hands. He looked up when I entered, puzzled at first. I don't suppose it got much more enlightening when he spotted the large water stain on the front of my shirt. "Drinking problem," I explained unhelpfully before turning to snag a few paper towels. I dabbed half-heartedly at my shirt, knowing that whatever I did, I would basically have to wait until my shirt dried. I leaned over the sink and tried to squeeze out what I could, but while it left my shirt drier, it also left quite a few wrinkles. Ah, well.

I'd thought that Duo was still standing by the sinks waiting for me to finish my business so we could head up together, but when I turned to toss my sodden towels into the garbage can, I found Duo staring at his reflection in the mirror. I pitched my trash and was about to propose we leave when I decided against it. He wasn't primping, just... thinking. Something somewhat gloomy, unless I missed my mark. I'd seen that expression in the mirror enough times. I approached him slowly, saying his name in question as I came up to his side.

He didn't spare me glance, but rather spoke to me as if he spoke to himself. "You know, it's not like I ever see them all that much. I never really think about it. But I guess... they are."

What was he...? Ah. Looking not just at his reflection, but his eyes. "Don't, Duo," I said before I had quite figured out what I was protesting. It almost came to me, and I bulled forward, confident that the thought would catch up in a timely manner. "So they're not normal. What does it matter? I like them."

He blinked his indigo eyes towards me in surprise. I was only slightly less surprised, so I shrugged, realizing that that last part had actually been the thought that had eluded me. It came first? Odd. I elaborated since the idea seemed to need further articulation for the both of us. "I've always thought that they're rather... you."

"Even if they are just 'mistakes'?" he asked, a flippant tone added to his voice to mask something deeper.

"You know, I had an interesting revelation a few years back: mistakes aren't always bad. And I don't mean the kind of mistake a person learns from, I mean... flaws, I guess."

"Great, so now I'm flawed?"

I shook my head at him, wondering why he felt the need to deliberately misunderstand me. "We're all flawed, Duo, and that's what makes us 'us'. It makes us unique."

"Thought you were a perfectionist, Yuy."

"I am," I admitted easily. It was a somewhat obvious character trait of mine. "Less so than I was before, though. See, I have this pen that has a scratch in its finish from where someone stepped on it once. I've got this book from a class that always opens to page sixty-three when I drop it. There's a dent in the fuzz of one of my house slippers."

He interrupted me to insert an incredulous question. "You've got fuzzy slippers?"

"I've got fuzzy slippers." Why did that come out almost proudly? "And even though they fit on either foot, that dent identifies the one I always put on my left foot. That crease in my book's spine differentiates it from the books of all the other students in that class. In a basket full of pens, I'd be able to tell which one was mine because of that scratch. It's these little, tiny things... quirks, if you will, that make them mine, make them special, unique. It came to me that... I rather like being able to lay claim to something unique."

He glanced back at his reflection for a moment. "Hm. Comes from not having much to call our own before, eh?"

"Maybe," I conceded. Maybe it was a rebellion against becoming one of the faceless masses, no matter how much I enjoyed my anonymity. "If we were all perfect, we'd all be the same. Just... cookie-cutter creations churned out on an assembly line. Our flaws -- no, quirks -- give us personality."

He looked at me thoughtfully, was about to say something, then blinked and looked around. "Why are we talking in the men's room?"

I shrugged, interested more in the fact that we were conversing companionably than in our location. "You started it."

We left, but continued to talk. "I didn't think you tolerated flaws, Yuy."

"Some flaws are better than others, of course." I chuckled. "Or maybe I'm just trying to rationalize away the existence of my own flaws."

He did what he'd been doing a lot of lately, stopped himself from saying something. What was it he was holding back? Was he just reconsidering his words, or was he censoring them? "Flaws?" he ended up saying. "You?"

"Nobody's perfect, though we can strive towards it." We walked past a Preventer in the hall that stared at the large damp spot on the front of my shirt. I ignored him. "Belief in the concept of perfection leads to arrogance. I wonder why anyone would believe that humanity has reached the limits of its perfection, though. Why would you even listen to anything that jackass was saying, anyway?"

"Who? Oh. Him." He tried to laugh it off. It didn't work so well. "I wasn't listening to him. I mean, as in, believing what he said. It's not like he was saying anything new, anyway."

It was an unfortunate truth of society that Brisbois' opinions were not unique. There were a number of known and accepted problems concerning the L2 colony cluster. Its situation was not improved by the fact that it orbited on the far side of the moon. For anyone in a position to help, it was easier to ignore what could not be seen. "The side effects of living in space can be seen on all of the colonies. All things considered, I think you got a pretty good deal of it if an unusual eye color is all you have to worry about. I bet most people don't even notice them."

"You did."

"I notice a lot of things." And I'd been in a position to observe them from a rather close range. "Besides, I'm hardly a good representative of 'most people'."

"No, that you aren't..." A pair of lieutenants was just exiting the stairwell, and they held the door for us as we entered. He spoke so soon after the door closed behind us that I nearly lost his words to the reverberations. "You've changed."

So it had been said. I was beginning to wonder what everyone's perception of me had been before that they all thought I was so radically different now. It wasn't something I saw in myself.

He went on. "I think I'd be more pissed if you hadn't."

"Changed?" I prompted, interested in hearing the rest of his thought.

For two people walking up a flight of metallic stairs in a fairly empty enclosure, we made remarkably little noise. "You said you left to change. I'd be pissed if that didn't happen."

"More pissed," I correctly softly. He was still pissed that I had left, for whatever private reasons he had. At least he didn't feel the need to point it out all the time anymore. I knew it, and he knew I knew it. "You know, Relena said much the same thing."

He laughed. It echoed, giving it a hollow sound. "Only I'm sure she didn't use the word 'pissed'."

"'Cross', she said. Before I left, she made me promise to have a big smile on my face when next we met."

"Ah, so that was what that was about... She missed you, you know." There was some subtle undertone that I was failing to understand again. I consoled myself with at least being able to identify its presence. He hit me with his next move before I could dwell on it much. "I thought for sure you'd have contacted her at some point. She thought you'd be in touch with me, or one of us anyway. Then we exchanged notes one day and found out we were both wrong."

Perhaps that was the story behind Relena's brief explanation of how she and Duo had become close. My absence had brought them together.

Duo didn't seem to need any response from me to keep going. "What I really don't get is why you were in contact with Une of all people."

His tone went from relatively casual to flat. Were we finally getting to the heart of the matter? "I wasn't 'in contact' with her," I answered mildly. "Like I said, I left her my contact information in case something like this came up."

"You could have left it with us." We came to a halt on a landing between floors when he turned to confront me. I somehow ended up trapped in the corner. It was not a comfortable feeling.

I tried to analyze my answers carefully, but I didn't have enough of an understanding of what he wanted to hear to be able to judge the impact of my words. "If something like this came up, I figured she would be in a better position to know."

"You could have left it with us anyway."

"I needed separation," I said in a low voice, working to keep my words from becoming heated. I was keenly aware of how loudly our words sounded in the stairwell. "Not from my friends, but from my life, my entire situation. I couldn't have that if we were in contact."

"You could have trusted us to respect your wishes," he nearly hissed at me, leaning another few centimeters farther into my personal space. "You didn't have to enforce it by just cutting us off. We would have left you alone if you had asked it."

"Maybe I didn't trust myself." The revelation was only slightly less shocking to me as it was to him. How did he bring these things out in me? "I couldn't go out and do what I had to in order to establish something new for myself if I knew that I could always fall back on the rest of you if things got to be too much. It would have been too easy not to meet new people if I knew I had good friends just a phone call away. If I knew there would always be people that understood me and all of my little 'quirks', then I wouldn't have felt the need to adjust to the rest of society. Not so long as we were the five of us as our own little support group. I couldn't have done it. It would have been too easy not to. I had to throw myself into it. It had to be absolute, no going back, just plowing on forward."

"What about us?!" he asked angrily. "Yeah, a support group. Of five, not four."

"Four is just as good a number," I shot back. "This may sound callous to you, Duo, but after it was all over, and it was time to think and make decisions... for the first time in a long time, I didn't have to give a damn about anyone else. And you all told me the same thing. I didn't have to think about putting others before myself. I could do whatever the hell that I wanted to do, and I didn't have to worry about it interfering with some responsibility that I had, some moral obligation, or some bigger picture. If I had stayed for all of you... I would have been no better off than I was before."

We faced off for several long seconds, each of us set in our ways, before a door opening several stories down broke the moment. The echoing footsteps pushed us apart and sent Duo turning on his heel to continue our interrupted journey up the stairs. I opened my mouth to call after him, but his name stalled in my throat, and with an unclenching of a fist I hadn't known I'd clenched, I let out a small sound of frustration and went after him.

"I like who I've become, Duo," I murmured to him once I'd gotten close enough. "Your disapproval won't change that."

He waited until we reached the last landing before answering in an equally quiet voice. "I like who you've become, too. But that doesn't change things, either." He swung the door open and walked through, not waiting to hold the door for me. I followed, and we left our little discussion behind in the stairwell.

*****

We made it back to the rest of the team in one piece. An hour later, Quatre and I were called up to Une's office to report to her. I wished we had more to tell her.

On the way up, Quatre and I had words. "Before we go up there," he said, "Is there anything you'd like to tell me?"

I glanced over at him, but his expression was unassuming. "What do you mean?"

"There's nothing I should know about?"

"Nothing you don't already know, I'm sure," I answered warily. "Why do you ask?"

He gave me a look just this side of reproachful. Quatre was too good for all-out reproach. "The tension between you and Duo was potently obvious."

Oh, that. "It won't impact the team," I promised. Our discussion had ended very unresolved. I was unable to determine if Duo just needed time to consider my words, or if I had managed irritate him further. Other than the small trust issue, our disagreement really only manifested itself in a few pointed barbs and a lack of comfortable small talk. It was a relief to know that it was staying a private issue rather than coming out to polarize the team.

"That's nice to hear, but the team's not all that's important."

It would have been so easy to just ask him what was bothering Duo, if it wasn't bothering Quatre as well. He had always been the best at understanding each of us. That understanding would probably lead him to boot me right back at Duo, and I would have agreed. This was a matter between us. If I couldn't settle it myself, then it didn't deserve to be settled.

"We're... slowly coming to an understanding," I answered. Not an agreement in any way, just... coming to understand where each of us stood. It was sort of disappointing to find that it was taking us so much effort to get even that far. Perhaps I needed to stop comparing it to the silent understanding we used to have. As everyone liked to keep pointing out, we had changed. Maybe my image of Duo just needed to change with it.

Quatre made a sound like he wasn't convinced. I wasn't surprised. "What's going on with you two?"

I tried to shrug it off. "Nothing special. Or new, I should say. Duo's still sore that I left, and I won't apologize for it. I think we're going to end up with an irreconcilable difference of opinions."

He sighed. "That's too bad. I was hoping..."

So was I. "We're still a team." He cast me an inquisitive look, so I elaborated. "The five of us. We're still... 'the five of us'. ...Right?"

I really shouldn't have added on that last bit of uncertainty, but I did. Momentary fears of four plus one assaulted me. In all the world, the five of us had shared something. I still valued that bond, no matter what Duo thought. As much as I had wanted to know who I was outside of that, I had never wanted to sever that connection.

"Of course," he answered with a gentle smile. The response seemed just a little too quick to me. I couldn't tell if that was because the answer was patently obvious, or if it had just been a knee-jerk reaction to answer positively and placate me with empty promises.

My turn to sigh. I passed. I also ignored the urge to ask what he thought about my departure, or more accurately, as I had recently discovered, what he thought about the fact that I hadn't left them any contact information. It seemed no one was arguing my decision to leave. The main issue appeared to be that I left for five years and didn't talk to anyone during that period. Asking his opinion wouldn't change anything, though. I didn't need another's perception second guessing my own.

Our meeting with Une was depressingly uninforming. There were a lot of directions we could go, but nowhere sure enough for us to pursue alone. While Brisbois' latest testimony had added to our understanding of the matter, it hadn't been enough to point us at the mastermind behind the heist. We could not even use his words as confirmations since we couldn't be entirely certain to what degree of accuracy he had been informed.

Une asked us if more manpower would assist us in our cause, but we had to reply in the negative. Besides the little matter of opsec, no one else understood the situation as well as we did, no matter how much we would have liked someone else to bear the burden of slogging through the mounds of paperwork and research. We knew what to look for, even if we hadn't found any clear sign of it yet. I think we were all going a little crazy with it. None of us was particularly well suited to life behind a desk.

Personally, I was getting antsy. I knew intellectually that it would take time to deploy Zero, no matter what purpose it was being put to, but the fact that we had the time to investigate didn't make me feel any easier about it. We would be able to counter Zero once its use was revealed to us, but I sorely wished we could neutralize the threat before it ever became apparent.

Back at the office, we found another old friend awaiting our return. Apparently Sally Po had been dropping off some more intelligence reports when she had decided to stay and chat a while. She stood from where she had been perched on the edge of the empty desk when she saw me, a warm smile on her face. It was reassuringly earnest. "Heero," she said, the twang in her voice a comfortably familiar mix between amusement and delight.

"Sally. ...You cut your hair." An odd statement to use as greeting, perhaps, but true nevertheless. I hadn't quite recognized the woman behind the desk at first, not without her two twists to frame her face. I sort of missed them. I'd always wondered what strange feminine magic was used in keeping the twists from unraveling. Now she sported a shoulder length cut. It still managed to frame her face similarly.

She laughed, running a hand through her hair. "Yes. Yes, I did. I went on, well, an interesting assignment a few years back and just got sick of it all, so I lopped it all off. Been freer ever since. But you? Let's get a good look at you."

I stood obediently for her as she studied me, stretching my arms out, poking me, taking a hold of my chin to turn my face this way and that. Far from a complete physical, of course, and yet I still felt as if her discerning eyes had caught a good number of details.

"Is that how you're greeting people these days, woman?" Wufei asked, dry humor in his tone.

"Only the special ones," she tossed snappily over her shoulder. She stepped back when she was done and put on a good business face. "You've been healthy?"

"Yes, ma'am," I answered with a nod.

"Taking care of yourself?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Taking it easy like I told you to?"

"Yes, ma'am. I think if I'd gone down with another Gundam, you'd have heard. I've been in school instead."

That broke through her professional manner. She clapped her hands together. "Oh, that's wonderful to hear. Where at?"

"HMU."

"Nothing but the best for our Heero, eh?" The sparkle in her eye took away any possible sting from the statement. "What are you studying?"

"It'll say computers on my diploma, but I've really been studying... everything. Whatever I felt like studying at the time. What have you been up to?"

"Oh, nothing but a lot of boring Preventers work. Do you like it out there?"

Trying to get someone to tell me about themselves instead seemed like an exercise in futility these days. My life as a student hardly struck me as any more interesting. Just what was it about it that everyone was finding so fascinating? "Yes, it's nice out there. A good balance between quiet and interesting."

"You have your own place?"

"An apartment. I don't think I'd enjoy living on campus." The thought of being assigned a random roommate hadn't sat well with me. I could do what I had to in order to become a functioning member of society, but I needed my own space in which to do it. I'd wanted total immersion, but living with someone else would have been an immersion so thick I would have choked on it. My apartment was something of a splurging point for me. It wasn't huge, but it wasn't the typical tiny student single. After a tiresome day, I really needed a place where I could go and be comfortable.

There were a few more exchanges of non-essential information before she sighed. "Well, I guess I've been here long enough. I should get back to work. If there's anything else I can do to help, by all means, let me know. This takes priority over a lot of things."

After she'd gone, Duo turned to me with a raised eyebrow and a twist of his lips. "'Ma'am'?"

Even Wufei seemed a little taken aback. "And she didn't protest, either?"

I shrugged, dismissing it as insignificant. I hadn't thought about it at the time, and I didn't want to make a big issue of it now. Sally had a nurturing air to her that I respected. Of course, if I used another term for it, say, 'matronly', she would probably do something vicious to my sensitive parts. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, I would show her the respect she was due, even if it was served with a side of amusement.

*****

Part 8

Two days later, we finally made a break in the case. Suspicious activity finally surfaced, consistent with the motivations of one of the groups high on our terrorist watch list.

All operations at Meridian Biotechnologies had come crashing to a halt the previous day. The entire complex had gone into a complete lockdown, its computer and electronic systems disrupted so thoroughly that emergency procedures had to be implemented to safeguard their biological research. They'd had difficulty evacuating all of their personnel because many had been caught in electronically secured areas when the systems had gone down. Precious man-hours were lost, and a couple of research projects set back a bit, but fortunately, they reported no injuries.

Meridian Biotech had been one of the leading industry proponents of loosening restrictions on genetic research.

We made the early morning trip out to the company, which was about a two hour drive from Brussels. As soon as we made contact with the proper people and established a line of communication, we started getting information from them. They were very cooperative, telling us that an activist group based in Central Africa had been threatening them on account of their research. Apparently, the 'terrorists' were against the manipulation of the stuff of life.

Quatre had the fun job of hashing it out with the company on why they had never reported such threats before. Their claims would have been taken seriously by the Preventers, especially when it involved an international dispute. We were informed that the threats had never been taken seriously by Meridian before, found to be nothing more than fundamentalist rumblings and bizarre conspiracy theories. We were taking the group seriously now.

Wufei and Trowa pursued the lead into this group that hadn't even been on our radar before that day. Shifting through reports, we found that Wufei had dismissed them as a possibility for being underfunded and not militantly inclined. Their fundamentalist stance did not move them towards the use of cutting-edge technology.

Quatre, Duo, and I were shuffled around for a while as we made our way from the public relations people to the director and CEO, Henri Hoffman. He invited us into his office to talk privately.

The entire complex had been designed with a modern, cutting-edge look. There were elegant lines and simple colors, with lots of glass and metal and open space. Hoffman's office, lofty as it was, overlooked an atrium, where we could observe scientists, researchers, and whomever else was on staff striding down hallways and going about their duties. It was impressive, but impersonal.

Hoffman himself was a man in his early forties or thereabouts, with a neatly manicured mustache and tailored suit. He didn't have many wrinkles around his eyes. Either he maintained his skin, or he didn't laugh much. I would have wagered on both. His view over his empire gave off a proud, paternal air.

He started off with effusive gratitude that the Preventers had taken an interest in his case. Being nothing more than a research firm in a small country, they did not feel they had the resources to pursue the crime themselves, especially against people that were on another continent. Quatre deftly cut through the obligatory niceties with his usual courtesy and flair, and managed to get us to the point.

"We have a lot of projects running here at Meridian," Hoffman answered in response to our questioning. "In general, we do a lot of research into technologies that can be used to improve the quality of life for people everywhere. Testing devices, non-intrusive medical supplementary devices, that sort of thing. Pacemakers, dialysis machines, incubators, glucose pumps -- we research a lot of areas that are currently susceptible to human error and require a lot of maintenance or equipment. On the testing side, we have developed and are continuing to develop new tests to root out the signs of diseases, specifically genetic diseases, as early as possible. Many of these tests are available today in pre-natal care facilities around the world and in the colonies."

"I'm not unfamiliar with your company," Quatre responded, his experience on the world stage and as a businessman naturally making him the best leader in this discussion. "You fund a lot of independent projects, not just in-house ones. You sponsor educational programs, health outreach programs..."

"Yes, we do that as well," Hoffman answered modestly. "One of the projects we've started in recent years has been our outreach programs in the L2 cluster. We're very proud of what we've setup there. We're just starting to gain momentum, but we're positive that it'll be flourishing in no time."

"I remember now," Duo interrupted. "This company was the major backing behind the clinic that went up on X13386. The Benning Outreach. And the Sunrise Rehab Centers on L2-X2834 and 17890."

"Yes. The main focus of the Benning facility is to investigate and hopefully control the numerous infectious diseases that seem to run through the colony periodically. The rehab centers were built to provide assistance to the people that had a genuine desire to change their lives. Are you from L2?"

As usual, Duo displayed his wary hesitance before answering, though it didn't show in his eventual tone. "Yeah. You've got good causes." But knowing Duo, that statement didn't mean he thought they were doing any good with them. It was important that someone make the effort, but L2 was a tough nut to crack.

"Ah. Would you by chance have been there when the TDC-3 infection hit, during the summer of 190?"

Duo's expression darkened in little ways, subtle enough that perhaps Hoffman didn't realize what dangerous ground he was treading. "TDC-2."

In contrast, Hoffman's expression brightened surprisingly, the gleam in his eye telling us he'd heard something he'd wanted to hear, but hadn't expected. "Ah, is that so? You were very lucky, then. It's been difficult for us to procure samples from that time. If at some point you'd like to contribute, I'm sure--"

Lucky? To have survived? To have been there during such an 'interesting' time? It was hard to determine just what Hoffman was talking about. Either way, Duo was displeased. He cut Hoffman off before he could speak of some arrangement. "Another time, perhaps."

The executive blinked at Duo's flat tone before apologizing in an ingratiating manner. "I'm sorry. My research enthusiasm gets away from me sometimes. There are just so many vital things to discover out there. I really don't see how anyone would find that to be a threat. I would never have suspected that we would become a target for such a terrible crime."

"As I recall," Quatre cut in smoothly, before Duo could question what enthusiasm a person could have towards a plague that had killed thousands. "You also lobbied against bill ESC289, against the stricter regulation of genetic research."

"Absolutely," Hoffman responded after a brief pause. "There is so much knowledge to be gained from a better understanding of ourselves, both before and after birth. The bill's opponents seem to be most afraid of the extreme cases, things we only see in science fiction and horror cinema. It's difficult to believe that any rational person would bring up the possibility of shooting laser beams from one's eyes before the ESUN senate. And why should we be interested in creating such things in the first place? There are so many other ways by which mankind could benefit."

His words put me on edge. They were uncomfortably similar to the rhetoric that Brisbois had spouted against that very thing. Hoffman's advantage lay in being shrouded by legitimacy.

We went over a few of their other projects, trying to find a reason that the activist group would be interested in striking at this particular point in time. Granted, if our theories were true, then it was in large part due to the fact that the organization had gotten their hands on a rather integral piece of computer hardware, but we had no intentions of letting Meridian know of our suspicions.

I managed to excuse myself from the discussion to begin talks with their chief of technology, James Conzemius. He showed me to the center of their computer systems, and allowed me to take a look at the destruction their hacker had wrought, but the trial was not without its difficulties. Everywhere I turned, I tripped over yet another polite blockade set up under the guise of sensitive, classified research and data. With his obstructions, it was difficult to get a good feel for what sectors may have been targeted by the hacker, but I managed to get a decent impression from examining their other systems.

There was almost a palpable decrease in my tension levels when I surveyed the damage and declared it inconsistent with a full-scale Zero attack. Yes, there were signs that Zero had been involved with the computer malfunctions. There were certain disruption footprints leftover in the bit patterns, a particular ruthlessness in the way the system was overloaded, but it lacked the familiar logic behind its actions.

There was no pattern to the attack, no focus. Systems all across the board had been overloaded, but no permanent damage done -- at least, none that I was allowed to see. For an attack, this one had been remarkably ineffective. Given a few weeks time, Meridian would be back to normal. It was possible that it was just a test, but a test with a rational mind behind it would have followed some logical scheme. This was too haphazard, which led me to conclude that Zero had been used in the attack, but without any proper preparation. Its circuits were still damaged, perhaps, its memory corrupted, and most importantly of all, there was no tightly controlled mind behind it. They were unfamiliar with the system, and they did not have anyone that could yet meld with it and bring it to its true potential.

When we regrouped, I reported my findings. "Their CTO was being less than helpful, but I found out what we needed to know."

"So? What's the diagnosis?" Duo demanded impatiently. If I hadn't known the answer to the question, I probably would have been just as impatient.

"We still have time," I said, getting straight to what was really the heart of the matter. I held up my hand to delay the collective sigh of relief. "It was Zero. There was no mistaking that. But it's not a major threat yet." My hand came down, unpausing the relief.

"So what's the skill level of our thieves?" Quatre asked, getting back on track.

"They don't have full working knowledge of how Zero works. From the lack of coherence, I would say that they're almost definitely using a neural interface. Even a damaged computer has to run an algorithm. Only the human mind could be this chaotic. Even if they were going to cut corners on its reconstruction, they would definitely have chosen a better subject for the system's use. He was unable to control it. There's no way of telling what their intentions were, but I don't think it was to cause the widespread disruption that they did. If it were me... I'd consider the test a failure. Then again, I have very high standards."

"Is it possible that Meridian wasn't even the target?" Duo asked. "Could the system have just gone haywire and Meridian just happened to get in its way?"

I mulled it over before shaking my head. "Possible, but unlikely. I don't think the attack would have been confined to a single network if it had been random."

Quatre had on a contemplative expression. "So they're testing it out... And we don't know what they were testing, or what the results were. I think there's a good chance that they won't try anything again immediately. Even if yesterday's test was a success, it wouldn't have been what they were shooting for as an ultimate target. Anyone should be able to see there's a lot of room for improvement. They'll look at yesterday's results and dwell on them for at least a while before they decide how to proceed."

"They're heading down the route of not repairing Zero, unless the system was intact, or they've done a crude job of it," Trowa added. "They've leapt straight into the use of the system. It's working. I doubt they'll stop to go back now."

Yes, the system seemed to be working. Though it was spitting out oranges instead of apples, at least it was spitting out something. I didn't like it, but I was having trouble separating my own feelings on the matter from what our thieves might be experiencing. For anyone else, the hack job on Meridian may have exceeded all of their expectations. For me, all I could see were the signs that Zero had sustained some damage, that it was acting erratically and unpredictably, that it needed to be fixed and put back together properly. It was both infuriating... and frightening.

"Yo, Heero?"

I blinked myself out of my thoughts and deduced by the expressions on their faces that I had missed out on a good portion of the conversation. My ears had listened to the words, even though my brain had put off processing them, so I reviewed my memories and put myself back on track. "Sorry. Yeah, it should be pretty simple to go over a few things they can do to rebuild their security. I can try and put some things in to trap an intrusion, should there be another, but I can't predict what degree of success that will have since we don't know what form of attack will occur next."

"It can't just be a 'Zero' attack?" Wufei asked. "You said there were certain patterns."

"Certain basic patterns, yes, but none that could easily be discerned by a computational algorithm. Besides, once, or rather if, Zero gets properly trained, or trained further, the patterns could shift."

"Do what you can," Quatre decided. "After we're done here, go have a chat with the CTO or whomever's in charge down there. Wufei? Trowa? What have you found on this group?"

"This group isn't even organized enough to have a name," Wufei said sourly. "It's mostly based out of one particular town, New Condasa. The citizens there adhere to a set of philosophies defining a 'natural' life. Reports indicate that the philosophy may have started fifty years ago with the writings of one Lamar Timesen."

Quatre shifted in his seat. "So they're like a cult?"

"Depends on your definition of 'cult'," he responded. "As part of their 'natural' living, they believe it is unnatural to attempt to divine all the secrets of the human body -- genetic research being what is relevant to us. The GSDC is the source of most our on information on them. They've had an unholy time of the region since the Condasans refuse routine vaccinations for illnesses common to the area. They believe it violates some greater plan."

"Something akin to 'survival of the fittest'," Trowa said.

"Which is a tenet of evolution," Duo completed. "So maybe Brisbois' not as much the patsy as we thought he was. Damn."

Quatre chuckled lightly. "You're just saying that because you don't like him."

"Well, duh." He rolled his eyes.

I almost cracked a smile. "What can they do?"

Trowa took up the report. "So far, they've done nothing provably illegal. Thanks to modern technology and a few progressive minds, the Condasans are capable of sniffing around the affairs of others, digging up dirt to use against them in the public forum. Meridian is not the only organization that they've researched and protested, but thus far, none of their action has been aggressive. They simply don't strike us as a likely suspect."

"I was thinking I would fly out there tomorrow," Wufei said. "Check it out. From what the local field office has told us, they haven't exhibited any unusual activity in recent weeks. I've asked them to check up on this group, but it might be a wise idea for me to make some inquiries in person."

We agreed that that would be a wise idea, and once again, we discussed and delegated tasks. Once we were adjourned, I found Duo lingered as he passed me by. Hovering until the others had gone, he turned to me, eyebrows drawn together slightly as if in consideration. His mouth opened, but nothing came out for a couple of seconds. When he finally asked me his question, it came out almost irritated, as if there was an accusation in there that I had forced him to ask. "Are you okay?"

"Hm?" I blinked at him with silent inquiry.

"I mean..." He waved vaguely with one hand. The motion was not gentle, and as my eyes got distracted by the gesture, he took advantage of the moment to direct his gaze towards the wall. "You were kind of out of it."

I didn't really see why he was asking. He obviously didn't want to. Had Quatre put him up to it while I hadn't been paying attention? I wouldn't have been surprised. But now Duo had asked, and I would answer. Perhaps I would even ask some questions of my own since he was conveniently here. If there was someone to be inflicted with my presence at this time, Duo could possibly have been the best choice. Such good fortune almost reeked of Quatre's plotting. "You loved Deathscythe, right?"

The look he threw me was more than merely puzzled. Once again, there was that suspicion to it, as if I were asking purposely to throw him off. "Well... yeah."

"What about... what about your ECM, for instance? Your hyperjammers? Were you fond of them as well?"

His shoulders twitched in a minute shrug. I must have thrown him enough for him to decide to just go with it. "Yeah, sure, I guess. I mean, they didn't have nearly the personality 'Scythe did, but yeah, they got me in and out of quite a few jams. Why?"

I hesitated, not really wondering whether I should inform him of my thoughts, but rather how I might phrase them, or what my ultimate purpose was. "Zero... was a part of Wing for quite a while."

"Hence the name, Wing Zero," Duo pointed out slowly. Testing the waters of my sanity, perhaps.

"We went into a lot of battles together, worked together..."

His eyes, those odd indigo eyes, widened. "Good god, Yuy... Tell me you're not fond of Zero."

I shrugged helplessly. "It was a computer system, a tool... but something I counted on, something I tweaked with my own hands. I knew that system, inside and out. It literally molded itself to me. How could we not...?"

He took a dramatic step backwards. "You're freaking me out here, Yuy."

I made a small exasperated sound, wanting him to understand. Wanting to understand it myself. "And if you saw someone take your systems, your ECMs or your hyperjammers, or god forbid, your 'Scythe, and you saw him using them wrong, or leaving them damaged... would you get the urge to go in and fix them? Or... or shake them for their stupidity? Or something?"

Maybe he picked up on something in my voice. He pulled a chair out slowly and took a cautious seat next to me. "What's the problem here, exactly?"

I was still freaking him out, but he was taking the time to sit and talk anyway. That was nice, no matter his reason for staying behind. "I'm just... having a hard time trying to picture what anyone else would want to do with the system," I rephrased, putting myself deliberately on the mild side. I'd get into the nitty-gritty if it came to that, but until then, we could sort of build up to it to soften the blow. "I see the results of Zero's usage... and I'm having a hard time of seeing it as anything other than a failure. I know what Zero's capable of. This isn't it."

"Well, that's what the rest of us are for," he ventured. "Perspective. A second opinion."

The corner of my lips quirked up, whether in smile or grimace, it was difficult to tell. "I'm not being a very good consultant on Zero if I'm making you do all the work."

He snorted. "Yeah, well, we all know consultants have the cushiest jobs."

"True." That one was more of a smile than a grimace, even if quite firmly on the wry side. "Does it excuse me from wanting to reach out and... fix Zero? Put him back together again right?"

He laughed abruptly, bringing himself back under control within seconds after I shot him a hurt look. "Sorry. I just had this sudden image of you cooing over a circuitboard, talking babytalk to it. Um, but..." His mirth faded, and he chewed on his lip for a while. "I guess I understand. I mean, I'd understand if it were one of 'Scythe's systems. It wouldn't really matter who was using it, or what for. I'd just want to show 'em all how it's done. Professional pride, maybe. But..."

He paused to run a hand through his bangs. "I'm not getting the Zero vibe. I guess I never used Zero all that much. Thank God," he muttered before returning to a normal tone of voice. "So it figures that I wouldn't feel any more for it than I would for Wing or Sandrock or something. But even so. I mean, geez, Heero. Zero?"

"Why not?" I wondered if I was the only one that heard the defensiveness in my voice. "Sure, it drove some people mad, but..." The lameness of that statement was made manifest by the way Duo raised his eyebrow at me. I hurried to finish the thought. "...we always worked well together." His other eyebrow rose, compelling me to append to my statement. "...After we got a few things straightened out."

He laughed again, this time a much softer sound. "Okay, fine. Zero's your little buddy. Is that a problem? Are you asking us to account for that, or what?"

I shook my head, wondering if I had gotten my point across at all. I couldn't tell if Duo was just dismissing it, humoring me, or accepting it. "No problem, I guess. Maybe I just wanted to ask if I was the only one that felt that way."

"Guess not, almost sort of," he answered brightly, springing out of his chair. "Well, then. Back to work?"

"Back to work," I echoed with a sigh.

*****

I spent a lot of time with Meridian's systems. Even though I was still being denied access to a lot of areas, there were a lot of details left for me to pore over. One thing I wanted to do was to try and trace the attack. The incoming paths were all jumbled; it would take a while to reconstruct. Their security also needed to be reviewed. In the meantime, as Duo reminded me when he wasn't chasing down his leads, there were other, non-electronic routes to pursue.

I borrowed a corner of the fine landscaping outside to place a call to a good friend. The phone had barely rung once when it was picked up. Good sign. That meant she was at her computer.

"Hello?"

"Trix, it's me."

"Heero? Hey, stranger. Where've you been?" Her tone was between a friendly inquiry and an outright demand.

"On a job."

"And you couldn't have seen fit to tell me?"

"It... just sort of came up. Emergency."

That caught her attention. She was familiar in vague terms with what it was I sometimes disappeared to do. "Ooh, that sounds like fun. Whose security broke down this time?"

Naturally, I didn't tell her for whom it was exactly that I worked, nor what it was I did. I usually covered it with the blanket statement of 'government work' or 'security work'. I think she had her suspicions, but she never made an issue of them. That was one of the things I liked about her. She knew when to just let things lie. "I'm trying to track down a hacker right now, and I was wondering if you could just save me some time by asking around, or telling me if you've heard something."

"Hey, now. I don't want to get anyone in trouble..." Trix wasn't entirely on the hacker circuit, but she knew people. I knew people, too, but she actually cultivated relationships with them.

"I don't think it's any of the regulars," I reassured her. I appreciated her loyalty. "The MO isn't... consistent with how things should be done. I was just wondering if there was anyone out there claiming responsibility or something. I'd hate to miss the obvious."

"You could just drop by and look yourself, you know," she said teasingly.

I sighed. I'd been resisting becoming an active member of the community for years, but Trix had a different opinion. I'd dabbled long enough to get a feel for things and prove that I was up to snuff, but that was all I really needed. While there was nothing wrong with the people that I had met, being sucked into some anonymous underground subculture held no fascination for me. "I know I can, Trix. But I'm--"

"Never mind," she cut me off cheerfully. We'd had the discussion before. "I know. So. What are we talking about here?"

"Has there been any news on a hack job done on Meridian Biotech? It's a company in --"

"Yeah," she interrupted again. Her mind ran at a swift pace. "I heard about that. But just about it happening. No word from anyone, although people've been talking about it. Wondering the same as you. Any dirt you can give me?"

"Not really." While news on the attack on Meridian systems had already hit the media, I was not one to go sharing the finer details. "We have a lead... but I have my doubts."

"So you think it's one of the crew?"

Zero had definitely been involved. Was it possible that a regular hacker could have been contracted to do the hit using the system? I thought it unlikely. Hackers of that level would have known what systems to attack. Even if Zero overwhelmed them, their latent will would still have directed the intrusion, and I saw no such direction in Meridian's system. The mind behind Zero had been unfocused, unknowledgeable. Could it possibly... have not been an attack at all? "Not really. I just wanted to make sure. What have people been saying?"

"Not much to talk about. No one seems to know anything about it, but they all wonder. It sounded like it was a pretty thorough job, but it seemed sort of amateurish, too. I mean, no one in our crowd would do that, right? Complete system shutdown? With dangerous stuff involved, too."

"No, probably not." The true elite of the hacking world weeded out people that were in it for malice or bravado. None of them needed to prove anything anymore, so any random and pointless hacks would probably point in a different direction. The elite that participated in the community didn't generally condone acts that were disruptive and destructive, either. That would only bring the authorities down on them and make trouble for everyone. "I don't think they'll find the person that did it."

"Ooh, but you will, right?"

"We'll see," I answered vaguely. "Well, thanks for your help, Trix--"

"Hey." I could almost envision the pout on the other end of the line. "You don't get to call me for work and then just leave it at that. Tell me what's up."

I knew her games. "You just want me on long enough to try and trace my call."

"Well, if you'd just tell me where you are, I wouldn't have to trace you, now would I?" As happened on occasion, her logic reminded me of Duo's. "No, wait, you're probably onsite, aren't you? Where was Meridian again? Somewhere European... one of those places you don't hear much about..."

"Yes."

There was a brief silence during which she waited for me to give her something more, but when she realized that nothing more was forthcoming, she continued. "Fine. Why would they hire you anyway? And hey, you disappeared before they ever got hacked." She gasped with an overdramatic flair I was familiar with. I had met her in my improv class. "You didn't hack them, did you?"

I suppose that was a reasonable conclusion. Sort of. I snorted. "Why would I do that?"

"Why would you be trying to find the hacker? You won't give me answers to either question!"

She should have been accustomed to this by now. "I was looking at something else. This just came up."

"Well, maybe I can help, then."

"That won't be necessary. We have an outstanding team assembled to deal with this." And yet we knew surprisingly little.

"What are you doing to track the guy down? Have you managed to trace him?"

I threw her a scrap of inconsequential knowledge to appease her. "The system logs were pretty trashed, but I'm working on a trace. I should be able to get something out of it in a day or two. Speaking of which. I have to get back to work, Trix. I'll call you later?"

*****

Part 9

My longing for Zero intensified. Wufei and Duo were in Africa, chasing down that lead, while the rest of us were back in Brussels. Having done all we could at Meridian, we had returned to base to continue going over reports. I couldn't shake the nagging feeling that Zero could have swallowed all of this data whole, crunched it, and spit it back out again all clean and shiny and full of answers. It was frustrating to work under less than ideal circumstances.

It was my turn to pore over all the day's headlines from practically everywhere to see what might turn up. I had only come up with more doubts about the African suspects. Going through Meridian's trashed system, I had managed to piece together a broken version of a trace. Unfortunately, the trail led me in one giant circle. When I had reviewed the security at Meridian, I'd found it to be rather secure already. I wouldn't have thought it vulnerable to such a disorganized attack. Maybe the perpetrator had managed to hold it together at first, long enough to bounce and reroute the signal before succumbing to Zero. Under normal circumstances, I might have been able to trace the signal back to its true source, but the records left over in Meridian's computers were in a very sorry state.

The night before, I had written a tool to increase our productivity in the matter. Creating a crude word association index, I was hoping to coax the computer into sorting the headlines by relevance for me. Either way, I would end up going over it all anyway, so I wasn't taking a risk with trying the application out.

I came across a likely suspect not buried too far down in my ordered list. An unidentified man had been found unconscious in an alley in Bonn. He had been transported to a local hospital, where he was found to be in a persistent vegetative state. All John Does were registered in an international database, so it was easy enough to get my hands on the real report.

All of the medical terminology took a bit of work to wade through, but certain facts were obvious: the man had suffered severe neurological trauma that left him in his condition. There were no signs his brain activity would ever recover to functioning levels, and no clues as to what trauma he might have suffered. There were no physical signs of damage. His higher brain functions had simply become impaired.

Judging from his physical health aside from the brain injury, the doctors concluded that his condition was a recent one. They had no idea how he had ended up in that alley. With his state of dress, he couldn't have wandered far, and no one in the area claimed knowledge of him. They came to the quiet, unpleasant conclusion that maybe someone had dumped him there.

What bumped the article all the way to number three in my list was the number of links to it from certain shady sites. Apparently, there was a popular theory going around that the man had been kidnapped by aliens, had his brain leeched of information to be used in an assault against the Earth, and then returned to a remote location by the mothership that had abducted him. The conspiracy theory involved a lot of vocabulary that I had flagged in my search. Figures. But who was I to question good providence?

After informing my teammates of the find, I went off in search of more information. Consulting several medical references, I interpreted the man's condition and found the symptoms to plausibly have been the result of an encounter with the Zero system. There was both relief that we had found a lead when we were sorely in need of one, but also sadness that this man had suffered such a fate. It was possible that this man had plugged into the system, and then proceeded to have his neural connections fried by an improperly configured neural interface. It would certain explain why the attack on Meridian had been so haphazard. Glad as I was for at least a possible partial explanation, that was not a pretty way to go.

In the effort to identify the man, a photograph of him had been distributed to the relevant authorities. There was something about him that looked familiar. It was difficult to tell with the man's sunken cheeks and sallow circles under his eyes. I ran the image against my computer's cache, trying not to imagine how quickly Zero could have produced results, and found a match. I stared at the two images for a long while, coming up with unpleasant associations in my mind until I blinked and remembered to share the wealth. I hailed the others. "I found something suspicious."

Quatre glanced up from his reports, then winced, bringing a hand up to rub at the back of his neck. "Bring it on." Trowa exhibited a similar desire for something, anything new.

I turned my laptop around to show them my discoveries. "Mario Stewart. Assistant director of technology in the biomechanics department of Meridian Biotechnologies. I asked after him when I was there. I had some question on his data integrity. I was informed that he had taken ill and hadn't been at work since the day of the incident, so I was referred to one of his underlings."

I switched over to the image the Bonn authorities were distributing. "Mario Stewart. Found yesterday in a permanent vegetative state in an alley in Bonn, Germany. Circumstances unexplained."

"A convenient coincidence," Trowa observed mildly.

"I'm not liking what it says," Quatre said, shaking his bangs irritably out of his eyes. When that didn't work, he pushed them back with his hand. "It doesn't match with what we've got. I assume you're thinking his condition is the result of an accident with a neural interface and Zero?"

I nodded. "It's conceivable. Of course, I've never seen it actually happen."

"First time I think I've actually been glad that Zero was what it was." That was, that Zero had been a highly sophisticated, remarkable, and most importantly, tested piece of engineering. He shuddered. "Anyway. So, what do we think this means? I don't suppose Stewart worked with a group in Africa while in Germany?" Trowa snorted. "Or the Condasans kidnapped him?"

My turn to snort. "Nice try, Quatre."

His shoulders slumped. "Fine." He exhaled gustily, inadvertently dislodging his hair again. "So maybe Stewart had a grudge against the company. Or maybe... okay, let's not go down the path of maybe right now. Let's go with facts."

"There was no reason for Stewart to be in Bonn," I stated. "There was no way for a person in his condition to get himself into that alley."

"Someone dumped him there," Trowa finished decisively. "Someone he was working with, likely."

Quatre leaned back in his chair, his wishful thinking now replaced with the cool analysis we were used to seeing from him. "His partners don't seem the hardcore type to me. They're soft, new to the game, indecisive, maybe. A real band of terrorists out to conquer the world with Zero would have killed Stewart once he had served his purpose, once he showed no signs of waking. They wouldn't have left him somewhere for others to find and possibly identify and trace."

"The fact that the attack involved a Meridian employee cancels out the possibility that the attack may have been targeted at someone else," Trowa volunteered.

"Hm. Conceivably," I started, then repeated again for emphasis. I wagged my finger at them to complete the image. "Conceivably, it is faintly possibly that Stewart was a random guy picked off the street, who just happened to have a grudge against the company. Conceivably, the malicious people who picked him up may have plugged him into Zero as a guinea pig, and the attack just happened to be the result."

"Let's ignore that conception for now," Quatre proposed.

"I agree." Better a false positive than a false negative at this stage in the game. Besides, that was a reach. I just wanted to make sure we kept an open mind.

"Let's also assume that Stewart had no grudge against his employers unless we find some evidence to support the theory. If that's the case, what then?"

"Either Stewart acted independently to acquire the Zero system..." Trowa started.

I finished it. "Or else Meridian has acquired Zero." A number of connections were made in the blink of an eye. "Dammit," I muttered, resisting the urge to smack my face with my palm.

"What is it?" Quatre asked edgily.

"There were signs. Lots of signs." I let my head drop for a moment in self-castigation. "None of it proves anything... but it's so possible."

"What do you mean?"

"Their security, for instance. They had a secure network. It didn't seem like a signal should have gotten in. Maybe nothing did. Maybe it was already inside, and we're lucky they were as tight as they were, otherwise it might have gotten out. And the hack trace, which ended up right back at Meridian, only I assumed the hacker had buried his tracks that way, or the real trail was lost in the destruction. And their CTO, who was less than cooperative. And--"

"Enough, Heero," Quatre cut in gently. "Enough. None of us saw the possibility."

"I was in a position to." A stray thought whispered to me that Zero would have seen it. I don't know if that made it better or worse. Maybe it just was. Did I miss Zero? I had a brief flash of Zero as my ally, and how wrong it was to leave an ally in enemy hands.

"Maybe Meridian doesn't have Zero."

I bit back my retorts, just resting my face in my hand and taking steady breaths to calm myself. The last thing I needed was Quatre trying to deny the possibilities just to placate me. It didn't even matter if Meridian had Zero. It was possible, and I should have seen the possibilities.

Well, I hadn't. All that was left was to deal with it now. One final breath, and I was ready to face the world again. "We should go back through Meridian's files. There might just be some credence to the Condasan claims, after all. Even if Meridian doesn't have Zero, there's something shady going on there."

They blinked at me silently, thrown off, perhaps, by my return to business. What else were they expecting? If the situation warranted more self-flagellation at a later date, I would take care of it then. Now was not the time.

Trowa nodded, accepting the shift in gears, and promptly followed my suggestion. Quatre studied me for a few seconds longer. I met his gaze evenly. He looked away, and research commenced.

*****

We found something buried in records from four years ago. Meridian had been in the news before, something to do with financial mismanagement. One of their chief accountants had been fired over it after a confession from him stating that he had been the instigator of the embezzling and laundering. The affair had been settled quietly and out of court.

Although Quatre could certainly have picked the company's records apart given time, we headed over to the department of forensic accounting to make our inquiries. In return, the experts there delivered to us a report on the matter. Money had gone missing. Numbers weren't adding up properly. Funds were being misappropriated. With all of the different causes that Meridian supported around the world and through the colonies, it was easy for a little bit of it to disappear, especially in the L2 cluster, where they had programs to research and treat the diseases that swept through the colonies periodically. Duo had had a thing or two good to say about what he knew of the company's efforts in his native cluster, but he would be vindicated to know the suspicions that every L2 kid harbored had proven true.

We decided to hunt up the accountant and have a little chat with him. Records indicated that he had liquidated all of his assets shortly after the incident and moved to Italy. Unfortunately, a little further digging indicated that he had died in a hit and run accident later that year.

Once again, eyebrows were raised. A bit much of a coincidence, wasn't it? Suspicions were mounting against Meridian, especially when a close look at the man's financial records didn't seem to show the man living outside of his means. For a man that had supposedly been embezzling from the company, he had lived a very modest life. No large purchases showed up on his credit report; no large deposits showed up in his account history. The only money regularly deposited was his paycheck. His was not a life an auditor would look twice at.

Another handy patsy, to be used, and then set up to take the fall? The situation reminded me of Brisbois, who had been taken in by promises of genetic purity. Meridian would certainly have had the information necessary to convince a man of such a cause, but what reason did Meridian have to pursue such a thing? And how many people at Meridian, if any, were involved in the scheme?

We were just about to contact Wufei and Duo with our findings when they contacted us first. Wufei's image on the vidscreen was troubled. Duo hovered over his shoulder, an equally upset look on his face. "We have a situation."

We looked apprehensively at each other, hoping perhaps that they were referring to the same situation that we were facing on our end. Quatre responded first, regaining his professionalism with the ease that distinguished us all. "Explain."

Wufei did. "The Condasan community just got hit hard by an unknown agent."

Had we heard that correctly? Trowa expressed our shock quite succinctly. "And here we were just about to clear them as suspects."

"What?" Duo demanded, leaning into Wufei's space to get closer to the screen. "Why?"

Why did Quatre and Trowa look to me to answer? I chose to oblige rather than protest, keeping our findings clean and simple. There would be more time for elucidation after they had shared their side of the story. "We've found signs that the hack job may have been an internal matter; in fact, not a hack at all, but an experiment with Zero gone wrong. All circumstantial, though. Now what did you mean by the Condasans being attacked?"

Duo retreated again, leaving Wufei to take the fore. "By a virus. This morning, everyone was fine. This evening, almost two-thirds of the community had fallen ill. There have been three deaths so far. More seem imminent."

"But the area is prone to the occasional endemic, isn't it?" Quatre asked. The members of the community refused GSDC assistance with local health matters, after all.

"Historically, yes, but nothing so widespread, and yet so limited. It's confined to their community. The GSDC say that so far, it's looking like a new strain of something local, but they've never seen it so severe."

"Were you exposed?" I asked sharply.

Both of them avoided looking at the camera for a moment. Finally, Duo answered. "I was there this morning talking to people. I came back, got a call this afternoon, and went back with the GSDC, suited up and all. They checked me out, though, called me clean. I haven't shown any symptoms, yet..."

"But they don't know how long of an incubation period this thing has, or--"

"Cool it, Yuy," Wufei commanded. "The doctors know. We know. All possible precautions are being taken. The situation is under control."

Of course. They were two extremely competent people. They knew how to handle things. And yet, a virus was one very difficult thing to control. I put that thought out of my mind and reined in the rest of my concerns. "What are the symptoms?"

"Victims report a cough, fatigue, alternating periods of fever and chill, severe headache. Our three casualties appear to have suffered acute pulmonary edema. The GSDC is still studying the course, but they're tentatively saying it looks like a resurgence of one of the diseases they thought they'd wiped out seventy-five years ago, only faster and deadlier. They haven't finished mapping the virus yet, so they aren't sure if it's just that the people have lost the immunity to it, or if it's something new and especially virulent."

"And we think the timing on this seems just a bit suspicious?" Quatre asked, hardly expecting a negative answer. It seemed impossible that the endemic was mere coincidence when the group was being investigated for its possible link to a major crime. "How is the disease transmitted?"

"They're not certain yet, but it doesn't seem to be airborne, at least. They were testing water supply, livestock, and everything else last time we checked. I don't think the results have come back yet. It's hard to tell how targeted of an attack this might have been. The Condasans are a close, isolated community. It would have been relatively easy to get all of them at once, and only them."

For a moment, I felt a surge of relief that biological weapons had never been used during the war of AC195. With a closed system like a colony, where resources were constantly recycled, things could have gotten brutal and ugly. I shuddered even more to think of what sort of mind could order such a thing. "Did you find out anything that might link them to the attack on Meridian?"

Wufei moved aside, and Duo took his place. "They're decent people out here. Got a few non-traditional beliefs, and they got a lot of faith in those beliefs, but they don't seem the militant type to me. I've been talking to them a bit. They're rather xenophobic to begin with, but once you prove you're not out to get them, they're more than willing to tell their stories to a person that'll listen. Most of their activity seems on the up and up to me. They do a lot of public records crawling. Did you know a few years back, there was some financial scandal involving Meridian?"

"Yes, we found out about that."

"Turns out it was some Condasan digging that sparked the investigation by the commission."

Yet another fact to be added to our list of things too coincidental to be coincidence. "Turns out the guy Meridian blamed the scandal on ended up dead later that year."

"No shit? Curiouser and curiouser."

I was, as often, fascinated by Duo's ability to juxtapose crudity and learnedness. "Hit and run. No suspects. And no indication that he was actually involved in the scandal."

"Not to mention our man in Bonn," Trowa brought up.

I explained Stewart to the others. The total outlook was not cheerful. Trading theories amongst ourselves, it seemed unlikely that the Condasans had acquired Zero. According to Duo, it wouldn't fit with their MO, and they had found nothing to support the idea during their sojourn there. At the moment, that left only Meridian as our primary suspect. We decided that it didn't make much sense that they would take retribution for a minor annoyance from four years ago. The scandal had not set Meridian back in any visible way. Their stock had taken a small hit, but they had recovered well enough after they had found a person to take the fall.

Perhaps Meridian had some new reason to silence the watchdog group. Perhaps the activist community had found something else to bring to international attention. Had they found evidence that Meridian had acquired illegal property? Had the scandal been merely cover for something larger that Meridian had to hide?

Duo and Wufei would investigate on their end, we on ours. We asked if they needed any of us to fly down and assist them, but they declined, citing it better practice not to put more of our team in the hot zone. As much as I understood that, I didn't like it. I didn't like having two of our team members in a potentially dangerous situation about which we could do nothing. The enemy there was invisible to the naked eye. They would never see it coming.

*****

Part 10

Thirty-six hours later, we received an incoming call, one of our scheduled contacts with our other team members. Since I was closest to the vidphone at the time, I verified the codes, then activated the device. Duo's face showed up on the other end of the line. In the background, Wufei was shuffling through files.

"Heero," Duo greeted tersely.

They must have found something. Something good, I hoped. Searching his face, I saw no signs of illness. "Duo. Anything new?"

I could almost see him organizing his thoughts for a moment before beginning. "It's been difficult getting information out of people sick and unconscious, but we've managed to figure out that a few key people were claiming that they had evidence proving that Meridian had some secret projects going on, things they were flying underneath the radar of various regulatory committees."

"What sorts of things?"

"Still working on that, but I thought maybe some of the testing that's been stopped pending the bills in the senate? Or they might be conducting drug trials and experiments and stuff on illegally contracted subjects. Human testing, even."

"That would be consistent with what we've been finding on our end. We've been fishing through their records, too, starting with the scandal four years ago. Things aren't adding up like they should." Things were beginning to click. The misdirected funding was going into their little side projects, off the book. Meridian had been very cooperative when it came to light. It would have had to cut its losses by firing the accountant before the investigation figured out where the money was really going.

"Seems so. Looks like this recent stuff is the result of a long-term project. If they finally got the dirt on these programs, we'd have motive for Meridian to shut them up before they went public. Unfortunately, the paperwork seems to have been 'misplaced' in all the confusion around here, but luckily, I guess, all the stuff they found was in public records, so we should be able to follow their footsteps and reconstruct their case. It'll take time, though."

"We've been doing a lot of research on their infectious disease department. We think it's possible they'd have the resources to pull off the deliberate infection of an entire population, just from samples they're working with, and while this seems a pretty good way to go to try and avoid detection, there is the question of why they would have chosen this method of attack. They could just have easily hired someone to go in and destroy their evidence or take out just the group's advocate."

"Who would think twice about the infection of a group that's always resisted inoculations? It'd be their own fault, after all," he said disgustedly. "What's annoying me is that, other than the fact that the alleged attack on Meridian involved the Zero system, we have nothing tying the system into any of this. If it weren't for your findings, for all we know, we could be chasing down some completely unrelated case. A good case, to be sure, but nothing that'll get us any closer to Zero."

Life had been easier six years ago. We wouldn't have had to look for evidence enough to justify warrants and investigation. Procedure had been created to fit the situation. Laws had been mere inconveniences. We could have just broken into Meridian systems, snuck into the building, monitored their communications, stolen classified materials, infiltrated their staff, and generally done whatever we needed to do to find out once and for all whether Meridian had anything to do with Zero's disappearance. Instead, now we were stuck on the outside, going through things they had chosen to let the public see, or perhaps things they had accidentally let slip into the public's grasp, and all the while on the inside, perhaps their nefarious plans were creeping along. Whoever had taken Zero wasn't going to wait around for us to catch up. Every day, every hour brought our opponents closer to understanding it, and all we could do was sift through the paper trail.

Duo's attention had been caught by a man entering their temporary office. It was one of the medical personnel by the looks of him. He came in waving a sheaf of papers vigorously and calling Duo's name. Duo excused himself with a mutter to attend to the matter, and Wufei took his place. "Six more people have died," he informed me without preamble.

The situation over there was grim. There would be no more Condasan community after this. If Meridian was behind this, they would pay dearly. "How's Duo?"

Wufei glanced over to his partner. I looked, too, even though he was off-screen. I couldn't see him, but I could hear him speaking to the doctor. "Still okay. Saleroso is probably over there telling him he's good to go. Too bad the others haven't been quite so lucky. They've traced the virus to a possible cause in the water supply..." He went on to give us the rest of the gory details. As we found out more about the situation, we could hear Duo's conversation with Saleroso growing louder in the background. The scientist was excited about something. Wufei seemed to be trying to brief us and listen in to their conversation at the same time, and finally he gave up all pretenses and left us hanging as he turned to catch the exchange.

I had to listen very carefully to pick up the details. The doctor was going on about blood samples and 7G10 binding sites and plasmodium vectors when he cut off with a squeak. From the way Duo's voice was raised, I guessed he had gotten into the doctor's personal space somehow. "What do you mean, it responds to the G10 antibodies!?"

The next words spoken were softer than I could hear, but I could still see Wufei's eyes widen. He murmured something beneath his breath, and it looked like a curse.

"Wufei," I said intently. "What's happening? What have they found?"

He didn't answer, instead leaving the field of view altogether, presumably to join Duo in harassing the doctor for details. That left me staring at an infuriatingly uninformative wall. Resisting the urge to shout after them, I left them to do their job and concentrated on eavesdropping, but they'd moved or had started speaking more softly because I could only hear about a third of what was being said, a good deal of which was expletive on Duo's part.

Finally, I saw Duo march across the screen. He looked furious. I was about to call out to him when he kept right on going off the other edge of the screen, Saleroso in tow. The doctor looked as if he would have much preferred it if someone else had been the messenger. Wufei trailed after him, but I refused to let him go as easily as I had the others. "Chang!" I nearly barked out. "Report."

He stopped in front of the camera, but didn't look at us until the door had shut with a loud thud behind our comrade. "The doctors have found something."

"We gathered as much," I said dryly. "Care to elaborate?"

Two distracted seconds later, he had his professional face back on. "The virus was engineered."

Damn. If it had been engineered, then it was inescapable that its release had been deliberate and malicious. We'd hoped that wasn't the case, but we hadn't really expected it. "That's what made Duo so angry?"

He let out a slow breath. "No... He's angry because the virus was engineered to contain one of the genetic markers for a particularly nasty strain of L2 plague."

I hissed in sympathy. "Yeah, that would do it."

He snorted before continuing. "They did blood tests on Maxwell to screen him for infection. After missing it the first time, they found that he had indeed been infected, but the virus had been neutralized before it became a threat."

"He already had the antibodies for it," I guessed, the answer coming to me with a grim certainty. I hadn't even needed Zero to come to that conclusion.

"Yes," Wufei confirmed, an eyebrow rising. "Saleroso was asking him about his medical history just now. It turns out that Duo grew up in a sector hard hit by the infection."

"Yes, he's... mentioned that before." Only in more graphic terms. I somehow doubted that he had just informed his two listeners that he'd grown up on the streets, that he'd cared for actual plague victims, that he'd never been inoculated. I remembered him whispering it all to me in a few concise sentences during one of our moments of odd intimacy. It didn't strike me as something he shared often.

He more than raised an eyebrow at me then, probably wondering when or why Duo might have mentioned such a thing to me of all people, the person he hadn't seen for five years, and the person at whom he was currently miffed. I did not enlighten him. "Since a local strain was used as the vector, they probably never would have noticed the small splice of foreign material. It's highly unlikely that the virus managed to evolve the exact same sequence independently of the L2 strain. Unfortunately, the knowledge will help them understand, but they doubt they'll be able to do much useful with it. There isn't the time to work on a cure, and then produce enough of it for the entire community. The L2 plagues are notorious nasty to work with."

Quatre came up beside me to contribute, leaving Trowa to my other side. They'd both been listening in from their desks. "No, but we can use the information to find those responsible for their deaths. The water supply, you were saying?"

"Whomever we're up against is smart," he answered sourly. "It's entirely possible that the infected material got there naturally. It's also entirely possible that someone dropped it in there upriver, knowing the uptake system would catch it here. No one would have seen a thing."

I found myself wondering whether Zero had been responsible for the suggestion, or mere human ingenuity applied to vile pursuits. Somehow, I thought the latter. In fact, I almost hoped for it. Zero wouldn't have made such propositions unless there was a mind focused enough behind it to use it, and so long as there was no such person, we were relatively safe from the most dire scenarios. "Meridian has strong L2 research interests."

"Meridian probably does a lot of gene splicing," Trowa added.

Quatre had another 'coincidence' to add to the growing list. "Meridian had reason to take them out."

"I'm not so certain why they would have done it this way, though," I mused aloud. It still bothered me, despite Duo's explanation that it had been a good, discreet choice. "First of all, why take out the entire community? There were smaller scale ways of eliminating the threat. And secondly, why use a biological attack? Wouldn't that identify them rather obviously?"

"They had the resources for it," Wufei theorized. "They could do it in-house easily. And it would have been difficult to detect, both as an attack, and as an engineered product."

"Yes, but..." A gut feeling was creeping up on me, nudging me towards thinking that there was something more behind their choice. On the counterargument, my brain was reminding me that maybe the choice had seemed natural to them. Just because I would have chosen something less insidious and indiscriminate, didn't mean that they would have. Perhaps I was just getting a chill from realizing that this could be no accident, unlike the 'attack' on Meridian. It was no mistake that almost the entire community had been taken out. The intent had to have been clear.

I had a sudden flash of insight, and I interrupted the others' discussion to share it. "Could it have been a test? Like the accident with Meridian's computers, only not an accident."

"That... sounds like a reasonable next step," Quatre said uneasily.

Trowa pursued the thought to its logical end. "If this was a test run, it sounds like they're building up to something bigger than this. I don't think I want to find out what that might be."

I liked it no more than he, but that wouldn't be enough to remove it from the list of possibilities. "We don't have anyone on a list of targets for them."

"And I can't think of where we would start," Quatre said. "We have no motives for them yet."

"Forget motive," I cut in irritably. "We have enough circumstantial evidence against them. Let's press Une into allowing us to search the damn place."

Quatre deliberated for a second, then nodded firmly. "Yes. It's time we stopped doing recon and got on with things. Wufei, you and Duo have found all you're likely to find there. The GSDC can take care of the rest. Prepare to leave. Get back here as soon as Duo's done blowing off his steam. The rest of us will brief the general and push for a course of action."

*****

Our efforts were unexpectedly unfruitful. Once again, the drawbacks of living in a civilized society. We made our case with Une, presenting to her all of our findings to date. She had been kept apprised of our progress as we investigated the case, but our most recent developments were the most significant. She agreed with us that all of the leads were pointing towards Meridian, and had been for a couple of days.

She had not been idle during all that time. A few discreet inquiries had been made, and we found our hands tied by red tape and an overcautious government. Meridian was a very large, very popular company. They had allies on the council, those that supported its causes when it lobbied before the senate. It was a campaign contributor. It was the leading developer of life-saving medical equipment. It ran, funded, or supported numerous socially beneficial health programs throughout the union. Those in the know were familiar with the company as a kind one, whose stance during the genetic engineering debate on the senate floor had included an endearing catchphrase on how it wasn't genes that made a human, but heart. Earnest reparations had been made to stockholders when their accounting inconsistencies had been brought to light.

In short, we couldn't move against Meridian if all we had was circumstantial evidence. The rather obvious irony was that we needed to be able to move against them in order to collect the evidence they needed.

We told Duo and Wufei when they returned. They were predictably... disgruntled. They decided to take a crack at Une in case they could come up with something that we had missed, and though Une was bombarded with graphic descriptions of the suffering of the Condasans, among other things, she remained fixed in her stance. She liked the bureaucracy no more than we did, but although she might have wished it otherwise, the current position of Meridian Biotechnologies in the world order was too important and too high profile to allow us to pursue the case as we pleased.

Tempers were short. It felt surprisingly like the time the colonies had turned their backs on us during the war. We knew what we needed to do, and yet we were not being allowed to do it. In the end, however, we had found other ways to pursue our callings. We would do so again.

Afternoon rolled into evening. Over a dinner where we ate little, all we could decide was that we would talk to Meridian again the next day and try to shake loose something incriminating under the guise of assisting. That left us the rest of the night to brood over our alternatives.

Some of us were all too good at brooding. I took to the gym on the premises, thinking that perhaps occupying my body would keep my mind from being overoccupied by things about which I could do nothing. In recent days, I hadn't been taking care of my body as I ought to have been. The light exercises I did in the morning helped me get going, but they weren't quite enough to sustain me for the day. The less I rested, the less I paid attention to my diet, the less I slept, the more my body protested. It demanded routine maintenance in order to keep running at optimal efficiency.

I found that I was not alone. I did my stretches, I did my lifting, I swam my laps, and when I was on my way out again, I saw the light on in the gym that had just previously been dark and empty. The angry, echoing thuds made me sneak the door open enough to take a peek inside. Somehow, I wasn't surprised to see the lone ball player had a long braid trailing down his back. He dribbled the ball with unnecessary force, channeling his frustration into the action. In a smooth move, he swooped the ball up and threw it against the backboard, once, twice, each time with enough force and accuracy that it rebounded right back into his hands. The second time he caught it, he held it, then spun it around in his hands a few times.

My hand rose. So did his. He had the ball positioned for a shot when my knuckles made contact with the wood of the door. He whirled around to find the intruder. His eyes homed in on me, and his ball rattled against the rim, hesitated, then fell in with a soft swish.

We looked at each other for a few seconds before I offered a greeting. "Hey."

His lips returned the favor, though I did not hear his word stir the air. I walked into the large room, and let the door creak shut behind me. His ball rolled towards me slowly as if I had called it, and when it got close enough, I took a step to the side to retrieve it. Duo looked at me silently as I did so, and maintained his silence as I tossed him the ball, then closed the distance between us to a few meters. "Long night, eh?"

His lips thinned, furthering his silence for another three seconds before he spoke. "You're making small talk again."

It took me a second to recall why there had been an 'again' tacked on to the end; he had said something similar after I had emerged from my session with Brisbois. As before, the statement neared accusation in its aggressive neutrality. Why? And what was the proper response? "Sorry?" I tried.

He snorted away my apology, shortly thereafter throwing me the ball. Though unprepared, I caught it, studying him to get some feel for his intent. He studied me in return. I got the impression it was a test. Wasting little time on trying to divine the right answer, I went with my first, natural response and shot the ball. It went cleanly through the hoop, bounced several times, and slowly rolled a couple of meters before coming to a halt. Neither of us picked it up.

"Where did you learn that?" he asked.

How to shoot a ball? No, not that. "People talked to me. I learnt to talk back. And since I learnt that people get unnerved by a person getting right to the point, I learnt to talk first."

"So there was a point to this?"

I shrugged. It hadn't been an important point. "I didn't get the chance to ask you today how..." I trailed off, wielding some of the discretion I had learned. Sometimes people didn't get unnerved by the point; sometimes, they got downright testy. He raised an expectant eyebrow at me, but I wasn't certain how I wanted to finish the sentence. I finally decided on something vague and neutral. "...how your trip was."

He continued to level an odd look at me. "You know how it went. You were briefed."

"On the details of the case, yes. Not on..." I swerved away from another landmine. It wasn't a wise move to ask Duo Maxwell how he felt. "...how it was. For you."

"What did you want to hear? It wasn't a vacation, you know. I'm not going to tell you I enjoyed myself, had a great time. Didn't bring back any pictures. Don't have a tan." He crossed his arms over his chest, tapping his elbow on one side with his fingers from the other.

I shook my head impatiently, though whether from my inability to approach the subject with the attitude I wanted, or from his use of sarcasm to obscure the point, I didn't know. "I don't mean that. I mean... about the Condasans."

"Well, I'm sure they weren't having a ball, either."

I suppressed my flinch at his acidic tone. "Why does this have to be so hard, Duo?" He knew exactly what I was talking about, but he refused to show it, choosing instead to tilt his head at me as if asking for clarification. Fine. I would give it to him. We'd see if that was what he really wanted. "Why can't we just talk freely? We used to. I don't even know what's going on between us half the time. You won't tell me."

"We used to?" he repeated with a sense of disbelief. "We were never all that open with each other, Heero."

"Then why do I know that you once watched a lot of people die of sickness? Why do I know that it drove you crazy, not being able to do anything about it? Why do I know that you felt guilty about not getting sick along with everyone else?" His expression got progressively darker as I enumerated the things I knew from his own lips. Those nights, a little less dark and cold and lonely than all the rest, I would never forget. "Am I wrong for thinking that you might be feeling all those things again this time around? Am I wrong to offer to listen again? If you don't want to take me up on that offer, that's fine. You don't have to. You never had to. But you don't have to reject it in such spectacular fashion. A simple non-answer will suffice."

He was doing it again. There were so many things swimming just beneath his surface, and he wasn't letting any of them out. I felt denied. I knew I didn't have a right to his inner thoughts, that being allowed a glimpse of them was a privilege not to be taken for granted, but that didn't stop the fact that I had lost that privilege from gnawing on me.

I made a choice years ago. If this was one of the consequences, then... I would just have to accept that. "Look, I just wanted to know..." No, this wasn't about knowing, not mere knowledge. It hadn't been idle curiosity that had motivated me to start this. "I just wanted to offer. To let you know that... that I care, and I'm willing to do what I can, if you need it. Obviously, that regard isn't returned, but that doesn't change things on this end. Offer stands."

I got no response. With a pang of something close to regret, I turned to leave. His voice stopped me. "Five years, Heero. Where was your offer for five years?"

A valid question. I wondered with some concern if he was just asking, or if he had needed it, and I had let him down. It seemed rather pointless to argue theoreticals. If our paths had managed to cross one day, yes, the offer would have stood, but just how much did that mean when I had seen to it that our paths would not so easily cross? "I guess... it just got subsumed by my own needs."

"And wasn't that a rather spectacular rejection of my own offer?"

His simple words hit my back right between my shoulderblades. I desperately fell back on my one true defense. How many more ways could I ask for clarification on the point? How could I phrase it without repeating that they had all signed off on my departure? "It wasn't spectacular. We talked, before I left. It was an explanation, a rather tame conversation, all things considered. When did it turn into a slap in the face?"

"When you came back."

I didn't understand how my actions now could reach back in time to alter my actions of five years ago. "So my return was a bad thing?"

The short silence before he spoke felt like a painful eternity. "No... Just the five years in between."

I was tired of this. I didn't want to push the issue in light of the more important things currently going on, but this was wearing me thin. Turning around, I confronted him face to face. His posture hadn't changed much. "Make up your mind, Duo. You seem to be saying that you were fine with the five years while they were going on, but they turned bad when I came back, only you also seem to be saying that my coming back wasn't a bad thing, just the five years. Unless now you're unhappy that you were happy with the five years, or you're glad I came back and ruined the five years or..." Great, now I was just confusing myself. "Either the five years were bad, or the return was bad, or maybe they were both bad, but just make up your mind and stick with it. It's unfair that you keep taking it out on me whenever you change your mind."

I think he got that all that was an exhausted plea rather than a reproachful demand. If he had thought the latter, he probably wouldn't have been standing there with a conflicted, contemplative look on his face. Or maybe that wasn't what it was. I could never tell. One thing I knew for certain was that his mood had just shifted, even if I never had any idea what it had just shifted to. "Maybe it is," he offered with a quiet shrug. "Maybe things change. You've--"

"--changed," I finished, refraining from adding the bitter roll of the eyes that I wanted to. It was quickly making its way up through the ranks of my list of things I really didn't like hearing, nestling itself right under number one, the accusation of perfection. "Everyone keeps saying so, so it must be true."

"You don't see it?"

"I don't see it. I'm still who I was. This is just a different situation now. People act differently in different situations."

"Maybe," he said again. "You sure are the same old stubborn son of a bitch you always were. So maybe you're the same, but you act different. And not in a bad way. I think I wouldn't be so pissed if you didn't come back so good."

That... didn't quite compute in my head. Something was going to get short-circuited very soon. "Didn't you just say the other day that you'd be pissed if I didn't come back... No, you said you'd be more pissed if I hadn't come back changed. So you're glad I changed... but not glad it was for the better? ...Is that just one of those things I shouldn't try to understand?" It wouldn't be the first time I'd just accepted something about him, about us. The relevant details didn't always make sense. It was like one of those stereographs. Viewed head on, the image was gibberish, but if I just let my eyes unfocus and stopped thinking about it so hard, a stunning, unexpected picture would jump out.

He chuckled softly, surprising me. "Maybe. I'm not so sure I understand yet, myself."

Glad I wasn't the only one that was confused. If he was, I had every right to be. Was that why he couldn't decide how he wanted to act towards me? I really hoped there was a bigger picture hiding somewhere in here, or else I was going to go cross-eyed looking for it. "Feel free to let me know."

"Hm. Maybe." He went to pick up the neglected basketball. It was a sign that this round was over.

That was a lot of maybes. Well, yet again, nothing between us had been settled, but at least we weren't parting on a sour note. Where was the pattern in this madness between us? We always started out conversational, then he sniped at me a few times, then I asked him why, and then he gave me no clear answers, and we parted with a vague, unspoken, extremely unsatisfactory agreement to disagree. As endings went, this one was actually fairly positive. Inconclusive, but positive.

As I walked towards the exit, he dribbled the ball three times, paused, then another three. I thought of waltzes, and the necessity in breaking patterns. I turned around with my hand on the pushbar to the door. "Hey."

"Hm?" He looked at me, twirling the ball around in his hands.

"Your trip. How was it?"

His hands stilled, and he hesitated, judging me. I remembered the look from the first time I had asked such a question, years ago. He was having difficulty believing that I actually cared, or perhaps that I could be trusted with the answer. Reasonable doubts, I suppose. I hadn't shown interest in his doings for five years, so why would I start now? But I'd always cared, just as I also always assumed he had others that cared just as much as I. The four of them were supposed to have supported each other. Everything that I'd heard indicated that they had been.

His gaze dropped to the ball in his hands, the silence lingering for seconds more before he, too, decided to break the pattern. "Rough."

I'd thought so. I also wasn't surprised that that was all he offered. It was all he really needed to say, anyway. "And this business about Meridian?"

He looked up again with jaded eyes. "Tough. Figures, you know?"

"It shouldn't."

"But it does."

"I know." I sighed. If we took Meridian down, there'd be a large gap left in the service sector of the L2 cluster. Hopefully, the scoundrels were limited to just a few individuals, rather than the conspiracy being widespread company policy, but that was just a hope. Hopes weren't known to fare too well in L2. I let my face express some sympathy before I let the matter drop. "Good night, Duo."

Even the return of such an innocent phrase required thought on his part, but he echoed the sentiment eventually and let me go.

*****

Part 11

The next morning dawned bright and early. There was work to be done. We met in our office again and talked shop.

Although I had been planning on attending the Meridian inquisition with Quatre, others things came up. Checking my e-mail, I found some potentially useful information. "Apparently, the team that was supposed to research Zero has been able to do some things, even without the system."

"Define 'things'," Duo said.

"I don't know yet. They didn't have a formal field of investigation. They were putting that off until they had finished an initial analysis of Zero. But I think it might have something to do with an interface. Either way, I think it'd be a good idea if I talked to them. If nothing else, they should be able to provide some valuable third party insight into what a research-oriented enemy might do." That was something I was having difficulty wrapping my mind around. As fond as I may have been of pursuits of knowledge, and as open a mind as I had about Zero's usage, I was not having an easy time coming up with ways Zero could be applied to non-combat issues that would still somehow be a threat to world peace.

"So you won't be coming with me?" Quatre asked.

My eyes swept the room, seeking out a likely replacement. "Duo can go with you." I was on unsteady ground with him, so I tried to make it sound like a suggestion and not a command. He didn't like it when things were decided for him. "I can brief him on my part. He's good with people... and Hoffman indicated a strange interest in him the last time we spoke."

Duo stopped playing with the pen in his hand. "Now that you mention it..." His eyes narrowed. "Eww, that's creepy. It's gotta be that freak behind all this. He wanted me to give a blood sample, remember? After he'd heard what strain I'd been exposed to. Pretty much the same stuff used in the Condasan infection."

Scenarios ran behind Quatre's eyes. He'd always been a bit Zero-minded himself. "Maybe we can use that to get information out of him."

"You are SO not offering me up to that --"

"Of course not," Quatre soothed, cutting Duo off before we had the chance to hear what nasty little term he might have used to describe Meridian's CEO. "But he's already given us one hint. Maybe he'll offer more."

"You're a good choice for other reasons," I told Duo, trying to distract him from the Hoffman issue. I agreed; Hoffman's interest in him was a bit scary in retrospect. "I was thinking about bringing surveillance equipment with me. If you take my place, I'm sure you'll be able to use those devices to greater effect than I could."

Why did he look at me as if suspecting me of giving false praise? I gave praise rarely; false praise more rarely still. I was far more skilled at picking out areas in need of improvement, but in this case, little thought needed to be applied. I could be as stealthy as he, yet Duo's ingenuity and creative genius would get him into and out of places he wasn't supposed to be with a natural finesse that was often beyond me.

After turning the matter over in his mind, he finally nodded, plastering on a grin. "That means I get to play with all sorts of cool gadgets, right?"

My overactive sense of caution kicked in. "Wufei, maybe you should go with them?"

"Me? I didn't meet with them last time."

"Yes, but you're the one with the most authority here. If we find something incriminating, we need to make sure it's formal enough to hold up in court. I'd hate to see us lose a case against them because we didn't follow acceptable procedure in obtaining the evidence."

Quatre nodded in agreement. "And if something major comes up, you should be able to lend some credibility to our efforts. Without you, we could be just a bunch of rebels with badges under the nebulous shield of 'special ops'."

"Besides...," I added reluctantly. I didn't really want to put this out there since it made things sound more ominous, but I felt it would be a good point to make. Better to err on the side of safety. "If Hoffman really is interested in Duo's blood--"

Duo shuddered dramatically, repeating his earlier sentiment. "Eww. Creepy. Make it stop."

I paused briefly for a wry twist of my lips. The words did seem like something out of a strange vampire movie. "Maybe we shouldn't leave Duo alone with them. They could try something."

If I couldn't guard his back, I could at least suggest that someone else do the job. Duo, to his credit, didn't waste breath muttering that he could have taken care of himself just fine. Maybe he appreciated the support. The rest of the team agreed to the addition of a third man, and we bustled off to the covert ops department to acquire some hardware.

After we saw them off, Trowa and I headed to the research department and located the scientist in charge of the now defunct project, a man whom everyone called RJ. Normally, I would not indulge in familiar nicknames, but his full name was some ten syllables long, topping even Quatre Raberba Winner.

He took us to the lab in which they were set up. Most of the team had been diverted to other tasks with the disappearance of their main topic of research, but apparently some had elected to carry on in the related fields.

"Interesting setup," I commented, stepping over a bundle of wires that crisscrossed the floor hazardously. I traced them to their source, a cluster of workstations pushed against one wall. The screens showed spreadsheets and charts of data. "What exactly is it you're doing here?"

The tech surveyed his realm. "Well, there were a few areas of study we were interested in regarding the Zero system. I understand that you're familiar with it?" We nodded. "In fact, we're told that you actually used the system?"

Again, two nods. "Remarkable," he breathed with a usual scientific enthusiasm. "Perhaps you can answer some questions for us. Obviously, we have no way of answering some of those questions for ourselves, at the moment."

"First, your purpose?" I reminded him. His fervor was somewhat reassuring. I could always trust a true geek to act in a particular way. Hoffman's fervor... had been disturbing. The gleam in his eye had not reflected a pursuit of knowledge, but one of power or personal gain. I was almost impressed that I could tell the difference, but upon consideration, I realized that I had a lot of experience with people across the entire spectrum, from benevolent geeks to malevolent freaks. I knew the difference.

"Oh, yes, of course." He adjusted the glasses perched on his nose. "Ultimately, we were interested in applying the system's technology to other things, rather than using the system itself. In fact, the director was quite clear on that. In no way were we to try to reconstruct the system in its entirety, up to and including its installation in a mobile suit. There are far too many things that could go wrong with such an application, as we, err, saw during the last war." He glanced nervously at us as if fearing we would take personal offense.

We did not. "Wise decision," Trowa murmured. If there was anyone that would be sensitive about the ways the system went wrong with its first run in Quatre's hands, other than Quatre himself, it would be Trowa, and there was no grudge there.

He cleared his throat. "Yes. We've been interested on the one hand in how we could use its computational power to do other things, such as maybe help in mission planning or identifying threats before they arise."

"Dangerous," I cautioned. "Zero's particular talent was in identifying threats before they manifested. Based on the quality of input, it was known to produce some rather unexpected results at times."

I received a curious look. "And yet you still label it a talent?"

"It's been known to be outrageously wrong and outrageously right." Even in its erroneous times, Zero had followed a certain ruthless logic that precluded its calculations from being categorized as completely incorrect. Just because it came to conclusions that we would not, many often assumed the system was flawed, but they were the ones that were mistaken. It simply had a different value system.

The scientist hummed thoughtfully. "Well, quality of input, you say. I assume you are referring to the neural interface? We wouldn't want to be using that during high-stress situations, no, of course not, but we are looking into it as a separate technology. Perhaps, simply to enhance the speed with which a user could use his computer. Or even to enable people that are paralyzed, say, to give them the power to access their world. Trimmed down, a DNI would be crucial if we were ever to develop advanced cybernetics or other mechanical implants."

Briefly, I considered the possibility of Meridian's interest in such a thing. It was quickly dismissed. While they did have research in biotechnology, the development of such devices would not be assisted by the Zero system. "You don't need the system to do that. How far along are you, then?"

"DNI technology is out there already. We've had the ability to read brainwaves for centuries. What we really lack is good software to interpret the brainwaves, so that's what we've been developing here. Of course, we also need a person capable of using the system. We developed our software along some of the noted baselines of Zero's approach, but we haven't really had the opportunity to test out the stability of our architecture. It requires a lot of calibration and tweaking, but we haven't figured out what standards we should be measuring against yet."

An interesting discussion for another time, perhaps, but for now, this was irrelevant to our case. Since he obviously already knew about the theft of the system, we could be a little more open with him. "What use would you say that the system might have for developing a weapon?"

He cleared his throat nervously again. "As I've said, our project has not been charged with exploring the possibilities of weaponry built on Zero technology..."

I raised an eyebrow at him, and felt guilt rising from him. He shifted his eyes elsewhere. As one of the pure-minded geeks, he would have thought about it, project directives or otherwise. Even if he had no intentions of ever exploring those ideas in reality, he still didn't want the administration to know that he had been entertaining forbidden thoughts. Perhaps he feared being removed from the project. How quaint.

I exchanged a look with Trowa. It seemed he had come to the same conclusion I had. Making a decision, I turned back to the researcher. "Your software interfaces with a modded OS?"

I think I startled him with the change in topic. He pushed his glasses up to the bridge of his nose with one finger again. They slid back down halfway. "Uh, a shell at this point, actually, but yes. Basically freeing the user of the need for a keyboard, mouse, or other interfacing device."

Trowa threw me a look this time, a doubtful one questioning whether or not I was really about to propose what he thought I might.

I was. "Plug me in."

"I beg your pardon?"

I hadn't broken eye contact with my comrade. "Are you sure?" he asked me in a low voice.

My answer was a nod, though my words were directed towards the lead tech. "Help us explore research-oriented weaponry involving the Zero system, and I'll test out your system."

"Ahem, err...." He made another sound or two as he mulled over the matter. "Begging your pardon, but we don't really need your--"

"You need a baseline," I interrupted him. "A baseline for your Zero-calibrated system. I am that baseline. Any data you would have acquired from Zero's usage would have been mine. Even if you had the system to study right now, you wouldn't be able to get any relevant data from it without someone like me behind it, and I'm the best you'll get right now."

That sweetened the pot for him as he realized the ramifications of my claims. I was that elusive standard he needed to measure against in order to get his system right. No idle boasting, that. Just plain fact. He was using my data, whether he knew it or not. Couldn't get any better than going right to the source.

He conceded to our deal. "Research-oriented, you say? What do you mean?"

If we had a very good idea of that, we wouldn't have needed to ask. Although we had already concluded that perhaps Meridian had intended the attack on the Condasan community as some intermediate step in a development process towards something larger, we hadn't devoted much further energy to figuring out their ultimate goals. Since that time, our main focus had been trying to acquire authorization to proceed against the company. "Say you had no intention of installing Zero in a mobile suit, yet you still intended to use the system for gain in some non-military-specific sector, quite possibly something to do with biotechnology. Cybernetics, for instance."

"Biological weaponry," Trowa proposed as an off-handed alternative. No point in letting the man know what our primary concern was at this time.

As RJ contemplated the matter amongst many noisy sounds of thought, I cast a glance to my partner for the day. Biological weaponry was not something we had discussed in depth. Maybe we had just hoped that Meridian's use of the engineered plasmodium against the Condasans had been an isolated incident, a matter of using what tools were available to eliminate a troublesome group. What if it really had been a test? Would they attack again? Or manufacture pathogens for the highest bidders? How would Zero fit into that picture?

"Weaponry, eh?" The man scratched at his chin. "Yes, those could both be used as weapons, but there are easier ways of developing them than stealing the Zero system. Cybernetics, for instance. There's no need for a great deal of computation to go into the usage of a mechanical arm. And as for a biological weapon, once it's released, it's released. Nothing to do but sit back and watch the show. Although... hmmm."

We waited him out patiently as he thought the matter through. Perhaps he would shed light where there was none. "There's actually a lot to be done after a virus' release, if you're smart about these things. There are the matters of containment, dispersal."

The moment he mentioned those things, I began generating my own possibilities. It seemed so obvious. Why had we not considered them before? Perhaps because those things were not concerns for the weapons we traditionally used. But now, even as the scientist went over his theories, I could see the possible uses of Zero just fine on my own. Deployment was always a tricky thing with biological agents. The vehicle of delivery was often a textbook chaotic system: water, air, explosions. Zero could go a long way in accurately predicting which way the currents would flow. There were computer models for that in place already, but they required time to run even a single simulation. A tiny tweak of the starting conditions, and the whole thing would have to be run and tested again. Zero could run more simulations in less time, yielding a reasonable approximation of real-time.

"What about during the development phase?" I asked him intently, wanting confirmation for what suspicions were beginning to form in my mind. "What would you be able to do with that much computational power during the development of a biological agent?"

"Hm, well, I suppose that, if I wanted to create something that did something specific, it would help me design the right specimen. You know, something targeted to a certain population, or even an individual. The system is designed to run simulations and possibilities, right? The problem with engineering new biological or chemical agents these days is that it's hard to tell what anything will do. Side effects or mutations or whatnot. I could easily see a person using the Zero system's capabilities to manage those."

I nodded. Again, something so simple and obvious. So concentrated on the bigger picture of how many would suffer, we had forgotten to think in microscopic terms. In all the ways that I had envisioned Zero being of possible benefit to society, it could also be used to great detriment. I was almost getting used to the little voice in my head that taunted me into thinking that Zero would never have forgotten. "And it could easily go through all of the permutations to find the perfect protein, the perfect... whatever to cause harm."

Trowa and I looked at each other again. He could see the possibilities as clearly as I, and when we reminded the rest of our team of what we had been missing, they would all see. We had sufficient scientific background to pursue the terrible potentials hidden in Zero's abduction on our own. Enough of this, then.

"Thank you for your time, doctor," Trowa said smoothly, adding a nod for acknowledgment of his assistance.

"Is that all?" he asked, surprise showing on his features. Maybe he was still curious in the matter. Maybe he had thought we were laypersons in need of more explanation. Either way, he had given us the seeds of what we needed, of what we had missed. We could carry on from there.

"Your machine?" I inquired. "Would now be a good time?"

"Uh... yes, of course." He had little reason to complain. In exchange for a few short sentences, he was about to further the progress on his project more than he had thought possible for the foreseeable future.

The DNI and the accompanying computer system were kept in the next room. He began to babble on about the details of the system as he started it up, but I listened with only half an ear, instead inspecting the headset that would be the hookup. Trowa put a hand on my shoulder to get my attention. "Are you sure?" he asked again.

"I don't need to do much with the system," I answered, glancing at the display that was beginning to load up. "It's not even connected to anything that could cause any harm."

"Does the name 'Stewart' mean anything to you?"

Yes, it did, but that was irrelevant to this matter. I turned the interface over for him to study, pointing at a label on the inner curve. "Look. This is a standard DNI manufactured by Holistic, the leading edge in neural interface production. There are all sorts of safety protocols built into these things, and they're still in place. It's effectively reduced to an interface only for output. I'd worry more about the computer than I would about me. The protocols for a system like Zero are typically ignored in favor of enhanced performance, which is why there is such a flood of input. That's probably what got him."

He pursed his lips, his thoughtful look camouflaging a continuing concern. I turned to the doctor to assuage his doubts. "Have you been testing the system out yourself?"

RJ paused in the process of booting up the shell. "Yes, of course. Who else do I have to test it on?"

"I'd like to see your results first. It'll give me a better idea of where the system is now."

"Yes, of course." As soon as the application had loaded, he flipped through a few of the menus with the mouse and pulled up the data from previous trials. To me, they seemed unsatisfactory by far. I wondered whether he thought the same, or if he considered even that much to be a success.

Trowa studied the charts as well, and after a minute, he nodded. "Don't get fancy," he murmured. "I wouldn't want the rest of the team angry with me."

As I addressed his concerns, I nodded to the scientist that we were ready to begin. "If anyone, they'd be angry with me. Duo would be angry with me. Then again, he's already sort of angry with me, so I don't suppose it will make much of a difference to me."

I pulled the headset on before he had chance to reply, adjusting the electrodes until they fitted snugly against my skin and scalp. Even knowing that the input ports on the device had been sealed, I still found myself faintly disappointed by the sensation. The familiar rush that I associated with an encounter with Zero was completely absent. Only the computer noticed a difference in performance.

The initial layer of the OS wrapper was positionally based. I oriented myself on the image of the mouse cursor on the screen, then started driving it around in little patterns until I got a feel for it. With data coming in between draw cycles, the GUI necessarily updated with a lag that just emphasized its relative snail's pace compared to a system wired to return input to the user.

Though I was less than impressed, I still heard the lab tech muttering to himself how incredible he perceived my results to be. With a self-admonition, I reminded myself to stop measuring everything by my own standards before I moved on to the next level of interface, which had been linked more closely to Zero's designs.

Using the subset of commands I knew were available to me according to spec, I navigated through the system with ease, exploring it until it felt like a little mouse's maze. I wanted out. It was simple enough to establish a secure connection to a Preventers subnet. From there, an idea I had earlier made me look through some of the public files we had accumulated, and again, I felt only held back by the interface when I had to wait for the results to show on the screen before I could continue to the next. With a complete feedback loop, I would have been able to explore the entire database in a fraction of the time. Even with a more powerful processor, I/O would still be the limiting factor in a one-way system. I was navigating more quickly than I could by hand, but not nearly as quickly as I could have.

Fortunately, I had a good idea of what I was looking for, so it didn't take me too long to complete my search. Noting that the scientist was so preoccupied by my data readouts that he wasn't even paying any attention to what it was I was actually doing, I highlighted a line from one of the charts to draw Trowa's attention to it.

"Circumstantial," he murmured after reading it. "Just because Meridian purchased a DNI, doesn't mean that they've been using it for any particular purpose."

"Circumstantial," I agreed, just happy for the moment that the government had mandated these records be made public as part of their stricter regulations on the industry. "But still something."

"Hm."

I implemented the shutdown procedures, jarred once again by the fact that there were so few, before removing the headset and handing it back to RJ. "You have what you need?" He took the headset without even looking at it, still engrossed as he was in my stats. "In the future, you might consider disabling the WC module. It's a little overkill for shell manipulation."

He muttered something vaguely positive, along with something resembling gratitude, and we left without making eye contact with him again.

We walked back to the elevators in a silence not completely devoid of communication. Once we stopped, I turned to face Trowa and save him the trouble of glancing at me out of the corner of his eye. "Whatever you're looking for, I don't think you'll find it."

"Depends what I'm looking for, doesn't it?" he answered calmly.

I tilted my head slightly in acknowledgment. "What about my using the interface bothered you so? You didn't have a negative experience with it, did you?"

His shoulders moved in the slightest of shrugs. "Negative, no. In the way that being thrown into a frozen river in order to wake up isn't a negative experience."

"Ah." Not really. "But that was you."

"That was the system."

"This wasn't the system." Though we were saying nothing that was particularly confidential, we waited for an office assistant to pass before we untensed and continued. "This was nowhere near the system."

He cocked his head to the side a little, moving his bangs out of the way of his eyes as he studied me some more. Sometimes, I wondered what he saw. "Do you enjoy it?"

"Enjoy what?" I wasn't faking confusion, only seeking clarification.

"I'm not sure."

"Hm." Why did it sometimes seem as if everyone was always turning to me for the answers? To whom could I turn when I needed answers? The doors dinged. We found it empty, entered, then pressed our number. I waited for the doors to enclose us in our own private little space, mulling over the answer as I did. "I was trying to talk to Duo about this the other day, I think."

"Trying?"

"It's..." It wasn't something that easy for me to articulate or understand, and given that it dealt with a part of me that most other people didn't understand either, I very much did not expect anyone else to really be able to follow my thoughts on the matter. Of all of them, I expected Duo to understand it the best. The others never had the same sort of attachment that we did to our machines, and Trowa least of all.

I went back to his first question instead, trying to appeal to the mechanic in him. "I enjoy it for what it is: something that increases operating efficiency. When it works as it was intended to, it really brings out the full potential of both the user and the machine. As a two part system, it's one step closer to a perfect harmony. Of course I find that a beautiful thing. If you're asking with a cautionary tone, then... no, I don't enjoy it for the power, or the speed."

He gave what I had said a few moments' thought, then nodded slowly in acceptance. "Duo didn't get that?"

Even more mechanically inclined than Trowa, Duo had understood this much of it. "We were talking about Zero, rather than enhanced interfaces in general. You know he... had problems with the system. Or maybe it was Trant. He was the one that pushed Duo into using it, after all. Maybe if he'd gone in with more preparation, or certainly more purpose, it would have worked out better."

"Even so, Duo isn't always the most... focused of people." He said it without malice, and we all knew it to be true. It was not correct to say that Duo could not concentrate on something, however. He had the same depth and intensity as the rest of us. He just concentrated on more things at once. A perpetual multi-tasker, that one was.

"He still might not have taken to Zero. It's too bad." I felt more than saw Trowa's curiosity pique up a notch. "This whole situation is too bad. I've always known Zero to have so much possibility, but I fear this little episode will preclude its exploration from ever taking place. Taking part in the destruction of a colony was a fluke, but now it's being used to create biological weapons. Une's never going to let it out of the box again, if she even lets it survive this."

"This... makes you sad."

Trowa had always been a deeply perceptive person, but I wouldn't rule out the idea that Quatre had been giving him lessons, even if I had been making no effort to mask the emotion in my voice. "It would be a great loss."

The office seemed a little empty with the lack of our teammates as we continued our discussion on the possibilities that RJ had presented to us today. "I made another miscalculation," I realized aloud.

"Oh?"

I shook my head, not in a negative answer, but in rebuke at my lack of foresight. Hindsight was useless to us. "If our enemies aren't using Zero in real-time applications, then it really doesn't need to have any of its processor nodes fixed. They don't need that much power. They also don't need to spend as much time training it and re-calibrating it towards its purpose before using it. If time isn't an issue in their application of the system, then they can afford to let Zero run with sub-optimal algorithms without seeing much of an impact in performance. And we also haven't considered how long they may have been planning this. If they're just using Zero for its computational abilities, they could have started gathering data and writing firmware for it a long time ago. Maybe it was all done a long time ago, only they didn't have any hardware capable of running it."

"And if any of that's the case," he finished, "we don't really have as much time as we thought."

"Worst case," I countered. "If they're making biological weapons, I can't see them just creating one super-pathogen. They wouldn't have needed the system for that."

"Provided they're reasonable and rational people."

A good reminder, but how valid was it really? "Reasonable and rational people that are interested in killing lots of innocent people. For profit, maybe. If they are in the market to engineer more than one pathogen, they might be interested in selling their products, with advanced simulated data offered to their clients on the side. Custom-tailored diseases would sell well, but it must take at least a little while to manufacture them even after the ideal molecular structure was found."

It was difficult to believe that we could discuss such things almost casually. "So we have no idea what sort of timescale we're operating on. They could already have clients lined up. We could be completely off-base and looking in the wrong direction again."

Yay. "I was thinking maybe I'd talk to Relena, see if she can come up with some way we can get around the red tape."

"She does have a lot of connections. And it doesn't hurt that she likes us."

Thinking of one woman led me to thinking of another. "How's Catherine, by the way? Still mad at me?"

It seemed I finally managed to startle even the unflappable Trowa with my sudden question. He spent three seconds blinking at me before he answered. "She's fine. Still with the circus. Helps the ringmaster out a lot. Coordinates this program for bringing sick, injured, or orphaned kids out to the show. Might still be mad at you, but... well, hasn't really thought about you for five years."

"I suppose I ought to be worried if she had." At least it didn't seem she had a wild grudge against me for bringing her Trowa back to the war. From what I recalled of her, she was not a forgiving woman when it came to the ones she loved. Trowa was lucky to have her looking out for him. "She still throws knives, I assume?"

"Practices every day."

"You still her target?"

"On occasion."

"Better you than me, then, my friend." I wondered if I could ever do that. And they said that I was the one with the gundanium balls. Go fig.

*****

Part 12

During the course of the day, we updated our knowledge of the Condasan situation. It was grim. Hundreds were dead, or close enough to it that it was only a matter of time. Though we now knew the root of the virus' fatal properties, it wasn't enough to save them. Health officials in L2 had been contacted --ironically, some of whom were in Meridian's employ -- and they had responded that they did not stock any vaccine from any of the past plagues, let alone TDC-2, a case of which had not been reported since AC189. There hadn't even been enough the first time around to inoculate the colonies.

Further investigation had been made into the source of the infection. GSDC investigators had narrowed patient zero down to a carcass found upstream of the settlement, caught in one of the grates filtering debris out from the water flowing into the purification plant. After the information had been shared with the wildlife department in the area, the rest of the gazelle population had been checked out, but none of the sampled creatures showed any similar sign of infection. It wasn't unknown for the gazelles to be host to the plasmodium that served as the vector for the infection; they ruled it just plain bad luck that the virus in that one gazelle had developed a mutation deadly to humans. The creature in question had actually drowned, unable to remove itself from the river on account of its broken leg. The researchers did not believe the mutated virus to be deadly to its original host.

They also thought it was just plain bad luck that a virus survived the trip through the plant, and that in that much water compared to such a small amount of virus, it managed to get where it needed to go to infect a human.

I didn't believe in luck. While there could be unfortunate chains of events, I didn't even see that here. Maybe I was jumping at shadows, but I saw the work of Zero behind it. It would have been able to compute the optimal placement of the body in order to ensure infection.

I made a call to Germany and spoke to the hospital caring for the unfortunate Stewart. They assured me that the man was still in a vegetative state and that there was very little chance that he would wake. While there were theories that one could communicate with a person in such a state, nothing conclusive had ever been proved. We would get no information out of him. Some simple research revealed that Stewart had some family, a mother and two siblings. Judging it would harm nothing, I tipped off the officials to Stewart's identity, though I provided no information on how he might have fallen into his condition. At least his next of kin would learn of his fate.

I also put a flag in our systems that would let us know if Meridian put in a purchase for another DNI device. In order for Stewart to have received as much neural trauma as he had, I couldn't imagine that the device would still be in working order, and after witnessing the effects firsthand of the dangers of an improperly calibrated and safeguarded device, I rather doubted they would try to construct one themselves.

We checked in with our remote surveillance setup. Our three team members on-site were all carrying listening devices with them to record their conversations with the Meridian staff. While not quite legal in the strictest sense, it would save them the time of having to completely brief us on their activities once they returned, and give us the opportunity to review the material more thoroughly at a later time. They made periodic transmissions of their accumulated data to our workstations. Combined with some text messaging, we had a pretty good idea of where they were.

They checked in with the Meridian crew. Hoffman greeted their arrival with the same sort of slick enthusiasm as he had the first time, but now that we were looking for it, we could detect the signs of a person eager to help in all the wrong, unhelpful ways. His interest and enthusiasm served to cover his misdirection and changes in subject.

Conzemius was no more useful. Since their systems were up and running again, there was no excuse we could manufacture that would gain us access to their network once more. Under the pretense of follow-up, Duo asked after Stewart again. We were curious, for the sake of being able to analyze the pattern of attack more thoroughly, what loss of integrity he had experienced in his department's computer systems, but Duo was told, just as I had been, that Stewart was still on sick leave, and in a twisted sort of sense, he really was.

It may have been coincidence, and maybe our sense of caution was just a little too heightened, but they may have tried to corner Duo a couple of times. They were not successful. Nor was Duo particularly successful at getting usefully 'lost' in the corridors. With Wufei along to cover his back, he had only managed to wander into a few legitimate labs in the process of looking for the server room before one of Conzemius' aides showed up to escort them.

Once again, Quatre was the one in charge of talking to Hoffman. Trowa and I listened in on the conversation after the fact.

"Have you found out anything on the Condasans?" Hoffman had asked on the tape.

"Nothing conclusively linking them to the recent attack on your systems," Quatre replied. "We did, however, find out more about the link between your two groups. They were responsible for the information that precipitated your accounting scandal four years ago, weren't they?"

"Yes, they were, and we were grateful to them for that, in a way. Of course, scandal is good for no company, but we are glad they helped us in bringing the criminal to justice."

"Dimitriev, his name was, wasn't it?"

"You've done your homework." Of course. Was there a hint of guardedness in his tone? "Do you think he's relevant to this case?"

"We wanted to look him up, see if he held a grudge against your company. Seeing that the scandal ruined his career, he would have good reason to strike back at you."

Hoffman recovered his ground, filling his tone with the proper amount of innocence and concern. "And what did you find?"

Quatre gave no sign that he suspected anything in his response. "That he died in an accident a few years ago."

"Ah, that's too bad. Outside of his misappropriation of funds, Dimitriev had always been an exemplary worker. One of those people you would never have suspected."

Especially since he'd been innocent in this matter. "The money was never recovered, was it?"

"No. No, I'm afraid not," Hoffman sighed. It could never have been recovered because it had never been stolen. "That money was supposed to have been going to some worthy causes."

I wondered if some of the misdirected money had paid for the hit on Dimitriev.

Unfazed, Quatre continued to converse pleasantly with the CEO. "Well, that took him out of the suspect pool, obviously."

"Back to the Condasans, then?"

"Matters involving the investigation of their group have been complicated due to outside circumstances," Quatre answered diplomatically.

"Ah. I'd heard about the disease going through the area." We heard a shifting of leather. "Those poor people. This is exactly the sort of situation that Meridian works to prevent, but we can't help those that don't want to be helped. I'm sure they were informed of the risks when they refused inoculations. Why anyone would, I simply don't understand. It was just a matter of time before something like this happened. It's a good example of what we must avoid in the future."

Trowa and I shared a look, each of us expressing silent disdain for the man behind the voice. Ought we to avoid angering Meridian, lest we suffer a similar fate? It angered me that he would spin this into a platform for promoting his company's programs, especially the ones in L2, which he could then use for his own ulterior motives. Hmm. Now there was an idea. Was it possible that he was interested in using the Zero system to create situations where his company would be able to swoop in and cure or prevent?

I gave Quatre credit for being to talk to him so calmly. Then again, I'd been able to get information out of Brisbois. What did it say about us that we were able to converse with madmen? "It was their decision. But the timing is unfortunate."

"I understand that you may have difficulty in bringing any of them to justice. It is, as you say, unfortunate, but perhaps they have been brought to justice by some force greater than you and I."

I was glad Duo was off with Wufei investigating the rest of the Meridian systems. He would have had a difficult time restraining himself from beating the self-righteousness out of the man. I imagined Quatre leveling a neutral smile at him. "Perhaps. But I'm afraid that doesn't help us close the case. I wish I had better news for you."

"No, I understand," Hoffman repeated ingratiatingly. "These things happen. How are they, by the way?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"The Condasan community. I've heard about the outbreak, but nothing really about the details. How many people have been affected?"

He could hide behind his professional curiosity all he wanted, but we knew he was interested in seeing how effective his little experiment had been. "I'm afraid there won't be much of a Condasan community after this is all over," Quatre answered unspecifically. "Have you received any more threats? From them or any other quarter?"

"No, we haven't. But I suppose they've been rather busy attending to their own affairs down there. Have you found out what's infecting them?"

Fishing for information now, was he? Quatre told him what he wanted to hear. "It looks like an outbreak of a new strain of a local disease. I'm afraid the name eludes at the moment."

"Ah." There was delight in that sound, although the unknowledgeable observer might consider it to be the joy of a researcher on the trail of something new. "Can you describe the progression of the disease?"

Enough was enough. "I'm afraid I'm not at liberty to release those details, Mr. Hoffman."

"Oh, of course, forgive me. My enthusiasm running away from me again." How many times could he use that excuse? Then again, the more he used it, perhaps the more credible it became. There was the sound of a knock on the door, and then it opened. Fabric rustled for a bit, becoming increasingly louder, from which we guessed that Quatre was discreetly turning up the volume on his mike's receiver. A low unintelligible murmur was picked up, there was a pause, and then Trowa and I both jumped as Hoffman's voice came across very loudly.

"You'll have to excuse me," he said. A chair screeched across the floor before the fabric moved noisily again and the volume was turned back down. "I have some business to attend to. Were there any more questions I could answer for you?"

"That's it for now, Mr. Hoffman. I appreciate your understanding in this matter."

Hoffman presumably ushered Quatre out of the office, and when the coast was clear, we heard Quatre mutter into the receiver. "He was remarkably insincere throughout the entire conversation." The sound clip ended shortly thereafter.

We backed up the conversation to the whisper we'd been unable to catch the first time and ran it through an audio analysis. Isolating that single time segment, we enhanced and tweaked and filtered and identified and ignored until we finally concluded with a reasonable degree of uncertainty that the person that had interrupted had said, "It's 'him' again, sir."

"Hmm, who, I wonder?" I mused aloud.

"Duo?" Trowa proposed.

A little shiver ran up my spine. "I hope not. Besides, he already knows Duo is there. And there hasn't been enough time for him to have been informed of Duo previously on this visit, so that wouldn't explain the 'again'."

"Hmm. Someone else, then. Someone from a previous day. Someone in the company causing trouble? Or someone visiting the company causing trouble? It'd have to be someone there at that time, or else Hoffman probably wouldn't have had to leave."

"Hm. We had to sign in at the front desk, didn't we? We should give them a call, see if they can't get a look at the entries."

Trowa did that. I pondered further as he did so. Once he had hung up, I shared with him what new thing had come to my mind. "You know, Trowa... why would Hoffman point us in the direction of the Condasan community, and then destroy them? If they had never mentioned the group, we would never have suspected them, and it would have been much easier for them to get away with the attack."

He mulled over it silently. "Perhaps they wanted to give us culprits whom they knew would be unable to defend themselves. If they were planning on killing them all from the beginning, it would have been convenient for them to give us their names. We went looking into the Condasans instead of Meridian, and after they died, hopefully we'd stop looking."

"And they didn't stop to consider that a convenient plague would seem a little too convenient?"

He shrugged, leaning back in his chair. "You know these sorts, Heero. They never think they'll be caught. They probably didn't think we'd figure it out. We weren't supposed to have discovered their interest in infectious diseases. We weren't supposed to have been interested in the scandal four years ago. We weren't supposed to have found Stewart. He's the one that really led us to suspect Meridian. We weren't supposed to have figured out the virus was engineered. It was just good fortune that Duo was there and that the doctors were doing blood tests on him. And we weren't supposed to have figured out that the 'attack' on Meridian was a misuse of the Zero system, even if they knew we were probably there looking for it."

"Hm... I'm surprised Zero let them go through with it all." Then again, maybe my expectations were too high. Again.

"What do you mean?"

"They must have used Zero during this... for the deployment of the pathogen, I'm guessing. And Zero told them where to do it without giving them a hint that it was a bad idea to carry out the plan."

"Maybe they didn't ask it."

"But they must have been thinking about it..." I saw another flaw in my logic. I had to stop thinking like me. "Unless they've stopped using the interface. Maybe they decided it was too dangerous. Or maybe they just haven't gotten a replacement for the one that must have been damaged. If they're using manual input, then Zero would only answer the questions posed to it."

Trowa swiveled his chair back and forth a bit as he considered it. "What does that gain us, if they're not using the interface?"

I didn't have a good answer for him. "Given what we already know... nothing, really. We already know they're not interested in using Zero for real-time applications, otherwise we'd get now that they're not looking for speed. We already know that they're planning on using Zero for running offline simulations. All we really get is that they're not stupid enough to try the interface again after what happened to Stewart. If I had to keep reaching... maybe we get that they don't have anyone on their staff that's an expert in DNIs."

"Speaking of which..." He shuffled through the papers on his desk until he came up with a list of Meridian employees. "We should go through at least the senior staff and check out what sorts of skills these people have. It might give us some idea of who's in on the project."

Given that it was a biotech company, it wasn't surprising that its ranks were filled with people trained in that area, but sorting through specialties, we found that Conzemius had gotten an advanced degree in cybernetics. I hadn't realized at the time that, being their Chief Technology Officer, he might have more to do than running their computer networks.

Hoffman had done his doctorate in the effects of space radiation on the human genome. That matched up with his interest in the genetic variations in the colonies, but we wondered where his intense involvement in disease research came from, and especially infectious disease. After a little thought, Trowa proposed a combination of the two: perhaps he had started studying the effects of space radiation on various viral genomes, especially those in the L2 cluster, where the two interests collided.

The CEO and the CTO showed strong signs of conspiring together. We could only conjecture on the rest of the Meridian staff. There were quite a few people that worked on infectious diseases; several of whom had specialties in the L2 cluster as well. A quick peek into their financials identified two possibilities for people being compensated for their extra work on a side project, one of whom had also been granted a promotion ahead of other more seemingly worthy souls two years ago.

There was one woman that had co-written a small paper on neural interfaces back in college, but she seemed rather low on the food chain within the company. Hoffman and Conzemius didn't seem the types to surround themselves with low-level flunkies. High-level flunkies, yes. Especially in a secret project.

By this time, we had received incoming transmissions from Duo and Wufei. Their work with the staff had been non-incriminating, but something did catch our attention. Between the three of them, they might not have thought enough of it to have mentioned it to each other, but since we had listened to both sets of data, we knew what they didn't. While Duo and Wufei had been speaking with Conzemius, the CTO had also broken off their discussion after being advised of something quietly by an assistant. Though they had not turned up the receptors on their microphones as Quatre had, a comparison of the timestamps showed that the interruptions had both occurred at approximately the same time.

The mysterious man must have been causing quite a bit of trouble to have warranted the attention of both the top men. Pity we didn't know who it was.

*****

In the search for ideas, I called Relena. She knew the political world; hopefully she would be able to talk a few of the key players into letting us move forward with the case before it was too late. Besides, I owed her a call. She needed to be kept updated in order to know what to prepare for the worst case scenarios, and it was just nice to talk to her. She insisted we discuss the matter over dinner.

I visited her at the embassy, glad that, if we were going to discuss such grim things, that we could at least do it in private. I told her what we had found out about the outbreak in New Condasa. I tried to be delicate about it, but how many ways were there really to sugarcoat the use of a biological weapon that had resulted so far in dozens of deaths, and likely would result in more?

She took it well, all things considered. We discussed the media strategies involved in the situation. The attack was being represented as a natural disaster to interested parties, and would probably continue thusly until we had a villain to present for punishment. Even then, we didn't know if we needed the public outrage that would inevitably spring up against the company.

She knew we weren't the types to go chasing wild conspiracy theories. It wasn't that difficult to convince her of the solidity of our findings since the facts seemed to speak for themselves, but she also understood Une's difficulty in allowing our investigation to take the next step. She was better able to explain to me the exact sociopolitical situation that had resulted in our stalemate, but just because I understood it, didn't mean I agreed with it. Looking into the options, she finally came up with something we might be able to use to circumvent the restrictions. With a little bit of wordsmithing, we were pretty sure we could squeeze our case under one of the bills that had been passed in the wake of the wars. Although we both had been against its passage because of the dangerous suspension of due process, it obviously had its uses. Under its provisions, we would be able to take action against an entity that was threatening world peace, and we didn't have to tell any but a few, so long as our activities were well-documented. Relena was willing to co-sponsor our acts with Une. I felt a little bit leery of putting her reputation on the line, but it was reassuring to know she had faith in us.

Our business concluded, I walked her back to her rooms, during which she felt free to discuss more 'interesting' matters. "So how are you all getting along now?"

She blinked at me with artless blue eyes, and in the space of a heartbeat I was taken back to an imaginary time of gentler affairs. It was no wonder she managed to remain such a dominating force in high society. "Fine. We're getting along fine."

"And how would you define 'fine' exactly?"

She had me there. I shrugged. "It's been mostly business the last few days. And Wufei and Duo have been in west Africa. Now they're out in Luxembourg with Quatre."

"Hmm, speaking of..."

"What? Duo and me?" Did everyone always have to ask?

"Mm-hmm."

Couldn't they have asked how I was getting along with Trowa or someone? Having no concrete answers to give her, I sighed. "We're... getting along."

She frowned sympathetically. "That bad, huh?"

"It's not bad," I automatically protested, as if denying it could make it more true. "We're not... actively antagonist towards each other or anything. We just... have a few issues between us that aren't likely to be resolved in a mutually satisfactory manner. They don't stop us from interacting like two normal people; they just... put a strain on things sometimes."

"Ugh." She put on a sour expression that didn't quite look right on her face. "Have you thought about becoming a politician lately? You are just so bloody careful about choosing your words to make everything sound perfectly neutral."

"Should I be insulted?" I asked with a slight smile, realizing after the fact that I was borrowing a page from Duo's book and using humor in an attempt to deflect the point. I was not successful. Being far more skilled than I in this game, she just looked at me steadily until I answered with an uncomfortable shrug. "I don't say things like that to be deliberately vague, you know. I just... don't like being inflammatory. There's so much room for interpretation in words, sometimes. I could say something simple like, 'we've had a falling out,' and it'll sound like we're fighting, but we're not, and I don't want you to think that. That's all."

"You make everything sound like it's not important." Why was that such an accusation?

"I don't get excited easily, Relena. Most things aren't really that important in the grand scheme of things. This included." We came to a stop outside the door to her suite.

"You're lying."

"I beg your pardon?" That wasn't the sort of subtlety she employed in her diplomatic dealings.

She stared more deeply at me, locking me into an eye contact I wanted to break, but couldn't. "You're sad. Disappointed, maybe."

Quatre had been giving her lessons, too, hadn't he? Finally, I managed to tear my eyes away from hers. "Well, disappointed, of course. This is hardly how I wanted things to be. But this is the way things are, and that's that."

Her foot connected with my shin. "You are not a doormat!"

"No," I agreed mildly. "I'm not."

"Then stop that!"

"What?"

"Stop-- ooh!"

Well, that was less than informative. She glared at me, her eyes hard over the pout on her lips. Was this another one of those things I could chalk up to the strangeness of females? "Why are you following this so closely?" I asked. She wanted her friends to get along, sure, but this was a little above and beyond the call of duty, wasn't it? Another question came to mind suddenly, bringing up a possibility I hadn't considered before. "You're not... You and Duo aren't... involved... are you?"

"Heavens, no!" She laughed, a little unease mixed with humor. "We're friends."

"Not even with a little bit of something unsaid hanging in the air between you?" I could see what she could be attracted to in him.

Her eyes widened before she laughed again. "Not even. What have they been teaching you in that school of yours?" I shrugged. Perhaps that had been a strange question, one whose origins I did not completely comprehend. Apparently, she had no such troubles. "Heero... is there a little bit of something unsaid hanging in the air between the two of you?"

A pause, deep and meaningful. I'd never thought so. For five years, I gave it a passing smile whenever I made eye contact with it. Maybe I even snuggled up with it at night on occasion. That was all, until I came back here and started being reminded of how that was all so very much in the past now. I had to swallow around something that had gathered in my throat. "Unsaid... perhaps."

We'd never talked about it, never followed up on it... We'd never had to. We had expected to be dead within a week or two, after all. I didn't mind that it had been brief and fleeting. I didn't mind that it was over and in the past. I didn't mind that it was as if it had never existed now. I didn't mind that I didn't quite know what it had been. It was only that... something not quite good had taken its place.

Her hand on my cheek pulled me back to the present. "Heero," she started, stopping short of further comment in favor of searching my face for answers. Though she ended up asking me a question, I think she already knew what I was going to say. "We'll always be friends, won't we?"

I wasn't naïve. I knew what she was asking, though why she chose to bring it up now, I didn't quite understand. I chose to answer it innocently, knowing she would hear what I meant, not knowing any better how to put it. I took her hand from my face and slid it to my lips. "Always."

Her eyes lit with a contentment underscored by resignation, and it pained me that I could do nothing to make it better. The feeling was all too familiar.

*****

Part 13

After dinner, I went back to the office, knowing that the rest of the guys would still be there. Quatre, Duo, and Wufei would have returned to Brussels while I was out. They'd all be together in the office tabulating the new data. I could trust that Trowa had been briefing them on our findings from while they were on-site. I was glad I had news; that way, it didn't seem so much like I had been slacking.

Although the mood had been a little downtrodden when I entered, things got a little more upbeat when I told them of the action we could undertake with Relena's help. It was not authorization to prosecute, but at least we had the go ahead to mount a campaign to gather what evidence we needed. Think of it as a search warrant, and we were under no obligation to let anyone know that they'd been served.

Duo grinned, a bit viciously, in my opinion. "Ooh, oh, me, me!"

"What?" Quatre asked, his tone almost indulgent.

"We're gonna break in and poke around, right? And we're gonna let me do it, right?"

My immediate reaction was to say 'wrong'. Let him undertake a solo infiltration mission into enemy territory? Five years after any war? Was he mad?

Of course not. Well, maybe, but not so mad I would accuse him of it aloud. There was some merit to his plan, whether or not he had weighed the pros and cons before jumping at the opportunity to go on a stealth mission. Meridian Biotechnologies was a high-tech facility, their security top-notch. It was even inspected by the government regularly to ensure its level of protection and containment since they were in the possession of potentially biohazardous materials.

Certainly all five of us wouldn't be going in. The more was definitely not merrier in this case, but did it warrant the reduction of our numbers to one? Could anyone else keep up with Duo, who was, we all conceded, the best at breaking and entering?

"Don't bite my head off for asking, Duo," I started, exercising a bit of hard-earned caution. I tried not to sound accusing. We just needed the information to better evaluate the situation. "But how have your skills held up?"

He didn't bite my head off, or even shoot me a nasty look. A couple of days ago, he might have torn me a new one no matter how kindly I had phrased my question. Maybe we were actually making progress. "Well, it's not like I've been using 'em every day, but, heh, they've gotten some practice, now and then."

Hm. I never did get a decent account of what he'd spent the last five years doing. "And you want to go by yourself?"

"Well... yeah." He shrugged an unapologetic apology to the rest of us. "I mean, I'll wait until we get the mission specs and everything before I start insisting on it, but you know this is what I do. And the rest of you, well, I'm sure you could hold your own, but...."

"When will Relena be able to get back to us with the official okay?" Quatre asked me.

"Probably tomorrow, noon-ish." They didn't make it a completely trivial affair to bypass the regular system of checks and balances, for which I was glad. "Certainly before we finish coordinating a mission. But she doesn't foresee any problems with it."

He nodded. "Alright, so let's say tentatively, two days from now, after hours, we want to mount a raid. Let's start putting the specs together, and once we have a better idea of what we're up against, we'll decide who goes in. Good?"

He received four nods in response.

There was a lot to do. Since it was already approaching late evening, we spent the rest of our time finishing up with the information that had been collected at Meridian, and deciding what sort of information we would be looking for the next time we paid a visit there. Luckily, Duo's, err, security-oriented tendencies paid off -- even without prior knowledge of our impending foray into the company's bowels, he had lifted passwords seen in passing, taken pictures of security arrays, identified several of the main access points, and gotten a copy of the internal directory. I guess he was just... security-oriented like that.

Comparison of what they had managed to find in the front desk's log book showed no one of note entering the premises before the time that the CEO and the CTO had been called away. What few visitors there were could be identified as significant others or friends of employees there, mostly visiting around noon, presumably to go out to lunch. We tentatively concluded that the troublemaker was an employee of the company. For the person in question to have caused so much of a stir, we surmised that he was a member of the project team working on utilizing the Zero system. Was this good news or bad news? Perhaps there was disagreement on the team, but whether the dissenter was in our favor or against, we had no way of knowing yet.

Discussion of the materials we would need to make a legitimate case against Meridian brought us to the identification of several different topics. We thought the chances of us fortuitously stumbling across the Zero system lying on a shelf somewhere during the short mission were very slim. Would we even be able to find the lab where Zero was hidden? Would it be one of the regular labs, or somewhere not even documented on the blueprints?

All we needed to shut Meridian down and buy us time was proof that they had had something to do with the Condasan attack, that they were developing biological weapons, or that they were conducting illegal and/or unethical experiments, if indeed they were. Incriminating internal memos would work, pictures of illegal setups, computer data, reports. We would pass on actually obtaining physical samples of biological materials. They would be too dangerous or unstable to transport on an infiltration run. Plus, we didn't want them to know that we had broken in. It would be obvious if vital things turned up missing.

We retired for the evening. I got back to my room with that familiar restless feeling bothering me again. I pondered it as I ran through the even more familiar progression of exercises I had done for almost as long as I could remember. Was it that we were about to take another leap into action? That we were getting closer to recovering Zero? That we'd fallen into mission planning mode with the same intensity seen years ago?

Only then, we'd never really planned anything as a group. During the war, we were rarely all five of us together in one place, let alone working together on the same thing, until those weeks on the Peacemillion. But by then, there had been so little to plan. Defend when attacked. Survive. Protect. We had barely enough time to fix our Gundams before something else came at us, let alone to plan. There was nothing complicated to it, until, perhaps, we were all deployed and Quatre was left to struggle to somehow form us into a cohesive team. I never envied him that position.

Was it just the different circumstances, or had five years mellowed our adolescent pride? We worked well together now. We knew our skills and our weaknesses. We had a single enemy.

And was Zero one of them? Would it be used against us? No. All of the signs pointed to 'no'. I was glad. While Quatre and I had both proven our mettle against the fractious system, I did not look forward to meeting it in battle again.

*****

As usual, I woke early with the intention of getting as much done as we possibly could in the time left to us. This morning, I got myself into working order even earlier than usual and made my way down to the office. Even the cafeteria hadn't quite opened its doors, yet. I knocked and charmed an orange juice out of them anyway.

Plans had already been on my mind when I had opened my eyes. The first thing I did after booting up my system was go looking for Meridian's government safety and security inspection reports. They were more or less a matter of public record, so they weren't too hard to find. Within the documents was a summary of the basic security and safety devices Meridian used in their labs and offices. While it certainly wouldn't list the security features that were most likely to cause us trouble, it would at least give us a good idea of the first line of defense we would have to break through, or possibly it would help us determine which areas were innocuous, and which were off-limits even to government inspection staff.

I was already going over the list and making annotations when Duo arrived in the office. I think he was about to say good morning when he stopped to reconsider, having gotten a good look at me. His eyes roved over the workspace. "How long have you been here?"

I shrugged and avoided a direct answer. "I woke up early." As I paused to watch him settle himself at his desk, it finally occurred to me to ask a question. "Have you always been an early riser?"

He stopped in the middle of reorganizing his colored pens to shoot me what could have been a mildly startled look. Because I had asked? Because he thought nothing of it? Who knew? He ended up shrugging it off as well. "Not really. Not this early, anyway. I've never needed much sleep. Which is fortunate, since Fei's gotta get in early to stop by his office and take care of stuff, and he's my ride, so that means I gotta be here with him."

He probably could have taken a room in the Preventers dorms as well if he didn't want to get in so early, but I didn't suggest it. Even though his current bed was a couch, the atmosphere was probably more friendly than the utilitarian quarters provided here. "We might consider requisitioning a car."

"A car? Hmm. Yeah, I could see how that might be useful. Hmm, I think Fei should probably still be in his office..." He switched seats to the spare desk, where the phone was parked, and hit the intercom button. When the overly loud dial tone sounded, he entered a four-digit extension and waited for the beep. "Chang?"

Wufei's voice rang out with that peculiarly empty sound that meant he hadn't picked up the receiver. "Maxwell?"

"Yup. Steffie in yet?" I had met Chang's secretary the day we borrowed his office to call Howard. She was a middle-aged lady that sat up very straight in her chair and somehow reminded me of Pargan: very mild-mannered and innocuous on the outside, but overwhelmingly thorough and capable on the inside. She had to be to put up with Wufei.

"No."

"Hm. Think you could have her put in a requisition for a car?"

"What do you need a car for?" His voice came across warily. I suppose Duo could have gotten into some mischief with the ability to move himself at will, but I knew for a fact that his driving skills were top notch.

"Nothing specific yet, though I can think of a few things that might pop up. Whether or not we end up using the car, I think it'd suck to need it and then get held up by paperwork, so we might as well get a jump on things."

A moment of silence passed before Wufei answered. "Alright. I'll leave a note on her desk."

"Thanks, man." Duo punched the phone's button again and ended the call before turning back to me. "We'll need stuff, and I figure we won't be able to find it all on base."

'Stuff'. He somehow managed to make that sound ominous. "I'm not familiar with what the Preventers have on hand, but to get past the easy stuff, you should only need a low-level scrambler." I turned my laptop around so he could see the display.

"My, you have been a busy boy," he murmured after a glance. Heading back to his own desk, he took his own laptop out of its carrying case and booted it up. "What report is that?"

I told him where I had acquired the information as he set up his computer to receive a datafeed from mine. After I had transmitted the documents, he took up their analysis, freeing me to search for more information on Meridian's system.

The others trickled in, and we soon had a full blown data-mining operation in progress. Based on the security systems that Duo had seen on his last trip there, combined with the security systems I had seen when I had been permitted limited access to the Meridian network, we were able to get an even clearer picture than what the government could provide us with.

Also a matter of public record, if one knew where to look, was the original zoning form submitted by Meridian before they had begun construction of the building, plus a few updated blueprints as revisions were made. Combined with some extrapolation, we were able to form a basic map of the premises, from which we could construct a point of entry and an itinerary.

Immediately we decided that one piece of equipment that could not be left behind was at least a basic gas mask. Despite the government's approval, who knew how well they secured their hazardous waste? If that was the only place to hide, we would be prepared. It would be embarrassing to be brought down by a lethal whiff of ethidium bromide.

We were in the unique position of having been inside not only the building, but the building's security systems as well. As part of our investigation, we had requested and received information about the guard roster, shifts, and electronic systems. While it took a lot of the guess work out of the planning, it still only affirmed for us how much security we would have to bypass.

A plan was formulated that would maximize results while minimizing exposure. As any break-in would be, it was not without its risks, but there was at least one advantage to breaking into a civilian installation during peace time -- most of the security devices were electronic. There would be no risk of running into heavily armed patrols in the hallways, willing to engage in shootouts, even in the areas that probably held the secret projects.

We decided to split up the team for a good search pattern. One of us would canvass the parking lot and outside areas to keep track of who was in the building and where. Inside, one person would search the lab areas, and one the offices. Each of us was capable of and accustomed to working without a partner.

No one was especially surprised when I declined a position on the strike team. Even if I hadn't been trying to maintain a pretense of consultation, I had been living a rather domestic life for the last five years. While there were things that a person would never forget, I would have preferred a trial period for getting used to my skills again, rather than being thrown into the field directly for a test run.

Quatre also opted out, choosing instead to stay behind with me to coordinate the mission remotely. The others had no complaints. In fact, Duo leapt right into things, claiming the position of lab sneak. He glared obstinately at each of us, daring us to challenge him for the spot. With a look like that in his eyes, no one did. Whatever was going on in those labs was personal to him.

Wufei would case the exterior and Trowa would take the offices. Their parts would be relatively simple. It was the security in the lower levels that worried me. Though Duo was thinking over the matter thoroughly, identifying problems and offering solutions, he did not indicate that he thought they would be much of an obstacle.

Finally, I planted myself firmly in a position. "I'm backing you up."

"Thought you weren't interested in field work anymore," he said evenly, baring his teeth under the pretense of a smile.

"That's not quite what I mean." I diverted my gaze to the map printouts we had spread out on the desks in front of us, stabbing at the appropriate points with my index finger. "We've both been in and out of the main network and server rooms. It shouldn't be too difficult for you to get back in. Actually, Trowa would be a better choice." I directed my next words to the man in question. "If you divert your path here, you should be able to follow this path and end up here, right outside."

Duo looked no less stubborn, though the narrowing of his eyes had dissipated. "So? We looked at their systems already, remember? We can't risk parking someone in there."

I had asked one of the staff if anyone had been working the server room the night of their so-called attack. She had said no, no one ever watched the servers at night except the security guards that patrolled the corridor every once in a while. "We just need to get in there once and set up an outside connection. I helped them secure their network from the outside, but it should be possible to get out from inside. We can go over that. I'll catch it on the outside and ride the signal back in again." That I had assisted in improving their security meant that their systems were even tighter against intrusion then they had been, but at least I knew what we were up against.

"I can break in to things as I go along," he argued, though Trowa was nodding his head in preliminary acceptance of my proposal. "All I need to do is get my hands on a Tate encyclopedia, maybe a ten-thirteen bypasser...."

"You'd need a different piece for the hand scanner we know they have." After going through their financials, we'd found the purchase orders of several of their security devices, a higher-grade than was required by the government, or even mentioned in the government reports. We knew they weren't upstairs, so chances were that they would have to be bypassed to gain access to the places we wanted to be. "The PH-1100 series also has a timed lock-out feature that would prevent the descrambler from working very well. On the other hand, I hear it's possible to reset that."

"It has its own chipset," he countered. "I doubt it'd be tied into the main network."

I tilted my head in concession. "Granted, you'd need to intercept the signal on your end with a remote access point. But if you wanted to do it on-site, you'd have to take even more equipment with you."

He thought about it grudgingly, but he would have to agree in the end. I asked but a short diversion on Trowa's planned route, and everything afterwards would go much more smoothly. Before then, however, he would have to put up a token resistance. "We don't know how deep the scanner is in the building. The remote signal might not be reliable."

"There are a few quite do-able things we can do to boost the signal strength. If you wanted to go it alone, I'd like to point out that the record shows the purchase of a Schoonmaker lock, which is incompatible with the ten-thirteen. You'd also need the twelve-twenty, if you ran into it. You'll waste time if you have to break every single lock between you and the target, and you can't possibly carry all of the hardware that would be necessary for you to do it. They put together a good mix of devices."

He gave it one last shot. "If you're going to go breaking in and unlocking doors for me or shutting down systems, there's going to be a hell of a lot of footprints you'll be leaving behind."

I raised an eyebrow at him. "I'm not questioning your skills. Don't go questioning mine. Trust me. I'll get your back." In the absolute worse case, I could always simulate another attack from Zero and scramble all of their networks.

His eyes narrowed fractionally for a moment, then his expression blended into a resigned grimace. I think it was my last few words that did it. Hopefully he realized that I hadn't meant to imply that he required my assistance to stay safe, only that I wished him to be safe and would do what I could to ensure that. Finally, he sighed and nodded.

"I thought you were a civilian," Trowa said to me, an eyebrow raised in mild amusement.

I shrugged. "I am. Doesn't mean I don't keep track of current technologies." I'd be doing a bit of studying over the next day or so all the same. "Just get me in there. If it turns out that any assistance I can provide to Duo is redundant, then I'll spend the time raiding their electronic files, or trying to trace Zero. No matter what, it can't hurt to have an inside line. Anyway, we got our callback from Relena for the go-ahead, so why don't we compile an equipment list and figure out what we've got?"

The Preventers stores were filled with a lot of reconnaissance devices, but if they had a few of the things we were really looking for, the Preventers would have to prosecute themselves. Putting the array of equipment together in all its permutations, we decided that it was definitely a good start, but it wouldn't be enough to guarantee that we would get very far.

Having secured a budget for our sanctioned project, Duo and I made another trip out to Jorge's. This time, we used the vehicle that Wufei's secretary had secured for us, and I got to drive. We left the others to plot out the rest of the strategic issues in our absence while we prepared ourselves to deal with all of the security issues. On the way, I started going over how he could get through the inner defenses of the computer network to throw a line out to me. The information he had acquired during his impromptu tour of the facility would prove useful in eliminating a lot of the guesswork, making our intrusion quicker and cleaner.

He laughed at the end of the discussion, leaving me to wait patiently for him to explain the humor to me. After the sound had passed, there were a few moments of silence. I wondered if he had chosen not to say anything further, or if he was waiting for me to ask. In the end, both were proven incorrect when he answered my unspoken question. "Wow. I was just thinking that it was like the good ol' days... And then I realized this is nothing like those days."

"Really?" Well, this was a mission, that was true enough, but I suppose that I, too, could see more dissimilarities than otherwise.

"Yeah. For starters, how often did we take road trips in a boring old four-door? One that was legitimately acquired?" He caressed the dashboard of our borrowed sedan in a joking manner, the motion ending on a contemplative note as the flippancy of his intro faded. "And we never went into this much detail when we made runs together."

"Which we did rarely enough, anyway." Our paths had intersected on occasion, but they had aligned infrequently. Even during our days on the Peacemillion, we had each had our separate battles to fight, no matter how we shared the burden.

"True. Either the plans didn't go much further than 'take out this target', or people were attacking and there was no time for much of a plan... Other than X18999, did we ever infiltrate a base together? And not just at the same time?"

I shook my head after only a moment's thought. "No. But we escaped from a few together."

He chuckled ruefully in remembrance. "Don't know if those make for the good memories.... not that there are all that many anyway, it being a war and all."

"If I have good memories, it's not really from what I did during that time, but from what I accomplished." The best memories I had were brief, stolen pockets of time during which we'd managed to make the war go away, at least for a little while. Those probably didn't count.

"But what are we accomplishing now?" he mused quietly, making it sound like a rhetorical question that I definitely shouldn't answer. He moved on before I had a chance to, anyway. "Do you enjoy it now? Now that you're out of the game, I mean."

"What do you mean, 'out of the game'?"

He shrugged a little. "I dunno. I mean, like... what, are you retired now?"

His answer had been less than elucidating. "From active duty, you mean?"

"Sure, I know there's no real war to be active in, but there's always like Preventers peacekeeping or whatever, but... you've gone all domestic."

I analyzed his tone for a hint of accusation. It was only there in the slightest quantity. Greater than that was a sense of wonder, tinged with a healthy dose of disbelief and a chaser of inquiry. I tried to address all of that as best I could. "I think of it more as being on reserve. When I'm called, I'll answer, and I'll rise up to the challenge, but until then... I'm not going to put everything on hold, waiting for it to come." I could tell the answer discomfited him. Maybe it wasn't the kindest thing to pursue that, but it seemed important. "And you, Duo? Have you gotten out of the game?"

He was silent for a good long while before he answered. "I've tried. It doesn't let go easy."

"Do you want out?" From his stubborn insistence on being the one to go in tomorrow, I had thought he was looking forward to seeing action again, but maybe it hadn't stemmed from any enthusiasm. Maybe it was responsibility. He was the best man for the job. Maybe it was Meridian. From the L2 plague right down to his indigo eyes, they had made it personal for him. Duo always did have both ends of the spectrum nailed down pretty well, if not much in between.

He shrugged uneasily. "Maybe there is no 'out'."

"You can't fight with it, Duo." I spoke from personal experience. He had to take responsibility for it if he wanted it to be a reality, not deny its possibility. "You just have to accept it. You have to let go of it before it will let go of you."

His ironic chuckle was better than an outright sneer. Humor was a better mask for the insecurity than disdain. "How many self-help books did you have to read, Yuy?"

Trial and error was all there had been. "If you want out, you get out."

"Always so goddamn easy for you. Why the hell you?"

Though the murmured words were nearly covered by road noise, I caught them. "What do you mean?"

He jumped a little in his seat. Had it been that pothole in the road, or had he hoped I wouldn't ask? As if I wouldn't respond to that sort of bitterness, no matter how quietly muttered. He tried not answering, but maybe the silence got to him after a while, so he put together something casually nonchalant. "I mean... I didn't figure you for the type. Didn't think you'd come back so... so normal. Figured... heh, I guess I figured a lot of things. Almost none of which proved right."

"What did you figure for yourself?"

"Figured... figured I'd be the normal one."

I would have agreed. "And that I would be far from it?"

He glanced at me briefly out of the corner of his eye before averting his gaze to the scenery. "Well... you know."

I knew. I hadn't seemed very well-adjusted to the others, and maybe I hadn't been, but now, it wasn't something a little hard work and determination hadn't been able to solve. "I didn't figure it for myself, either, in the beginning. Maybe you just haven't gotten there yet." He didn't seem so far off to me, but all that mattered was that he was discontent with his current place in life. He had said earlier that he hadn't been able to settle down. There had only been a few times in my experience when I hadn't seen him restless.

It wasn't often that I had insight into the inner workings of Duo's brain, and even then, it was only after a lot of hints had been thrown in my direction. "Duo, is that why... is that what you meant when you said you're not all that happy to see me? Because I managed to..."

I stopped when he started chewing on his bottom lip. He obviously knew what I was talking about, so there was no reason to finish my sentence. I let him think about it while I turned my attention back to the road. "Maybe," he said eventually, clearly uncomfortable admitting the possibility. His fingers played with the hem of his shirt. "I don't know. I don't usually.... I mean, it's kinda petty, if you say it like that, isn't it? But of course, I guess it doesn't really matter how you say it; it's still the same. Any way you slice it... I guess... you just have something I want. That's just... I probably shouldn't take that out on you."

A shrug expressed how unnecessary I thought an apology to be. "It's not like you were trying to take it away from me. I might be a little more upset, then."

"Yeah I was," he said, retorted almost. Either it was the repentance that drove him to claim responsibility, or it was the rivalry and tension between us. "I kept bugging you about leaving, like that was a bad idea. I mean, obviously I can see it wasn't. What with the years being so good to you, and that whole contact with Une thing..."

"Hm. If you could make me regret my decision, then that would mean that the only thing you could take away from me would be a false sense of security. I wouldn't have what you wanted." A person could only have regrets if they had doubts. "Did we ever resolve the contact issue?"

He grimaced. "Sort of, maybe. I mean... maybe it took me a little while to think my way through it, but I accept that you had your reasons for doing what you did. I respect that you felt you needed to put yourself in a vacuum for a while. I would have respected it even if I had your contact info," he added in a pointed not-quite-mutter. "But that's neither here nor there, is it? It's not something I would have done. In fact, I'm still not entirely sure I understand your reasoning. My reasoning might have gone in a completely opposite direction. But that's the way things are, ya know? I still think it kinda sucks, but... easy as it would be, can't be sore just because we don't think the same way."

I hummed in agreement. "A civil difference of opinions, then. I... can see that your point has validity. I didn't consider things in that light at the time. ...And I think it's nice that we don't think the same way."

He snorted wryly. "Makes things more interesting?"

I nodded amiably. "And we get twice the good ideas. What were you saying about tracing the power leads? I don't think I followed the thought as far as you did, but thinking about it now, I think that it could be a good addition to the plan with just a little modification..."

When we reached Jorge's, it took us a little more time to get in to see him than it did the last time, but eventually we found ourselves back in his office. Little about it had changed. Even the date on the calendar remained the same, only it was now even more inaccurate than it had been before.

As usual, Duo took the lead. He started off asking about our previous inquiries, just to stay in character. Jorge informed us that he had been unable to acquire the parts that we had specified, for which I supposed I was glad. I didn't like to think that someone could easily build the sort of machine I had outlined. It didn't reach Zero-levels, but it ranked quite up there. In even better news, Jorge told us that no one else had been looking for such parts, which led him to trying once more to sell us parts inferior to what we had sought. Theoretically, the lack of competition would have negated part of the necessity of such a high-end machine.

Duo politely declined and shared that we now had a different project in mind. If we hadn't been us, I probably would have disliked our kind. To me, we projected the image of flighty hackers, still immature enough to be seeking out random targets merely for the opportunity to prove and hone our skills. Worse yet, our trips to this vendor suggested that we thought that better hardware would solve all our problems. For personal pride, if not for the sake of our cover, I hoped we also obviously possessed the confidence without the bravado to demonstrate that we were serious people with a serious goal.

When Duo rattled off the list of things we needed, this time of items much more likely to be in inventory, Jorge whistled appreciatively. He had clearly computed what uses we might have for such counter-security devices, but as the professional he was, he declined to comment.

After jumping through the typical bargaining phase used to determine our relative levels of cooperation, he extended his invitation to the back room. I stayed in my seat this time, until a discreet tug on my sleeve signaled that I ought to reconsider. I met Duo's eyes, and with a meaningful glance we came to an understanding. I followed them into the storeroom.

I was impressed mostly by the sheer size of his inventory. Computer components were not large these days, especially when stripped of their packaging. He could fit a lot in a small space. Naturally, we were not allowed to wander the shelves at will, but we stopped at a large table already partially covered with devices.

There was no secret Sweeper handshake, but I did catch a number of odd turns of phrase that seemed to hold a significance deeper than that which I understood. It was a marvel to listen to the terms being bandied about, to observe Duo as he maneuvered Jorge into showing us all his good stuff, and then proceeded to bargain down the price to a level far below my expectations. I think Jorge was a good man. He seemed to accept the camaraderie and excitement of the lively deal-making as a balm for the loss in profits.

*****

Part 14

We took our haul back to HQ, inspecting and fiddling with our new toys on the way. When we left the dealer, we had a medium-sized box, and one rather fascinating computer case with modified slots inside to hold and transport various shady components safely and inconspicuously. The computer was even fitted with a low-capacity hard drive, a small, generic motherboard with built-in video, and a battery that probably wouldn't last that long, all as a service provided at no additional cost. They were most likely flawed parts that Jorge had acquired in the course of his legitimate tech support business. If anyone got suspicious, they could hit the power switch on the machine and find nothing more than a fully-functional computer system. I was probably more amused by that than I should have been. With my thoughts immersed in hardware, I separated myself from Duo for a brief time to take a detour to RJ's office.

Upon my return, we worked on refining our plans until late evening, only slowing down for dinner. Living on my own, I had figured out how to cook, and did so regularly. In the last week, I had seen more take-out than I had in the last couple of months, but it was rare that we were willing to stop for an hour for something as trivial as food. We could certainly handle thinking and eating at the same time.

Late morning the next day, we would transport ourselves and our equipment out to Luxembourg, where we would set up shop somewhere out of sight and conduct a little external reconnaissance to acquire the information we needed to polish and confirm our plans. Since we would be up for most of the night that day, we considered ending our night early, but decided that our time would be more wisely spent getting as much done as we could early, in case we hit a snag. It would be more effective to rest up right before the mission.

We were fairly confident in our plans by twenty-three hundred, skilled as we were in throwing together complex operations with little warning. Meridian Biotechnology's offices weren't entirely a black box to us since we had been in there to some extent before, so this wasn't a case of going in blind. Given that Meridian had no reason to suspect an attack from outside, despite their previous 'attack', they would not be in a heightened state of security. In the worst case scenario, we could always push the mission back, or go in multiple times. Though sooner was better, we had no deadlines to limit our options.

It was little comfort to us that the information for which the Condasans had paid such a high price would help us in the endeavor to put their murderers away. From the notes that Duo and Wufei had brought back from Africa, we had a decent idea of what to seek in their labs. Their reports also confirmed for us that their satellite operations were for the most part innocent of such discreet experiments. Most of the corruption seemed to be concentrated at the top and corporate levels.

Left to my own devices, I naturally went back to my room to brood. Something kept me from sleeping, so I stood by my window, staring out into the night and thinking about the days to come, when a very soft knock sounded from my door. It took me a few moments to recognize it for what it was. I could see a shadow beneath the door. I nearly called out to ask for identification, but before I had uttered a sound, I suddenly knew who it was. I opened the door, completely unsurprised to see Duo standing on the other side. In a flash of déjà vu, I stood aside to let him in wordlessly.

"Hm, didn't think you'd be asleep yet," he said as he slid into my space smoothly. His hand went automatically to the light switch as he entered, but it paused, perhaps respecting my need for the darkness. It was just one of those nights. He shut the door behind him, and soon all that illuminated the room was the ambient light of the compound at midnight. The moon was faint, the stars practically non-existent. Such was the night on Earth. Light pollution was one thing I was not fond of here. It made space seem somehow less significant and meaningful.

He joined me by the window, opposite me. There had been a similar night on the Peacemillion when he had knocked quietly on my door. Just as now, I had let him in, only there had been no porthole to gaze out of. We'd sat quietly, the nightlight in my quarters doing little to illuminate the scene, leaving us shrouded in a hazy cocoon where we as ourselves didn't exist. There had been only sound, touch, and all the things we wouldn't let out into the light.

Silence made itself a third companion to us. I wondered what Duo was seeing as he studied the landscape outside of my window, if he was even seeing anything at all. Apparently, he had been seeing me, instead. "Have you always been so melancholy, Heero, or have I just missed it?"

The question caught me offguard. "...'Melancholy' is not a word I would have used to describe myself. That implies a certain level of sadness." I shrugged. "I just think too much, that's all."

He made a tiny sound of acknowledgment to show that he had heard me, but continued to study me silently. I could have borne his amiable scrutiny all night, but that would have been something of a waste of time. "Why are you here, Duo?"

Maybe he was thinking of dropping his eyes when they lost their focus, but he stubbornly resisted the temptation. "I don't know," he said softly, a small shrug accompanying the admission. "Like I told Fei... just felt like there was something I had to do."

And it seemed right that we be here, now. "I'm backing you up tomorrow," I proposed as an explanation. I think that, too, had been the case six years ago, when he'd come to me.

He mulled it over carefully. "Where do we stand, Heero?"

I blinked a request for clarification at him.

"I mean, there were things between us... things we never talked about. And now, maybe I need to know where we stand, if I'm going to trust you to back me up."

I hadn't thought those things were relevant to this matter. We hadn't discussed it before, and still he had trusted me to watch his back in battle. "It was never necessary to talk about it before."

"We thought we'd be dead before the week was out, before. But hey, guess what, we weren't."

"We didn't talk about it after the week was out, either." Not that I was really opposed to talking about it now. I was just saying.

"Had other things on our minds, then." He went ahead and finished the progression for me. "Then we parted ways, saw each other again a year later, still had things on our minds then, and before you know it, five years have passed and it's nothing more than a memory."

"Then why are we talking about it now?"

He closed the distance between us as he spoke. "It's not just a memory anymore. We're here again, and maybe we've still got stuff on our minds... but not so much that it doesn't leave room for anything else anymore, I think."

I looked up at him across a five centimeter height differential. "You've grown," I observed in quite the non sequitur. We were level before.

He smirked, close enough to me and the window that I could actually see it. I got the feeling it was trying to be something more, but he successfully wrestled it down. He sobered after a moment. "In more ways than one."

We fell into that silence again, heavy with potential, where so many things were being said without anything being spoken aloud, and finally, at that crucial point when it all demanded release, he leaned towards me slowly. I accepted the action with a feeling of inevitability.

When his lips touched mine, I was brought back to the past. We had been awkward and shy at first, though earnest enough to make up for it. We got to skip past that phase now, settling easily into the slow, comforting rhythm we'd soon discovered for ourselves. I was a little surprised by how quickly it came back.

We parted gently, leaving me as warmed and cozy as ever our past encounters had. Two lingering breaths were shared between us before he pulled back just far enough for him look at me without going cross-eyed, even though there wasn't much visible in the dark. "So where do we stand, Heero?"

Against the wall, at the moment. I had turned to my side at some point, uncomfortable with being exposed in the frame of the window, and he had followed along. I hadn't been aware of the moment his left hand had come to rest on my hip. His right hand was planted next to my head, his forearm resting against the wall. I was equally unconscious of my left hand at his waist until it slipped off to mirror my right, pressed against the support at my back. With a minimal exertion of force, I could have pushed myself toward him.

"From what I've seen," I said carefully. "I think it's up to you."

Something in his expression tensed. I don't think he was pleased by my answer, but he was the one that seemed to be in question here, not I. I knew what I thought about all of this, and I could have lived in peace without it ever having been brought up aloud again.

He considered the matter with equal care, during which I simply relaxed in the closeness we had conjured. No matter the outcome, this moment would be packaged up with care and tucked away with the rest of our feel-good run-ins.

Thus it was that I was caught unawares again when he kissed me. I retreated reflexively, but there was nowhere to go. Both my hands jumped up this time to counterbalance my shoulders being pressed back, and being raised, they decided to wrap themselves around him to simulate a control over the situation that I just didn't have. He commanded my attention wholly, his lips pulling me into a pleasantly mind-numbing whirl of subtle shifting and soft sounds.

I was pinned to the wall with a firm steadiness, but that displeased me. I needed to be able to tilt my head upwards to meet the kisses that now rained down on me from above, so used my leverage to push us away from that unyielding surface. I couldn't say how long it was before we got ourselves turned around and across the distance, but when I felt the bed behind me, it seemed only natural that I bend my legs and allow him to press me downwards. He settled a knee on the mattress beside me, then the other joined it, and soon enough I was flat on my back, legs dangling over the side of my bed as our mouths leisurely continued to reacquaint themselves with each other.

The haze receded a little when his lips drifted off to my left to explore the contours of my cheek, the line of my jaw, the pulse at my neck. If I hadn't stopped us, I don't think I would have regretted it in the morning. All the same, some things just had to be done.

"Duo," I whispered roughly, becoming rather self-consciously aware of his saliva smeared across my lips. "What is this? What's going on here?"

His mouth traced a trail up to my ear, his hand wandering down my chest in the opposite direction. "We never questioned it before."

"This is different from before."

"I fail to see how." His words were murmured around my ear lobe.

I swallowed. "Well, you never did that before." It was just an ear lobe. What was it that made the action so intimate? Maybe the way his warm breath traced the path of a shiver down the side of my neck? His errant hand wandered over to palm the lower edge of my right pectoral, rubbing surprisingly distracting circles over it. My feet lifted off the floor as my whole body tried to curl involuntarily at the sensation. Remnants of my willpower and Duo's weight on top of me combined to halt the motion before completion. I swallowed again. "Or that..."

"We're older..." He swiped his tongue across the skin right beneath my ear. "Wiser..." He nipped at my neck. "Things change." He moved to capture my lips.

When I was free to speak again, I did. Breathlessly. "So that means... things are different..." Were they ever. We'd always been about comfort and companionship. The night had started that way, but we were adding whole new dimensions right now that I couldn't even begin to define.

He groaned softly against my skin. "God, Heero, don't try and spew logic at me now."

I had started this; I wasn't about to give in now. I wasn't the sort to act first and ask questions later if I didn't have to. Seizing control of my body, I commanded my hands into action. One rose up from where it had fallen beside my head to align itself to the curve of his cheek, fingers tangling in the loose hair framing his face. The other stilled his hand on my chest and moved it somewhere a little less distracting. He tried to stall by occupying my mouth again, but I managed to get the words out, smothered though they were. "Duo, please."

He stopped, sighed, and retreated, escaping my hands as he rolled over on his back to lie beside me. We touched at the shoulder and wrist. He stared at the ceiling with resignation. "What?"

I had my reasons for asking, but it took me several long breaths to piece them together again as I stared at perhaps the same point on the ceiling as he. "I know why we used to do this... but why are we doing this now? Why resurrect something from the past?"

"This isn't about the past," he said softly. "It's about the present."

I don't know if the 'future' that I imagined tacked on to the end of that sentiment was what I thought he implied, or if it was what I wanted to hear. "What do you mean?"

"You're right; things are different now. Things got different. We were fifteen, Heero. What were we doing? Looking back on it... barely makes any sense anymore."

There were very few things that did make sense during that time. I had never been sure of why I had let him into my room that night. We hadn't been particularly friendly. As comrades, we'd ran a few missions together, watched each other's back, trusted each other... but we weren't really friends. And yet when he knocked in the middle of the night, I let him in. We talked a bit about the battles we were fighting, about how OZ could wear us down until we had nothing left to give. "The world was a cold... dark... lonely place."

He chuckled nostalgically. "And I kept extra blankets to ward off the chill."

"And I kept a light on at night to stave off the dark."

"And the loneliness..."

"...We took care of together." Sitting on my bed, our shoulders touching with a reassuring solidity, we turned to each other somewhere in the middle of all that brooding, and we sought out a little something to soothe our souls. Why it ended up as two people brushing their lips against each other's, I don't know. The prompting of our pubescent bodies, perhaps.

We kissed once and startled ourselves with how comforting it had been. Staring hesitantly at each other for a few long seconds led us to repeating the experience. No, we didn't know what we were doing... but it made us feel better, and that was all that was important. As to what it all meant... it didn't matter. In a week or two, we'd be too dead to care. We put all that aside, and just concentrated on making it to the end without cracking.

It had nothing to do with sex. We never even strayed anywhere near that. It was just about being with someone, someone who understood, someone who was just as cold and tired and lonely. We talked a bit, too, sharing our burdens, confessing our sins before our deaths, but the kissing... just helped us get past those times when it was just too hard to put it all into words. Communication passed between us directly from one set of lips to another, without all the terrible trouble of struggling with their form in the air.

For me, that was how I got through the war. I found simple things, things that were just so basic, so elemental, that they didn't need to be questioned. With all of the things going on at the time, it became vitally important to me to find things that wouldn't turn on me. When I needed to, I could pull these constants out and ground myself to them. These anchors that were just axiomatically right were few and far between, but they could be found: maintaining one's weapons, not stepping on the daisies, supporting the princess struggling for peace, kissing Duo.

"It was so simple," he said, echoing my thoughts. "It didn't need understanding, discussion. But I didn't stay a fifteen-year-old with a life expectancy measured in days. I grew up... hormones finally kicked in all right and proper." He laughed softly. "Got me some height, finally. Inevitably started thinking about girls... and about that one boy I used to kiss. And I wonder what it all means."

"It didn't mean anything... even though it meant the world."

"That's what it meant. I wanna know what it means now. I mean, they were good times, good memories, a little something to keep me going til the end... I see where you're comin' from," he conceded. "But then one day, as I'm growing up, I realize, 'Wow. I used to make out with Heero Yuy.' I mean, that's not really what it was... but that is what it was, and suddenly I'm just not that sure anymore what went on. I hadn't thought about it for years, and suddenly, I used to make out with Heero Yuy. What the hell does that mean? You ever think back on the things you used to do, and think, what the hell was I thinking? Or, I could never do that now. Or, if I did do that now, it would be something else entirely. 'Cuz that was what I thought. If I did that now... what would it be? What if we'd been in a different situation? What if..."

He shifted against me before continuing. "But you know, it was an interesting thought exercise, but that was it. Didn't matter since Heero Yuy was long gone and I'd never see him again, so what might or might not have happened was totally unimportant..."

"...Up until the day I came back," I finished, finally beginning to see how everything fit together to explain his behavior towards me. I liked that feeling of revelation creeping up on me. "I guess... I never really thought about it. I mean, I've never really started thinking much about kissing girls, so it's never bothered me that I used to kiss this one boy. But... in retrospect... I guess I can see how that might be confusing, looking back on it without the blinders on. It's almost funny to think how innocent it was....So... does this mean we're gay?" It was just an idle thought.

He laughed again. I found it an attractive sound. "I don't know about you, but I've kissed a girl or three in my time. I liked it. Of course..." He turned over on his side to face me. I thought a dark figure looming over me should make me feel threatened, but it didn't. Maybe it was just because it was him. "I've kissed you a time or three, too, and that was at least as good. I thought maybe it'd be just a thing from before, that maybe it wouldn't be good anymore, six years later and a little more knowledgeable and worldly about these things... but I think we proved that wrong just a few minutes ago. For me, anyway. Dunno about you."

He tried to offer that with an artless nonchalance, but I felt a sort of tension beneath it anyway. I turned my head towards him even though eye contact was rather less meaningful when I could barely even see his eyes. Then again, I think that was what we'd always found in the darkness. It took away the immediacy of things without dimming the intensity. There was no body language to worry about. We didn't have to fret over giving away something we hadn't chosen to. Smiles and tears were equal creatures, although we somehow had a sense of what we were each doing without having to see it happen. Perhaps it was as they say, that being deprived of one sense, the others strengthen to compensate. Perhaps not being able to see each other led us to learning how to understand each other in different ways.

"It's not the same anymore," I mused, sharing my thoughts with him. "Is it because we're not quite so... desperate anymore? Or are we just not fifteen anymore, and are all of our hormones finally getting routed into the proper channels? Or maybe there's just a different connection..."

"...An interesting thought exercise, Heero, but...."

My rambling around my point must have confused him. I was just trying to understand where that new, rather captivating edge came from, but I could put that off to another time and give him something more concrete now. "Hm. I've never really kissed anyone else but you, but you I've kissed a time or three. And I rather liked it. Then... and now." I hadn't stopped us because I didn't like it, or because I was confused. I just wanted some things cleared up first. It kept things cleaner on down the road.

"Oh. Well... that's nice. So... where do we stand?"

That really depended on what he meant by that. Where did he want us to stand? I found myself rather intrigued by all the possibilities I had never considered. "I don't know where we stand. But at least it seems like we're on the same page, now."

My weak offering amused him. "Woohoo! Strength in numbers. Although I guess I was the only one trying to figure this out before, and now I've just managed to drag you down with me into this mess, so maybe that wasn't the smartest thing to do, putting us both in a state of confusion."

I shrugged lopsidedly. "You said it yourself. This isn't about the past, but the present. Now that we don't have a life expectancy measured in days... things have changed. We can stand wherever we want, and we can stay there for a while. So why don't we just start all over again from the present, from the fact that you liked it, and I liked it, and just figure it out from there? Is that enough resolution for you to get through the next few days?"

"Huh?"

"The mission," I clarified. "Because I'm backing you up tomorrow."

"Oh yeah." He hung his head for a moment. "I guess I came in just... wanting to know who it was that was going to be backing me up."

"Is that enough of an answer for now? I don't know where we'll end up standing, but..."

He nodded. "At least we're on the same page... Finally." His exasperation hinted at a roll of his eyes.

"Good. You staying, then?"

"Huh? Uh..." He glanced reflexively at his watch before realizing that he couldn't see the numbers. It didn't matter anyway. Maybe we didn't know the exact time, but we both knew it was late, and there was a lot of work to be done the next day. "Um, sure, I guess."

"Then can we actually get completely on the bed?" I straightened out my legs, which were still hanging over the side of the mattress. "My knees are killing me."

I won another of his low chuckles as we dragged ourselves up the length of the bed and attempted to settle down in a mess of arms and legs.

"Well, this is a little more cozy than it used to be," he observed shortly after meeping out an apology for accidentally squashing my hand beneath him. We'd both been rather scrawny kids, and though neither of us had become a wide person, it still seemed we took up substantially more space. "We actually used to fit on a twin-sized bed?"

"We can still fit. All we need to do is..." While it certainly wasn't as easy as it used to be, I squirmed around a bit, moving his limbs as necessary, and finally got comfortable with him spooning up loosely behind me. It worked out surprisingly well, considering the mishaps we had getting there. "There. We still fit."

I felt his breath stop for a moment before it resumed its steady pace. "Yeah... Yeah, we still seem to fit pretty well." He hesitated again before disturbing our arrangement briefly. His lips descended from nowhere to brush against mine. "Good night, Heero."

I smiled in their passing. "Good night, Duo."

*****

Part 15

I slept soundly, but I still woke with the sun. Duo woke not long after. It was a little odd seeing ourselves together in the natural light, coming leisurely back to life in a room not cold and sterile. The lights had always been off when we woke on the Peacemillion, with no sun dawning to announce the arrival of morning.

After blinking the sleep out of his eyes, Duo's lips parted as if to say something, but he thought better of it, and with little fuss we rose and prepared for the day, falling very easily back into the pattern of just not thinking about it. We weren't avoiding the issue, or even ignoring it; there was a time and place for everything, and this wasn't it. Now that we had laid the groundwork for communication, we could continue our other work comfortably, knowing that we could come back to this at any time.

I spared a moment to appreciate the humor of sorts. We'd finally had a good, long chat, and we'd only identified more unresolved issues between us. But at least I could finally follow him to a decent extent. The idea that I might actually be able to figure this whole thing out put a bounce in my step that morning.

As usual, Wufei arrived at the office not long after we did. He waited until Quatre and Trowa showed up to use them as a cover to address Duo in a low voice. "What happened to you last night?" I had momentarily forgotten that Duo was using Wufei's couch as his bed. Of course his temporary roommate would have noticed if he didn't come home at night.

"Told you, Fei," Duo answered. Quietly, but not obviously so. "Had some stuff I needed to work out before the mission."

I felt Wufei's eyes on me for a moment, but they flicked away before I could catch him at it. What did he know about us, I wondered idly. Would Duo have talked over his problems with him? The thought reassured me that Duo had truly not been without support during my absence.

It wasn't long before we were shipping out. After double and triple checking that we had all of the equipment and data that we needed, following a final confirmation of our plans, we started the two hour drive to Meridian in a nondescript van used for Preventers surveillance. Wufei drove, with Quatre keeping him company in the front, while the rest of us sat in the back and played with our gear, setting frequencies and initializing modules. As we did that, we let out some of the tension by speaking of little nothings. We were all prepared; going over the details of the mission would be of no further assistance.

One of the first things we did when we got into town was stop by a car rental agency and pick up a generic sedan. We parked the van in the lot of a business park less than a mile from Meridian, then proceeded to gather more information on our target. There were a few details we needed to confirm from our previous visits. We had never been here with the intent of breaking and entering, so we hadn't paid as much attention to certain facts as we could have.

The security on their delivery bay was useable. We sent Trowa in as a courier with a fake package we put together, labeled with the correct address, but tagged as belonging to another company. While he was there, he verified the electronic locking system on the door, and caught sight of the timesheets. When the person manning the bay wandered off to find the one in charge to verify before rejecting the package, Trowa was left to his own devices, discreetly planting a leech on the interior locking mechanism. In the first test of our illicitly acquired devices, we hooked into the security pad and downloaded the codes we would need to bypass it later on that night. The short procedure was carried off without a hitch. Jorge had provided us with high-quality goods.

Once the package got officially marked as 'return to sender', Trowa made it back to us without any incident. He reported that there were two security cameras within, but they were both directed towards the loading docks rather than the personnel door. On the off chance we missed something, we could always erase or alter the system logs after we gained access to the building. From our correspondence with Meridian, we knew that there was no one actively monitoring the video feed from this area. Because we were thorough, we investigated further into other possibilities for entrance and exit, but we anticipated no problems with our first choice.

No matter how many missions we'd been on, we always got that same tense anticipation going in, no matter what the objective. That made it difficult to settle down before the plans commenced, but since it seemed we would not be getting any sleep that night, we made it a point to grab some downtime right before mission start. A valiant attempt to sleep was made, but some of the time passed with eyes closed and minds running. Duo and Wufei took a trip out with the sedan to return it to the rental agency, and stayed out for a little extra time to drain some of the jumpiness.

Preparation time was interesting. We had the back of a van filled with equipment, and three people to get wired and set. Explosives and weapons were, fortunately, kept to a minimum. We had decided on a tranquilizer gun to be used in case of emergency, but nothing more harmful. There were still plenty of other things to get strapped to their bodies. The van was temporarily filled with the sound of Velcro and zippers.

Though I would be supporting him remotely, Duo still had a lot of hardware to carry with him. His vest and pants had more pockets than I cared to count, but we filled a good number of them. He put the digital camera into his top left breast pocket while I neatly coiled up the wires for the jumper he would use to access the hardware he ran into. As he sorted through the rest of the bypass devices to be hidden away, I tucked the jumper into his vest's top right pocket. The wireless transmitter that all of the devices were keyed to would go in his left pants leg.

"Stop that," I said to him, trying to pull open the Velcro pocket and stop him from bouncing up and down on his toes a bit. The entire van rolled with the motion.

"Sorry," he said quite unrepentantly, though he did stop. It took the van a few moments to come to a halt. "Just testing the distribution out. This guy rattles." He undid the button on his back right belt pouch and pulled out his biometric descrambler. Puzzled, he shook it twice, listening carefully for a noise, but didn't hear anything. While he slid it back into his belt pouch, I took advantage of his standing still to insert the transmitter into the pocket on his leg. He wiggled his backside a little this time, frowning again when he caught the tapping sound again. "Hey, see what's causing that, will you?"

I patted the pocket closed and shifted around towards the piece in question, after which he obligingly moved his hips again. Nearly done with his own preparations, Wufei chose to look over at that moment. "What are you doing, Maxwell? Some obscure mating dance?"

He wriggled a little bit again. "Is it working?"

I let Duo deal with that while I experimented, moving the scrambler back and forth with a finger. "It's the button," I declared after a few tests, taking the device out and handing it to him. "It's hitting the metal snap of the button. Put the wires on the outside. That should cushion it enough."

He did as instructed, bounced again, and declared a victory when he didn't hear anything. Quatre chided him this time. "I don't even want to know what people are going to think is going on in here if you keep that up, Duo."

Duo smirked and apologized without meaning it at all again. With a final pat-down of his loaded apparel, he declared himself done but for one last accessory. Out of his backpack, he pulled out a few pins and what appeared to be a wad of dark cloth. I gave him a bit of room to work with as he fiddled with his hair, pulling the braid up and pinning it in loose coils to the back of his head. Next, he took the headset and attached it to his ear, and then he shook out the cloth, which proved to be a muffin cap, and secured it on his head, the muffin part of the cap having ample room to contain his lengthy tail.

"And there we have it!" he said with a flourish of his hands. He held the pose for a second, then demanded, "What?"

Had my lips twitched? "It's cute," I remarked. And it hid one of his most distinguishing features, and covered yet another part of him with something more suited to blending into the shadows. I approved.

He planted his hands on his hips. "I do not like being called 'cute', Yuy."

"I wasn't calling you 'cute'. I was calling the hat 'cute'."

"That's it. When I get back, I am so making you wear the hat. You can use it to cover up your green hair."

"His hair is green?" Quatre asked with good-humored surprise.

"Just a little," I said. He tried to see it, but it was too dark. Not that there was much to see.

Duo smirked. "Heero Yuy dyed his hair. Can you believe it? For no particular reason, too."

Well, I did have a reason, frivolous though it may have been. I had reasons for everything.

"When?" Quatre asked, a sort of wonder in his eyes. Was he amazed that he hadn't noticed? Was he interested in following the same course I had?

I shrugged. "About a month ago? It's a quiet sort of green."

Duo punched me in the shoulder. "It'd have to be, after it got put in your hair. Unless you bleached it first, which I think is something even less likely for you to do."

"I don't think I'd look good as a blonde."

"Well, you wouldn't do it all." He reached out and fluffed my bangs. I started to jerk back until I realized his hand was innocently going for my hair. "You know, just some artistic highlights..."

I couldn't picture it, and was about to say as much when Wufei interrupted us. "If we're done here, gentleman, we have a building to break in to."

Duo immediately withdrew his hand and got an anticipatory gleam in his eye. "We sure do."

The cleaning crew went in at twenty-hundred. They tidied up the upstairs and ground floor offices, mostly, plus hall sweeps downstairs. Lab technicians were expected to keep their own spaces neat to avoid the need for uneducated personnel to be in and out of their potentially dangerous work areas. With a building as large as Meridian's, there was an army of janitorial workers. If it had proved necessary, we probably could have snuck in and assimilated ourselves into the crew, but we didn't have to. They were out by twenty-three hundred.

By counting the lights in the windows, we could see that four people were still in their offices, maybe making up work that had been interrupted by the breach in the Meridian systems. Comparing the window positions to our blueprints, we easily determined which rooms they were, and they proved irrelevant to our case. Trowa would have no reason to stray near them. His primary targets were Hoffman and Conzemius, and they were out.

The labs proved to be a more difficult challenge since they were mostly underground. Wufei went in first, jumping the low walls on the side to gain access to the parking lot. It wasn't long before he started rattling off license plate numbers to us through the comm. Reference checks combined with access to the employee directory let us know who was most likely to be down there. We found four people in the artificial membrane project, one from accounting, one from cybernetics, and two in oncological pharmaceuticals.

This left the path clear for Trowa and Duo to slip into the building using the back door we had tagged that afternoon. Their entrance went off without a hitch. Contact between all parties was maintained over the comm as Trowa headed to the network room, and Duo proceeded towards the labs to get into position. I very strongly requested of Duo that he wait in a secure place until I gained access to their networks, if he could bear to do that at all, but I didn't have high hopes that he would follow my directions to the letter.

It was a tense wait for Quatre and me. Though we knew that they would probably run into very few problems, and none that we hadn't already discussed, idle chitchat was not encouraged over the line. They wouldn't talk to us unless they had reason to, and being professionals, they had very little reason to. The most feedback we were getting from them was a locator signal, showing us a little blip on a screen superimposed on a 3D map of the premises.

I stopped anxiously tapping my fingers over the keys of my laptop when Quatre decided to shine a light on my head. "What?"

He smiled and turned the penlight off. "Green, eh?"

I shrugged. "Why not?"

He smiled contemplatively. "Are you going to keep it that way?"

That was an option that I had never considered. Though it apparently made an interesting conversation piece on occasion, it otherwise made no difference to me one way or another. I shrugged again in answer. "We'll see."

After a thoughtful look on his face, Quatre chuckled. "I might be interested in seeing what would happen if I walked into a meeting with green hair one day."

"Don't be such a copycat, Quatre," I joked. "Why don't you try blue instead?"

He laughed even harder. "Can you imagine the sight of us, all five of us, each with our own color?"

"I don't think you'd get Wufei to cooperate. What shows up in black?"

"I'm sure we could get some red highlights in there, if we tried hard enough."

I tried to picture it. All I could come up with was images from bad kung fu movies. "And Duo? You really think he'd do something like that to his hair?"

"Well, he wouldn't have to do it all. Just some artistic highlights..."

My application registered some incoming traffic, and I immediately forgot whatever it was that Quatre had been saying in favor of the ping. I caught the signal and rode it back into the network as planned. With a little bit of effort, I insinuated myself into their network, my peripheral applications all loaded up and ready to monitor my logs and keep this a clean operation. "I'm in," I announced over the line. I wasted little time in penetrating their security systems.

"Whee," I think Duo said in response. It was rather sotto voce.

"Alright, people," Quatre started briskly. "Report."

"Heading upstairs," Trowa answered. "No one in sight."

Duo chimed in next. "Heading towards virology. About to go downstairs. No complications."

I scanned the display in front of me. "There are cameras in the stairwells going down. Give me a moment to bypass them.... there." It was simple enough to tie their log files to a different set of cameras. Starting up a queue in another window, I set the cameras to be reset upon my exit of the system. "You're good to go."

"Roger that."

Quatre took over directing Trowa's progress while I supervised Duo. Wufei kept up his external surveillance of the property, keeping track of lights, traffic, and time. We all had the blueprints memorized, but they were just blueprints. Keeping an eye on the little dots representing the team's progress, I flipped through the files at my disposal, trying to find something with a map in it. Once I located one, I tossed the blueprints we had obtained and superimposed their map on our grid. There were a few minor changes, plus a wing that hadn't been accounted for earlier.

Bringing Quatre's attention to the data, I left him to tell Trowa of anything relevant while I covered my half of things. "Duo. I have an updated map. They added a couple of doors and a short hallway connecting the B-two-hundreds to the B-four-hundreds. Maintenance closet B-three-twenty-eight has been turned into a storage room. From the looks of things..." I called up some of their inventory data in another window. "They keep routine chemicals in there, general to all the projects. The new storage room replaces B-three-thirty-three, which was turned into a ladies' room slash janitor's supply closet."

"Acknowledged. I'm at the bottom of the stairs. There's a card reader. Hmm, number two-eight-nine-four."

"On it." As I was looking up the device in their database, I made a request of Quatre. "You can hook up the video feeds to that monitor over there."

He nodded, typing away at his own terminal to access the cameras.

I returned to my primary task of unlocking the stairwell door. It wasn't the type to stay unlocked once accessed, but rather the type that was unlocked only so long as the proper electrical signals were being received. It was designed to be more difficult for people to bypass since it would be more awkward for them to pull and bypass at the same time. "You'll need to pull it open on my mark... Mark."

"Got it. Wow, this door is heavy."

I trusted him to open and close it without making a sound. He'd already turned right, according to the plan, and gone about thirty meters before I stopped him. "You'll want to go left instead," I advised him, seeing his little blip halt, then turn around. I was pleased to note he did as I said without question. That deserved an explanation of what I saw in the logs. "It looks like they've mixed up the security rounds since they briefed us. They're on the right, now. They should have already covered the left. They'll probably double back and use the stairwell. I'm going to revert the cameras to their normal feeds."

"Understood."

"Other than that, the hallways are clear of any security devices."

Quatre caught my attention. "He's almost at Hoffman's office. Can you unlock the door?"

Hoffman's door lock operated on the same principles as the mechanism used on the stairwell door. I set up the proper commands for him to execute in coordination with Trowa, for Hoffman's office and any of the other ones nearby.

Duo informed me of his progress. "Popping into lab B-one-eighty-five."

I looked up the number. "Should be... insulin pumps."

"Looks like." Though the room was not what we were looking for, he was probably studying the contents to get a feel for what a regular lab looked like. It would help him distinguish what felt out of place in another lab. "Heading out."

I double-checked to make sure his path was clear before wandering off to other parts of the computer system. With his voice keeping me briefed in one ear, I looked into the trace of their system meltdown again. Now that we suspected that the attack had come from within their walls, I wanted to see if I could follow it back to its origin within the building. Unfortunately, Conzemius had cleaned up after himself. The logs weren't where I had last seen them. I hunted through the caches in the hopes that he might have forgotten something.

"Damn, Heero," Quatre said jokingly to me as I searched. When I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye, I saw that he was focusing on the information flashing across his monitors. "Stop giving me all of this data. I can barely keep track of it all. And you're even running it across both your screens. That's crazy."

My eyes flicked back and forth between my dual monitor setup with practiced ease. The screen real estate was important to have, especially in high-speed applications. I couldn't afford the time to search through all of the layered windows I would have with less display space. "I run three at home. Four would be easier, actually, if I could find a secure way to stack them."

He shook his head with humor. "If you can deal with that much input, no wonder you did so well with Zero."

I snorted quietly, knowing that he could process just as much information. He'd been a Gundam pilot, same as the rest of us. We had data displayed on three sides in the cockpit, plus a few subscreens, although granted, the screens usually didn't all display important data at once.

They were well-buried, but traces of the deleted logs slowly revealed themselves to me. I had just found another piece of the puzzle when what Duo said caught my attention. "The corridors here look a little swankier. Security looks a little tighter."

I glanced back at the monitor. "Duo, stop."

His dot followed my command. "What is it?" he asked tensely.

"Where are you?"

"You lost my signal?"

"Your signal is still clear, but you've wandered off the map." I called up the history and watched as the computer drew a line indicating Duo's path back through time. I stopped it once it connected to the map on the display. "You took a left at B-two-eighty. According to our maps, there should have been a lab there, one door. Hang on. I'll see if I can find something... Can you get into one of the rooms? Try and find a computer down there."

"You got it. Mostly lab space down here. Hm, numeric keypad lock." He could take care of that with one of the numerous devices hidden on his body. Less than a minute later, he told me he was in.

"What's the IP of the computer?"

"IP? I don't wanna turn -- wait. They're all labeled. How convenient."

"Yep." Understandable procedure at a company with as many computer systems as Meridian. The IT department had printed out the relevant addresses and pasted them on the case of every computer I had seen while I was there for easier identification.

Duo gave me the numbers I needed, and from there I searched through the systems to link it to a particular computer on the subnet, found the matching physical location for it, then went back to the security net and accessed the files for that area. It wasn't long before a new section of wireframe was added to our map, colored symbols illustrating the placement of different security devices.

"This lab's empty," he said softly to me, his voice automatically lowering in response to this more secure area, even though the chances that someone would be there to overhear him were even lower than before. "I'm moving on. Lights are dimmed in the halls, but adequate. If you hear me scream my bloody head off, it'll probably be because I just ran into rows and rows of human fetuses in little glowing jars."

I snorted. "You watch too many movies, Duo."

"You watch movies?"

The question was completely irrelevant, but I thought maybe he needed the sound of someone's voice to make his journey a little less tense. Well, I could keep him company and go fishing through security at the same time. "In this day and age, how could a person not?"

"Yeah, I guess. You'll have to tell me about your favorites, one day. You'll have to tell me a lot of things, one day."

There was something odd about that assertion, but I put it aside for the moment to give him an update. "About forty meters ahead of you, there's a T-intersection. Starting with the cross hall, there are security cameras interspersed to monitor the traffic. Do you want me to bypass them, or would you rather I gave you the timings? They swivel."

He gave the matter a moment's thought. "Must be in the right place, then, if they've got tighter security. Do you know where I should be going?"

"Just let me finish up..." Listening to Wufei updating us with one ear, I went back to the segment of the trace that I had found before I got distracted, following the footsteps until I could identify the computer it had come from. "Oh yeah. A lot of those labs are equipped with motion sensor lights."

"I'll turn 'em off, then." It wouldn't be a problem. He was equipped with handheld light sources and night vision lenses if necessary.

While he investigated the last lab before the secured hallway, I extracted an address I thought might be valid, tracked it through the Meridian building to a physical location and synced it up to the map. "Okay. You'll need to go left at the junction. Follow the hall as it turns right, and there will be a door. Go through the door, and you should be in the proper area."

Duo inadvertently let out a puff of air into his receiver. "Might as well keep things clean. Give me the timing on those cameras."

"Alright. On my mark, you'll have five seconds to get to the space beneath the camera on the left. Then we'll wait three seconds, and you can get to the door."

"Got it."

"...Mark." I watched his dot move rapidly to the end of the corridor and come to a rest below the camera's position.

"There's a lock," he muttered into his comm. "Is it safe?"

"Stay where you are," I ordered, already trying to navigate to the proper security subsystem. "Your position is in the clear. What does it look like?"

"Another keypad."

"I'm on it." He wouldn't have the time to stand there and wait for the hand decoder to do its work. If he were working by himself, he could plausibly run up, plug it in, and then leave it there while he retreated to the blind spot, but there was no point in going through the trouble when I could circumvent it from my end.

"It must be a pain in the ass to work here."

I smiled briefly. "Okay. We're getting a little trickier here. These locks won't be controlled by the same set as the others were. I've uploaded the bypass to your jumper. It should only take a couple of seconds to unlock after you've plugged it in."

"Understood."

"I'm not registering any cameras on the other side. This appears to be the bottleneck into the area." I didn't have to tell him when to move this time since he could see the camera right above his head and gauge his actions accordingly. That didn't stop me from holding my breath for the ten seconds it took for him to complete the procedure.

During that time, Quatre relayed some of the information that Trowa had unearthed on his end of things. "The guy that they got called away to deal with. There's a memo that may be about him, if it was Zamora, Marc, they were talking about."

The name filtered through my consciousness, and I switched output channels. "Wufei. Zamora, Marc. License DHN-three-eight-zero. Still in the building?"

Chang responded after a moment to verify. "Yes. In his office."

Quatre had looked him up in the employee database. "Cybernetics. Related to Zero, you think?"

I couldn't answer, my attention drawn away by Duo's current position on the monitor. "Duo, you're coming up on--"

"--Some infrared beams. I see them."

I heard Trowa informing his guide of our earlier conclusions involving the improbability of Zero applied to cybernetics, so I didn't bother returning to their conversation. I raced ahead of Duo's path instead, trying to identify the threats before they became a problem. Although we were now walking into territory on a separate security subnet, I could still see the devices, even if I couldn't directly control them.

"Whee, a card reader," Duo murmured, having run into yet another locked door. He was right. All of the security measures in that area must have made it annoying to work down there. "Something different. You know, I bet each one of these blasted labs has a different code to get in, if they're really this bloody paranoid."

"I hope that's nothing I suggested to them," I said, a faint smile staining my expression where he couldn't see as I continued to root for information in their computer systems.

"Better not be. You suggested enough crap to them. Hmm, Orion? Yeah, I can get this one..."

Conzemius had tightened things up, unfortunately having taken some of the things I had said to heart. While it wasn't difficult, per se, to break through since I was already in, the timing on the system was crafty. Windows of opportunities closed almost as soon as I opened them, but there was a thin slice of time, measured in milliseconds, of which I could take advantage. I knew just what to do, only my fingers couldn't move fast enough. Though I had hoped this wouldn't be the case, I had foreseen the possibility.

I pushed my keyboard away and got out of my seat a bit to reach out to an unmarked bag that had been shoved into the corner of the back of the van. Garnering a questioning look from Quatre, though he said nothing as he continued to provide guidance to Trowa and Wufei, I returned to my little stool and pulled out a familiar, though not particularly welcome device.

"Heero?" Quatre finally stopped to say, an edge to his voice. "Where did that come from? And what do you plan to do with it?"

I calmly untangled a wire while keeping an eye and ear on Duo's progress. He had entered a lab area where work was being done, but the research was not sinister in any obvious way. Illegal testing, perhaps? Illicitly acquired materials? He decided to take pictures of labels before moving to greener pastures. "This comes from the Preventers' project team," I finally answered Quatre, flipping my comm receiver up so that I didn't distract Duo. "It's not particularly outstanding, but it'll give me what I need to get through the system."

"You mean the other day, when they said they had developed some things? They developed a working interface?" He paused for a moment, head cocked as he listened to the comm. "You tested it for them? And you want to use it now?"

I set aside his dismay to deal with later. "Trowa will tell you that it's harmless. We ran into no complications at all."

"But it can't be ready for use in something like this," he said, trying to reason with me. "This is important, Heero, not just some trial run."

As if I didn't know that. I did not do things like this frivolously and without forethought. "I spoke to the researcher in charge yesterday to ask for some adjustments. I tested them out this morning when I picked it up. Everything checked out."

He listened to what Trowa had to say again. I briefly considered flipping to their frequency, but decided that would be intrusive. "I know, but-- You're sure? ... Hm, that's true, I guess... You can unplug at any time?"

That last part he directed towards me. "Of course."

"You'll disconnect the moment anything funny happens."

"I will," I promised, noticing the distinct lack of request or question in his flat statement. I hadn't yet decided whether or not I was disappointed by their lack of faith in me. Zero had been my machine, almost as much as Wing had been. I knew it. I knew what it was capable of, what it had done, what I could do with it. And, rather importantly, I also knew our limits.

I put the assembly on before he could come up with any other suggestions or objections, booting up RJ's modified shell with one hand while I adjusted the fit with my other. Once everything was set, I pulled my comm back into place. "Duo, I'm going offline for a bit to reinitialize some stuff. Shouldn't be more than a few seconds."

"Mm-hmm. Almost done here."

Assured that Duo wouldn't be unable to reach me without knowing why, I transferred command to the shell interface and waited for the change to settle. Once it did, I tested its integrity with a few simple commands, and when I was satisfied with the results, I woke my remote connection. "I'm back."

"You ready to receive the pictures?"

A mere thought was all that was needed to confirm it. "Yes."

"Transmitting now, then. I'm heading out the door.... Where the hell did they do their shopping? A flea market? Shouldn't they have ordered all this crap in bulk or something? Stupid two-point-eight..."

I told him how to reconfigure his three-point-oh for compatibility with the earlier version, then returned my main thought process to trying to find out where Zero was. Tracing corrupted network packets wasn't fun. Zero probably could have helped me in reconstructing them more quickly and accurately, but without that assistance, I was left to muddle along as best I could.

"Dammit, why can't super secret evil lab doors have windows?" Duo's annoyance at having to break into every single lab to confirm their contents was becoming quite apparent.

"Or name plates would work, too," I contributed, letting him know I was listening. If the lab hadn't been empty of personnel and cleared of security hazards, I might have insisted he stop the chatter, but he was in a relatively safe area, so I kept him company instead. He knew what the practical limits were.

I paused to study the flow of electricity through the complex, slipping through some tight security to get at some of their internal records. Referencing the day in question, I found voltage spikes at the corresponding time. I could correlate those with the other traces I had done to narrow down the location of the computer even further.

Since I was there, I slid through a few more layers of their system to hit their e-mail server, initiating a download of their traffic. I was able to get the history from the last two weeks. Anything prior to that was stored on a different server, and I didn't judge it worth the time to acquire those files as well. I made sure Quatre was aware of the data before I went back to my primary goal.

Duo and I had gained access to four more labs in that area before I finally pieced together enough information for a practical conclusion. "Duo. Does it seem likely that you'll find what we need in the lab area?"

There was a short silence as he opened the door we had just unlocked. "This one's empty. Moving on. Yeah, I think so. I'm gonna skip a few and follow up on that report... ooh, what's this? My, what a pretty, shiny lock you are..."

A short second after he plugged in the jumper, the specs for the lock popped up on my screen. If it was the only biometric device that we had run into so far, surely something important was being secured. "I can do this more quickly on my end."

Without waiting for him to answer, I initiated the decryption and descrambling process, making use of the resetting loophole that I had identified and prepared for prior to the commencement of our operation. While my use of the DNI did nothing to speed the process, the computer that I had at my disposal was more powerful than the handheld that Duo carried with him.

I didn't have to babysit that process, so I continued with my search, my attention returning after only a short while when Duo spoke to me. "This was a good idea, Heero," he admitted quietly. "Hooking up to the network and all."

Though the dictates of society probably called for some sort of false humility or gratitude, that wasn't my style, so I refrained from expressing any at his concession. "Different minds," I said instead, recalling what I had mentioned the previous day. "Different ideas."

The puff of breath into his receiver masked what was certainly a mild snort. "Why were you asking again? About finding what we need?"

Back to business. "From what I've seen in the records, Zero may have been in that direction before, but it probably isn't there now. The attack originated in that sector, but there hasn't been any activity since. The address doesn't show up on any of the internal subnets, so they probably wised up and cordoned it off from access to any vital systems. Even if I can find the computer in the system, there's no guarantee that I'll be able to track it down to a physical location."

"I wouldn't worry about it overly much, then," Quatre broke in. "I think we just found what we need to make our case."

Setting Duo's communicator to receive input from Quatre's channel, I sat up a little more straightly on my stool. "What is it?"

"Paper.. a whole lot of paper. And a few documents that weren't shredded thoroughly enough. We have reports tying Meridian activity to that region of Africa, plus articles on the progression of disease through the Condasan community. Even a few GSDC reports that I know they shouldn't have access to."

Wufei's voice cut in on the other line. "Is there anything to tie them to the actual use or production of the biological agent that got the Condasans?"

Trowa responded. "I've found some references to research being done on those strains, but Meridian does legitimately have research concerns in infectious diseases, especially those from L2. I'm about to hit general accounting for more information."

"Then anything we have so far is circumstantial. We don't have anything linking them with the method of delivery--"

"But I think I've found the vector," Duo cut in with a low voice. The computer had finished its work while I wasn't watching, and he was in. There was just a little excitement in his voice, mixed with a larger portion of dark anticipation. Shinigami was pleased, but not happy. "A mini-fridge with a terrifically familiar name on it.... and petri dishes with lots and lots of numbers of them. Crap."

I knew a little bit about lab work. "Labs keep strain books to track all the different varieties. It should have records of which numbers map to which strains."

"Strain book... strain book... This it? No... How about this? Hmm, interesting, but not quite. I'm turning on their computer." Six seconds later, I received an image of the 'interesting' report he had found. "Wait, found it. Yeah, this is definitely it." He started muttering the names as he read through them to himself, low enough that I could hardly catch them, but the cadence of his words sounded approximately correct.

That was it. We had found samples of biological agents that had been used to produce the disease that had killed off the Condasan community, along with substances with other known detrimental properties. That was all we needed to tie the whole thing together.

Quatre and I started compiling all of the information we were receiving in nearly a constant data stream. We were getting everything from detailed biochemical analyses pulled from the lab computers to payroll and shipping from the accounting computers. During it all, I recognized that Trowa had found two more clues involving our suspected troublemaker, Zamora. Letting Quatre know of my impending digression, I followed the possibilities, tracking Zamora's activities through the security subnet that I was logged into.

His user account was accessed primarily from five machines: one in his office, two in one set of basement research labs, and two in another, with a decent amount of network traffic moving between the three points. One set of computers resided in the lab the directory listed as the cybernetics department. The other set wasn't registered on the main subnet.

Fortunately, computers had addresses. I was swimming through the routers in search of the physical location to which those addresses mapped when my attention was caught by a blip in the packets. I turned to study it further, but by the time I got into the proper module, it was as if it had never been. Perhaps I had imagined it.

Once, I could believe. Twice was pushing it. Three times, and something was definitely up. I sidetracked a portion of my attention to monitoring for those strange patterns. I pounced on a fourth instance of the suspicious phenomenon, but didn't get there quickly enough to catch it in action. I did, however, manage to get a copy of the traffic logs before they were altered irreparably. A quick comparison showed at how fine a resolution of the timescale I would have to work to be able to identify the source.

That sort of speed was beyond my system's current capabilities. I thought about the situation, cast a quick glance over to Quatre's workstation to see that he was handling the flood of information just fine on his own, and made my choice. Maybe I wouldn't have done it under other circumstances, if not for that almost instinctive recognition of Zero's handiwork in the patterns. What was it doing riding the network? At what level was it functioning? Where was it? Who was behind it? I had to know.

Maybe I pretended reluctance, but the fact was that when I had met with RJ earlier, I had suggested a few minor modifications that I knew for certain would facilitate my own adjustments later, should I be in a position to require those adjustments. Had I anticipated it? Did I look forward to it? Was I capitulating a little too willingly?

All of which was irrelevant. Zero was on the network, and I had to catch it. I pulled the interface off, shaking my hair irritably out of my eyes as I lifted a panel on the device and carefully used my fingernail to slide a tiny switch to the right one click. That done, I slid the DNI back on and reinitialized the shell with a few additional parameters.

It loaded up smoothly, and with the click of a button, I no longer saw all of the input on the screens in front of me, but in my mind's eye. I was no fool; of course I didn't re-enable the two-way flow of information to the extent to which the Zero system had. This was only the faintest of echoes, what I could get away with without disabling the safety features. Zero had, after all, fried a man's brain. I could deal with the Zero system that I knew, but who knew what Meridian's inexperienced engineers may have done to it.

Despite its continuing limitations, the newly expanded DNI gave me that tiny speed boost I needed to overtake that frustratingly elusive data blip. There was, admittedly, a decent thrill that came from being able to traverse a network without the bottleneck of the human visual processing centers. As soon as that distinctive signature flashed itself across the net, I was on it without having to twitch my fingers in response, even though I left them on top of my keyboard out of mere comfort and habit. My eyes became similarly redundant, the image rendered by the computer on the monitor being a few distracting frames behind what I saw in my mind. I looked away and focused instead on Duo's dot, his graphical representation on the screen bobbing reassuringly in place.

My unknown adversary reacted with surprise when I made my first move, blocking it from erasing the traces of its presence on the network. It retaliated almost immediately by trying to sever my connection. I fended off the attack and dug into the footprint I had frozen, following its history halfway through the routers before it caught up with me and obliterated the trail. That in itself left a mark, and it lit the way for me as I pursued that avenue of approach. As it blocked one, another opened, and between offensives came defensive moves as I strove to avoid being booted from the network.

The game of tag seemed to go on for quite a while, but since the timescale was on the order of clock cycles, it couldn't have gone on much longer than a minute. During that short eternity, I gained quite an appreciation for my opponent. There was no doubting its authenticity as the Zero system. No mere human could move at these speeds, and no mere program could defend itself with such assiduous creativity.

A pattern began to make itself known, though I spared a moment's thought to wonder whether its unfounded nature was a result of an unconscious analysis or a gut feeling. Either way, it felt as if the merry chase on which I was being led was designed to run me through my paces.

It was a pattern quite suddenly broken by a harsh overflow of data, one that left me no doubts at all that Zero was behind it. My opponent threw a massive amount of information at me, enough to drown out the thought level I used to direct my system despite the safeties that were still intact on the device. Things would have gotten a lot more interesting without that buffer. As a backup safety system, I had also been sure to include an automatic shutdown in the event of such an excess of throughput.

Even so, in the few clock cycles that it took for the protocols to take effect, the burst of input threw me off-balance as I reflexively scrambled to respond. It was so shocking and instant that I didn't even know for sure what I was responding to. As soon as my mind fired its answers off, it felt like they were just sucked right out of me and down the line before I even had the chance to get a good look at them. My vision was overlaid with a familiar staticky sensation that made my world glow for a slow-fading moment as my mind diverted its resources from processing the input from my optic nerves to dealing with the data invading my personal space.

It was, in reality, a ridiculously short amount of time for such an ordeal. It was over before my hands had finished reaching up to tear the interface off of my head, an almost pointless gesture since the shell had already reverted to a manual state. Such a reaction did not escape the notice of Quatre, of course. He questioned me with a note of edged worry. "Heero?"

I shook my head at him, shutting my eyes for a moment to cut down on the input as I tried to settle my thoughts. I think the sudden cessation of data flow threw me almost as much as the beginning of the abrupt flood.

"Heero?" another voice buzzed. It took me a moment to recognize that it wasn't Quatre asking me again, but Duo. My comm was still attached to the side of my head. "Everything okay there, buddy?"

I must have made some sort of sound in surprise or the like for him to pick up on. I swallowed before answering steadily. "Yes. Status?"

There was a brief pause of silent suspicion before he responded. "Peachy. Computer's almost done dumping. Looks like I got about six more pages to scan in this book. Pics are taken. I'll take a quick tour of the other labs in case, then I'm outta here. Q-ball, he lying?"

It was a sign of how dazed I was that his sudden shift confused me for a moment. During the time that Quatre used to study me critically for an answer, I preempted him and spoke for myself. "I ran into Zero on the net."

My quiet words elicited a grave silence while everyone digested that little tidbit of information. A moment later, Quatre snapped back into gear. "Can you locate it?"

"No... Shit." My hands went automatically towards the DNI before I realized that that wouldn't be a good idea with my current state of mind. I shoved it aside and dragged my keyboard back into place, regaining access to avenues that had timed out during my absence.

"What's he shittin' about, Q?" Duo asked tensely.

Again, I answered for myself. "If Zero knows I'm here..." No, something was wrong with that statement... wasn't there? I started over. "If whoever was behind Zero knows I'm here..."

I didn't need to finish my sentence before Quatre started issuing orders. "No more loitering, then, gentlemen. Let's pack it up. We have what we need. Trowa, as soon as the download is complete, clear out. You should be okay since we didn't have to circumvent too many security systems to get you up there. Duo--"

"Fine, I'll skip the rest of my sight-seeing. I'll finish up here and clear out."

"Wufei?"

"Proceeding to point delta-four. Continuing to monitor personnel movement. I'll keep you advised."

"A few of the systems have been reset," I informed everyone, feverishly mining the consoles for what I needed. Something wasn't quite sitting right with me. "But there don't seem to have been any alerts sent out."

"With luck, they thought you were a computer blip." Exactly what I had been chasing to begin with. Unfortunately, I wasn't as clean in my execution as Zero had been.

"Done," Duo declared. "Clearing out."

Zero wouldn't have thrown all of those packets at me if it thought I was a computer blip. No, there I went again. The person behind Zero wouldn't have. "It seems that Zamora's on the project. He's probably our troublemaker. I followed his network activity to Zero."

"We'll make sure we pick him up in the raid," Quatre said.

But that didn't sound right either. That he was a part of the project, yes, but that he was the one behind Zero? No, that didn't seem right at all. Circumstance prevented me from devoting any more thought to the matter. "Duo. Cameras show the security guards about to enter your wing. I'm not sure how far they'll go. Looks like it's just a part of their routine patrol, though."

"Should I wait 'em out?"

Quatre shook his head immediately, even though I was the only one that could see. "No alarms have been sounded that we can tell, but we can't be sure if it'll stay that way. Is there another way out?" He looked at me as he asked.

I was already on it. "That lab section is a giant square. Head in the opposite direction and you'll end up where you started. By the time you get there, they should probably be safely down the hall from your position."

"On it," Duo answered shortly.

With one thread in my mind, I was occupied with cleaning up the traces of all of the data transfers we had set up this night. It didn't have to be perfect. We just needed to cover our tracks well enough that they didn't go underground before we had the time to put together a proper, official raid. With a secondary thread, I followed Duo's path through the lower corridors of Meridian. "Beams on the other side, too."

"Acknowledged."

Despite the resetting of the system and the unexpected patrol of guards, the escape from the bowels of Meridian Biotechnologies was rather anti-climatic. Not a single ventilation duct or elevator shaft had been necessary. There were no explosions, no diversions, no close calls. There were long, tense periods of waiting, but that was mostly on my part and not Duo's. He progressed smoothly through the building with no more trouble than he had had getting in, while I poked and prodded one corner of my mind into figuring out just why this was so easy.

My mind wasn't seeing any obvious answers. The network had been compromised. Why hadn't Zero -- no, the person behind Zero --cared? Nothing had bothered me as I went about cleaning up after ourselves on the network. What was that person doing on the network to begin with? Just as I had been unable to really trace the source, I had also been unable to determine just what it had been doing. Gathering data? Changing data? Securing data? I had no good ideas, but the question continued to gnaw on my ankle.

Duo was the last to return to the van. All of us had our eyes fixed on his glowing dot as it made its way through the complex, and once he was back with us, Wufei started the van and began the long drive back to Brussels with a slow, inconspicuous beginning.

I helped Duo divest himself of his assorted mechanical helpers. He seemed even more jittery than he had been before the mission, although that had been in anticipation. His excess energy afterwards was probably due to the fade of the adrenaline rush. It didn't help that he was standing in a moving vehicle. He had a perfectly legitimate excuse to bobble to keep his balance.

I was pulling one of the descramblers out of his pocket when he suddenly pitched forward and put a hand against the wall of the van. I leaned back with the motion, not wanting to get in the way of his balance, when I realized that he hadn't been responding to some dip in the road. His other hand came back close to my face holding up the DNI that had been on the equipment counter behind me. "What the hell is this?"

Chances were good that there was no correct answer while he stood looking at me with such an expectant glare. With my back almost literally to the wall, I tried to think of one anyway. "That... is probably what you think it is."

"Fair enough," he said evenly. "Then what the hell is it doing in here?"

His look made it clear that I had better not give him a similar answer. "It's what the Preventers research team was developing. I was using it for system input. It gave me a speed boost. It's not Zero-compatible."

He gave the device a closer look. "Input, huh? Then what's this?"

I looked to where he was pointing with his thumb. It was the jumper I had moved to enable the dual channel capabilities of the device. He had done a bit of neural interface research in the early part of our case; he knew exactly what it was. "I may have tweaked it a little."

"You may have tweaked it a little," he repeated flatly, closing his eyes briefly as if praying for patience. He gave the device a shake for good measure. It was close enough to me that I could feel it brush against my cheek. Actually, he was close enough to me that I imagined I could feel all of him against all of me, given the aura he was projecting beyond the limits of his own skin. Because he couldn't stand completely upright in the back of the van, he was conveniently hunched over me to get even more intimidating. I supposed I would have to get used to the idea of his looming over me, given the shift in our situation.

"You may have tweaked it a little?" Quatre echoed as well, his voice only slightly more mild than Duo's. I peeked around Duo's body to see Quatre casting an accusing glance at Trowa, probably because Trowa had supported me earlier.

"Two-way," Duo informed the rest of the team. I resisted the urge to call him a tattletale.

Quatre came back with a reprimand. "Heero, you said you wouldn't--"

"I said I would disconnect the moment something funny happened," I cut in calmly. "And I did."

"Ha!" Duo barked sharply. "I knew you were lying!"

"I was not," I bit back, keeping an equally sharp tone out of my voice. Given that a lack of trust, perceived or otherwise, had impeded our relationship barely a week ago, I felt very committed to making sure that we would not see a repeat of that. "You asked if everything was okay. It was. There were safeties and failsafes. They kicked in before anything really funny could happen."

"Then why did you tear the interface off?" Quatre asked.

"It... was reflex." Of the sort one had for pulling one's hand out of the flame before it got burnt, but I hardly thought the comparison would fare well in this situation. "The whole thing was over before I even took the interface off."

I would have rather pointedly turned around to get started on the data analysis of everything that had been retrieved, only Duo still had me pinned in place. I had to glare up at him instead. I'm sure he took the hint rather immediately, but didn't act on it for seven deliberate, obstinate seconds. Finally, he backed off just enough to expose me to the scrutiny of the other two with us in the rear of the van.

Fortunately, Quatre's word was law, relatively speaking. He got things moving along again, even if he did hammer another nail in my coffin. "Well, what's done is done. Let's get on with sifting through this data. And Heero? Next time you think about doing something like this, consider letting the rest of us know in advance."

It was quite civil, but it rubbed me the wrong way nevertheless. Would I ever be on the same wavelength as these people? I knew what I was doing. When would they stop judging me by their own standards?

The quiet that fell upon us as we looked over all of the documentation was determined rather than companionable. We should have been able to work together in harmony. That was our selling point, wasn't it? That together we could accomplish the impossible? It almost pained me that I seemed to be the one bringing the tension to the team. Almost. I still thought they all had something stuck up their asses when it came to Zero.

*****

Part 16

Maybe we were at a stable point, after all. It blew over after an hour, though I was sure the incident hadn't been forgotten, just set aside in favor of more important matters. We paused in our journey only long enough to switch drivers halfway back to Brussels. Other than that, though it was the middle of the night, we didn't stop our operation. Some of it would have to wait until we had returned to HQ, such as the reconstruction of the shredded documents that Trowa had snagged, secure in the belief that, if they were missed the next day, they would assume that the cleaning crew had disposed of all of it. Much of the other work we could do right in the van, such as the correlation of samples to strains.

When the sun dawned the next morning, we didn't see it, but only because we were locked up in our windowless office again, still putting together our case. Une scheduled a preliminary debriefing at oh-eight-hundred, and after we had presented our initial findings, she assigned what seemed like a platoon of people to assist us, though there were really only half a dozen. With the case practically guaranteed to come to a satisfactory conclusion in the very near future, we could afford to declassify at least Meridian's role in illegitimate research concerns and unethical business practices. The additional manpower really helped to speed things along. They were minds trained and skilled in sniffing out the clues from the paperwork.

By the end of the workday, we were good to go. A full-scale, Preventers-backed official raiding party had been authorized, with Une at the fore of gathering the troops. We were each glad not to have to deal with the details of that, and yet I think it sat uneasily with all of us to have been in the middle of the action, only now to take a back seat when things were just reaching their climax.

Still, we would be a part of the party the next day. For one night, at least, we could stand down and have faith that all would be ready the next morning. It felt uncannily like letting Howard's repair crews fix our Gundams before our next battle.

Quatre, unfortunately, had other business concerns that he had to attend to while in the city. Trowa accompanied him to make sure that his brief downtime was not entirely squandered on such things. I was well on my way to grabbing some quick grub in the commissary when Duo stopped me with a hand on my upper arm and a hard look. "Where do you think you're going, Yuy?"

I blinked at him, not quite certain what the appropriate response was, and not quite willing to take the chance.

He continued to look steadily at me until he finally gave up and rolled his eyes. "Hey, Fei. Why is it that Yuy's been in town all this time, and he still hasn't been invited over to your place?"

That prompted a little more blinking, both from me and Wufei. Finally, Wufei turned to me and responded to the accusation. "You will eat with us tonight."

Since there had been no room in that statement for dissent, I agreed.

Wufei's apartment was a cozy little place. Clean and uncluttered while maintaining a definite statement of taste, about the only thing that seemed out of place was Duo's duffel sitting by the foot of the sofa, and even that didn't look unwelcome. I probably should have helped them get dinner together more than I did, but they insisted I was a guest, and I was too distracted wondering what I had expected out of Wufei's apartment.

There were two very large bookcases filled with things I was certain Wufei had actually read and digested despite their orderly arrangement. Other than that, there were a few elegant Chinese ink paintings adorning the walls and a few houseplants. Most of his furniture was designed with straight, clean lines. His sofa was not quite. It was a large, amply cushioned sort of thing that probably didn't give Duo a hard time when he slept in it. It, too, somehow managed to match the rest of the decor, as if its comfort counterbalanced the severity of the rest of the furniture.

I felt a sudden pang of homesickness, which I might have suffered more severely if I hadn't been simultaneously surprised and delighted that I was finally in a situation to feel such a thing. Though there had been plenty of times when I would rather have been home instead of somewhere else, I had never felt it so keenly. I missed my own bookcase, my own houseplants, my own computers, my own bed.

But none of that was really 'my apartment'. I was fond of those walls, but I think it was the comfort I missed, of being surrounded by the familiar, by something that I had formed of my own tastes and opinions. Somewhere I was accepted, even if just by my computers and my blankets and my leafy friends. Even here, among people whom I considered friends, I didn't feel like I could really relax and just be whoever I felt like being. I was on guard against their judgment. I'd felt the sting of their condemnation more than I would have liked.

No, there had been a few short moments of freedom in a room wrapped in confidential darkness just two nights ago. Would there be more? We would see. If there were, they would probably be few, complicated as it was by this notion of not knowing where we stood with each other. Honestly, it wouldn't have bothered me that much if I hadn't known that it weighed on Duo's mind.

A hand on my shoulder startled me. I think it startled Duo just as much to see that he had made me jump. "Hey. Did you want anything to drink? Asked a couple of times, but you didn't say anything."

Damn. I got uneasy when I let my mind wander so far that I lost awareness of my surroundings. "Sorry. Guess I wasn't paying attention. No, I'm fine. Thank you."

He glanced over his shoulder towards where Wufei was shaking the water off the vegetables, which reminded me of how inconsiderate I was being. I got up before Duo had turned back to me and went to the kitchen. "Is there anything I can help with?"

Duo caught up with me and tugged me back in protest. "Hey, you don't have to help out. You're a guest, remember?"

"So are you," I reminded him quietly, dwelling on the technicality of the label. Yes, he was a guest, but he was also a good friend, it seemed, so maybe he didn't warrant the formal treatment, whereas I did. The thought made me perversely want to help even more.

"Yeah, but--" He stopped in his excuse, probably thinking the same thing that I had thought, but being too polite to say something along those lines aloud. I saw that understanding hit him, that moment his face fleetingly expressed something soft and pained before everything smoothed out. "But this is your first time over. You get to be coddled at least once before you have to pay your dues."

That was diplomatic of him. Unfortunately, I was unwilling to oblige. I stepped out of his grasp and surveyed the kitchen. Wufei was ignoring our exchange in favor of chopping an onion. I saw that the rest of the preparations were complete, but there was yet one thing to be done and that was the actual cooking. The wok had already been set to heat over the flame, so I opened the cupboard next to the stovetop to find the oil.

"Okay, now that's really going too far," Duo protested again. "Like, setting the table, okay, but actual cooking?"

"There's nothing else left to do." I put my hand in the concave space of the wok and measured the heat against my skin. It exuded an impressive warmth. I was of a mixed opinion of the stovetop I had in my own apartment. Though the electric components made everything easy to clean and take care of, it just wasn't the same as using a gas stove. With a skilled hand, I poured the oil in a ring around the wok, getting a slightly geeky zip of pride when I ended the action without any oil dribbling down the side of the container.

Duo probably wanted to argue the matter some more, but maybe he had finally learnt the futility of arguing with me. He spoke instead of other matters. "You cook."

"I have to eat, don't I?"

"You cook stir-fry."

I shrugged. "Quick, simple, and easy to do for one person."

"Can you cook other things?"

Why the sudden fascination with my culinary abilities? "Sure. Cooking's not all that hard." I picked up the pan by the handle and rolled the oil around until it coated the cooking surface evenly. "Do you cook?"

It became a small competition, masculine pride running headlong into womanly pursuits. "Of course," he sniffed. "But I bake more than I cook, really. I think you can do much more interesting things with baking."

Wufei snorted his way into the conversation. "Duo doesn't seem to have the patience for mere cooking."

Duo huffed in mock indignation. "I don't know what you're talking about. Baking takes much longer than cooking." "But you just stick it in the oven, set a timer, and forget about it." He turned to me as if seeking a sympathetic ear. "He's not good at waiting for the wok to heat enough, nor the oil."

I nodded sagely in understanding.

"Hey." Duo raised his hands in his own defense. "I don't get how it makes any sense that things will burn less if the pan is hotter."

"I imagine it has something to do with the viscosity of the oil and--"

"Don't finish that thought, Yuy," he cautioned me, wagging a finger in my direction. I hadn't yet been able to determine whether my habit of answering rhetorical questions truly annoyed him or amused him.

"But you don't--" He made a disapproving sound at me and gestured emphatically again. I thought I detected a faint gleam in his eye. "You don't have to wait--"

He made that noise again and accompanied it with a humorously serious glare.

I batted his hand away and completed my sentence. "You don't have to wait long if you turn it on ahead of time. Since we turned on the flame before chopping the onion, it was already heated up by the time the onion was done."

Holding his vegetables in a colander, Wufei was probably waiting for me to get out of the way so he could make use of the oil that was about ready to start smoking, but I surprised him by plucking the spatula from the container beside the cooktop and relieving him of the vegetables. After flipping on the overhead fan, I dropped them into the wok with a satisfying hiss and crackle and started to stir-fry.

Duo took the emptied colander off my hands with a look I couldn't quite place. I was getting a lot of those. While I flipped my veggies, he glanced at Wufei, then back to me again with an amused snort. "Huh. You must be doing something right if Wufei isn't bitching about your technique."

"I do not 'bitch', Maxwell."

He took the colander over to the sink and rinsed it out. "I'm sorry. Is 'complain' a better word? 'Whine'? 'Pout'?"

"You're the pouter, Maxwell, not me."

That strange homesickness faded a bit. While I wouldn't necessarily say that I liked cooking, I did get a pleasant sort of sensation from performing a domestic task and deriving a measurably positive result at the end. I liked putting things together. The friendly banter of which I was quite nearly a part helped, too.

"I don't pout, do I?" Duo pouted exaggeratedly at me, and I laughed. His expression immediately changed, his eyes widening and his lips forming an 'o'. "You laughed," he accused me.

I laughed again, this time making it a short, dry sound. The sizzle-hiss of the vegetables chimed in at just the right time to give it a faintly evil overtone. "I do that on occasion."

"Since when?"

Again with the accusation. I suppose that meant he thought it was a change for the better. He was lucky I took his odd logic with a certain sort of humor. While I could wish he didn't condemn me for having changed for the better, I chose to accept it as a distinctly 'Duo' phenomenon. I accepted a lot of 'Duo' phenomena. Things were easier that way. "Since always."

"Since when?" he demanded again.

I thought back over the times we had spent together, trying to find some occasion when I had laughed in his presence. "Okay, maybe not so much during the war."

"Ever so much?"

There seemed to be a few words missing from that question. Perhaps the sounds of the kitchen overshadowed them. I glanced over to Wufei, leaning calmly against the counter beside the sink watching us with a curiously intent, closed expression. I turned back to Duo. "Huh?"

Unfazed, he clarified. "I meant, that was like a comparison, right? 'Not so much during the war'... then so much more... when?"

The longer I took to answer the question, the more it seemed I could read his expression, and see something a little bit... hurt? beneath it. Because he had missed it? Well, that wasn't anyone's fault. Or perhaps it was that faint betrayal he had expressed at my perceived change, as if I were leaving him behind in this progression towards inner peace.

"Then..." I shrugged awkwardly, hand still working at flipping the vegetables. They were nearing completion. I found the salt canister. "...Other times."

A single glance at Duo's faint frown prompted me to add something more to my answer, using this as an example of something I had said earlier that he hadn't quite seemed to accept, though leavening it with a bit of dry humor. "I spent most of the war alone. It's not generally considered healthy to laugh too much when a person's by himself."

I felt an irrational surge of pride when I squeezed a small laugh from him. He declined to continue the exchange further, which gave me the opportunity to request a dish from Wufei. This time, it was Duo that watched the interaction carefully, and that brief feeling of contentment receded. I still had to guard against their judgment, it seemed. I accepted them as they were; had I not earned the same respect from them?

A quick rinse of the wok and we were ready to cook the meat. I did so with a subdued, silent air. I'd done this enough times that I didn't need to think very hard about it anymore. The time during which we waited for the oil to heat once more passed in almost silent challenge from Duo, as if he was testing whether or not we really had the patience we claimed we had. I know I did. There was no point in putting effort into something if the end result was going to be suboptimal. Especially if this effort was some sort of test. Despite the fact that I thought it an unnecessary test. Even if it was a test I found myself wanting to pass.

The fact that I couldn't quite make up my mind about the 'test' annoyed me, depressed me, amused me... I couldn't even make up my mind about how I felt about that. I needed more sleep before I could deal with something of this sort of complexity, so I chose to ignore it for the time being. The situation, though dynamic, had proven to be omnipresent. I could deal with it some other time.

Dinner was, at least for me, an uneasy affair. I found myself uncomfortable even with the way they complimented me on my cooking. I shook it off enough so that they didn't seem to notice anything amiss, but still it rankled that they would constantly question me, or perhaps more accurately, question my ability to be normal. I had taken a certain amount of pride in being able to show them more than they had seen during the war, but now I had to stop and wonder just what sort of impression they all had of me that I was constantly showing them things they hadn't expected. Was it all really so difficult to believe?

Perhaps I needed to temper my uncharitable thoughts. It had, after all, taken me a few years to prove to myself that I could be normal. I suppose I couldn't hold it against them that they might need a similar amount of time. The difference, though, was that I hadn't surprised myself. I knew it was in me. I had just needed the time to let it assert itself.

Wufei took care of the dishes after dinner, in return for my cooking. Duo probably would have split the duty with him to make things even, but that would have left me to my own devices again, so he let it go and sat with me on the sofa.

There were a few obligatory quiet moments before any conversation got underway, and then he asked me a question in all seriousness. "You want a beer or something?"

"No. Thank you." It was an automatic response. I didn't normally drink on general principle, even though I was fairly confident that a beer wouldn't impact my senses enough to be a threat. I also didn't drink because I had tried a few different things in my time, but had never really found something enough to my liking to make it worth it.

Duo laughed, finding humor where I saw none. "That's good to hear, since Fei doesn't stock any. This is a tea-swilling household."

Without having to look over my shoulder, I remembered that I had seen a hot water heater on the kitchen countertop that would certainly confirm Duo's assertion. In fact, I belatedly remembered seeing Wufei start to brew a pot. I must have been less alert than I thought. I favored Duo with an inquisitive look. Why had he asked, knowing what he did?

"Hey, you can tell a lot about a guy by what he drinks."

Maybe these 'tests' were just his way of trying to discern more about me. Could I fault him? Maybe. I had hoped that, by now, we knew all the important things about each other. "Can you do the same with tea?"

He shrugged carelessly. "What kind of tea do you prefer?"

"Green tea. Jasmine tea." I tried to figure out what that could possibly say about me, but I couldn't come up with much.

Duo made a show of considering it. "Hmmmm. Real tea, then. Not the cream and sugar kind."

Cream and sugar weren't inherently evil. Just with most Asian teas. "I used to know a guy... He considered all teas to be just about equal since he always put so much sugar in them that they all tasted the same. Like sugar." I shook my head in remembrance.

"Heh, didn't like that, did ya?"

I suppose the disapproval had been made evident in my tone. "It... saddened me, I think."

He chuckled again. "And you claim you aren't melancholy."

That brought a faint lopsided smile to my lips. "I claimed I wasn't always melancholy. That doesn't mean I don't have my moments."

He shifted in his seat beside me, settling down to something a little more relaxed. "Why does this guy's tea make you sad?"

It sounded silly when it was phrased like that, but after giving some thought to what I had said, was it really any more silly than the reason? I could have gotten away without answering, but I answered anyway. "I think because... there are so many different kinds of tea, and each of them different in their own special ways... and yet he chose to ignore all of that. He just dismissed all of their unique characteristics in favor of... of dosing them all with enough of what he liked that he could swallow it, and all the while claim that yes, he likes to drink tea. It just seems so... blind and artificial. Why bother pretend it's tea at that point? Why not just admit that you don't like tea, and stop trying to find ways to sugarcoat the truth, or change it into something it's not? Does a person really benefit from that much self-deception?" I came to a halt with a startled blink, an off-balance silence, and an uneasy shrug. "But maybe I'm just reading too much into a cup of tea."

I dared a sidelong glance at Duo, turning into something more direct when I saw a strange, introspective understanding in his face. He, too, paused for a few long moments before quirking a nonchalant grin at me. "Heh, guess you really can tell a lot about a guy from the tea he drinks, then."

Or maybe you could tell a lot about a guy from the tea that other people drank. His grin was used and then dismissed, his look returning to something more deep and complex. I wanted to know what was behind it, but resigned myself to never finding out unless he told me, which was unlikely.

I felt it only fair that I get to find out about him in return. "So, do you drink?"

It didn't take that long for his mind to switch gears. "Me? Kinda. I mean, I'll drink, but never as something I would look to do on my own."

"Social drinking, then?" Yes, that did say something about him.

"I guess you could call it that. It's never been something I wanted to really wander into..." His expression darkened. "Too easy not to wander back out."

There were a lot of ways of coping with our histories. Alcohol could easily have been one of them. I tried to imagine myself as an alcoholic. I could, but only if I'd wanted to become one, or hadn't cared if I did. If I ever got to that point where I was just numbed beyond all good sense, I could see me throwing myself into it with the same zeal I did anything else. It was a sobering thought.

"There were a lot of paths I could have chosen," I shared with him softly, counting on him being able to follow my progression of thoughts. "I'm rather fond of the one I did."

His eyes dropped to the pattern of Wufei's couch. "Lucky you," he murmured.

That saddened me more than any sugar-laden cup of tea ever would. I put my hand on top of the one that was scratching discontentedly at the upholstery and tried to catch his eye, but the sound of Wufei turning off the water with a finality that indicated completion of his task cautioned me that our moment was over. I gave his hand a squeeze and withdrew fingers that decided to brush lightly over the back of his hand as they departed.

With the addition of Wufei, the conversation turned to lighter matters. It was, once again, eerily reminiscent of our group encounters on the Peacemillion. With the final days of battle staring us in the face, there had been no need to discuss it with words. Conversations during our downtime, if any, lingered on inconsequentials, solemn or otherwise, while all matters of greater import were easily conveyed in the spaces left unfilled with the weight of words.

*****

There was the feeling of an embrace, of something wrapping itself around me and welcoming me. It was familiar. My mind struggled with it for a moment before it interpreted all the data and created a vision to match the sensation.

I sat in a chair, the cushioned seat having long since molded itself to my contours after innumerable hours of training and severe gravitational forces. I knew I had grown since I had last sat in that chair, but still I fit. The cockpit welcomed me despite my superficial changes. The control sticks in my hands were still worn with familiar grooves that matched the calluses that had never quite gone away. I knew if I shifted my feet just so, I would find the foot pedals controlling my roll, pitch, and yaw.

A pattern of green lights lit the console in front of me, reassuring me that all of my systems were operating within allowable parameters. It made me stop and realize one of the reasons why I had always found green to be such a comforting color.

My central monitor was what really confirmed it for me. This wasn't just Wing, but its successor. Shortly on the heels of that thought came the awareness of the Zero system, its thoughts and calculations lying neatly beside my own. We had no purpose at the moment, no enemy to battle, no strategies to plot, but I had never had a problem handling Zero under such circumstances. I may have imagined it, but I thought I almost heard a peaceful purr when I let our thoughts mingle.

It transformed into a thought-voice, pushing curiosity at me in soft pulses that seemed to mimic the rhythm of a heart beat. Who are you?

Heero Yuy. It was the name I had made my own.

Who are you?

Pilot of Wing Zero? I hadn't identified myself as such for a very long time, but it seemed appropriate now.

Who are you?

Me. I didn't like labels. I was a soldier, a student, a friend, a pilot... I was each of those, but more than just a sum of my parts.

Images from my life flashed before my mind's eye, everything from Odin telling the port authorities that I was his son, to J giving me my new designation right before I left for Earth. I relived the first time I had seen Wing and the first time I had seen the ocean. I saw myself pressing the button to destroy a base with an apartment complex too close by, and I saw myself pointing a gun at a little girl already sporting a bullet hole in her chest. I saw the back of Relena's head as she stubbornly stood between Duo and me, and I saw her giving me a teddy bear right before I left for parts unknown. I saw Trix teasing me about that very same teddy bear, and I saw the computer lab at school, all of the resident geeks present and accounted for.

More memories flashed by more quickly than I could recognize, highlights of the path that I had chosen, but it all solidified into one very solid question.

Do you still have it in you?

"Yeah, maybe, I guess."

That hadn't been my voice answering. And come to think of it, the question itself had a vaguely Wufei-tone to it. I wriggled my way out of sleep and managed to blink heavy eyes open. Duo sat beside me on the sofa, body facing me, but with his head directed over his shoulder.

"Duo?" I asked, voice rough with sleep. I realized I was curled up in a corner of the sofa, having fallen asleep in the middle of our conversation. That hadn't been a part of my plan. The lights were all out now. How much time had passed? I uncurled stiffly, set on getting up. "Sorry. I didn't mean to fall asleep in your bed..."

A hand on my shoulder kept me seated. "Did you get any sleep last night?"

Behind us, I heard a door shut softly. Perhaps Wufei really had been here. I thought about looking towards the short hallway to the rest of his apartment, but I winced at the crick in my neck. "Not really." There had been so much to do, and so many Zero-induced feelings ready to pounce on me if I stopped.

His hand migrated to my neck and took over the sorry job I had been doing with my own hand. I suppressed a hiss as he kneaded at the sore spot, shifting my focus to the rest of my uncooperative joints. There was a reason I normally slept flat on my back.

"Hey, where do you think you're going?" he chided, once again making sure I didn't get up. "It's late. You're staying."

"It's... but... your bed." That wasn't the most coherent argument I could have made, but it would have to do. My thoughts were still a bit scrambled.

"Big enough for two." He tugged my unresisting body towards him, turning us so we sat with our backs to the high arm of Wufei's sofa. It took me a few moments to recognize that a pillow was there to give us additional support. Occupied with gratefully stretching my legs out along the length of the sofa, I didn't think too hard about the fact that he held me in a loose embrace. I did notice that he was wearing a loose pair of sweat pants and a tank top, and that he smelled faintly of soap.

My mind just filed that under 'pleasant' and let it go, choosing instead to go back and pick up on something it had wanted to before, but had missed the opportunity to do. "Mmmm... what path have you chosen, Duo?" I asked muzzily. It would have been nice to be able to see some of the highlights of his life.

There was a brief interruption in the pattern of his breathing. "One that leads into a cul-de-sac," he whispered, the warm darkness around us conspiring once more to bring things out in the open.

Then again, the darkness hardly mattered to me at the moment since my eyes had long since fallen shut again. "Maybe you should choose another one," I advised, with all the sage wisdom of a person half asleep.

"Screw you, Yuy."

His words lacked heat, but the challenge did stir me to a slightly stronger state of awareness. "Seriously. If the horse throws you off, shoot the goddamn thing and get yourself another one." His startled chuckle made me smile. "Well, maybe you should try getting back on a few times, just to make sure the first time wasn't a fluke."

"But if it ain't working... maybe it's because I keep doing the same things wrong."

"Mmmm."

He hummed thoughtfully. "Don't know too much about horses, I guess."

I obliged him by rephrasing. "Don't get a Pisces to do a Gundam's work. It won't work, no matter how hard you try."

"You mean I've been flying a fucking Pisces all this time? No wonder I can't get shit done." I felt him laugh again, though I didn't hear it. I decided that I liked making him laugh. It ended with a sigh. "I don't know if I can fly Wing, Heero."

"Why would you want to? 'Scythe'll get the job done just as well." I had a vague awareness that we were speaking metaphorically of paths and life decisions, but I could -- apparently --talk mobile suits in my sleep, so I stuck with it and hoped the analogy would hold without my having to devote any sort of deeper thought to the matter.

"But where is 'Scythe now?"

I shrugged, the action sort of blending into a cuddly shift of position. "He's in you. Waiting."

"How will I know?"

I made a sleepy, nostalgic sound. "Remember the first time you laid eyes on him? Did you think, he was made for me? Did you think, he's exactly what I need? Do you remember the first time they let you sit in his cockpit? The first time they let you work his controls? The first time you really, really looked forward to reading a user's manual and memorizing specs? There was a long learning curve, but you enjoyed every second of it." I exhaled audibly as that old feeling washed over me. "Mmmmm. Something like that. Something like that'll hit you, and you'll know he's the one."

His breathing pattern changed again, but I was too fuzzy to attempt an analysis of it. I was drifting off again when he finally finished assimilating my words. "You're half asleep, and I talk to you for a couple of minutes, and you answer questions I've been struggling with for years. Even Fei's been less than helpful."

I think there was another one of those strange accusations in there, but I like to think it held some measure of fondness as well. "I struggled with them, too. ...You talked to Wufei?" I squeezed out through a yawn.

"Sometimes. But not about everything. Some things..."

Hmm, maybe that would account for the unexpected shifts in mood or mindset I found in him from one meeting to the next. I should have been curious about what the other guys knew. Speaking with the others reminded me of something. "What do you still have in you, Duo?"

I don't know if I was awake or asleep when I heard the answer. "You."

*****

My world was bathed in a golden glow, but I finally arrived at a state of waking and realized it was the sunlight hitting my eyelids. I averted my eyes before opening them. From the strength of light, I figured it was later than I normally woke. Oh-eight-hundred, perhaps?

I was still reclining against the cushions at one end of the sofa, but Duo wasn't one of my pillows anymore. The blanket I had seen draped over the back of the sofa was covering me now. I heard sounds coming from the kitchen, and I sat up, finding it much easier than I had the previous night, now that I had spent my sleep stretched out in comfort.

"Morning, Heero," Duo chirped as I ran a hand through my hair. "Sleep okay?"

I glanced over to him, then at Wufei behind him, whose eye I caught as he sliced some bread. He nodded briefly at me in greeting before I returned my gaze to Duo, nursing a cup of orange juice. I wasn't certain if his question actually demanded an answer, nor was I particularly used to being the last one up in the morning. Even though I knew I hadn't slept for thirty-six hours before dozing off on the couch, it still displeased me.

Deciding a shrug was a good enough answer for Duo's question, ambiguous enough to mean anything if he hadn't been looking for an answer, I stood, stretched, and turned back to Wufei. "Mind if I borrow your shower?"

He turned dark brown eyes on me, and recalling bits of my conversation with Duo before I drifted off into sleep again, I wondered what it was his look said he knew. Did he wake up first, or Duo? He nodded in response to my question. "Towels are in the hall closet."

I took a towel as bidden and went to the bathroom. The mirror captured my attention. I still looked tired. Then the shine of my hair reminded me that I hadn't bathed in two days, and I turned to rectify the situation.

I showered efficiently, keeping in mind that we had a raid on Meridian planned for this afternoon. The only hitch encountered was when I straightened after drying my legs. A brief head rush hit me, reminding me that I had been remiss in taking my vitamins, too. They were still in the bathroom in my quarters at HQ. I made a mental note to be careful around Sally. She had made it clear that she would happily kick my ass if she found out I wasn't taking proper care of myself.

There were two toothbrushes on the sink counter, a tube of toothpaste, one brush and one comb, and one overnight bag. It wasn't too difficult to figure out what belonged to whom. I settled for rigorously toweling my hair dry and finger-combing it. I had found that my hair didn't need much more than that to settle down into its normal appearance. Not knowing what I should do with my towel, I hung it neatly on the rack and returned to the others in the kitchen.

"Wow," Duo said by way of greeting, handing me a glass of orange juice. "It's not floofy. What did you do, finger-comb that mop?"

I opted to drink my juice rather than answer. If necessary, I could run a real comb through it when I got back to HQ. It would be nice to stop by my room and get a fresh set of clothing, brush my teeth, maybe pop a pill.

*****

Part 17

The incursion against Meridian Biotech was carried out smoothly. Because the execution of warrants against such a large entity was not our forte, the five of us took a back seat to the experienced professionalism of the other Preventers Une had assigned to the case. We had quite the army of uniforms with us in order to lock down an entire facility. Since I was the only person without a Preventers jacket, Duo even managed to locate one for me.

After confirming the presence of all the major players, we swept in through the front doors of the building, men and women filing by in quick step as someone stopped by the front desk and showed the warrant to the receptionist. She stuttered and tried to buzz her superiors, but a polite smile and a warning imparted to her how unnecessary such a gesture was. Her bosses would know soon enough.

All of the exits were secured with cool efficiency. Staff were instructed to please stay calm without an ominous baring of teeth. But while we left the rest of the building to the others, Hoffman and Conzemius were ours.

They were conveniently holding a private meeting in Hoffman's office. When the door opened, Hoffman immediately stood. "What you are doing? We're having a--" The words died on his lips when he recognized us. Instead, he put on an appropriately greasy smile. "Gentlemen. Is there something I can help you with? I'm afraid you've interrupted me in the middle of something..."

He was on the receiving end of several nasty smiles. We were not here on friendly business any more. Wufei took the lead in delivering the good news. "Henri Hoffman, James Conzemius, you are under arrest under ESUN law for illegal research involving radiogenic treatment of stem cells, use of the banned substance NBH, and manipulation of the Yersinia bacterium, all of which fall under the ESUN statute BD-three-twenty-six. Until further notice, you are being held solely responsible for the actions of your company. You have the right to remain silent--"

"That's impossible!" Conzemius burst out, surging out of his seat.

Duo, with the lovely privilege of standing the closest to the man, leveled a threatening look at him. "I would strongly suggest that you sit back down, Mr. Conzemius."

He sat. Wufei calmly finished reciting their rights.

Hoffman was a little more composed. "I'm afraid we don't know what you're talking about, gentlemen. Are you suggesting that people at Meridian have been conducting illegal research?" The CEO reminded me faintly of Treize Khushrenada, only Treize had been ten times better at it.

Quatre decided to cut through all of the useless denials. "We have solid evidence linking not only this company, but you two personally, to enough illegal activity to shut this company down permanently, prosecute a significant number of your employees, and lock you two away for a very, very long time. Just how hard we decide to come down on you will depend on you."

There was a coldly furious, calculating look in Hoffman's eyes as he considered the possibilities. Perhaps he was seeing the inevitability of his downfall. Conzemius was not as gracious. There was a reason he wasn't the CEO. "You're bluffing," he asserted tensely.

Quatre calmly stared him down. "Are we? We know you're guilty, you know you're guilty, and soon enough the rest of the Earth Sphere will know it, too. We have everything from internal memos to corpses to prove our case, and even without that, I'm sure that we'll be able to get quite a few of your own employees to turn and incriminate you once they realize how things are going down. I would suggest you cooperate with us."

Hoffman took a non-threatening step forward, just enough to take the fore. "What do you want from us?"

"Everything we've charged you with is a very serious crime, and we will happily prosecute you for what you've done. Let there be no mistake about that. But as serious as those charges are, let us not pretend that there is not something equally dangerous that you've done, that you now hold in your possession."

The CEO attempted to pretend innocence even though his expression clearly indicated that he knew exactly what we were talking about. "What do you mean?"

Quatre continued, unperturbed. "We were originally brought here because of the claims that Meridian Biotechnology was hacked by some terrorist agency, and in the course of our investigation, we learned that indeed, you were, only it wasn't any by outside party. The party responsible for the system failure lay within these walls. There was an accident involving a piece of hardware you had stolen from the Preventers. No doubt we'll be able to locate it somewhere in this complex, but I think we'll be in a much more pleasant mood if you just tell us where to look. Otherwise, we'll just have to tear this entire place down in our search."

"Meridian Biotechnologies is a very influential company on Earth and in space. Our research, our products, and our programs help millions. We provide thousands of people with employment. If you destroy this company, you will be destroying much more than just my or James' lives."

So apparently the man had a bit of heart after all. Or at the very least, he was not above using it to try and preserve his own skin. Quatre took the pronouncement of doom without batting an eye. "Do not think that we are not keenly aware of this, Mr. Hoffman, but also do not think that we will let that stop us from bringing you to justice. There will be others to fill the holes that Meridian leaves in its passing, if it comes to that. But it doesn't have to come to that. It is not a question of whether we care for these millions of people. If you care at all for these people, you will tell us what we want to know, and we will make sure that as much of Meridian as possible survives."

Hoffman walked over to the large windows overlooking the atrium of the company he had built, presiding over the crumbling of his empire with a proprietary air. The floor below was teeming with activity. I didn't get the feeling that Hoffman really cared about the people his company affected so much as the company itself. He struck me as just arrogant enough to want to see his company go on, even if he couldn't go on with it.

Conzemius got that shifty-eyed look that said he was going to try and bolt while we were distracted by his boss, but Trowa and I closed ranks on the door and glared him back into his seat. He complied, hunching in on himself and leveling a poisonous stare at his comrade. Perhaps he was feeling betrayed by the fact that Hoffman seemed so accepting of his fate.

Hoffman turned around and pinned Duo with an intense stare, and Duo tensed under the scrutiny. "It is truly a pity that you were unwilling to provide us with a blood sample. L2 really is such a fascinating place. There are so many things to be learnt there." His gaze released Duo and swept across the rest of us. "Mutations abound there, you know, giving rise to new adaptations in established, stagnant patterns. Our research interests started there with the intent to study the genetic anomalies of the indigenous population. Wouldn't it be ironic, after all, if all this time we had been seeking a cure or treatment for some terrible disease, only to find that years ago, some human had already evolved a resistance to it? Wouldn't it have been a shame to let such a wealth of possibilities slip through our fingers?"

He turned to Duo again. I could see that Duo refused to take a step back from the man through a stubborn exertion of will. "I wouldn't be surprised to find that you had naturally developed some sort of immunity to the illnesses that ravage the cluster. You might consider donating yourself to science one day. You could hold some very beneficial answers in your genes."

This time, the tension in Duo's body came from forcibly refraining from taking a step forward and doing something he would have regretted. I had to admit, I admired his restraint.

Quatre shifted slightly to the right, throwing his presence between the two of them as a buffer. "Admirable goals, but you seem to have wandered away from them."

We let Hoffman have his final words before his downfall. Explanations were good, especially when they had been properly warned that anything they said would be used against them at a later date.

The CEO turned back towards the window, hands clasped loosely behind his back. "If we could have harnessed that power... If we could have found a way to gather all of those beneficial anomalies, all those tiny bits of evolution, and combine them into a single person... we would have had a superior member of the human race. Although I suppose the government of L2 had similar plans, if a radically different idea of implementation."

"What do you mean?"

"Rather than gathering the positive elements, they decided to eliminate the negative elements. I was quite captured by the notion when we came across proof in our research that they had deliberately allowed the infections to spread through the lower segments of their ranks."

Duo couldn't stop himself from commenting now. "Yeah, and it was the self-interest of politicians and companies like this one that let them get away with it."

"Get away with it?" Hoffman laughed darkly. "No, they got away with nothing. It was the disease that got away from them. They never intended to let it kill as many as it did, but they miscalculated. Viruses and bacteria evolve at a much faster rate than humans do because of their rapid reproduction. They forgot that. They thought they would be able to control the course of the disease, but it evolved beyond their ability to keep up with. They certainly had an interesting idea, but what they lacked was a way to predict which way the disease would turn."

"Zero," I murmured. Melancholia must have been creeping up on me again. I found myself glad that we had spared Zero the fate of being turned to such evil purposes.

"Yes, the Zero system. What a remarkable piece of technology. Melded with the sheer force of nature, the potential defies all measurement."

"How does one get from the improvement of mankind to the engineering of deadly biological agents?" Trowa mused from his place beside me.

Hoffman tore his eyes away from his domain below and turned back to us. "Small steps first. How can we hope to understand and control the human genome when we cannot even master that of a creature infinitely less complex than us?"

The impact of his words nearly swayed me on my feet. It seemed that every time we thought we knew what was going on, the rug got pulled out from underneath us again. That they would decimate groups like the Condasan community for money, I could understand. That they would do so for the sake of science sickened me. They could just as easily have turned their minds towards engineering something that would have benefited others, but instead they chose something that would cause harm.

From a distant, objective standpoint, I could see some sort of reasoning behind that, if it weren't something as simple as money. The development of new medicines and treatments was very carefully monitored and regulated. If they came up with something effective, they would have had problems bringing it to market without thorough documentation of their experimental progress. They wouldn't have to worry about what sort of side effects they conjured up if they weren't trying to cure their guinea pigs. They would always have a market that would be willing to provide them with ideas and targets. Death was a simpler thing. There were so many different ways to kill a person, and far fewer to save one.

Stop that! I scolded myself harshly. I didn't want to keep thinking these cold, callous things.

Quatre, too, had had enough. "Where is it, Hoffman?"

He breathed in a final breath of freedom before answering. "The backroom of B-four-sixteen."

Wufei stepped out of the room immediately to inform the search teams to secure the area in question.

Conzemius lashed out at his boss. "You're a fool, Henri!"

Hoffman had turned back to the window.

Maybe his goals had been 'pure', so to speak, but I didn't think the rest of his employees necessarily shared his vision. Conzemius was a fine example. Maybe he was in it for the money, or maybe he had other research concerns, but whatever the case, he and Hoffman had parted philosophical ways, just as, perhaps, Zamora had. We would have to remember to take that into account.

We called in some of the other Preventers to take the two Meridian executives into custody and begin the search of their offices, then met up with Wufei on the way down to this backroom of B-four-sixteen. If Hoffman wasn't telling the truth, all bets were off on the informal deal we had struck with him.

It honestly took us a little while to find B-four-sixteen. Even with all of the schematics that we had gathered during our jaunt through Meridian's halls two nights previous, and stopping to ask for directions from a couple of Meridian employees, and getting two members of the Meridian security team to let us into restricted areas, the labyrinthine corridors almost got us.

I surveyed the people there once we finally got to the lab. I recognized two of them as people we had pegged as possibly being members of the secret team, according to what we had divined from their skill sets and HR information. None of them looked particularly sinister. They looked like they were carrying out absolutely mundane research. How guilty were they really, I wondered. Did they understand what they were working with? Did they have any idea where it had come from?

We startled them as we filed into the lab, our uniforms giving us an instant air of menacing authority. Either most of them were clueless, or they were really good actors, but I didn't get the feeling that they had any idea what was going on. After informing them that they were working with a highly sophisticated, illegally acquired piece of computer hardware, they finally seemed to comprehend their situation.

After enduring their stammered answers to our questions, I was forced to revise my assessment. I still thought they were mostly innocent, but only because Hoffman had this crew doing little bits of related research. Any of the deeper research would have been done by a smaller, more discreet team, possibly after hours. There was no way that this many people could have kept quiet about Stewart's condition or the resulting system shutdown the incident had caused.

It took us a while to get into the secured back room of the lab, and when we finally did, we encountered an unpleasant surprise. Zero wasn't there. It was clear that it had been at one point, what with the computers and the wires and the interfaces and the mounts, but there was one conspicuously empty spot in the middle of all of it.

I turned on one of the lab techs that had helped us get in. "Where is it?"

"Where's what?" he squeaked nervously.

Reminding myself of my opinions regarding their innocence in this matter, I forced myself to approach the situation more calmly. "There's something missing from this room. Has anyone been in or out of it lately?"

When the man shrugged helplessly, I looked demandingly to his comrades, but after a minute of collective hemming and hawing, we received no answers. The others started asking about who would have access to the secured room, while I decided to take a more direct route.

On a hunch, I commandeered one of the lab computers and accessed the security subnet with an account that wasn't mine and a password I wasn't supposed to have. Once again, the team from that department expressed dismay at my rampant disregard for their system integrity, but I ignored them. There was only so much one could get accomplished when going through the proper channels. Security systems were secure because it was supposed to be very difficult to obtain any useful information from them using conventional methods.

There was one name that had popped up a little too often during our investigation into this case, and I didn't see his face here now. I ran Zamora through the system and tracked down his activity in the building.

I got the attention of the rest of my team, and with a few stern looks at the lab technicians, they flocked around my workstation.

"Security has Zamora logged as accessing this room at oh-six-hundred."

"That would have been before any of these guys showed up," Duo mused, casting a suspicious look over his shoulder at them for the heck of it.

"Unfortunately, it also has him leaving the premises at oh-seven-hundred. He hasn't been back." This was becoming terribly reminiscent of the time when Brisbois had taken off with the system from HQ.

Wufei cursed softly. "Did someone tip him off?"

"Let's talk to Hoffman," Quatre proposed. "And in the meantime, we can let local authorities know we're looking for him."

Leaving the lab to be secured by the Preventers force we had brought with us, we made our way quickly to the executive offices, arriving in much less time than it had taken us to track down the lab. Hoffman and Conzemius had been shut away into one of the conference rooms, two agents watching over them.

"Where is it?" Quatre demanded as soon as the door was closed.

Hoffman looked at him, surprised. "I told you--"

"It's gone."

"What?" That came from Conzemius. While Hoffman looked concerned, Conzemius looked offended.

"Who is Marc Zamora?" I asked.

Conzemius pushed himself away from the conference table in anger and turned on his partner. "Zamora? That idiot! I told you he was dangerous."

"James," Hoffman started sharply, the name a warning.

It was ignored. "I told you he was unpredictable. As soon as he showed he had a different agenda, we should have gotten rid of him."

"We were trying to, remember?"

"'Agenda', gentlemen?" Quatre cut in.

Conzemius clammed up sullenly, leaving the CEO to answer the question. He seemed reluctant at first, but there are very few people that won't cave in under the force of five very powerful stares. He cleared his throat uneasily. "Marc Zamora... didn't agree with our decision to eschew the neural interface. We removed him from the project last week, but suspected him of continuing to conduct unauthorized research with the system after hours."

"Research?" I repeated, a sinking feeling beginning to develop in my gut. "Was he using the interface himself with the system?"

Hoffman shrugged. "Maybe. It seemed likely. We don't suspect anyone else of working with him."

"We were hoping he would fry himself with it," Conzemius spat out. His eyes opened wide and he shut up afterward when he realized that what he had said could have been quite incriminating. We had not brought up the Stewart matter, and they didn't know whether we knew about him or not.

Well, this newest piece of information made things interesting, in a not particularly good way. Using Zero could have left Zamora in an altered state. I could easily see a man running off with the system in a paranoid fit. This did not bode well at all.

"What sort of disagreement was this?" Quatre asked.

Hoffman took the time to straighten his tie before answering. While he might have been delighted to see the Zero system slip through our fingers, I didn't think he liked the idea of one of his upstart underlings making off with it. "He thought we were wasting the potential of the system by not using the interface."

"What sort of 'potential' did he believe could be attained?"

"Zamora was one of the first persons we recruited to work on the project. The man is brilliant, despite his little... quirks. He believes in the 'harmony' of technology and biology, to the creation of something superior to the sum of its parts. Once we discarded the interface, I suppose we strayed a little too far from his ideas."

"What sort of man is he? What will he do if he has the system?"

Hoffman shrugged. "James?"

Ungracious in defeat, Conzemius scowled, but answered reluctantly. Unfortunately, he was less than helpful. "Zamora was a loose cannon. Always wanted the chance to prove his ideas, thinking he was better than everyone else. The guy was a nut. He's probably locked in a dark closet somewhere with Zero in one hand and an interface in the other."

We needed to look into the man's background and see what we could see. Once again leaving the rest of the operation to the agents assigned to the case, we reconvened in a different conference room and discussed our alternatives while remaining on-site. Local authorities had put out an APB on Zamora, but he had maybe a six hour head start on us. A man could get very far in six hours. Just for kicks, a squad car was sent to his apartment, but there was no one there.

Meridian had a decent record on its employee. We scrounged up a bit more information to complete the picture. Zamora was one of the senior members of the biotechnology department. He had rather broad interests in cybernetics, nanotechnology, computer vision, and neural networks, with two advanced degrees from prestigious colleges. His files indicated that he had no offspring or siblings, and that both his parents had passed away some years ago.

Of particular interest to us was that he was ex-military. Federation R&D, to be precise. A few calls were sufficient to determine that his service had been unremarkable, stationed not too far away from here at a small base that had surrendered peacefully during Operation Daybreak. He resigned his commission not long after and joined the private sector.

We checked to see if he had any ties to paramilitary rebel groups or the like, especially those we had suspected early on in our investigation, but as expected, we found none other than his old Federation ties. Given his profile, we found it unlikely he would have kept up with his former comrades unless they had also been in the R&D division. Our best guess was that he had joined the Federation only because they had plentiful funding for projects in the fields in which he was interested. After the OZ coup brought the action to his doorstep, probably cutting down miscellaneous side projects such as Zamora's in favor of more relevant research, he had taken off for greener pastures. We had limited access to OZ records with which to prove our theory, but the fact that the base was eventually shut down after the wars, its funds and personnel diverted elsewhere, confirmed it enough.

Duo went off with Quatre to chat up some of Zamora's co-workers. He was noticeably disgruntled when he came back. "Why can't evil villains ever have any friends?" he grumped, plopping back down in a chair.

Quatre smiled. "What Duo means to say is that Zamora kept to himself. We weren't able to find out anything useful from his co-workers."

"Other than the same sort of crap we got about Brisbois."

"We got useful information from Brisbois' co-workers," I reminded him. "You did manage to find out a good part of his motivation, and we used those leads to direct our search."

Duo frowned uncertainly at me, as if unable to decide whether or not I was patronizing him again. Hadn't he yet learnt that I didn't give false praise? It was mere fact that he was the one that had uncovered the genetic purity lead. Funny how that had come back now. It was an interesting thought exercise to debate whether Hoffman's schemes had been designed to enhance human purity, or pollute it.

"Did Zamora annoy his co-workers in the same way Brisbois did?" Trowa asked.

Since Duo was otherwise occupied, Quatre answered. "He worked long hours, recently more than usual. He hinted that he had some side project of some sort, but his co-workers couldn't give us any clues as to what. It seemed top secret. Since he was recently diverted to the Zero project, most of his old cronies have had limited contact with him. No one could tell us if he had any interests other than the ones we already know about. Judging from his track record, he works on projects for the sake of research and advancement of knowledge rather than caring much for the actual goal of the project. I don't know what he might do with the system, now that he has it."

I was forced to share my misgivings with the rest of them at this point, even though I knew it would likely bias them even further against the system. We were all aware of this possibility, but it was one of those things that could be conveniently forgotten. "If Zamora is unable to handle the system, it might not matter what he was like. He may be unbalanced enough to do anything now. Even the smallest idea could be amplified out of proportion if the system picks up on it."

Two dark looks and two pained looks filled the room before Quatre, chewing on his lip for a second, regained his business-like manner. "Any guesses, then? Based on what sorts of things Zero might prefer."

That was a very open-ended question. I took a few moments to gather my thoughts and figure out what might be useful to us. "Well... Zero is more likely to pick up on goals. If Zamora had ideals, about the 'harmony of technology and biology', for instance, it might interpret the implementation of such an ideal as a goal."

"So it might decide to..."

"It might influence Zamora to," I corrected. I preferred to make it clear that Zero wasn't the one that was making the decisions.

He nodded his head slightly in acknowledgment. "So it might influence him to... try to create some harmonious creature?"

"Try to become some harmonious creature," Trowa suggested.

Duo popped in with the next proposal. "So what would he do? Make some sort of cyborg thingie, based on himself or not. Whatever. Probably someone else at first, I'd imagine, since it's probably hard to replace your arm with a mechanical one when you've only got one to work with. So he'd need guinea pigs, maybe, and hardware. He'd definitely need to acquire components. I'm sure we can... Heero?"

I blinked, but continued to stare at some point in middle space. I was too busy imagining the possibilities. "You forgot to factor in Zero," I said slowly.

"What do you mean?"

"If I were high on Zero, and wanting to create some sort of ultimate hybrid... I'd find some way to fuse myself, or someone, with Zero. An embedded DNI, perhaps, or a human permanently hooked up to the computer. A remote or portable device would work well, too. It'd be perfect. Optimal. Ideal."

Wufei frowned. "I don't like where you're going with that, Yuy."

It didn't matter. It was coming whether or not it was a pleasant idea. "Zero is the ultimate computing machine, by its own standards and otherwise. A human with its analytical power at his fingertips would be... immensely powerful. Forget hardware. That's nothing without the mind to wield it."

Silence, nervous and uneasy. Then Duo. "You don't have to make it sound like you'd like to try it," he said with a low, even tone.

That wasn't what I had been implying at all, but in retrospect, perhaps my tone had been admiring and intense. I looked for a good response, and found only a weak one that didn't quite help my cause. "It's... it would be... 'harmonious'." I opened my mouth to try and explain more, but after a few half-formed syllables fell from my lips, I quit while I was ahead.

When talk started up again, it was careful and deliberate. I tried to stay out of it as much as I could since I had become highly conscious of every opinion I had. They came up with a lot of good ideas on their own. I didn't want to give them the wrong impression of where I stood. All I was doing was showing respect for the system and appreciation for the elegant efficiency that would be achieved upon a successful fusion of man and machine. I hadn't meant anything more. I didn't know if such a melding would be possible, or if it would be a good idea. In fact, it would probably be a very bad idea with Zamora at the helm, but that was irrelevant. I could easily follow the reasoning behind why Zero might suggest such an idea.

With my brooding silence shuffled off to the side without further comment, we re-evaluated our facts. While Duo and Quatre had been talking to the Meridian employees about our errant biotechnician, they had also confirmed to the best of their knowledge what, if anything, might have been taken by Zamora in his flight. Though they found his office in a slight disarray, they were assured that Zamora was accustomed to scattering his papers around in a haphazard fashion. Naturally, his hardware was confiscated for my perusal at a later time since Zamora was apparently on the paranoid side as well. His data was encrypted in more ways than I could break through in a few minutes. We were also informed, however, that the man had a laptop, and since it was missing, I was fairly certain that most of the data that we would want access to was no longer within our reach. Other than that, his office looked the same as always. Either he had planned on coming back, or he had had little warning before our raid to clear out.

His personal lab space was as boring and impersonal as his office. His computer told us that he had burnt the entire project folder on the computer to disc, but it couldn't tell us what in particular he had been interested in. A spare neural interface was unaccounted for, as well. Any other equipment that was missing would have to wait until we got back a complete inventory, which wouldn't be ready for at least a day, most likely more.

When we poked our heads outside of the conference room, I found myself highly impressed by the efficiency that the Preventers had managed to maintain despite the large scale of the operation. Employees were rounded up and interviewed en masse, sorted by project and rank. Scientists determined to be innocent were released, with stern admonitions that any attempt to leave the area and engage in otherwise suspicious activity would be interpreted as complicity. Employees that did not pass the initial inspection were shuffled off into another room for further interrogation.

As our superior officer, Une was briefed on the situation while Quatre and Duo had been speaking to the employees, and re-briefed after we had more information. Assured that the experienced agents in charge were thoroughly capable of handling things on their own, we were released from the Meridian investigation to start work on this latest offshoot of Zero's story.

*****

Part 18

I wasn't surprised by the knock I got on my door that night. The circumstances were the same: same time, same 'melancholy'... it seemed only natural that I get the same knock on my door. I padded over to the door and opened it, barely even giving my visitor a glance of welcome before stepping to the side to let him in.

His hand didn't go towards the light switch this time, but I was prepared. Some strange sense of nostalgia or something had made me activate the faint nightlight installed on the wall next to the bathroom door. While the door was still open, Duo took advantage of the greater light from the hall to plop himself aggressively down on my bed, favoring me with a frustrated look. "You know, Yuy, sometimes you... you just... augh!" He threw himself down onto the bed in a huff.

Blinking, I shut the door, cutting off the light with some vague hopes that perhaps in the pseudo-darkness, everything would make sense again. I waited for my eyes to adjust before taking a seat at the foot of the bed next to him. "What did I do this time?"

He leveled a glare at me. "You're doing it again!"

"Doing what?" I didn't feel the need to keep the exasperation from my voice.

He deflated rather suddenly, surprising me. "Doing... being all... calm and stuff."

"When have you known me not to be calm?" I asked pointedly.

A tired, edged laugh came forth from his mouth. "Alright, fine. You know, even when you were screaming at yourself and pieces of a spaceship about succeeding and living and stuff... I always thought you did it rather calmly, like you were just stating a well-known fact. Dammit, you were going to live through that; you were going to beat it and it was gonna like it. End of story." He laughed again, flailing his hand a bit on the covers until he could pat me on the knee. "Heh, you are such a crazy sonuvabitch sometimes."

I wouldn't disagree. "Is that what I was doing this time?"

A sober silence fell between us. His fingers pressed into my leg as they attempted to curl with tension. I put my hand on top of his and convinced it to relax. "You scare me sometimes, Yuy," he said quietly, still staring carefully at the ceiling. "You understand it too well."

There was no question what 'it' was. I tried to make light of it. "That is what I was called in for, isn't it?"

"'World's foremost expert', was it?" He snorted. "Who the hell made that title up?"

"Wasn't me. I certainly didn't ask for the position, either."

"Heero... Really truly... Is Zero just a computer to you?"

I shook my head. "Far from it. Well, yes, it's just a computer, as in it's not the monster that hides beneath the bed, but... it's no more 'just a computer' than Deathscythe was 'just a mobile suit'."

"You're fond of the mobile suit analogies, aren't you?"

I shrugged with a wry smile. It was easier to speak in analogies than it was to speak of more momentous, personal things. I could express more without having to say anything at all. I'd have thought Duo would seize such an opportunity to speak indirectly. "Stick with what you know, right?"

He smiled faintly in response, but it faded. "And you know Zero."

"Not in a biblical sense."

"Ack!" He shuddered violently, lifting his hands to his eyes to scrub vigorously at the image being presented on the inside of his eyelids. "Get it out! Get it out! Oooh, make it stop, Heero!"

Oops. Had I traumatized him? I'd been told my sense of humor could have that effect on people. I reached out tentatively and touched him on the shoulder. His whimpering stopped, his fingers cracked apart, and he peeked through the spaces at me. Two seconds later, his hands were removed altogether and his body untensed, but his expression remained pensive.

Finally, he took my hand in his own and stared at it. "You know... I keep looking over, expecting to see the boy I knew..." He turned his eyes to the rest of me. "Only to see the man I'm getting to know."

I took possession of our hands and went over his with my own, conducting a surface examination to find familiar calluses and trace life lines and love lines and all the other lines whose meaning I had never learned. "Why do you keep being surprised by what you find?"

His brow rose in an inquisitive fashion. "Do I?"

"You do," I confirmed. "Just now... I think you were startled by my sense of humor."

He hid behind a small laugh. "Oh, so that was a joke. Phew."

"Or when I was cooking," I continued, not about to let him stop me. "Or any time I mention a friend of mine from school. Or when I laugh. Or--"

"Hey, I have a right to be surprised by you having green hair."

"It's only a little green." That mild response seemed to be my new standard. "I'd be more surprised if you dyed your hair green."

"Oh, nuh-uh, not gonna happen."

I smiled, and caught him at it again. "There. See? You're doing it again." Only as an afterthought did I notice I had echoed his words from just minutes previous.

"I am--" He halted before a complete denial could come from his lips. "Well... okay, maybe just a little. Come on, you said it yourself. The war was a different sort of time."

I nodded amiably. "It was. Still... you never quite seem... happy with what you find when you look at me. Is that..." I stared at our hands for a few moments, trying to reconcile the difference in impressions. "Is that just how it is these days?" If that was the case, then it just seemed pointless to have brought up the matter of our physical intimacy.

It was gratifying when he chewed on his lip for a moment in thought, idly swinging our joined hands back and forth a bit. In the end, he shrugged uncomfortably. "Yeah, maybe a little.... I should probably stop doing that, huh?"

Another shrug sufficed for an answer. "Can you?"

He pinned me with a curiously intent look. "Do you want me to?"

The day I was cowed by another person's gaze would be a long time in coming. That didn't mean I couldn't shift slightly in my seat in a manner that might have been construed as uncomfortably. "It'd be nice. Why aren't you liking what you're finding?"

"Hm." His thoughts turned inwards for the space of several long breaths. "It's silly, really. I do like what I'm finding. It just... I dunno. Rubs me the wrong way or something. Makes me feel inadequate. Piques my curiosity. Maybe I just don't like surprises. Whatever. I dunno."

I picked up on the 'inadequate' part, despite his half-hearted effort to bury it with other possibilities. There it was again, him expressing dissatisfaction with the way his life had turned. With an impulse I had never experienced before, I felt compelled to give him a hug. I played with his hand instead, watching as my fingers danced their way down his arm to rest against the warm, firm curve of his bicep. His frame had gained some substance over the years. "What did you come in here for?"

"I..." He avoided eye contact and chose to stare at the ceiling again. "I was just talking to Trowa... and Quatre... about you and Zero. About how... well, I may have said some less than complimentary things that I may or may not have meant. And he was telling me how... unforgiving some of that may have been. And I listened to him and agreed a little... and then I left and started disagreeing again, even though I knew I shouldn't... then I guess just came over here to..." He shrugged awkwardly. "I dunno. Vent? Point a finger? Confirm what they said? Something. Everything. Heh, I'll give you this much, Yuy... you sure know how to make a comeback."

"I haven't even done anything."

"And yet you still manage to do nothing I expected."

"What did you expect?"

Having started out at a diagonal, he pushed himself a little farther up the bed, lifting one leg and laying it on the mattress, his foot dangling over the end of the bed. I enjoyed the subtle flexing and relaxing of his muscles beneath my hand. "Dunno. Something extreme, maybe. You'd either still be uber...whatever you were during the war, or else you'd be what I least expected -- well, theoretically, anyway -- and go all to rot now that you had the freedom to do so. You'd be all laid back, with a pot belly, drinking beer, with a hand scratching your crotch. You know."

"...Not really." Could he really imagine that?

He laughed with a weak humor. "Yeah, I guess not. But you've... you've defied expectation."

At least he didn't say that I had changed. "By being normal?"

"By being normal."

"Did you really have so little faith in me to begin with?"

That startled a reaction out of him. He rose up on one elbow and threw me a stricken look. "No, of course not! I just..." The idea sunk in and took root. "That's... that's really not what I've been implying... is it?"

I just looked at him and let him think over his own words. When he came to an unpleasant conclusion, he collapsed back onto the bed again. "I'm sorry," he apologized softly. "That's really not what I mean to say. You haven't... yes, you have surprised me, but I think... I've surprised me more. You've only exceeded my expectations because... I had higher expectations of myself. And that's never so clear as it is in comparison... What do you think of me, Heero?"

"Huh?" I was thrown off by the sudden question.

He projected almost a need to know. "Did you have any expectations of me? Am I where you thought I'd be in life? Hell, where do you think I am now? What do you see when you look at me?"

I quite nearly hissed at the necessary delicacy of my response. That was a very tricky question, but it was one I knew I couldn't answer with half-truth and misdirection. "I see a man... who still cares a very great deal about the things that are near and dear to him. Who's willing to go forth and do things about them, or for them. One who's not too proud to take a step back and consider things from another's angle."

He frowned, not hearing what he wanted to hear. I could give him that, too. Some things just needed to be said first. "But I also see a man who... is unhappy with where he is in life. I see a man who wants to change that somehow, but just hasn't been able to figure out how just yet. I see a restless man, searching for something that has eluded his definition thus far. I see a man... beginning to fear he will never find it."

He used a bit of fleeting levity to cleanse his palate of the heavy taste to the air. "Heh, right now, I'm looking at a man that's a lot more perceptive than I ever gave him credit for... even though I probably should have known better. I wonder why... I think you're right. You haven't changed as much as I think you have. Maybe it's just the years granting me wisdom to see what I never did before." He snorted wryly. "Too bad I can't turn a little bit of that wisdom on myself. No, wait, I have, if realizing just how empty my life is can be called a bit of wisdom. Things have gotten truly pathetic when I'm so self-absorbed I can't even be happy for a friend."

That impulse to comfort returned, and in situations like this, we had always comforted in a few set ways. I leaned down to kiss him softly on his lips, maybe just to reassure him that this hadn't evaporated. After we parted, he blinked, expression blank as he tried to process it, but it was an analysis I ruled as unnecessary, so I moved his mind on to other things. "Just what have you been doing these last five years?"

He blinked some more, then switched gears. "This and that. Really. I mean, I've kinda... bounced around a bit. Spent some time slumming around L2. Overstayed my welcome with Hilde. Hung out with Howard. Hitched a ride or three on some other Sweeper ships. Tripped around Earth a little, catching some sights. Checked in with Lena. Bummed with Quatre, Wufei. Thought about joining up with Fei, kept promising a someday, never followed through. Ignored every other e-mail from Q 'cuz they made me feel bad. Man, you know, I've had this apartment for the last year, and I've probably spent more time out of it than in? I didn't even know why I bothered, except to have a permanent mailing address, which was pretty much useless anyway, but it made me feel better. Finally thought I'd try living there a few months ago, unpacked my bags and bought a little furniture and everything. Got me this job at a bookstore down the street, thinking maybe I could meet some interesting people, but it's not even one of those small cozy ones, but one of those chains, so we don't even get much interesting traffic through there. All in all, this whole damn thing's been a bust, and I've been staring at it for the last few months with that sitting there staring right back at me."

I pushed at him a bit, then laid down on my side beside him, curling my legs over the one of his still hanging over the edge of the bed until he took the hint and moved his leg out of the way. One of my legs straightened out alongside his. The other stayed bent and rested comfortably on top of his. "Where did you think you'd be right now?"

He sighed, blowing his breath up into his bangs. "I don't know. Well, okay, I do know. I just don't want to admit--okay, fine, I'll admit it. I already did anyway. I thought things would be more... you know. The other way around. Like, I'd have this neat apartment I called home, with friends and hobbies and stuff."

"And I wouldn't."

"Well--" he started defensively.

I chuckled. I should have stopped finishing the thought he was too polite to say aloud, but it continually amused me. That, and it was good for Duo to hear it aloud if a comparison between the two of us had been bothering him. "It's okay, Duo. I didn't think I would either. And that thought helped motivate me to change things. I spent a year wandering around, too. Then I decided that I'd had enough of that, so I found something else to do. I'll say this again: the only difference between you and me is that you've just taken a little longer to get to that point than I did."

He laughed outright. "'A little bit longer'?"

"Just a little." I reached up to pull one of my pillows down to rest my head on instead of using my hand. As an afterthought, I snagged the other pillow and nudged it at Duo's head until he lifted it enough for me to slip the pillow underneath.

He adjusted it with one hand, then heaved another one of his sighs. "After this is all over, I guess I should take some time to think about things... Maybe stop staring at it and kick it in the nuts instead. That'll show it."

I don't know why I found that so delightfully amusing. "Why wait until this is over?"

"What, no time like the present?" He made a face at the saying.

I shrugged. "The longer you wait, the easier it is to make excuses to wait even longer."

"You... really bug me sometimes." He put on another sour expression.

I laughed again. I don't think I'd ever laughed so much in so short a time. That nearly made me laugh again. It was a good feeling.

He started playing with the hand I had lying on the bed between us, eventually letting out another audible puff of breath. "You bug me, and yet... and yet... here I am."

There was a serious answer to that lurking somewhere on the edge of my consciousness, but it danced away from my searching thoughts. I selected another option. "And is that okay?"

It would be too easy playing poker against him if he always stilled when pondering solemn matters. Finally, he turned to me and engaged my compliant lips in a contemplative kiss, rolling the taste carefully around in his mind after it was done. "Hmm. I guess it must be."

That was probably a statement I could have run through my mind for the rest of the night, trying to come up with new interpretations of it, but I had better things to do, so I put it off for another time and just accepted it at face value.

*****

There was a note from Sally waiting for us when we got back to the office after lunch. We called her back to visit us in our office since it was probably a little much for all five of us to crowd into hers. She arrived waving a disc at us. "I hope you all realize just how much of a mess some of the Federation records are."

"Of course," Duo chirped cheerfully, pulling out the spare chair for her. She turned it down in favor of perching on the tabletop. "And we knew you were wonderfully qualified for the task."

She raised her nose imperiously into the air. "I had to call in favors, so now you boys owe me."

"Of course," Quatre said, his tone a little less flippant than Duo's. "Thank you for doing this for us. What did you find?"

"Well," she started, affecting a put-upon air. It wasn't as if she could have refused our request. This was still a high-priority investigation. "First of all, this base, Olin. Quite an interesting place. The commander there was very interested in research that was, shall we say, outside the box? He entertained thoughts of biomechanical enhancement, ostensibly for replacing limbs or functionality lost by soldiers in the wars, though rumor had it that his ultimate goal didn't involve waiting for injured soldiers to come to him. There was also some mobile suit design being conducted on the base, trying to develop something that was suitable for ground, air, space, and underwater combat without any necessary modifications."

"Bet they never got very far on that project," Duo commented.

She smiled briefly. "No, they didn't. They did make some interesting progress on their missile guidance systems. When the base was closed, some of the engineers on that project team were rerouted to another base. Most of the others went into the private sector, according to reports, as was true for your Zamora character."

Quatre sought more specifics. "Do you know what he was working on in particular?"

She put her disc down on the table top and pushed it towards him a little. "An autonomous robotic probe that could be sent into dangerous areas for delicate work, such as navigating through a mine field, disarming a bomb, doing recon in a hostile environment. Interesting stuff."

Wufei snorted. "I think I would have been happier hearing he was on the guidance system team. At least the applications for such a thing are well-defined."

"There's no guarantee that he maintained an interest in his project beyond its end. He could have something else entirely in mind for the Zero system. I believe he was also attached in some way to the biomech department, but not in an official capacity."

Quatre hummed thoughtfully. "That is fitting with what we know about his interests today, in his education, research, and side hobbies. This disc has the details?"

"What I could find. There were a number of proposals and abstracts written up on the topic, but I'll have to dig deeper if you want the actual reports, if indeed there are any on record."

He shook his head. "We'll work with this for now. See if it has any hints that pursuing this any further will be useful to us."

Duo was eyeing me suspiciously, and finally he poked me in the upper arm. "You're thinking something again, aren't you?"

I cast him a mild look. "Nothing dark and sinister this time." Not that I ever really considered my thoughts to be dark and sinister. It wasn't my fault that the others often didn't like the conclusions that I drew.

Rather than voicing his question again, Duo just poked me in the arm a few more times. I took the hint. "I'm just thinking about J. Sort of hard not to when the issue of cybernetic prosthetics comes up."

"What happened to his arm, anyway?" Quatre asked, a morbid curiosity on his face. "I have to admit, the first time I saw him, I thought of space pirates." Duo snickered, and Quatre turned to him with a shrug. "Come on. You know you thought it, too."

"He had a claw, not a hook," I reminded them. I'd never really thought much about J's prosthetic. He'd had it ever since we had met, and at the time, I was still young enough that I could simply accept things like that without question. Of course, Odin had taught me to analyze my surroundings for things that were out of place, but after a while, J's claw was mundane. I'd seen stranger things before, after all. "I never asked what happened to his arm. Seemed rather personal to me, and no one else really went around talking about it, either. Although maybe there were hints of some sort of accident. I don't know. It served him well enough, and that was all that mattered."

Duo laughed darkly. "Man, I bet if G had one of those, and I asked him, he'd come up with a different story every time, each one more outrageous than the last."

I couldn't sympathize. That wasn't J's MO at all.

"Well, I'll leave you to that, gentlemen," Sally said. "If you need anything else from me, let me know."

Quatre smiled. "Thanks for all your help, Sally."

She stood, knocking off some file folders as she got off the desk. "Got it," I said automatically since they were right next to my seat. I knelt down to pick them up, straightened, and planted a hand on the edge of the desk as I put them back where they belonged in order to minimize the swaying on my feet as I recovered.

Sally caught the slight deviation in my balance and pinned me with stern look. "Yuy."

I blinked innocently at her.

"My office. Now."

Such an exchange would not go unnoticed. Sitting next to me, Duo interjected an interrogative syllable. "Huh?"

I favored Sally with a steady stare, which she returned with admirable skill. Finally, I let out a minute sigh and turned briefly to the others. "I'll be back."

Though questioning looks were directed at my back, I let them bounce off harmlessly as I followed Sally out of our office. She wisely didn't question me in the halls, knowing that I would probably be less than forthcoming in a possibly public forum. Once we were safely ensconced in her office, she pointed at the chair in front of her desk with a one word command, and I obeyed, sitting down to await my fate as I plotted strategies for how to escape from her office with the minimum of fuss.

She rummaged through one of her cabinet drawers amid chatter of frivolities and came up with a sphygmomanometer in hand. As she approached me, pressure cuff unwrapped and ready for use, I stopped her. "That won't be necessary, Sally."

"Really?" She leaned against the side of her desk. "Then you can tell me what your blood pressure is right now?"

"It's well within my normal operating parameters."

"That's nice," she answered blandly. "Mind telling me what 'normal' is for you?

I sighed. We didn't need to play this game. "Look, we know I'm not the standard definition of normal."

She nodded agreeably. "Which is fine. But that doesn't mean that your blood pressure can't be low, even for you."

"It was just a moment." If there was one thing that I admired about Sally, it was her ability to stay calm and level-headed in the face of a stubborn Gundam pilot.

"Is that normal for you?"

One way or another, she would have her answers before I left this office. Might as well make it relatively painless for the both of us. "Only on occasion. I'll admit it. Lately, I've been running a little short on sleep, my diet has been erratic, and exercise has been limited. I also haven't been as good about taking the pills you gave me as I should have been. Once this mission is over and we've found Zero, however, I fully anticipate that this will come to an end, and you'll have no further cause to worry."

"Heero." My name was quickly becoming a chastisement on the lips of the right people. "We talked about this. You know you can't just abuse your body and expect it to bounce back as good as new anymore."

"And normally I'd agree with you. But whereas a few bulletholes might represent a problem, a little lost sleep won't kill me."

"You're weakening your system either way, Heero, even if only by a little. It's a cumulative effect, and the weaker it is, the more easily it'll break the next time around."

I couldn't tell if she was trying to scare me into caving in. She was just concerned about my health. Someone had to be, I suppose. "The last time we spoke about this, I never said I would take it easy for ever after. I think finding Zero is a worthy cause, don't you?"

"There's no reason for this to be a high-stress mission for your body, Heero. Is it too much to ask that you eat three meals a day?"

"No. But it is too much to ask that I get a full night's rest every night." Thinking about what had occupied two of my nights thus far, I thought that, too, was a worthy cause. I would likely have spent that time brooding anyway, so really, maybe having Duo keep me company those nights had actually been of a benefit to me. "There don't seem to be enough hours in the day, sometimes."

She sighed with a note of resignation. "You push yourself too hard, Heero."

"That's who I am, Sally." It didn't really enter into my worldview that I could give something less than one hundred percent. If I did something, it would be to the best of my abilities.

"But you won't be able to be that person if your body can't handle it anymore," she suggested softly.

I shrugged philosophically. I would deal with that when it happened. "I'll still be able to give it my all. It just won't be as much as it used to be. I'm already here as a 'consultant', Sally. You can't ask me to sit out any more than that."

"You're not as young as you used to be."

I smiled faintly. "Believe me, I'm well aware of that." Though maybe I hadn't changed that much, as I liked to insist, things had changed. My core was the same, but I had gained wisdom and experience, and paid the price for that. I wouldn't take it back. "I do pay attention to what I'm doing to myself. Even if I choose to dismiss it as a necessary evil. And I'm fully prepared to accept the consequences of my actions."

"You're not the only one that has to deal with the consequences, Heero," she said sharply. "I don't care if you've been gone for five years. You're still--" She broke off, trying to find the words before she tried another approach. She sighed. "I wasn't surprised when you came back. I always knew you were out there, watching out for us. You as much as promised me you'd be back if we needed you. Well, threatened, more like, since I told you not to. I found it comforting, nevertheless. It'd be... disheartening to know that could no longer be the case."

Her faith in me had not been shaken by my absence, it seemed. I found that comforting in turn. "I appreciate your concern, Sally. Trust me, I have no intentions of getting completely out of the game yet. If this is it, then that's that, but if it's not, then I'll be back for more. Even if it's against my doctor's orders."

She laughed her deep, smooth laugh. "As your doctor, I probably shouldn't find that so reassuring. Oh, but there's probably not a thing I could do to stop you anyway."

"You've armed me with knowledge. Now it's up to me to use that knowledge."

"I don't suppose you'd let me increase my wealth of knowledge by allowing me to run a test or two? Maybe a scan?" She wielded a set of puppy-eyes on me with a reasonable degree of failure.

"Maybe after this is all over," I conceded. "Just to keep track of things. But right now... it's pointless. There are things to be done, regardless of how well I'm holding up under the circumstances."

She shook her head at me. "You both frustrate me and impress me, Heero Yuy."

"I get that a lot. Though usually more of the 'frustrate' part."

She laughed again.

*****

Part 19

It seemed as if Zamora had vanished into thin air. His escape was made in the early morning hours, with almost no one to witness his departure. As expected, he hadn't surfaced since he had left Meridian with the Zero system in tow. I wrestled with his computer for most of the afternoon. While his system wasn't sophisticated, it was armed to the teeth with enough simple things that I could hardly get very far before tripping over another. It wouldn't have been so bad if his assorted security options hadn't interfered with each other as well. After giving his computer a cursory examination, I was surprised that it could retain a good chunk of its functionality. Conflicting lockouts contrived to make even the basic usage a trial.

Eventually gaining a crude level of access into his computer, I found not too much beyond the cut and dry of his official work-related reports. There were a few snippets relating to his work on the Zero project in temp caches, but nothing that the Preventers hadn't already seized from other computers that had been linked up to that particular subnet. Judging from his internet records, I guessed he had recently made a purchase online. Based on his browser's image cache, I decided it was a toaster.

I did manage to find some interesting dirt in his e-mail. Beyond progress reports and company memos, Zamora had exchanged a string of confrontational e-mails with his superiors, Hoffman, Conzemius, and one other researcher that had already been identified by agents as one of the ranking members on the project. Spanning the last week, the messages chronicled his induction into the secret project and his excitement at being included, hit his strong protests at the decision to move away from the neural interface towards non-realtime analytical applications, and ended with warnings and responses sent due to Zamora's refusal to terminate all contact with the project members.

Quatre took a break from the work the rest of the team was doing to pore over the bodies of the e-mails and attempt to form some sort of context in which they were written. On the day that Quatre, Wufei, and Duo had visited Meridian for the second time, when their separate meetings had been interrupted by the mysterious troublemaker, we determined that Zamora had been behind their distraction. Records cross-referenced with login timestamps, file dates, and displeased e-mails indicated that Zamora had been relatively docile during the day, working on the project to which he'd been assigned, and getting in the faces of those still on the project with only minor aggression. After hours, however, he had stayed late and 'borrowed' the equipment while everyone else was out to continue pursuing his own interests. When Hoffman and Conzemius had been called away, the staff had just discovered Zamora's violation of the rules.

Duo was the one that pointed out the irony to us. "You know what really annoys me? The freak was there that night we were there. He might have been playing with Zero right underneath our noses that entire time!"

Leave it to Duo to pull out the dark humor. The connection should have been more obvious to me without it having to be pointed out. I went silent for a cold minute before Duo poked me. "You zoning out on us again, Yuy?"

Yes. I had been too busy with my self-castigation to pay attention to the rest of the conversation. "This is my fault."

This time, he used not just a finger to jab me on my arm, but his entire hand curled into a fist. "What the hell?"

Rubbing absently at my abused flesh, I shook my head. "He was there that night, and I tripped over the Zero system. If..." I got distracted by a passing thought, but it zipped by before it could fully realize itself to me, so I continued on my way. "If Zamora knew enough to have figured out what my presence meant on the network, then he would have had plenty of warning to get out of there. If I hadn't been using the interface to chase after Zero's wake, I wouldn't have given us away, and he'd have been at work yesterday, and Zero would be in our custody already."

Duo felt free to punch me again. "What the hell are you on, Yuy? I swear..."

Quatre took on my accusations with a milder approach. "It's not your fault, Heero. He played his luck and won. Even if he recognized you on the network, they couldn't have known when we were going to attack. They took their chances by not leaving the day right after we were there. Might as well blame us all for not getting the case together in time to get a raid on that day instead."

"We never confirmed whether or not they were able to identify you as an intruder," Trowa added. "Remember, no actions were taken against you on the network that night. We decided as a group that they didn't know you were there, and maybe the fact that Zamora took off yesterday morning was a simple coincidence. Hoffman and Conzemius were certainly ready to hand him his walking papers after all the trouble he was causing, anyway. Maybe it was just bad timing."

He passed the figurative conch back to Quatre, who took up the persuasive argument as smoothly as if his point-making had never suffered an interruption. "Even if they detected it was you, you took a justifiable risk in chasing Zero down. You made a decision, and none of us offered an alternative, so there's no reason for anyone to go around accepting blame for something outside of our control."

I held my tongue and let them think they had convinced me to drop it, but I hadn't. None of them really had an accurate sense of what it was I blamed myself for anyway. It hadn't been outside of my control -- I had seen the suspicious ripples in the net and made the conscious decision to go after them, with a modified interface no less. I had let my curiosity, or perhaps my desire to get Zero back, cloud my judgment. By the time I took off in pursuit of the trail, we had already acquired all of the information we needed to shut Meridian down. There was no reason for me to have followed the clues left behind in the net, only I had, and in doing so, I had quite possibly wasted all of the work we had put into the investigation so far. That was inexcusable.

*****

Later that evening, as I continued to probe Zamora's computer for answers, I found that my life would be much easier if I had a tool I had written to assist me. I didn't have the file with me, but I did keep it on my server, so I set up a secure connection and remotely accessed it. After I had downloaded the small application, I checked on some of the other things that had been gathering on my machine.

There were a few e-mails from friends wondering where I had disappeared to. Those reminded me to send off a note to someone postponing an appointment I had scheduled with an acquaintance in three days. I didn't know when I would get back.

I was falling behind in a few forums, but those could easily wait until I had leisure time once more. Just in case, I sent a cursory glance over two of the underground communities to see if there was anything lurking there that could possibly be of use in our investigation, but I found nothing. As Trix had said, no one had claimed responsibility or even knowledge of the so-called attack on Meridian's systems. It had already dropped off of the radar.

I was ready to log off of my system completely when I received a notification in my tray. Someone had just run into one of the sniffers I had laid out quite a while ago. Certain information in various systems had been flagged to let me know whenever someone was trying to access any files on me. Although I'd distanced myself from the rest of the team, I was still interested in knowing if they, or anyone else for that matter, were looking for me. If such pings grew in number, then I would know if something was up. If nothing else, I would know how close they were to finding me.

And yet I'd already been found. Who would be looking for me now? The ping was dismissed in my mind as one of the ones that just happened every once in a while, but then I received another notification that belied that idea. Someone was accessing my files.

There was another hit, and then another. I settled down in earnest to try and determine the source of the hits, but that had never been what I had set out to do in laying down my traps. Since they were embedded in foreign systems, I had access to only so much data without hacking myself more privileges, which would be an act of futility anyway since most of the data that I needed would probably be gone by the time I had gotten in.

The spate of activity was over and done with in just about five minutes. Since I could not ascertain the source of the requests, I looked instead at the pattern of inquiry. To my surprise, I found not only hits on 'Heero Yuy', 'Wing', and '01', but 'Hiro Yui' as well. Only my fellow ex-pilots had been privy to the information that they were one and the same.

My mind arrived at the obvious conclusion, recalling for me the conversation I had had with Duo earlier that day. I had mentioned having taken a psychology course or three in school, and he had said, "I like to delude myself into thinking that I won't be getting any new surprises out of you, Yuy, but every time I think that, I find out something new and strange that I never knew about you."

He had clearly expressed an interest in getting to learn more about me. Was this his way of doing so? Back when we had first discussed my sudden reappearance, he had mentioned that he had feelers out on the net for me. From the frequency of the hits, I had to conclude that the search had been automated. Had he added a few new search strings and then let it loose on the net?

*****

I was startled out of working when a hand stopped just short of landing heavily on my shoulder. Apparently Duo thought better of it at the last moment. It still managed to jerk my attention back to reality.

"Hey, Heero," he said, letting his hand fall the last few millimeters to make contact. "I know this is serious stuff and all, but really, you keep thinking about it so hard, you're gonna strain something."

Hadn't I already? I spent five seconds blinking the moisture back into my eyes. After that, the moment passed in which to make a witty comeback, so I let it escape entirely with a mere shrug of my shoulders.

Duo lifted an eyebrow at me. "I was going to get some more water." He shook his empty bottle at me. "Wanna come with? Stretch your legs or something?"

I blinked a few more times, then nodded. "Yeah, that might be a good idea." I was definitely in need of switching tracks for a little while. I stood, and forgot to brace myself for the inevitable moment of vertigo.

He noticed, his eyes narrowing. "You haven't been eating much lately," he observed.

That wrung a frown from me. "Have you been talking to Sally?" I muttered sourly. My blood pressure having stabilized, I snatched my cup off my desktop and headed towards the door.

He caught up with me before it had swung shut. "Hey, no need to get all grumpy, man. I was just saying."

"I do not require your concern." It worried me that I had to pause for a moment outside the door to orient myself. I had made the trip to the water cooler more times than I could remember, and yet just then I found myself having to think about which way to turn. Maybe Duo was right. I really had strained something. I figured out which direction I was supposed to go and started walking.

Duo matched me stride for stride. "Well, tough shit, 'cuz you're gonna get it regardless," he snapped.

I stopped, automatically stepping towards the side of the corridor to remove myself from the flow of traffic despite the fact that the hall was currently empty. Duo overran my position by two steps, but recovered quickly enough. I stared at him for a few more long moments, waiting for my thoughts to catch up with the rest of me. Eventually, I finished processing the string, then blinked some more, running a hand through my hair. "Sorry. I... didn't mean that."

His expression immediately softened somewhat, and he drew closer to me. "You sure you're okay, Yuy? You've been zoning out an awful lot lately. You're... starting to worry me. I mean, I know you've got some heavy thinking to do, but really...."

I snorted. "You sure Sally didn't put you up to this?"

He took a step back, puzzled. "What does Sally have to do with this?"

I shook my head and started towards the water cooler again, this time a little more slowly. He followed. "At least I know you haven't gotten into my medical files," I joked. Not that I thought he would be able to. They were locked up pretty tightly under the confidential Preventers medical heading.

"Why would I--? Whatever. Seriously, man. You okay?"

He must have been really concerned for him to have asked so many times. It surprised... and warmed me. That deserved an answer, so I gave him one along the lines of what I had given Sally. "I'm fine. Just tired, I guess." I would have to pick up some snack in the lounge, whatever protein or energy bar I could find. That would alleviate some of the nutritional problems I was having. As for the sleep part, perhaps I could convince Duo to help distract me from my thoughts. I didn't suffer from a physical exhaustion, but a mental one. Recently, all of my thoughts had eventually ended up back on the case, even my dreams.

"Heh, you always so spacy when you get tired?"

Having arrived at our destination, I went towards the table with the food while Duo hit the water cooler. "I don't know. I haven't been tired enough in the past to have formed a pattern."

I had finally selected an energy bar when Duo came up beside me and touched my shoulder again. I turned towards him, and his hand moved to my chin, a light touch holding me still in the light. "You're getting circles under your eyes," he noted disapprovingly, releasing me.

That was what happened when a person got tired, was it not? I shrugged it off. "And they'll probably stay there until this case gets resolved."

"You need more sleep. Maybe I'll drop by tonight and make sure you get it." He tossed out the possibility as an offhand remark.

I was pleased to note how well it mirrored my own ideas. I gave him a smile in return. "I look forward to it."

A mischievously thoughtful expression took its place on his face. "Although, I dunno... a spacy Heero might be fun to play with. I'm sure I could worm some interesting things out of you. Sleep dep is a well-known interrogation device, you know."

"All you need to do is ask, Duo," I chided him. "I'll answer. You don't have to go searching the net for the answers instead." Hadn't I responded the other night, when I had fallen asleep on Wufei's sofa?

I expected him to say something along the lines of, 'where would the fun be in that?' but he surprised me with something else entirely. "What do you mean, 'searching the net'?"

Was there some miscommunication here? "I logged you, or your queries, anyway, trying to access my files last night."

"That wasn't me," he said slowly. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

That was troubling. "Someone has been looking into me. I assumed it was you."

He raised an eyebrow. "Why would you think that?"

"You said you had some sniffers out on the net doing casual searches for me. I thought maybe they were periodic, which would explain the number of hits I got last night. The searches were run on both spellings of my name, along with a few other old appellations. You all are the only people who ought to know to look for both now."

His uneasy expression probably matched mine. "I shut those things down a few months ago. I don't leave them running. I just pull 'em out every once in a while when I feel the whim to do so."

"So if it wasn't you..." Our eyes met, and both of us probably had some sort of expletive running through our minds at the same time. I turned to hurry back to our office. Maybe one of the others had gotten curious.

"Hold up a sec." Duo snatched my cup right out of my hands and moved towards the water cooler, filling it with hot water and just a splash of cold, just the way I liked it. I took it automatically when he handed it back to me. "Now we can go."

When we got back to the office, I waited for Quatre to get off the phone with one of the agents handling the Meridian case. He held up a finger for us to wait when we signaled that we needed to talk to him, calmly finishing his conversation with the agent in an efficient manner that did not give the person on the other end the impression that he was in any hurry to hang up. It was a good skill for an executive to have.

Once he was done, I asked my question of the room. "Has anyone here been attempting to access my files?"

No one volunteered the answer. I wasn't sure what I wanted to hear. Wufei asked for clarification. "What files?"

"My official records. School files, Preventers files, old military files. I have them all tagged to notify me when someone accesses them."

"And someone has been?"

"Yes. But none of you?" They all shook their head. Damn. If not them, then who? Another possibility struck me. "Hang on a sec."

I retreated to a corner of the room and pulled my phone out of my pocket. Seeing that I had sufficient reception, I dialed a number and waited impatiently for someone to pick up.

"'ello?" She sounded sleepy.

"Trix, it's me."

"Hey, stranger." She had the ability to perk up in short order. "What's up? You back yet? Or are ya just calling 'cuz you need my help again? And why the hell are you calling so early?"

"It's not early, Trix."

"Says the guy that gets up with the sun."

No denying that. "Have you been digging for information about me again?" She had been known to do such a thing, though well within the limits of propriety. I wouldn't have trusted her as a friend if she had been attacking my files maliciously.

"Uhmmm.... hmmmm..... no." Should I have been worried that she needed to think so hard before answering? "Why?"

"Are you sure?" I asked though I doubted it was her. She should not have been able to link my past and my present together.

"What do you mean, am I sure? Of course-- no, wait. Hmmm. No, yeah, I'm sure. Besides, it's not like I've ever been able to find anything interesting about you anyway."

Duo raised an expectant look at me. I shook my head as a negative. He frowned and started muttering to Trowa.

I tied up my inquiry with my friend. "I don't suppose you know if anyone else may have been involved?"

"No, no I don't. What's this about, Heero?"

"Just checking something out. I got some flags triggered last night."

"Oh." She yawned. Must have been staying up late again. "Lucky bastards. I never got that close to you."

She was a good friend, but not that good. "Thanks, Trix. I'll talk to you later."

"When are you getting back?"

I glanced around the room, eyeing the sprawl of laptops and paperwork we had. "I don't know yet, I'll let you know when I do, though, okay?"

The noise she made was a pouting one. "Fine, be that way. I'm going back to sleep. Later, Heero." She hung up without even waiting for me to respond.

Sliding the phone back into my pocket, I rejoined the others, confirming what I had already told Duo. "No luck. It wasn't her."

"'Her' who?" Duo asked.

"A friend. She likes trying to figure me out."

"Hn, don't we all," he muttered. "Can you give us any more specifics?"

I let his side comment slide in favor of getting back to business. "Last night, I was checking in with my home computers, and I got some notification messages that some of my files I had tagged were being hit. There were six hits in five minutes at approximately twenty-three fifteen. I think they may have all had the same source, but I wasn't able to determine that to an absolute certainty. My school files were accessed twice. Two hits were logged from the Preventers network, one querying my current status and one querying events at the end of the Barton insurrection. One hit originated from the old Federation database, involving the first report filed on my presence on Earth, and the last hit was a request from the old OZ records, for when I was the test pilot for Mercurius."

"How much information did they actually get out of it?" Wufei asked.

"No way to tell for certain, but probably more than I would have liked. None of those files were classified. What I'm more concerned about is the fact that they were able to find those files at all. My school files are filed under the alternate spelling I've been using for the last five years. My status at the Preventers would be filed under my name with the correct spelling. As I recall, the report on the Barton insurrection should not have mentioned any of us by name, but number or codename. The Federation and OZ didn't have my name, so they would also be filed under number and make of my Gundam. Who would know enough to be able to access all of those files?"

"Zamora is the obvious answer," Trowa suggested, fingers idly flipping a pen across his knuckles. "Given that we're currently engaged in an investigation against him."

The thought had, of course, crossed my mind, but it didn't quite add up so easily. "But why would he be interested in me? And why would he know enough about me in the first place to be able to research me?"

Quatre coughed nervously, the ease with which he had dealt with the agent gone now. "I hate to suggest it, but what about Zero? It has massive data storage capability. Could it have retained what it knew about you?"

That was something I hadn't considered. "Hmm... provided the memory systems remained intact after our last battle? Then yes, I suppose it is highly probable that Zero would have retained any data it decided was relevant to its calculations."

Duo finished off my thought. "But that still doesn't explain why he, or whoever, would have an interest in Heero. And that doesn't explain the whole misspelled name thing. Zero wouldn't have any knowledge of something that happened after Heero last connected."

"The timing is too much of a coincidence for it not to have something to do with our investigation, though," Wufei affirmed. "Unless we want to consider the possibility that Zamora may be working for or with other people..."

Quatre shook his head to that. "That was the obvious answer for Brisbois, but it seems out of character for Zamora. He doesn't need anyone else to provide him with a means of pursuing his own goals. In fact, they'd just get in his way." Even though Quatre had never met our suspect, he was still able to form a good impression of him. Most people fit into a set number of templates, and Quatre was familiar with them all.

"Maybe Zero knew it was you," Trowa proposed. "That night on the network."

"That was less than a second," Wufei pointed out.

"Maybe that's all it needed. Maybe Zero is just gathering information on its adversary."

A part of me cried that I was not Zero's adversary. I was on its side. Then I remembered just what side Zero was on at the moment, and I rescinded the thought. In any case, I was against Zamora, and Zero had been known to be rather liberal in whom it considered an enemy.

Duo shook his head, pacing a little around the room. He wasn't the type to stay still for long. "Still doesn't explain how it found Heero's recent records. Unless it's just that smart. Also doesn't make sense that it identified Heero that night, but then didn't act on it until a day later."

"No," I cut in softly. "Zamora didn't act on it until a day later. Zero... would have made a tactical decision of some sort. It wouldn't have been panicked into taking off immediately." It was dangerous to keep forgetting there was a difference between the two entities. All Zero did was evaluate and offer suggestions. It was up to the user to decide on a course of action. Although admittedly, sometimes Zero was rather forceful in its suggestions.

"Alright, fine, Zamora," Duo accepted, in all likelihood not truly understanding the distinction I was trying to make. "There wasn't any reason for them not to take off immediately. He had a lot of time with what was left of that night to gather up whatever stuff he needed and get out of there before the sun rose."

"Assuming that they didn't have to wait for anything," Wufei added.

Trowa inserted another dimension to the problem. "His co-workers didn't indicate that anything seemed amiss in his behavior the day before he took off with the system. If he fits the classic mad scientist profile, he probably wouldn't have been very patient with delays."

That was an all too correct observation, given my experience with mad scientists. Apparently, Quatre agreed with a small laugh. "True, true. Maybe it was a justified delay, though. Forrester gave me a preliminary inventory," he said, referring to one of the agents on the case. Presumably the one he had been speaking with on the phone. "Let's see if he had to wait for some equipment."

He took one of the general use laptops in the room and used it to access the file server. As he did that, Duo's course of motion eventually carried him to my side, where I was leaning against the file cabinets in the corner. I was getting tired of sitting all the time. "You've got that look on your face again," he said, frowning.

I was seeing that expression on his face a little too often for my liking. "Hm?"

He commandeered the wall next to me to lean against. "That sort of... disturbed look you get when you're contemplating something you don't like. What terrible conclusions are you coming to now?"

Able only to summon the weakest of smiles for him, I didn't bother hiding the path of my thoughts. "All of this makes sense. I know it does. It has to. I'm just..." I rubbed tiredly at the skin between my eyes. "...annoyed as hell that I can't see what it is."

"Hey, you're not the only one." He poked me in the forehead, startling me. I swatted at his finger with my hand, then looked up, expecting to see a playful expression on his face, but it was serious instead. "Maybe it's one of those things that'll come to you if you stop thinking so hard about it. For now, maybe... we went to the lounge for a reason, Yuy." He pointed towards the water and energy bar I had set down on my desk earlier. "Fuel up."

An excellent suggestion, one I took up obediently. I didn't think I'd have to worry too much about my health with him and Sally hovering nearby.

*****

Part 20

As promised, Duo showed up in my room again that night, a small bag slung over his shoulder. Following the pattern, I allowed him into my room without a word. I hadn't been waiting for him to knock on my door, but I had had the feeling that he would. Though he hadn't promised as much earlier, he had said it with that peculiar undertone that indicated he meant it.

He sat down on my bed, watching me watching him. I had left the light on this time. It made things seem different. I became more aware of the fact that I was wearing a tank top and pajama bottoms, while he was still wearing his button down and slacks, though his shirt had the top two buttons undone and its sleeves rolled up. What was in the bag, I wondered. My eyes moved in that direction. His followed, then returned to me.

This was obviously not getting me any closer to a restful sleep. With a slight shake of my head, I walked over to the main light switch and flipped it off, the small nightlight by the bathroom automatically kicking in.

"What the heck?" he asked, a confused amusement leaking into his voice.

I climbed around him on the bed and sat with my back to the pillows, facing him. One leg hung off the side of the bed. The other was bent, and I rested a hand on my knee. "Do you realize that any time we've been in this situation, the lights have always been off? And with them on just now, we obviously weren't getting into any sort of situation."

He was silent for a moment before he chuckled. "I do believe you're right. That's gotta say something about our relationship, you know? Like..."

"I can think of a few things it can say, but I don't like them very much. It could say we were hiding from each other, or that we're uncomfortable with each other... But we're not, are we?"

Repeating his earlier MO, he was quiet for a few long moments before he moved. "If we are, we shouldn't be," he said, determination in his voice as he leaned over me to hit the switch on the small reading light next to my bed.

I reached out to turn the switch another notch, dimming the light. It was still brighter than it was before, though. He caught me with startled look. "You're not... are you?"

That was the obvious conclusion, I supposed, but incorrect nevertheless. I shook my head. "No, I just don't like white light too much. It's so... institutional."

"Artificial? Cold? Man-made, even? Yeah, reminds me of the colonies, I guess. You'd think that after all this time, 'simulated sunlight' would have more of an emphasis on 'sunlight' and less on 'simulated'."

"And bases... without windows," I added thoughtfully. "They have that same lighting, too. Hangars, and metal walls. Office buildings. Anything with those overhead fluorescent bulbs. Those things are horrible. Especially when they flicker."

He smirked at me. "No wonder you live on Earth. You sure you were born to the colonies?"

"I like space," I said in my defense. "I like low gravity. I like being able to look at some point far away, and not see the horizon curve off at a measurable distance. But that's space, which is different from living in space. I do like not having to think about recycled air and reclaimed water and explosive decompression."

His lips spread into another smile. "How did you ever survive in the cockpit of a suit?"

"Wing was different. For starters, I trusted Wing to not explosively decompress me." Exercising some right only he had, he pushed at my knee, humor passing through the gesture. His hand lingered, then slid down my shin to rest lightly around the bare skin of my ankle. I looked at it for a second before finishing my train of thought. "Wing was warm with the heat of all the electronics. It wasn't lit with white light. There were the green lights showing everything checked out. There were the red warning lights. The blue LEDs for the numeric readouts. The amber display of Zero."

His grip tightened barely for a fleeting moment. "Zero..."

I shrugged. You'd think its name was some sort of horrible taboo, what with the way everyone always flinched at its mention. "I like warm light. It just seems to make everything... warmer."

"Gee, ya think?"

"Not everything in life has to be rich with meaning." Some things were just simple gestures, like the way his fingers rubbed soothingly at my ankle.

He made a sour face. "But a lot of things are, even if you don't realize it."

And that was probably one of them. I didn't push him into explaining. Everything came in its own time, and at its own pace. "Have you spent much of your time in the colonies?"

What was so difficult about the question that he pursed his lips? "Yeah. Yeah, I did. Or ships, otherwise. You know. Sticking with the familiar, I guess."

"There's nothing wrong with the familiar, so long as you don't fear the unknown."

Though he laughed again, this time it was a sharp sound. "'Not everything is rich with meaning', and yet you're always spouting these... these sage little sayings."

I took his cynicism in stride. "Perhaps I should rephrase, then. There are some things in life that are simple, and maybe meaningful in that simplicity." I put a hand on top of his, forcing him to meet my eyes. "This is one of them." The distance between our lips was easily dispelled in favor of a more comfortable communion. I kissed him, trying to recapture that air of innocence we used to have.

Success was achieved in some small measure. When I pulled back, the faint beginnings of a scowl had faded, though its replacement was not worry-free. Patting his hand, I left his thoughts to percolate while I got up and headed towards the sink with the intent of brushing my teeth.

As I squeezed my toothpaste from the bottom up, Duo sighed. "I'm discontent, Heero. Fix me." His tone was only partially joking.

If only that were one of the simple things in life. I paused, turning to face him, then turning back briefly to set my toothbrush down before it dripped onto the floor. "Figure out what's bothering you. Figure out where you'd rather be. Figure out how to get there. Then start doing it." That was, sadly, all the advice I could give. I wasn't certain what it was that was making him unhappy, and I wouldn't know until he decided to tell me, if, in fact, he knew himself. I suspected he didn't.

I watched him contemplate things in the bathroom mirror while I brushed my teeth. His presence there reminded me of his initial goal of making sure I got enough sleep that night, which in turn reminded me of Sally, which in turn reminded me of the orange bottle sitting in my overnight bag that was probably still more full than it ought to have been. After I was done with my teeth, I popped the cap off the bottle and tipped two tablets into the palm in my hand, briefly wishing that they could have a cumulative effect as well. If only I could do the entire bottle at once and just be as good as new. Shaking my head a little, I left the sink to cross the room for a water bottle, and with a sip I tossed back my pills.

Capping the bottle and putting it back down, I returned my attention to Duo, only to find him staring at me with wide eyes. "What?" I asked.

His mouth moved several times in aborted beginnings before he buckled down and found the proper thing to say. "You... That's not a part of why you left or something... is it?"

I blinked with incomprehension. "Is what?"

He gestured vaguely in my direction. "I mean, you're not, like... sick or something, are you?"

I blinked some more, then figured out he was actually waving at the sink area behind me. It clicked. "Those are just vitamins, Duo. Really."

His skepticism endured for the duration of a good, hard look before he laughed nervously. "Vitamins, huh? You... you had me worried for a second there. What with you being so worn out lately, and Sally getting on your case for... for... I don't even know what, and you just leaving and coming back all philosophical about life...." He ran a hand through his bangs. "Geez. Scare a guy, why don't you?"

"Sorry." I smiled an apology and moved back to the bed, tugging the covers out from underneath him and folding them back. Taking my former seat with nearly the same position, I stopped to give him an impulsive embrace before releasing him and tucking my toes beneath the blankets. He seemed to need one. "You're not completely incorrect, I guess. It is a part of the reason I left."

"What?" An edge of tension ran within his one word.

I moved to allay his fears immediately. "I'm not sick or anything. I'm just... worn out." I sighed, deciding to start from the beginning of the story. "After the Barton incident, when I was still in the hospital, Sally came to talk to me. They'd done some testing. She gave me a run down of all the damage I had done to my body... and all of the long term effects it had. She warned me in no uncertain terms that if I continued to 'pull off such crazy stunts' that my body would break before I did, and that, as it is, I'm going to have to be extra nice to myself if I don't want to be trapped in a prison of my own making in my later years."

He reached out, staring at me as if he could see past my skin and straight to the bones that had been fractured, the muscles that had been strained, the joints that had been dislocated. "...So you take vitamins?" he hissed in disbelief. "It's all breaking down, and you just take vitamins? What the hell is that going to do?"

I could help it. I laughed. He glared. I laughed again, taking his hand that had been suspended above my skin and pushing it down to the mattress with my own. "And I take it easy, most of the time. I can't fix it, Duo. I can stop it from getting worse, but it's not going to get better. The damage has been done."

He raised his other hand to my shoulder and ran it down my arm. "So you really are out of the game," he breathed.

"Absolutely not," I responded firmly. "If something needs doing, I'm going to do it. But in the meantime, I'm going to maintain my body so I know it'll be good to go if I need it."

"But..." That disturbed, concerned look in his eyes hadn't gone away. He shook his head, dismissing his previous thought. "Dammit, Yuy, maybe you're right. Maybe you haven't changed that much after all."

I quirked a smile at him. "Told you so."

With only an absent gesture that ended up more a caress than anything forceful, he slapped at my arm, fingers ending the action by tracing the curves of my muscles, the lines of my scars. They lingered on that little reminder he'd left me of our first meeting. "I guess that makes me feel a little better."

"I thought you were going to be pissed if I hadn't changed. More pissed, that is. And for the better, as I recall." I shook my head at him fondly. "I can't tell if you're always placing yourself in a win-win situation, or a no-win situation."

"Heh, Quatre's the Winner. I'm just... me."

He shouldn't have said that like it wasn't a remarkable thing. It was. "I hate to be a source of your discontent, Duo."

His hand stopped, then jumped, as if only in stopping did he realize what it had been doing all this time. "You're not--Well... it's not your fault, anyway."

The concession hardly appeased me. "Would it help to just... make up your mind about me? If you need answers from me, I'll give them to you gladly."

He looked up at me through downcast lashes, glancing down at one point to focus on the hand that had fallen on top of mine, fingers curling around my wrist. "...Maybe by 'change for the better' I meant... being well-adjusted. I guess... a person doesn't really have to change for that. Which makes me feel better, see... 'cuz then it seems a lot easier."

So there was a bit of logic behind his wavering. I knew it had to be in there somewhere, but it was probably something I would never figure out on my own. "No. They don't have to change. It's not much more complicated than... changing your clothes to fit your environment."

"Hey, that wasn't a mobile suit analogy." He pouted an accusation at me to put off having to process the statement.

I smiled. "Fine. Mobile suits have to undergo different modifications to be fit for land, sea, air, and space, right?"

"That's not as easy as changing clothes."

"See, I liked my original comparison better. You're still wearing the long sleeves from the war. Shed a few layers. It's not so cold anymore."

He laughed sharply. "Ha, this coming from the person I hear wore a tank top and shorts in Antarctica."

I shrugged. "Didn't I say it was warm in a cockpit?"

He laughed again, some of the edge taken off this time. "What if I don't have much in the way of short sleeves?"

"Go shopping."

His nose wrinkled a little. "I hate clothes shopping."

"So do I. But it's a necessary evil if you want to find something that fits well and looks good. And is something you like. Watch out for when other people try to buy you clothes according to what they like. That doesn't always work out so well."

His laugh finally wore itself down to warm chuckle. "Personal experience much?"

"Yes," I answered, thinking about the t-shirt Trix had given me. The one with the evil bunny wielding a pointy carrot on the front. She'd thought it was the most hilarious thing in the world. I wondered if Duo would like it.

He plucked at my tank top, rubbing the fabric between his fingers as if he could get a decent feel for the 'clothing' that I was wearing. "Sometimes it takes a long time to find something you like."

"Maybe in the meantime, you take off your shirt anyway. You may not want to go out in public much, but at least you won't be so hot."

"Couldn't I just push up my sleeves?"

This conversation was getting sort of surreal. I had long since stopped trying to figure out what I was really saying. "That never works for long. They always fall back down again. Maybe if you take it all off, you'll have better incentive to find something-- what?"

He had started laughing. His head was tossed back in helpless amusement, but when his chuckles died down he leaned forward, resting against my shoulder. "You do realize you just told me to strip to my skivvies?"

That startled a small laugh from me. So I had. Maybe it had been a bad idea to disengage my mind from the task. "That wouldn't be an entirely bad idea if you're staying." My fingers squeezed between us and wandered up to his shirt buttons.

He jerked back. "Heero..."

"Are you staying?" I had meant it as a simple question, but my quiet tone somehow added a depth of implication I hadn't intended.

"I..."

"Because if you are," I continued, shaking off that moment of meaning. "You'll get your clothes all wrinkly if you wear them to sleep. You should put on the proper attire for the given activity." I wasn't sure anymore whether I was actually talking about clothes, or life in general.

He suddenly looked frustrated and relieved at the same time. "Heero, you..." He exhaled forcefully. "Yeah. I guess. I probably shouldn't or something, but... sure. I'll stay."

"Good." My fingers crept back up to his buttons, not that he needed my help. They just felt like performing the task. He watched me as I undid the four buttons, tugged the cloth from the waistband of his pants, and unbuttoned the last. When his shirt finally parted completely, I found myself fascinated by the way his body had filled out over the years. He was neither bulky nor scrawny, his wiry strength having spread out into something a little more solid. I ran a finger beneath the collar of his shirt, heading towards his shoulder, but then he broke the contact, leaning forward suddenly to untie the laces of his boots.

I watched him, watched his braid slide forward over his shoulder, watched him flick it irritably back. I caught it before it defied him again, and I could tell that he noticed my action by the brief tensing of his muscles, but he let my presumption pass and finished taking his boots off.

After he straightened, I returned the tail of hair to his custody with an odd reluctance, compensating by moving to complete my earlier action. Slipping my hands beneath the edges of his open shirt, I slid the fabric off his shoulders and tugged at it until Duo shrugged his arms out of it completely. With careful aim, I fluffed it out and tossed it over the back of a nearby chair.

Under his curious scrutiny, I started in on his belt, then paused, hands still on the buckle. "You are wearing your skivvies underneath this, right?"

I knew I was losing it when I mentally cheered that I had managed to make him laugh again. I'd gone too long without hearing it, and it'd only been a couple of minutes.

"Yes, I am, thank you for asking." His hands fell on top of mine, holding me by the wrists for a moment before he nudged my hands out of the way. I let him finish on his own. After he wriggled out of his pants, revealing boxers underneath, I took them from him, shook them out again, then folded them neatly before tossing them over to join his shirt.

"Wow," he commented, amusement dancing over his entire face. "You weren't kidding about that whole 'wrinkly' thing, were you?"

"You can't show up to work like that," I answered primly. "What would people think?"

Something else danced its way into his expression as he leant forward. "That I slept with Heero Yuy... and you wouldn't be able to deny it."

I was trapped in our eye contact when his finger darted forth, slipped beneath the waistband of my loose pants, and pulled. He craned his neck and got a glimpse before I managed to jump in surprise and slap his hand away. "Duo!"

He smirked at me. "Briefs," he announced smugly. "Just so we're on the same page."

Yes, he liked that, I'd grant him that. It gave him peace of mind to know that we were equals. "What would you have done if I hadn't been wearing anything under there?" At least I'd asked first.

"Then I would have gotten an eyeful." He didn't sound the least bit bothered by the possibility. Were we on even ground again? He seemed to have gotten his confidence back, enough for him to close the distance between us again and engage our lips in a kiss. It crossed my mind to try and pour some comfort into it, but he stubbornly turned it into something more, much like the first night he had come to this room. Once again, I tried to process what it was that had changed about it, but he was making it damned difficult to think, so I gave up and saved it for a later time, abandoning myself instead to the way his lips massaged mine, the give and take of pressure and acceptance, the feel of his hand as it followed the dips and curves of the abs beneath my shirt.

My initial impression had not changed in the slightest: it was indeed good, if in a way I didn't understand. I liked the way we spoke without words. I liked the way I felt like I could trust someone enough to be in this position with him. I like the way humor and melancholy played off each other. Somewhere inside my mind, a voice was going on about hormones and pheromones and humans being wired as reproductive beings, but that voice was boring and sounded something like Dr. J, the last person I wanted to be thinking about at a time like this, so I let it ramble on in the background while other things drowned it out.

A proximity alert sounded in my mind just a tad too late. "Oof!" I couldn't help myself from saying, interrupting our kiss. My hand removed itself from the base of his braid and flew between the wall and the back of my head, where less than gentle contact had been made when we had started leaning back without consideration for our position.

He stared at me with wide eyes before laughing, covering his mouth with one hand and clearly trying to stop so he could comfort me, but clearly failing. I leveled a mock-glare at him, which finally induced him to reach out with his free hand and cradle the back of my head. "Sorry," he choked out. "You okay?"

I nodded, recognizing the humor even if I didn't feel the need to double over in laughter over it. It didn't hurt. It just surprised me, was all. He gathered me to him and shifted us far enough down the bed that our heads could rest on the pillows. I dropped a kiss on his cheek when he apologized again, letting him know that it was already history.

He sighed, settling on his side while I laid on my back. His hand went back to toying with the fabric of my shirt. "You know... I've never slept with anyone before -- literally, that is --other than you, I guess."

That was an interesting revelation, if, in my mind, completely irrelevant. In the spirit of equality, I answered in kind. "Neither have I, I suppose."

"Just letting you know... Wouldn't want you to think I'm easy or something." It sounded more like he was just trying to make conversation to me.

I snorted. "Somehow, I don't think you'll ever be easy to me." There was very little about him that I understood without a bit of thought, but that was why I had labeled him axiomatic, wasn't it? The same applied to us. I accepted the way things were between us without need for logical derivation. If I didn't, I'd have to wonder why I was unhesitatingly undressing and sleeping with a man whom I was only really getting to reknow as of a few days ago.

From the way he looked at me, I thought it funny how much energy we probably devoted to trying to understand each other. I wondered if he knew any better than I did. I wondered if just maybe I was axiomatic to him, too.

"I think I like jammie-clad Heero," he declared suddenly.

It took me a moment to process what he meant by 'jammie', then another to recognize what my sleepwear had to do with anything, and even then, I still didn't quite follow his train of thought. "Oh?"

He grinned, the discontent from earlier almost completely gone now. No doubt it would be back, but for now, it had fled. "Jammie-clad Heero is warm and cuddly and full of wisdom."

I chose to let the 'warm and cuddly' part slide. "Jammie-clad Heero has been on a journey in search of wisdom," I answered solemnly.

"Was it a long journey?"

I revised my answer to head off the tiredness that threatened to return already. "A life-long journey. Jammie-clad Heero is still on that journey. ...And maybe he wouldn't mind a little company. To keep things lively, you know."

He struggled against that dark mood again, waiting until he had emerged triumphant before answering. "And where is jammie-clad Heero off to now?"

I shrugged. "Maybe he'll wander over to your neck of the woods next."

"Hm." He reached up to turn off the light, then settled down more deeply. "And what will jammie-clad Heero do there?"

"Wait for an invitation?"

He hummed again thoughtfully, but in the end, he chose not to continue. Instead, he bid me good night, and we closed our eyes. About a minute later, I knew he wasn't yet asleep. "Duo?" I asked softly.

"Hm?"

"I meant it. You can ask me whatever."

"Already did."

That was news to me. "...Oh. Did I answer?"

"Mm-hmm."

Huh. Who knew? Hopefully I gave a good answer.

*****

As pleasant an interlude as the previous night had been, I still found myself waking up at what most people would consider an ungodly hour. I might have rolled out of bed, too, if Duo's leg hadn't been thrown over my own, and his arm over my chest. His other arm was wrapped around the arm I had resting between us, and his head lay close to my shoulder.

I shifted experimentally, using my free hand to dance around the arm on my chest, wondering how it could remove the impediment to my rising. I was frowning at the appendage when Duo's sleepy murmur caught me in the act. "Go back t'sleep."

I didn't answer, but I suppose he could guess at my reluctance by reading the body beneath his outflung arm. "It's..." He dragged that arm closer to his face so he could crack open his eyes and squint at the watch he was still wearing. "Not even oh-six-hundred, dammit. An' I said I was gonna make sure you slept, so sleep." His arm slid across my chest again, and applied a passing downward pressure as if to emphasize that he had no intentions of letting me up.

"There are things that need to be done," I responded softly, reluctant to keep him awake with my own desire to be up and about.

"Not this early," he grumped, the morning scratchiness of his voice turning it into something more like a growl. "Now go back to sleep and stop worryin'. I won't let you oversleep."

I sighed. Short of throwing him off of me, I had no other choice but to obey his commands, so I closed my eyes and let myself drift off again.

The next thing I knew, there was a tentative shaking of my shoulder. "Heero?" Duo was saying softly. His foot rubbed up and down along the inside of my calf.

I woke up rather immediately, but he soothed me back down with a hand through my bangs. He looked like he'd been awake for at least a little while. "Hey, relax, it's only seven-thirty. Earlier than I'd want to get up, which I figure probably makes it just right for you."

Blinking the sluggishness from my eyelids, I let awareness saturate my mind, let it analyze the feel of waking up with a warm body next to mine. It reached some positive preliminary conclusions. "Good morning," I answered belatedly.

A corner of his lips curved upwards. "Good morning to you, too." He brushed his hand down the side of my face again. "No wonder you haven't been getting enough sleep."

"Hm?"

"You're kind of twitchy in your sleep, you know that? Like you're dreaming."

"Really?" I couldn't refute his claims. Though I retained no memory of any dreams I may have had, I did get the impression that my mind had been active during my sleep, busy with things just below the surface of my consciousness. It happened on occasion, but a lot more so recently.

"Mm-hmm." His hand wandered back up to my hair. "You're gonna insist we get out of bed now, aren't you?"

I let my actions speak for me, nuzzling his hand only briefly in apology before untangling myself from him and getting out of bed. I stretched, and he lay there watching. "That your idea of 'taking it easy'?"

"Regular exercise is an important part of routine maintenance."

I didn't catch his expression, but I knew he was emoting something at my back. After a few moments, he rose and headed towards the small bathroom.

There were indeed things that needed doing, only we didn't have a good idea of what they were. Unfortunately, we had no solid leads into Zamora's whereabouts or intentions. That did not negate the fact that we still had to search for clues, however. I was already feeling lazy from getting the extra ninety or so minutes in bed, despite the fact that I had probably needed it, and that the hour wasn't really late so much as normal.

I was done with my morning exercises and had gotten dressed by the time Duo emerged from the bathroom, the small bag he had brought with him last night in his hands now. Eyeing its contents before he tied it shut, I saw it contained a few personal products. I caught his eye and raised an eyebrow. "You were planning on staying."

He shifted on his feet. "No... I was just prepared in case I decided to stay."

Details. I shook my head and brushed by him. He was fully dressed when I got out, but I walked up to him and straightened out his collar for him, then smoothed the shirt over his shoulders. "See? Wrinkle-free."

He laughed. "You weird me out sometimes, Yuy."

On the way into the office, I followed my custom and stopped by the commissary, once again prompting comment from Duo. "Hey, do I now know the reason why you always have breakfast in the morning?"

"Breakfast is the most important meal of the day," I intoned piously at him. That, and Sally would do unpleasant things to me if she found out I had willfully skipped a meal.

Wufei actually beat us to the office for once. It was almost an odd feeling. I left Duo to deal with him while I sat and booted up my computer.

Duo responded to some unasked question. "What?"

Wufei spoke quietly, but not so quietly that I could not hear. "Do you know what you're doing, Duo?"

I felt Duo's eyes on me, but made no sign that I noticed as I opened my milk while staring at the loading screen. He eventually answered Wufei in with a similarly low voice. "I sure hope so."

It didn't bother me that they were talking about me. If they had been doing so this entire time, then it had helped Duo to think his way through some of the issues with me that had plagued him through the last week and more, and I could not begrudge him that. Of all people, I knew that sometimes a person needed a change of venue and maybe the opinions of a disinterested party in order to see his problems more clearly.

Once I was logged into my computer, I hopped another signal out to the file server running out of my apartment. A muttered curse caught the others' attention, and I informed them that during the night, there had been another four hits on information pertaining to me, three of them raised on files I had only flagged the day before. It made me worry how many I might have missed the first time around.

I'm afraid I was rather useless that day. Perhaps whatever had toyed with me through sleep had followed me into waking, creating an incessant undertone of thought to which I was not quite privy. I made it into the afternoon, lost in my own little world so many times that Duo was starting to shoot me worried glances once in a while.

He was just as startled when I finally moved out of my funk to tap rapidly at my keyboard, accessing the images we had on file of Meridian's security systems. I had already been in and out of those systems so often that they should have just given me an administrator account and been done with it. It took me barely any time at all to find the data I needed, and when I had, I sat back in my chair and contemplated the ramifications.

Duo threw an eraser at me. It hit me on my left arm and bounced to the floor. I bent over to pick it up, and was able to hand it directly to him since he was next to me by the time I straightened. He took it back without looking at it, instead looking at me intently. He jerked his head towards the laptop. "What did you find?"

Something that was only beginning to add up. "Zamora was there that night we were."

"Yeah. And?" He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back casually against the edge of my table, but already there was a wrinkle about to form on his brow in anticipation of my news.

"Zero was, too. The only problem is, they weren't in the same place." We had caught the attention of the others. I flicked my fingers towards my computer. "The day we raided Meridian, I checked their logs to see when Zamora had used his security clearance to enter the research lab where Zero was being kept. I only just now realized and confirmed that there weren't any entries in the log indicating that he was there when we were."

"I concluded he was in his office," Wufei reported. "I saw activity in there."

Quatre nodded, but brought up another idea. "Could he have taken Zero to his office?"

I shook my head. "The Zero system isn't something you can just pick up and borrow, unless they've done something revolutionary with its casing. I didn't see any evidence of that in B-four-sixteen."

"You did say that portability would be a good thing," Duo reminded me.

"I did. But would Zamora have been working on that by himself, and have it well-developed enough to be fully operational? We know Hoffman and company weren't interested in that. Even if he did borrow the system from the lab, he would have had to return it at some point, and the system doesn't log him doing so. He couldn't have had it the whole time. The team reported seeing it the next day."

"You also implied that remote control would be good. Could he have accessed it remotely from his office?"

I tapped my fingers absently on the tabletop while I mulled it over. "I'm not certain what sort of technology would be involved in that. There would have had to have been hardware changes, maybe something someone would have noticed. Some sort of wireless transmitter, sure, but over so great a distance? Zero was on the network, but none of its systems were accessible from remote accounts via landline. But wireless is more error-prone than a direct connection. Either there would have to be a whole set of error-correction algorithms written, or else... or else Zero would just accept the flawed data and proceed as normal."

Quatre winced. "That sounds... dangerous."

I nodded slowly. "Yeah, it does. And the latency might mess things up even further. I can't see that being a very good idea... but of course, that doesn't mean that it wasn't done." The foolishness of man would never cease to amaze me.

Duo made a wry sound. Apparently he agreed with me. "I don't suppose the logs show anyone else in the lab while we were there?"

"You wish things were that easy."

"Yeah, I do, sometimes."

So did I... sometimes. Some things shouldn't be easy, like Duo. I think I liked the fact that we were often on different wavelengths, so long as they were concordant frequencies. I wouldn't find him half so interesting a person if I could easily understand his every whim and fancy.

That led me to wondering what Zero would think about Duo... and what Zero would think about me thinking about Duo... and then came that startling realization that I was thinking about Zero thinking, all on its own.

My face must have gone blank again because Duo snapped his fingers by my head to get my attention. "Yo, Heero? Still with us?" He had on an amused expression, but there was concern lurking in his eyes.

"What if..." I ran the words through my mind first to make sure they weren't as crazy as they sounded. "What if Zero was acting on its own that night? What if... I don't know why, but what if someone told it to watch the network that night? What if there wasn't a human mind behind it?"

Oh, it made far too much sense in my mind. That night, when contact between the two of us was made, I should have sensed it. The way it deftly avoided me as I tracked its wake was far too graceful for it to have been wielded by some untrained, ill-equipped mind. The bombardment I had received when I finally caught up with it had been no jumbled chaos of corrupted data, but a dense packet of information too concise and abstract for me to comprehend at first glance, though now I suspected my brain of slogging through it all in my sleep. No, when I ran into it on the network, my thoughts had been entirely focused on the familiar sensation of Zero, with no one else getting in our way.

"Can it do that?" Wufei asked. "Can a person hook Zero up to run on its own?"

"Not... exactly," I answered distractedly. "You could change the input, set it up to receive network traffic, for instance, and define the pattern of input, but then you'd have to impress it with some sort of purpose. You'd have to specify for Zero what you wanted to get out of the packet stream, and then you'd have to give it some form of output. You could do it, but it'd be much like hooking a person up to Zero, and then having the person watch the network traffic, only then you'd be limited by the person's ability to receive and parse all that data well enough for it to be useful for Zero. It's an analytical engine at the heart of it. It'll analyze whatever you point it at. The human hookup only provides direction, and a set of definitions can serve as a rudimentary proxy in the short term."

"So maybe that's why nothing happened when you were detected on the network," Trowa mused. "Maybe Zero was never told what to do in that situation, and Zamora didn't take a look at Zero's activity until the next night, at which point he ran."

That was as good a theory as any, and it was what we went with, but still there was something... something more that I felt I was missing. I don't think I'd ever been so frustrated with myself and my situation.

*****

Part 21

After a late dinner in the office, Duo pulled me to one side and stood blocking my view of the room. "Heero... why don't you give it a rest tonight, okay?"

It took me a few long moments for it to click with me what he was saying. "What? Why?"

"Heero." He took my hand loosely into his, holding in front of his body to keep the others from seeing. "You're... frankly, you're starting to freak me out."

The first two words to run through my mind were again, 'what' and 'why'. The next two were, "Excuse me?"

He looked down at me with a serious expression. "I think you're freaking the other guys out, too."

I managed to catch a glimpse over his shoulder to the rest of the office, where the others were quite studiously ignoring what was happening in this corner. So they had sicced Duo on me, had they? I must have been really out of it indeed to not have noticed. "What are you talking about?"

"You're stressed out," he said bluntly. "You're looking kinda pale, too. Don't make me tell Sally on you."

My eyes narrowed dangerously, and I pulled my hand out of his grasp. "Tell me this has nothing to do with that." I never wanted any allowances to be made on account of my health. There was a reason I didn't go around making a sob story of it to any who would listen. Even Sally knew to chastise me, but otherwise leave me alone.

He shook his head impatiently. "This would be something even without that. Do you know how many times you've just zoned out today? And when you do come back, usually it's just to start looking into something feverishly."

Didn't he understand? "I've been useless enough today. I can't retire early."

"You'd just be useless again tonight. You're barely even paying attention to any of the other ideas we've been pursuing. And actually, I don't even know why I'm telling you to get outta here since knowing you, that just means you're going to go give yourself an ulcer in the privacy of your own room."

"Duo!" Quatre's voice rang sharply across the room. "What part of 'gently' don't you understand?"

"The part where 'gently' will actually get through to this guy!" he threw over his shoulder, not taking his eyes off me. "You need to take a break, Yuy."

"You're right," I told him. "I don't know why you're telling me this because I'm not going to take a break. I can't. I can stare at the blank screen of my computer just as easily in my room as I can in here."

"Why?" he demanded. "Why won't you--?"

"Because I can't." My response was soft, but firm. "I can't stop. Now maybe I haven't really been paying attention to the other avenues of investigation that you all have been pursuing, but I think I would have noticed if something had panned out, and nothing has, has it? Well, I assure you, if I had anything useful to add to the matter, I would, but I have been sitting there all afternoon coming up with precisely nothing, and it is driving me out of my mind. That doesn't stop me from continuing to wrack my brain for something, anything that might help."

I could see the others behind him, all with that expression that said they were backing away from the crazy person, cautious of making any sudden moves, but I didn't care. That didn't stop me from continuing to vent at the stunned figure in front of me. "And you know what the most frustrating thing is? I think I know something. I think I have some vital recognition sitting inside my head, and I can't for the life of me figure out what it is. Everything's going to become completely clear in hindsight, just like every other bloody thing in this entire case, and maybe this time, it finally won't be okay that we figure it out after the fact."

My laptop beeped as if to mock me. Another hit had just been registered on my files. I'd been trying all afternoon to trace those as well, and had failed at it as much as I had failed at the rest. "And that! Someone is looking for information on me. What? Who? It's not just seeking information about an adversary now. This goes beyond what any mere human would want to know about someone. Even I wouldn't exercise this level of thoroughness. What does Zero want with me? And why can't I figure it out?"

There were so many things running across Duo's face that I couldn't even begin to interpret it. I didn't even bother trying and sidestepped him to get back to my laptop. He grabbed my arm as I passed by and pulled me around to look at him. "Heero..."

"What?" I realized I had snapped somewhere on the way from there to here, but it barely mattered at all. At least I had retained enough awareness of my actions to stop myself before I had said something about wishing I could use Zero to figure this whole damn thing out for me.

He released me as if burnt, but for some reason I couldn't take advantage of my freedom to move away. That wounded, almost scared look captured me. I squeezed my eyes shut and made quite the effort at calming down, but that cool I exercised normally was elusive tonight.

Duo eventually put a tentative hand to my arm and steered me back to my seat. I slumped down in it tiredly, only as an afterthought tapping halfhearted at my keys to note where the latest flag had been raised. It was embarrassing the way they all watched me without making eye contact.

Everyone except Duo. Maybe it was a mistake to have looked up. He met my gaze steadily, and held it. I felt guilty, seeing there an exhaustion that hadn't been present before I'd gotten started. "I'm sorry," I murmured.

He bit his lip, then shook his head with a semi-apologetic smile. "Well... at least you concede that I'm right."

The others all jumped when they heard me laugh. I ignored them. So did Duo. He sighed. "Are you sure I can't persuade you to give it a rest? Let me recap the day for you. We figured out what the guy took with him, and have been chasing our tails around trying to piece together his master plan. Even took a trip down to your little buddy RJ's. We've been chasing down people he used to work with. No luck. We've been looking into places he might be hiding out. No luck. We've of course been trying to find him. No luck."

"Sorry." The word fell from my lips before I could remember that I'd already said that. "I'm not the only one that's frustrated here, I'm sure."

He shrugged crookedly, dismissing the apology. "Most of this legwork has been done with people, most of whom have probably gone home for the night, so we couldn't talk to them even if we wanted to. So how about we turn in, recharge, maybe do a little light thinking about things while we do other things like sleep, or at least stretch our legs, and then we come back tomorrow, ready and willing to bang our heads against this again?"

I ran my fingers over my keyboard, ready to protest, but he cut me off at the pass. "Hey, I'm not proposing you stop worrying altogether... I'm not that stupid. All I can do is try and make sure you don't get so frazzled doing it."

Well, I had said I could stare blankly at my screen just as easily in my room as I could in the office, right? I nodded reluctantly and shut my laptop. Duo caught me hugging it to my chest as he and the others gathered their things, and he chuckled. "Guess you were right: you haven't changed that much, have you?"

"Different clothes for different occasions," I reminded him. We had moved into a high-stress situation. In times like these, I would naturally not be as mellow as he had seen me before.

He smiled reassuringly at me, patting me on the back as he slung his bag over his shoulder. "Well, let's get you tucked and squared away in your jammies, and everything will be all better, right?"

I summoned the strength for a dry snort. If only. Before we left the room, I stopped and turned to the others. "I'm sorry I was less than helpful today. Hopefully things will be different tomorrow."

We left amidst their murmurs of understanding. When we got back to my room, Duo shook his head but did not comment when the first thing I did was pull an adapter out and plug my laptop into the wall socket. He didn't even say anything when he found out that I hadn't done so much as turn the laptop off for the trip. He just shook his head and went to the bathroom.

With everything just as I had left it, I sat down on my bed with my laptop on the side table and finished looking into which files had most recently been accessed. Duo returned, sat down behind me and wrapped his arms around my waist, settling his chin on my shoulder. It gave me pause as an unexpectedly intimate gesture.

"Heh, wrong Heero Yuy," he commented, looking at the file displayed on the screen. "I thought you'd filter out hits on the diplomat guy."

His observation returned my attention to the archived newspaper article. I had filtered out those references, having no interest at all in every little kid that had to do a class report on the colonial spokesman. I skimmed the article quickly, trying to figure out where it would have fit in the expanded search net I had put out. Halfway through, I started reading a little more carefully.

"Heero?" Duo asked, his attention caught by the way I had tensed. "What is it?"

I finished off the article with a troubled feeling in my gut. "Well... it could be just a coincidence that the reference got through my filters..."

He squeezed my middle comfortingly. "Please don't finish that with a, 'Or it could be a development with some ultra evil and scary implications.'"

I swallowed. That wasn't what I had been thinking, but it wasn't entirely inaccurate. The article, after all, was from a small, independent press. If someone had been doing a general search on Heero Yuy, he would surely have found much more popular sources. "I told you about Odin, right? The guy that had me before J?"

"...Yeah. Yeah, I think." It had been during one of those dark nights six years ago.

I pointed to the rather large section of the report that detailed the police investigation into the diplomat's assassination, along with theories. "Odin was the one that killed him."

His breath caught. "I think I like the coincidence theory better. Who would know that this had even the slightest thing to do with you?"

The list was so short that it could pretty much be summed up with a single letter. "J. That's about it. No, I guess Dekim Barton might possibly have known, too."

He shuddered. "I'm not gonna ask why. Okay, who living might know?"

"I have no idea. I don't exactly go around telling people these things.... I think I like the coincidence theory better, too."

His sigh translated itself through my back to me, his embrace tightening in a comfort I found reassuring. I slumped into it slightly, trying to convince myself to stand down at least a little. I had someone looking out for me, watching my back. I was just starting to believe it when he released me with a friendly rub across my shoulders. "Come on. Let's get you all jammied up, and then maybe you'll get all warm and cuddly and wise again."

No luck. After showering and 'jammying up', I was not significantly cuddlier nor wiser, though warmer was correct.

*****

With no peace for my mind while I was awake, it was hardly any surprise when I woke up early feeling unrested and restless. Much like the previous night, however, Duo's arm around my waist kept me from rising. I sighed to myself, resigned to waiting out the dawn. Thinking could be done just as easily in bed as otherwise, although it was a little less appealing now that I had the warm, solid presence of someone sleeping beside me. His chest was deliciously warm against my back. The embrace felt decadent. I hadn't thought I would adapt so quickly to it, or anything else for that matter. Kissing Duo, sleeping with Duo... even yielding to the pressure in front of him. It all worked out without my head having to think about it.

Too bad Zamora couldn't show himself with equal ease and grace. Why did he have to run off with the system? Why had I gotten greedy and pursued Zero that night on the network? We had been so close to having this over and done with.

My laptop was still sitting on the bedside table, within arms reach of my current position. I shifted slightly in experimentation. Satisfied that Duo wouldn't stir, I pushed the lid open and tapped the trackpad to wake the machine. I nearly flinched as its faint light lit the room, but luckily Duo's head was turned down enough that it didn't bother him.

I had left the machine to scan the network, putting into effect the script I had written that night in the hopes of possibly catching something before it was too late to divine any useful information out of it. To my disappointment, it did not have anything to tell me.

Duo shifted behind me, sleepily nuzzling the back of my neck. Maybe it was more correct to say that jammie-clad Duo was the warm and cuddly one. I wouldn't have minded having one around. There was a certain measure of peace attached to us being together like this, though it was difficult to quantify with the constant undercurrent of worry I had concerning Zero.

With one finger, I opened a command prompt and tapped out the address of a hidden directory. Its contents looked like temp junk with the convention I used for the naming of the files, but that was to discourage intruders. I typed out the name of the first archive that, together with the other four, would join together to form the basic schematics of the Zero system. Staring at that command before I pressed 'enter', I squashed the whim and deleted the filename, opting for another one instead. The file opened in a separate window.

I looked back on our faces from five years ago, all the same, but different. It was after the Barton incident, but before we had all scattered again. I was up and about, but still convalescing, with Relena hovering solicitously by my side. I had agreed to sit for the picture, but refused to look at the camera as Pargan framed the shot. There was something about a posed picture that had never quite sat well with me. The others were all in a state of candidness, anyway. I had my eyes on the chess game instead, where Duo and Wufei were playing on the rug not far from our feet. Behind us, Trowa and Quatre were examining the contents of one of the bookshelves in the library. I'd always found it a good picture to pull out every once in a while, just to have something tangible as I looked back and reflected.

I used to think about those times, needing to know where I had been in order to get a sense of where I was now and where I wanted to go, but now I could compare the past to the present, the memory to the reality, and see how it all matched up. It wasn't completely surprising that we had all ended up where we had, although I suppose that, if I were one of the others, I might have been surprised by my chosen path. I agree that I had never expected to leave as I did, to find myself in a civilian life, but perhaps that had been one of the things most appealing about it: that I could do something that I had never even considered as a possibility.

I hadn't been staring at it long enough for the screensaver to activate yet when an icon starting flashing in my system tray. It took me a second to recognize it for what it was, but when I did, I closed the image file and brought up the window that was running my script. It had registered another hit.

Still typing with one hand, a skill I had honed during those days when an injury had forced such a handicap, I ran the backtrace on the signal, hunting down its source. The file being accessed was one on the Preventers network, and I nearly grinned at the discovery. This network I could work with.

My quarry didn't make it easy on me. I finally pulled out both hands to type my commands, and inevitably, the clacking roused Duo. He made a sleepy sound before regaining a decent amount of consciousness, but any and all sluggishness he was experiencing was quickly thrown off in favor of outrage when he saw what I was doing.

"You've gotta be fuckin' kidding me, Yuy! Do you know what fucking time it is?"

It seems I had displeased him. Quite understandably, I suppose. Using the arm he had slung around my middle, he tried to restrain me from further action, but I shrugged him off and continued the hunt. "Not now, Duo," I answered absently.

"Exactly!" he practically yelled into my ear. I think he was prepared to climb right over me to do what he had to do in order to separate me from my laptop. "Not now, Yuy!"

I should have responded more assertively and less dismissively. I tried again, this time putting more confidence in it than I had felt in the last two days. "Back off, Maxwell. I got a hit on the Preventers network. I'm tracing it now."

He stopped, squinting suspiciously at my screen before he finally relented and withdrew, not bothering to hide how he felt about the matter with a little muttering. "What the hell were you doing on the computer in the first place?" No doubt he would berate me again later when I wasn't quite so occupied.

The trail was a tricky one to follow, one I was frankly surprised I could follow given the early morning hour, my scarcity of sleep, and my gloomy, testy mood from the day before. Though it took nearly forty-five minutes to figure out, plus a few grudgingly given suggestions from Duo, I finally managed to track down its source.

Duo stared at the results. "We checked that place," he said flatly.

"Why did it turn up negative?" I probably should have been paying attention at the time it had been discussed so I could know without having to ask.

"Because we checked the power on the place. There weren't any signs of it being used. There hasn't been any significant electricity going out there for a while. Just a small weather station on the corner of the base, and what they need to keep it in lockdown. A facility of that size would have to consume a lot more power than that. Between ventilation, and Zero itself, of course..."

"But the power's still on," I interrupted. "And so long as it's on, records can be falsified, read-outs can be faked, electricity can be siphoned..."

"It's feasible," he conceded reluctantly.

I gestured at my display. "More than just feasible, given this."

He frowned, and checked the clock again. "Six-fifteen in the fucking morning, Yuy. What the hell?" After sighing explosively, he shook his head and started getting out of bed. "I'll call Wufei. You can call Quatre and Trowa. Let's round up the posse."

Mental note to self: jammie-clad Duo had to be a class by itself so I could properly derive jammie-clad disgruntled in the early morning hours Duo and jammie-clad warm and cuddly Duo from it. The two child classes had little else in common.

*****

Part 22

Duo's sour mood did little to dampen my own. Although I would not have labeled it 'high-spirited', I was definitely re-energized now that we were getting somewhere. Duo, in an aside to Wufei, commented that I was still working like a man possessed, only at least today I was a man possessed productively. I smiled to myself and continued with the mission planning.

We called the power company for the area and sweet-talked them into confirming that there were a few discrepancies in the reports, though none major enough for them to have taken action. That was enough evidence for us to put together a team and move out.

The old Federation base where Zamora used to work was located about an hour out from Brussels, an hour and a half from Luxembourg. Towards the end of the one-year war, OZ had cut funding to the base, and all of the staff suddenly found they had other places to be. It had been abandoned, then swept out by the beginnings of the Preventers, and then shut down for good. Since it was a small base, it hadn't gotten as much attention as the larger bases had, but eventually the government would have gotten around to finding a better use for the land.

Until then, however, it seemed Zamora would be safe there. After the power problem had been taken care of, the former research facility would have provided him with ample room and setup to do as he pleased. Though we still didn't know what it was he was up to, we were going to stop him.

We let Une know about this latest development, and then we took off, a backup army unnecessary this time as we anticipated only the one man as our opponent, if indeed he was there. Should there prove to be more, we were confident we would be able to handle them anyway. We had certainly done so in the past.

Olin was a stout facility, its gates and walls having withstood the years of neglect, despite the look of the earth barren of all but weeds. We drove past the place once with scanners on the lookout for any EM fields, but found none, a good indication that there were no electronic surveillance devices in effect outside. We parked the van not far from the front gates and proceeded forward on foot.

There had been a lone security booth with a wooden arm to guard the entrance, but after the fledgling Preventers had cleared out the base, they had brought in additional fencing to close up the entrance and lock the facility from casual prying eyes. Not being of that persuasion, it was nothing for us to scale the chicken wire fence and gain access to the grounds. If we had taken the time to case the entire perimeter, we probably would have found a hole cut in the wires somewhere.

Though the reports had not indicated that the base had sported any extreme security measures such as land mines or gun turrets, nor would anyone have been able to install them in a short amount of time, we were still cautious in our approach, automatically falling back into old patterns of hand signals and formations. As expected, we reached the main doors with no trouble.

There was an electronic locking device securing the door. Since it was the Preventers that had installed it, we had the codes, but they were no longer recognized. That was our first confirmation that someone had invaded the base. Popping the panel out, Duo stripped a few wires and bypassed the code lock. The door sprang open a few centimeters with an angry hiss, and after seeing what we could see through the thin crack, we pried the door the rest of the way open.

Flashlights to the floor, we could see footprints in the dust, and two lines. They looked like wheel tracks. Zero was being rolled in some sort of container, perhaps? We followed them, mindful of tricks that may have been laid in our path. There were security cameras scattered through the halls, but none of them seemed to be active. When we ran across an array of beam emitters installed in a doorway, we took the time to raise enough dust in its path to see that they were not activated.

Though we found nothing more dangerous than locked doors and stale air, we continued to be thorough as we followed the trail in the dust. They branched off on occasion, but there was a more heavily trafficked course we could follow that led on in one cohesive direction, first going downstairs to the underground level, then inwards towards the center of the base.

It took about half an hour of moving slowing through the network of hallways before we finally reached a section of the base that looked like it was being currently inhabited. The air was fresher. We cast significant glances at each other. Not long later, we came across a flickering light. It was the first of a chain of lights that seemed to point us in the right direction.

Made wary by the ease with which we had gotten in thus far, we were even more careful now that things seemed a little too obvious. Creeping along, we all loosened our weapons in their holsters, Wufei and Duo even going so far as to pull them out and hold them at the ready. The hum of the overhead lights made itself known, gradually added to by the whirr of the ventilation systems, the quiet buzz of the air purifiers, and that feeling on the back of your neck that tells you something's about to happen.

We turned down a corridor with a large window in the wall that spilled light across our path. On the far side of the window, we could see a reinforced door. Some simple glances sent Trowa and Duo crawling to the other side beneath the view of the window while Wufei took a peek through the glass. He nodded curtly, signaling to us with his fingers that the man within was alone and appeared ignorant of our presence.

Zero? I asked him.

He shrugged, moving his hands around his head. Zamora had an interface on?

Duo inspected the locking mechanism on the door. Frowning, he let us know that it had been tampered with. Despite that, he pried off the paneling and got to work.

About half a minute in, we heard a click that had nothing to do with the door. It was followed by the sound of small gears winding up. We turned towards the wall opposite the window and saw a formerly inert camera had activated.

There was no cover, but we all twitched away from our positions anyway, prepared if something had been aimed at us, but nothing came. A sinister red light was blinking at us, and then a speaker popped. "Now what do we have here.... Ah, of course. The infamous Gundam pilots."

We looked at each and came to the consensus that there was no point in trying to leave if he already knew we were there. Presumably he had access to the base security system and could track us at will. We didn't make it so easy as to stand in front of the window for him, though.

"You might as well stop trying to unlock the door. You'll only damage the circuit."

Unfortunately for him, Duo liked a challenge. With the tip of his tongue showing between his lips, he continued to sort through the wires.

I was surprised when I was called out. "Heero Yuy. I would like a word with you."

Casting a glance at Quatre, I received a nod in reply, so with a breath to ready myself, I stood and turned, eyes assessing the room for any threats before returning to Zamora. He was on the far side of the research lab, scanners and circuitboards and various other pieces of machinery spanning that space between us. As Wufei had indicated, Zamora had a helmet of sorts on, long wires attaching him to a system against the wall. I assumed there were microphones somewhere around here so he could hear me. "Let me in, then. I'd be happy to join you for a spot of tea." I wasn't certain whether or not I really wanted to step into his lair without the others to back me up.

"I think we'll be fine as things are."

My game plan was to stall and distract, unless he gave me some sort of opening. While I kept him occupied, Duo could get the door opened, or Quatre could find another way into the room. "Alright, then. What do you want?"

He stared at me for a few seconds, a little too steadily, and I got the uncanny feeling that Zero was sizing me up through his eyes. "So you're Heero Yuy, huh? Hmpf. I thought you'd be taller."

"Why would you think that?" He should have had all of my stats, given the information mining he had been doing on me.

"Zero thinks very highly of you." It was almost a sneer, one of the ones that covered a thin admiration.

I shrugged. I did not want his admiration. "After all of the time I spent with it, it would almost have to think highly of me by definition. Its data was calibrated to mine."

"And yet you expect so little of it. You think it can have no judgments of its own, that it's a mere slave to your data? Then you fail to see its potential."

I was getting a little sick of people telling me that. Maybe it was arrogant of me to assume that I knew more than everyone else about Zero, but I had the most experience with it. "Its potential is almost without limit... given the right user."

"Then you must not be the right user." He had a face well suited to smirking. "You never took Zero to the next level."

"What's your version of the next level?" I asked. Trowa had rounded the corner on the far side to do some recon. Concentrating on the image in the left corner of my field of view proved that Wufei had done the same, backtracking through halls we had already visited.

Zamora tapped the side of his headgear. It was an entirely new design, less clunky than the model seen on board the Libra to command the army of mobile dolls. That setup had included a virtual reality visor in order to cut down on the direct feedback that the user would have to receive from the system. It was also quite different from the DNI bands I had used during our infiltration run, which were based on a standard model. Instead, Zamora had invented something not dissimilar to a chain mail coif, a mesh skullcap that covered his head with a fine network of interface nodes. "The user is limited when he's tied to the machine, to a chair and an interface that preempts all of his sensory input. He's limited by Zero's perceived limitations. Who was the fool who first decided that Zero could only work when applied to a specific application?"

Zero could be applied to many, many applications... but when he said 'specific', did he mean to imply a general use? Was he not using the analytical engine for anything in particular right now? I studied his setup more carefully. His interface was connected to an open-air casing, Zero, its parts exposed for work. The wires were especially long, though coiled and retractable. Was their purpose mobility? That the user might not be tied to a single place?

But usually, the user didn't care. He would be plugged into the system for some purpose, to complete some task, generally one that needed to be done quickly and then applied in some immediate fashion involving the console at which the user sat. I didn't need long wires to pilot a suit or surf a network. If the calculations were intense, such as climate predictions, then I could leave the system running without my input. Why would I want mobility?

Only if I was going to wander around a lot, using the system as I did. What purpose would that serve? Zamora had implied a general use. Did he mean to have a person hooked up to the system at all times, for no particular purpose... other than the enhancement of man, a harmony of man and machine? I remembered what I had concluded earlier about what Zero might do to achieve that goal. "How long have you been using the interface?"

Zamora blinked, then laughed. Through the speakers, it was a very tinny sound. "Oh, very good, Heero Yuy. Perhaps I was wrong about you. You are a sharp one after all." He walked over to one of the devices on the tables and started fiddling with it. I couldn't tell what it was from where I stood. "I have been connected to the system for almost twenty-four hours now."

Twenty-four hours? Continuous use? Remarkable. The most time I had ever spent in the cockpit of Wing Zero had been eleven hours straight, and even then, I had turned off the input from Zero when I hadn't required it. I didn't doubt the ability of the human mind to cope with the incredible speed of thought possible, so much as I questioned a need for that much constant processing power. What was Zero doing for him? What was there to analyze?

"Shit!" Duo cursed softly from the door, shaking his fingers. His curse had been preceded by a spark and a buzz.

Zamora looked up from his device. It was a measurement machine of some sort, I thought, though all of the displays were turned in the other direction. "Did I not advise you to stop playing with the locking mechanism?" he chided, making it clear that it was no coincidence the lock had experienced a power surge. "And while we're at it, you might as well call your comrades back. They will find no entrance to this lab. They have all been sealed as well."

If that was the case, then they would come back on their own soon enough. Sparing a glance at Duo as he scowled at the door, I put my mind back on the conversation I was having with Zamora. With him hooked up to the Zero system, I had little hope of distracting him now, though maybe, just maybe, something useful would come out it. "In my experience, Zero has required a purpose to keep it focused, keep it from picking up on all the stray thoughts of its user. Are you seeking input from Zero on absolutely everything, or have you found some way to refine Zero's input parameters?"

Zamora's eyes refocused on me, and now that I knew Zero was in there, looking out at me through his eyes, I had to wonder if it was evaluating my question carefully and thoroughly, extrapolating meaning from it beyond what any human would think reasonable. "But is man ever at any time without purpose? Though he might think he is, man has always had the most remarkable ability to delude himself."

There would be such lovely irony if he was the one deluding himself. I went ahead and asked a question I probably knew the answer to. "And what is your purpose now?"

"It ought to be every man's purpose to perfect himself, to constantly strive towards something higher."

"Admirable goals," I murmured. Wufei had returned, conversing with Quatre in a quiet undertone. Duo rounded the corner, following Trowa's path. "Is this union with Zero the best way to achieve that? Is it still the purpose of a 'man' at that point?"

"Man and machine in perfect harmony. Mutualism at its finest. If the man has the strength of mind to maintain his sense of self, of course. If man is in control, despite what assistance he might have, then is he not still man?"

Mutualism? That implied that Zero was getting something out of their union. What was it? A mind on Zero would not suffer so simple a thing as a slip of the tongue or a misunderstanding of vocabulary. "How does one define his sense of self? How does one determine just how greatly Zero is controlling him? Could Zero not have imprinted this man with a new sense of self? Don't most people use Zero, only to discover something new about themselves?" Something metallic was set on the floor around the corner. Wall paneling? Ventilation grill?

"A new sense of self? A true sense of self. How many people do you know are actually truthful with themselves? Zero strips away all of that to find what is truly within a person, and if that person can accept that truth and come to terms with it, then Zero will never be able to take it away from him."

Why was it I was always drawn into philosophical discussions with these sorts? "But following this epiphany, what need does the user have of Zero anymore?"

Through the filter of the speakers, his bark of laughter sounded more like a harsh cough. "Knowing who you are is important, yes, but mankind still has its limitations. With Zero, he will be faster, stronger, wiser."

"And who would reap the benefits of it? Would you propose a ruling elite? Or a society where everyone was plugged in to the system?"

He waved his hand impatiently at me. Why was it that people never thought about the ramifications of their actions? "Not just plugged in to the system! You're still being held back by the limitations of the current arrangement. Imagine the possibilities if the system could be embedded within a person!"

"The entire thing?" If he could wear the interface, but be freed of the wires... if he could go not just wireless, which would mean connecting to a remote system, but instead always have the system with him, then yes, I could imagine the possibilities... They were even more frightening than some of the possibilities with a limited Zero system in the wrong hands.

"Of course! Why would you voluntarily eliminate the entirety of its power? That was something those fools at Meridian never understood. Without the direct interface, Zero still served their purpose, but it was handicapped, hobbled, a prince forced to do a slave's work. Why waste it on such menial tasks when you could have the world at your fingertips?" For someone currently on the Zero system, I had to admit, he had retained a remarkable amount of coherency when dealing with the outside world.

Duo came back around the corner, his dark clothes covered with wrinkles of dust. He shook his head at Quatre before disappearing again. Quatre followed suit with Wufei in tow, leaving me alone. I trusted them to try and find a way into the lab while I mulled over what Zamora was saying. A fully embedded system? How? Zero required special hardware to run. Theoretically, I suppose, it was possible for the system to co-opt the human brain as its processor and memory storage unit... but I wouldn't make any guarantees as to what would be left of it after Zero took over, especially since there also had to be a way to hardwire Zero's algorithms. It wouldn't be compatible with the operating system most people ran.

"What if that's not the best way to perfect yourself?" I asked him. "What if perfection comes from being able to look inside of yourself, and find whatever it is you need within that one closed system? Then it's you that's being perfected, not some combination of you and some other entity."

I think trying to deal with that idea may have caused an assert somewhere. He turned on my comrades instead, eyes turning towards the walls as if he could see them through it. "I advised you to stop, didn't I?" he shouted, his words reverberating in the empty metal hallways.

Quatre yelped in answer. "Son of a--!" Someone on the other side smacked the wall in similar protest.

I stepped closer to the window, looking at Zamora intently. "How much longer are you going to run your experiment? Until you find a way to fully embed the system?"

His attention snapped back to me, a somewhat feverish expression on his face. "I'm nearly there," he insisted, the gleam in his eye becoming manic. He rushed over to another device and started pressing buttons. "I have the prototypes done."

"You'll have to leave that lab eventually, Zamora. Your system is useless if you're trapped inside a box. You said it yourself: what sense is there in placing limitations upon yourself? Open the doors, Zamora."

"No!" The quaver in his voice was both encouraging and worrisome as he barely looked up from what he was doing to answer. If I was pushing him over the edge of his ability to handle the system, it could go either way. He could go mad on us, or he could capitulate. "I can do this. It's possible. After I get the array up, it should easy to program them with what they need."

I tried to appeal directly to Zero. "The system will be wasted on this application if no one accepts it. It could be the most wonderful creation mankind has ever seen, and it will mean nothing if it never sees the light of day." Surely Zero would be reasonable about this.

"There!" He hit one final button in triumph, pulled out a tray that appeared empty to me, then ran over to the Zero mainframe.

"Oh, fuck this," Duo muttered irritably, suddenly at my side again. He pulled out his gun, pushed me back with his free arm, and let loose into the window. I jumped at that sound I hadn't heard for so long, but a piece of my brain was still functioning properly as it noted with admiration and some strange pride how closely grouped Duo's shots were. It noted only as an afterthought that I could see the shot pattern because the glass hadn't shattered yet.

"Shit," Trowa said quite succinctly. I agreed. In hindsight, I realized that the door had been thickly reinforced, that the ventilation for the room was abnormally filtered and protected, and that some of the debris lying on the perimeter of the room looked suspiciously like blast shields. Apparently Zamora had chosen a room in which weapons experiments used to be conducted.

Though we were caught off-guard, I found it interesting that Zamora was as well. Perhaps Zero had been able to predict the traditional ways used to enter the room, but somehow had missed the alternative that Duo had chosen. Honestly, it surprised me, too, though really, I should have thought of that since I was standing in front of the window.

Zamora recovered, his attention riveted to the device in which he had inserted the tray. "Aha!" he shouted in triumph. That could not bode well.

His excitement did not last long. Soon after his exclamation, he slapped a hand to the side of his head, hunching over in what appeared to be pain. "No! What's happening? Why isn't it wor--" There was a loud speaker pop, and suddenly the audio transmission to the hallway was gone. A spark arced across the surface of Zero's console.

"I don't suppose you have any explosives on you," Wufei asked Duo.

His gaze having been transfixed to the scene behind the bulletproof glass, Duo had to blink back to our side of things before answering with a grin. "Never leave home without it." He took a quick glance at the situation before deciding that the door would have to be a weakness he could exploit. From pockets I hadn't noticed he had, he started pulling things out, but I could tell that they were separate components, and he would have to assemble things before we could use them. Apparently he hadn't anticipated their necessity.

I just knew that we wouldn't get the door blasted open in time. Zamora was saying something, a frantic look on his face, but the sound did not reach us. Both his hands were clutched to his head as he tossed it back and forth, and then he seized up, body stiffening in pain before he fell over to the floor, small convulsions wracking his frame. Zero calmly dropped sparks on him as if in tribute.

"Duo, hurry!" Quatre said with urgent command.

I shook my head, watching the blood paint a scarlet line from Zamora's nose to puddle beneath his cheek. Smoke rose as incense at his grave from one of Zero's panels. "I think it's too late."

"Well, we've gotta get this door open anyway," Duo muttered to himself, inserting his detonator into a small charge. "Okay. Clear?"

We retreated to a safe position around the corner, and he pressed the magic button, a loud boom going off in response. That small charge had packed more punch than I had expected. Did Duo routinely carry such explosives around in his pockets?

The door was largely undamaged, but the blast had taken out the circuitry next to it. We forced the door open against the protest of servos and gears, and entered a room that smelled of dusty fire. Knowing with an absolute certainty that Zamora was dead, that his fate was no less painful and permanent than Stewart's, I left the scientist to the others and headed towards the computer array that was still emitting the occasion spark. I traced the cords with my eye, and when I found the one I wanted, I knelt down and unplugged the array from the wall. Wisely reserving judgment until further evidence had been gathered, I suppressed that ache that welled up somewhere inside of me at the thought of Zero's demise. That, truly, would be a waste.

The others eventually came to the same conclusion I had about Zamora. Leaving him for the moment, we turned our attention to the rest of the lab. Perhaps Zamora may have been able to stay in the lab for a few days more yet. We found a stash of ration bars and other snacks in the corner. Not far from it was a bucket he had apparently been using as a toilet, so unwilling had he been to unplug from the system. We avoided that corner thereafter in favor of the technology strewn across the countertops.

I came back to squat next to Zamora's body, curious about the neural interface that he had been using. I poked it cautiously, wary of any lingering effects the overflow of data might have on its circuitry, but it appeared to be safe to the touch. Tugging on it gingerly, I found that it moved slightly, but would not release its host. I tried to peel up one of the edges to see what it could be caught on, but couldn't lift it enough to get a good glimpse of it.

Resigned to having to work for it, I put a hand to the floor and leaned down, trying not to look straight into Zamora's glassy eyes as I did. I was also careful of putting my hand in the blood. Working one finger under the interface, I pulled it up despite resistance and looked beneath. Was that his hair? I leaned in for yet another closer look, and when I figured it out, I jerked back, falling back on heels and nearly on my behind.

"Whoa there," Duo said, suddenly behind me again. He put a steadying hand on my shoulder and helped me regain my balance. "What did you find under there? Lice?"

I shook my head, taking a moment to use him to help me get up. He silently waited for my brush with dizziness to pass. "Microfilaments."

"What?" He frowned.

"It looked like... they'd have to be nanotechnological microfilaments extending from the head piece through the scalp and probably connecting directly to the brain."

Duo looked slightly ill. "You mean--? Ewww. So that interface is bonded to him permanently now?"

I looked over at the crisped shell of Zero, a pang of sadness running through me. "There was probably a way to release the connections... but now, I'd guess we either cut them, or scalp him."

That didn't help him feel any better. "Ugh, let's leave that for now, shall we?" He tugged on my sleeve a little, pulling me away from the body. "Wouldn't that hurt? Retracting all the connections, I mean. And for that matter, what if you got an itch under there or something?"

Dwelling on minutiae was a good way of avoiding thought about the big uglies staring you in the face. "If the microfilaments are as fine as those looked, I imagine it would hurt even less than a pin prick. Well, a lot of pin pricks."

Trowa drifted over to us. "I didn't know that nanotechnology had progressed so far."

"That was one of those things that he did, right?" Duo asked. "Cybernetics, computer vision, nanotech, and something else."

I nodded to both of them. "The technology is actually pretty advanced, but almost none of it has been released for commercial use. Since he was a researcher with an interest in the field, he would have had access to the resources necessary to make this sort of interface."

Trowa scratched thoughtfully at his chin. "So he actually was pretty far along in his idea to embed the technology in humans."

Duo shuddered. "Yeah, sure, except for the fact that after twenty-four hours, or after... whatever the hell it was he was doing, it'll fry your brain to a crisp. Seems like that might keep it from ever getting past the testing phase."

"Well, yes, there is that."

He rolled his eyes, then turned to me with some comment, but my attention had already strayed back to the devices over which Zamora had hovered during his final minutes. I wasn't familiar with them, but I could make a guess. The table beneath the scanner was relatively clean, compared to the dust-covered surfaces elsewhere, leading us to believe that it was a piece of hardware that had existed in the lab before Zamora's arrival. There was an LCD touch screen on it displaying generic readouts on voltage, currents, impulses and stability, but the values had been zeroed out when Zamora had removed the tray from the machine.

He had inserted that container into the console housing Zero, but when we extracted it, the tray was empty. Either its contents had been consumed in the process that eventually overloaded the computer's circuits, or Zamora had been driven mad by Zero and there had never been anything in the tray to begin with.

There was certainly work done with hardware at some point, however, since there were wires and transistors and other pieces scattered through the lab. Obviously he had to have been well-equipped to have constructed the interface that he had. A handful of the microchips here had turned up missing in the Meridian inventory, along with three of the other small devices we found in the lab.

Though I had avoided looking very closely at Zero before in an attempt to put off learning the full extent of damage done to it, I forced myself to do so now, and I was glad that I did. After popping the casing off, I peered inside the machine, thinking to myself that something didn't quite seem right. Although I would have to consult with the Meridian research team to be certain that they hadn't made any modifications of which I was unaware, I concluded that some of the parts used in the Zero machine had been replaced with products of inferior quality. Especially troubling was the memory core. It was not the original unit that had been installed in Wing. Had someone made a copy of the data? And if so, where was the original now?

I grew worried, though the others managed to get me to admit that the data that Zero contained would be largely useless without the proper interface to access it and the proper processors to run it. Still, given enough time, a person could eventually find a way to make use of the memory unit. In exchange for the concession from me, I made them agree that it was definitely a matter to be looked into.

No one asked me if Zero had been damaged irreparably. I don't think they wanted to know. Of course, I wouldn't be able to tell for certain until I got back to HQ and ran a few diagnostics on it, but from a preliminary analysis of it, I predicted that at least some of it could be salvaged. Zero had, after all, survived mostly intact after my last battle with it. Certain parts of it had been made with an extraordinary degree of resilience with thoughts of combat-readiness in mind. A little overload wouldn't destroy it. The thought reassured me.

*****

Part 23

As a mere 'consultant', I wished I could get out of some of the reams of red tape that followed, but I was too conscientious to dump it all on my comrades. There was still a lot to be done. Although we had given our verbal reports to Une, there was still paperwork to be written up, especially since we had ended up with a dead man and a system damaged to a yet undetermined state. Diagnostics would be run and autopsies performed, not to mention charges filed. Though we were no longer the main agents on the case against Brisbois or the people at Meridian, we had started the investigations and done a lot of the legwork on them, so we would inevitably have to catch up on all of the things we had delegated to others in the pursuit of our main goal.

Une held me back a moment after the others. "Well, Yuy. You've had quite a week."

She wasn't one to make small talk. There was a point in all of this. I nodded briefly.

"What is your evaluation of how things turned out?"

There were wrong ways to answer that. I paused to consider my words carefully. "I'm pleased that the incident kept to a relatively small scale," I said with an internal wince. I'm sure the Condasans would have disagreed, although compared to the possibility of full-scale war on Earth and in the colonies, the situation had stayed fairly isolated. While Duo would probably have torn my head off for saying such a thing, I trusted Une to understand and appreciate my point.

She nodded. "And the casualties?"

"...Regrettable." And yet I could see no way of having avoided them. Dimitriev had died before we had ever gotten onto the case. Stewart had died before we suspected Meridian. The Condasans... sort of the same way, but they were innocents, which made everything worse. Even I, king of self-castigation, could not really see a way I could blame myself for that one. And as for Zamora... he had brought it down upon himself. My only wish was that he had not taken Zero down with him.

I was subjected to an intent look before she asked her next question. "And Zero?"

"We've yet to see what sort of damage Zero has sustained." But I had a soul-deep hope that it hadn't been so great that the entire system was a loss. I wished I had the time to tinker around in a lab with it, but I didn't, so I would leave that to RJ and his diminished crew. They would also have access to the interface that Zamora was wearing, just as soon as the medical team finished removing it from the body. I would leave that little detail out when briefing RJ on his new task.

Her glasses reflected the light as she leaned back in her chair. "So what did you think of this whole case?" When I gave her an inquisitive look, she clarified. "Would you be interested in doing it full-time?"

My first response was that no, I would certainly not like to see entire communities laid to waste, or valuable resources destroyed, but obviously that was not of what she spoke. She had asked me this question once before. This, too, was an answer that required some deep thought. "I think... that is unlikely. While I am, perhaps, more willing to make myself available now, I do not believe I would be interested in doing this on a daily basis at this time."

She nodded. I think she had expected as much.

When I left her office, I found Duo loitering outside waiting for me. I was surprised to see him there, though I knew I shouldn't be. He accompanied me wordlessly to the staircase, waiting until we were safely inside before asking. "So... what did she want?"

I cast him a sidelong glance. Duo had his eyes fixed on the stairs. "She offered me a job."

"Oh?"

I didn't make him ask. "I turned it down."

"Huh."

This time, I stopped myself from asking what he meant. "Was there something you wanted?"

"...Yeah. Quatre wanted to let you know that we were going to get some real grub for lunch instead of that quickie we did, so we wanted to make sure you didn't go wandering off somewhere first."

"Oh. Well, I was going to stop by R&D for a while, but I guess that can wait."

He snorted. "Damn right they can wait. Not like you're really all that eager to pass it off to their hands anyway."

I made an equally wry sound. "No... I guess not."

"You..." He trailed off, changing his mind. Sometimes I was glad he did, and sometimes I wanted to know what it was that he was about to say. He let out a little puff of breath, then started looking uncomfortably at random points on the wall. "You... you know. Okay and all?"

As usual, it took me a little while to follow his train of thought, if indeed I could at all. While sometimes I could find the beginning of the path, it was rare that I could follow it all the way to the end. "About what?"

"Well... Zero and all. Getting..."

"Crisped? Fried? Toasted? Burnt? Charbroiled?" I was sure I could come up with a few more if I wanted to.

"Uh... yeah." He looked even more uncomfortable now. I was starting to worry he might trip down the stairs at this rate.

One corner of my lips lifted. I appreciated that he was interested in looking out for me. "You can say it for what it is... so long as you're reasonably accurate. I would stay away from things like 'wasted', 'trashed', or 'destroyed'. That might upset me."

His stride smoothed out as we continued to descend. Being a top executive, Une had an office near the top of the building, and being former Gundam pilots, we generally avoided elevators. "So you're being optimistic, eh?"

"Cautiously optimistic," I corrected. That was the better course, to hope for the best but expect the worst. "From my initial assessment of Zero, the system didn't look like it was completely destroyed. And even if it was... the original memory core of Zero is still out there."

"Oh yeah... Bet I know what you're going to be concentrating on."

I shrugged apologetically as we exited the stairwell and headed back towards our office. "I won't skip out on the paperwork. A lot of that will be my responsibility because of the computer work that I did. I wouldn't force that on all of you. I can do that and look into the missing--"

"You're going to do that by not sleeping much, aren't you?" he cut in accusingly. At least this time, I could understand his motivation for such a tone. "That is unacceptable, Yuy. The case is over. Sure, there's a lot of mop up work left to be done on it, but it's over enough that you can stop losing sleep over it. And for every argument you can come up with, I'm likely to just tell you you're being stupid, so you can just not bother."

I smiled. "That's one way to save me time."

"I can do whatever I have to," he retorted unrepentantly. "How did you ever manage on your own?"

I recognized that as a friendly dig, but I answered seriously enough. "I think I attract people that like to look out for me."

He laughed, starting out heartily, but puttering out rather quickly to a more thoughtful sound. "What are your friends like, Heero?"

"My friends? Hmmm. Well, I think they're all computer people, to start with." Mostly people I had met in the labs or in classes. They all tended to have the same sense of humor, the same level of intelligence, and the same tolerance of social ineptitude.

"What about that girl you called the other day? About nosing around your files? I thought you'd think that was kinda annoying or something."

"Trix? She's... Actually, I think she's kind of like you."

He turned to me as he walked, shooting me an amusedly offended look. "Are you insulting me?"

Only if he was putting words in my mouth. "Of course not. If I thought she was annoying... If I thought you were annoying, you wouldn't be my friend, now would you?"

A suspicious glance was thrown my way, as if he doubted the simple logic of my statement. I liked things simple. Of course, I also liked Duo, and he was far from simple, so obviously that was not an exclusive opinion. "She's just inquisitive. And bright. And she likes to help. She's not trying seriously to be invasive. It's more like... what drives hackers to hack. The good hackers, I mean. It's just a desire to break the system, to figure out what others didn't think of."

"And you've got so much system around you to break, it's obvious you've got some sort of secret agent past or something. I'm sure you just scream 'challenge', don't you?"

Why don't you tell me? I thought, but I chose not to vocalize the question. "She knows there's something I don't want to talk about. That more than anything is probably what keeps her from trying too hard. She respects me, and she knows that I'll be open and honest with people so long as I respect them. Which is why you have a standing invitation to ask me whatever you need to."

We turned the final corner to our office. "Heh, I could ask you all the questions in the world, and I bet there would still be a lot of things about you that I just wouldn't understand."

I paused before opening the door. "Don't worry. The feeling is mutual." And it didn't bother me in the slightest.

*****

My door chirped that little sound that seemed somehow common to all such portals in institutionalized housing. I continued to speak on the phone as I got up to answer it.

"I hear that you aren't one to talk, Relena. Word is that you work too hard, too." I nodded to Duo as I let him in, completely unsurprised to see him here. It was a reassuring pattern. He was about to greet me when he noticed that I was on the phone, so instead he just slipped in silently.

"And just where did you hear that?" she asked.

"A little demon told me," I said, showing amusement when Duo lifted his brow at me. I gestured at him to take a seat.

"Why, that little sneak. It's unfair of him to put you on my case, too. I can't deal with that many overprotective people."

I snorted dryly. "Tell me about it."

Her voice took on a mischievous tone. "Oh, you too, eh? Has Duo been hovering over you?"

"You could call it that." I cast another quick look at Duo, swiveling back and forth at my desk chair. He had probably come by to make sure I was getting enough sleep again, even though it was pretty early. When would the madness end?

"I told you everything would turn out alright."

"I didn't exactly disagree with you." The only difference had been my definition of 'alright'.

"Well, I suppose you can be right if you must, so long as I'm right, too."

I chuckled. "You sound like him." He kept watching me as I talked. I was fairly certain he knew exactly to whom I was referring.

"Hey, next time you see him, tell me to give me a ring. He owes me."

"Better yet..." I handed the phone to Duo. "She wants to talk to you."

"Huh?" He took the phone and put it to his ear. "Hello? Oh, hey, Lena... No, I just dropped by. Can't leave him alone for a second, you know... Ugh, Lena..."

He cast me a glance as he listened to her on the other end, fielding her responses with an amused exasperation. "No, I haven't... Well, you know how world crises are... Yeah, I know, but-- Hey, why don't you give it a shot and see how easy it is? ...Now wait just a second there... Lena-- Lena, look. Just let it be, okay? ...Don't worry. Yeah, it's... it's not so bad... It is. Really. Even though you know that's not the case at all. Okay? ...Yeah, okay. G'night. You want to talk to Heero again?" He tipped the phone away from his mouth and turned to me. "She says 'good night.'"

"Good night to her, too," I answered.

"He says-- yeah. Okay. Bye, Lena." He flipped my phone closed and made a tossing gesture at me.

I declined, indicating with a tilt of my head that he could just set it down on the desk beside him. "So she gave you a dressing down, too, huh?"

Duo stuck his tongue out in good humor. "She made a good queen of the world," he answered obliquely.

"That she did." Better than I had expected, actually, given the practical limitations of her position. And she was still an excellent policymaker today. "I called to update her on the case. Une gave her an overview, enough for her to know that we don't have a potential emergency on our hands anymore, so much as a 'problem'."

"Yeah? What did she say?" He leaned back in my chair, putting his hands behind his head.

"She's glad, of course. Une told her about Meridian before. There's been a bit of a shuffle because of that. I think the official spin is that they're being investigated for unauthorized research, but rumor is that it's nothing of the sinister type. Their satellite facilities and offshoot programs are still running the same as normal. Their stock has taken a slight hit, but all things considered, consumer confidence is still relatively high in their products. There are, of course, some loud detractors declaiming the company, but they're for the most part being marginalized."

"So nothing about Zero, eh?"

I shook my head. "The public doesn't even know anything about Zero. Some people might know that it was involved in Quatre's... momentary lapse of reason, but other than that, it's just a number to them. It may come out that Meridian may have illegally obtained some hardware from a government facility, which would explain the Preventer's inordinate interest in the case, but other than that, I think they'd like to keep it under wraps. Of course, that sort of results in other things having to be brushed under the rug..."

Duo's expression darkened, hands coming down to be folded with deceptive laziness in his lap. "They aren't going to say a thing about the hundreds of deaths by biological weapon, are they?"

I pursed my lips, knowing that I couldn't tell him what he wanted to hear. "That more than anything else would effectively raze Meridian to the ground," I answered softly.

The angry set of his jaw gave away how hard he was trying to be reasonable about this. He threw himself out of the chair and started pacing. "Are they at least going to be prosecuted for it?"

I shrugged helplessly, following his path with my eyes. "I don't know. I know that even without it, the prosecution can put them away for life."

"You're talking about Hoffman. Conzemius, maybe, if he doesn't plea out, which he probably will. What about the researchers and the scientists that worked on the project? There's no way they couldn't have known what they were making when they were working with deadly viruses and bacteria. And what about the guys that delivered the disease? Or the guys that snuck into houses and took evidence they had against Meridian?"

"You don't have to convince me, Duo. I know. There's Stewart, too. At least they've finally contacted his next of kin. They'll know his status, even if they'll never figure out what happened to him. And I'm sure we won't ever tell them. We can't without letting on about Zero, about a machine that can fry people's brains during a malfunction, among many other things. And Dimitriev. Will there be justice for him? Or has his death been made completely irrelevant by the preponderance of evidence elsewhere? It was years ago, after all."

"Will the case even be tried?" he asked with rhetorical bitterness. "Or are they just going to settle quietly out of court, with nothing ever being released to the public? Maybe the top people will resign, and some of them get sentences in some nice, cushy pen. Oh, and monetary recompensation, of course. That'll fix everything, right?"

I had to shrug again, not knowing the answers. I walked over to him, draping my arms over his shoulders to stop his restless motion and pull him in close. "Duo. I know this isn't the ideal solution, but it's the way it is."

"God, Yuy," he half-groaned, half-growled, his hands moving reluctantly around me. "If you tell me that at least they won't be able to do it to anyone else..."

The thought had crossed my mind, but I let it continue on its merry path on out the other side. "All those people are going to get shafted," I said with a quiet bluntness. "Actually, they already have been. They're gone, Duo, and we know why. They're only getting away with it legally."

He laughed bitterly. "Woohoo. We know. So what are we going to do, shoot them nasty looks the next time we run across them? That all we can do?"

That sneer did not belong on his face. I put my lips to his and coaxed it away with a gentle inexorability. "We can get them punished for it, even if their real crimes aren't read aloud at their trials. It won't be the best solution, but..."

Eyes closed, and a distraught look on his face, he nodded, then pulled me even closer to him and held on tightly.

*****

"--it and make it all better?" Duo was saying to Quatre as I walked in. He glanced at me as I entered, then turned back to Quatre. "...Yeah."

Quatre looked at him and me with some sort of significance before asking, "What news?"

"They found an onboard debug storage chip on the interface that they think they can pull state information from. That should help give them a better idea of just went wrong. They've also made an image of the drive, so now I get this back." I held Zamora's laptop up for them. "Anything new here?"

He shrugged. "Not really. Going over some of the reports. Duo thinks we've just about made up for the evidence that the Condasans had. Wufei and Trowa are completing the report on Brisbois' arrest."

I nodded in recognition of the data as I sat down in front of Zamora's laptop. While computers were my ever-faithful companions, it was getting a little tiresome having to fish through low level histories and caches for unspecified information. I settled down with a grim expression, girding myself for the challenge and compiling a list in my head of what I needed to find.

Hopefully, Zamora was fond of taking notes. We had confirmed with the crew at Meridian that they had never made any copies of the Zero central memory unit, therefore it must have been Zamora that had done so. Where had he hidden it? What had he done with it? With luck, his files would tell me.

I had thought that perhaps Zero was still running somewhere on the base, but after spending an arduous hour and a half with the power company in its various departments, I had finally convinced them to narrow down and specify the inconsistencies in their records regarding the Olin base. They hadn't yet corrected the problems that were causing the misreadings, but they were able to inform me at least that there was now, honestly and truthfully, an insignificant amount of energy being diverted to the base. While I was glad that meant that Zero hadn't been left running there somewhere, it would have been nice if we could have located it so easily.

Quatre and Duo continued their casual conversation as we each sifted through our stacks of information. "You know, Q, you might be kinda right."

"I told you it was kind of inevitable," the blonde said smugly.

"Oh, shut up. It was not. I don't know if I really believe in 'inevitable'. Well, that kind of 'inevitable', anyway."

"Well, that's the great thing about inevitability. It doesn't matter whether you believe in it or not."

"I don't think I would even be having this conversation if I didn't--" Duo paused. "No, wait, I think that supports your point. Dammit."

"You make it too easy, Duo."

"Oh... shut up," he groused. "No, wait, I was wrong-- I mean, I was right, it doesn't support your theory. See, I wouldn't be having this conversation if I hadn't done something. 'Inevitable' sort of implies that I wouldn't have had to do anything, right?"

Quatre gestured at him with a hand holding a sheet of paper. "You may well have been having this conversation. It may just have taken place at a later date in time."

Duo stuck his tongue out. "Well, then you can't prove a thing. If nothing ever happens to back your 'inevitable' theory, then all you have to do is say that we just haven't waited long enough."

"Therefore making it inevitable that I win this argument."

"Augh." He stopped looking over the data to glare at Quatre. "This officially makes it even more frustrating to argue anything with you than it is with Heero."

Upon hearing my name brought up suddenly, I blinked myself out of the unparsed lines of data and back to the present. "Huh?" My mind caught up a moment later and filled me in on everything it had heard, but had been too busy to process. "Frustrating?"

He leaned towards me with a half-formed pout on his lips. "And do you have any idea how frustrating it is sometimes when you don't even realize how frustrating you're being?"

I took a guess. "No?"

"'No,' he says." He looked at Quatre and received a commiserating look in return. "'No.' Of course not. It makes perfect sense to him to make perfect sense."

That was... mind-boggling. "...And it doesn't to you?"

"But perfect sense isn't always perfect! Sometimes it makes no sense at all!" After sparing me a moment's glance, he turned back to Quatre again. "Which brings me right back to the whole 'inevitable' thing, you know. It doesn't make any sense at all."

Quatre smiled with the perfect confidence of a person that knows he has an utterly defensible position. "Which is why we slap an 'inevitable' on it. It doesn't have to make any sense right now, but it'll make sense in the end."

Duo snorted. "Yeah, says you."

"If I were a betting man, Duo..."

He wagged a finger at our teammate. "Oh no, don't even go there, Q-ball. Because I am a betting man, and I don't want to take that bet because I have a feeling I'd get shafted either way. I wouldn't want to have to worry about ruining something this good just to spite you."

Quatre grinned toothily. "'Good', you say?"

Duo snapped his mouth shut, a wary expression closing all the banter away rather immediately. In the end he shrugged with a force nonchalance. "I never said it wasn't."

"You haven't said a lot of things, Duo. Especially not to the other parties involved in your inevitability."

He turned Quatre's logic back on him. "Well, if it's inevitable, then I don't have to say anything at all, now do I?"

"Only if you want to wait a really long time for it. Just because things are inevitable, doesn't mean they can't happen too late. Who knows what you may be missing out on?"

Duo looked like he was ready to shoot back a snappy reply, but he paused thoughtfully, eyes flicking to me for a moment before returning to Quatre. "Hm. I'll get back to you on that one."

I wasn't going to wait around for the exciting conclusion, so I went back to work.

*****

It was getting slightly ridiculous. With Duo's efforts to get me in bed and keep me there, he had practically moved in to my room. He brought his knapsack with him now, holding a toothbrush, some clothes, and a hairbrush. I wondered what Wufei thought about the situation.

I supposed I could see the logic behind his actions. The case was, to their eyes, over. Maybe it was time I stopped working late nights to try and catch up on things, but obviously if I didn't, then I would never catch up. For the most part, however, the paperwork was kept thankfully to a minimum. There were a few signed affidavits that I had to write up testifying to my part in each individual case so that they could stand in for me when trial time rolled around, but other than that, it was just an afternoon of reading that was necessary to catch up on all the developments.

The Zero core unit was being elusive. We didn't think Zamora would have sold it off or given it to someone. In the unlikely case that he had been seeking money, he probably would have sold a copy and not the original. Leaving it in someone else's care was equally improbable, given the man's possessive nature when it came to his research. In the advanced fields of science, there was a cutthroat race to be the first to discover something, anything, shiny and new. Why would he willfully create competition for himself?

Duo made himself at home in my little room as soon as he arrived, setting himself up on my bed as he watched me finish up some work on my computer. He commented when I set it to sleep mode. "Not so frantic anymore?"

I sighed. "If we want to be reasonably optimistic about this whole thing... we know as a fact what time Zamora notes in his files that he made the copy of Zero. Given the time, and given the likelihood that he left his secured niche in favor of the outside world, I think... it's likely that it's still on base somewhere. Where? I don't know. So long as it isn't running something right now... I guess I'm okay with not losing any sleep over it."

He chuckled ruefully. "I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that with such reluctance or resignation."

"Well, I'm not happy about it," I defended myself. "The ideal solution is that we recover the system. But at this point... with his paranoia kicked into high gear by Zero, I wouldn't be surprised if he made a copy, put the original in a box, and then buried it in the ground somewhere. If that's the case, then..." I kept my exhalation from being another sigh. "Then I guess it's okay if we can't find it, so long as no one else can find it either."

"Aw, not planning on combing the grounds with a metal detector?"

Well, I had considered the possibility, so I shrugged noncommittally. "I do plan on making another trip out there sometime, as soon as I've got the time. We only conducted a visual inspection under time constraints. I'd like to make sure the place is clear before signing off on it." There was still a chance.

We talked a bit instead. I finally got him to tell me a little more about what he'd been up to for the last five years. It wasn't all that bad, despite Duo's dark coloring of it. It just wasn't very progressive, according to him. We managed to identify some good points, things to remember in the future, like how much he enjoyed working with the kids one day at the park, or his reaction when he saw a school of dolphins in the Pacific on one of Howard's barges.

Mostly I let him talk, with only a few comments or questions here and there. The thought process often benefited from being put into words. Funny how I would have thought him to have realized that, rather than me. Giving the matter some side thought, however, I realized how it worked out. The words only helped when they were based on meaningful topics. Chatter and banter didn't count.

The abbreviated version of his last few years ended around twenty-two hundred, when he turned things around and made me share a little more of myself with him. As always, I didn't think there was much to share, but one man's trash is another man's treasure, as they say. I talked a little about what kinds of classes I had taken. I was glad to do it, too, when he showed interest in the topics. There was a little bit of a wide-eyed wonder to it, as if he was catching a glimpse of something he had never thought was meant for him. If nothing else, I wanted to show him that it was well within his grasp.

Around twenty-three hundred, we both ended up in my bed. It was fortunate we were as friendly as we were, otherwise it would have been quite the tight fit. We were snug as it was, but I had no complaints. It was warm and companionable and, well, sort of reaffirming. It was a good feeling, knowing that I had someone with which I could get this close.

Maybe Duo felt the same way. He turned over so he was on his stomach, and in the process of transforming a friendly kiss into something more, he managed to maneuver himself halfway on to me. Honestly, I hardly noticed such trivialities when he threaded a hand through my hair, using some light pressure to guide me into cooperating fully with his mouth's whims. I didn't offer up much resistance, even when I found his tongue cleverly teasing mine, which was quite an unexpected development.

He broke contact and leveled a deep, searching look across my probably hazy expression. At length, he drew breath to speak, changed his mind with an incredulous little shake of his head, and pushed himself off me, floating a vague intention to shower over his shoulder at me.

Yeah, it was a good feeling.

And yeah, finding out about some more of his life events still didn't help me understand his thought processes at all sometimes.

*****

I was typing up a report when Wufei and Duo rejoined the rest of us from getting an update on the situation in Africa. They were continuing a conversation they had been carrying on along the way as they drifted towards their desks.

"I get what you're saying, Fei, but I don't think you're really seeing the full extent of my point. I know I said it was nothing, okay? But nothing has the perfect potential to become something."

"Nothing comes from nothing, Duo," Wufei answered with his usual implacability. "There must have been something, even if you don't know what it is."

"...Hmmm, okay, how's this? That nothing was really nothing. This is just an entirely different something."

Wufei gave it some thought as he added to the notes on the whiteboard. "The two are related. They must be. It is impossible to divorce the present from the past."

"I'm not trying to. Trust me, I know. I think that's half the problem right there." He picked up a dry eraser and started cleaning off some of the miscellaneous that had accumulated.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, not updating. Getting stuck at some comfortable point and never going beyond it. Not realizing that things have changed." So it seemed that Duo had been listening to me after all.

"Have they?" Wufei asked.

Duo made an exasperated sound as if the answer should have been obvious. "God, yes. Totally and completely yes. From my point of view, anyway, which should really be anyone's point of view. I mean, it can't just be me. It's him. He doesn't get it. Just flat out doesn't get it at all."

"Have you tried asking?"

"Asking? What good would asking do? If you have to ask, then obviously the answer is a big, fat negative."

"How do you know if you don't try?"

He snorted. "Some things in this world, Fei, you just know. The stars don't actually twinkle in space, outship without a suit is Bad, and he obviously doesn't get it."

"Are you sure you've made your intentions clear?"

"I bloody sleep with the man, for chrissake, and we're twenty-one. You don't do that sort of thing innocently, but does he get that? No, apparently not. I kiss the man, and I kiss him gooooood, and does he notice? Not at all. I could wake him up, humping his leg and sporting some morning wood, and he would ask me what I was doing! And if I made some half-assed excuse, he'd probably just shrug it off. 'Oh, don't worry about it; these things happen.' Probably not to him, no, but in a general sort of sense. And it's weird, because normally he's sharp as can be, but sometimes, I bet we could be talking about him right in front of him and he wouldn't even notice!"

I guess I just had to finish the thought I had started in my written report before my brain was freed to process the conversation happening in the room around me. Duo didn't sleep with anyone else, did he? I was in a position to know, wasn't I? I took my attention from my screen as the snippets of conversation lined up properly in my mind, and I ended up catching Trowa's eyes above my monitor. He saw realization gradually start to creep up on me, and he snorted.

That was confirmation enough that something was going on. I turned around slowly to face Duo, finding that the entire room was watching me expectantly. "Am I... missing something here?"

He planted his face in the palm of his hand. "Finally! I was really starting to worry about you, Yuy. Would I have to carve it on the face of the moon with a beam rifle or what?"

"Carve... what?"

He blinked at me with a look of determination, then started closing in on me. I was dimly aware of Quatre getting out of his seat. "Look at the time," he announced cheerfully. "Who's up for some coffee?"

"I hear the café on Brown and Fitch is good," Trowa said, he and Wufei both heading out of the room with him.

That left me and Duo. He put his hands on either side of me and leaned over my chair. "Look, I like you. I'm just going to be upfront with you about that because I know you're not going to go all weird on me. Worst case scenario, you just completely miss my point and go on with your happy, oblivious life, right? So I like you. In a, 'I'd kinda like to date you' kind of way. Well, maybe also in a, 'I'd kinda like to do you, but hey, you're great company, too!' kind of way. What do you think of that?"

"Uh... Oh?"

Well, at least I amused him. "Hey, look, I was right. He doesn't get it. Let me help you out. You like me, Heero?"

"Yes?" That was a no-brainer, even though I wasn't quite certain what the definition of 'like' was anymore. I'm sure there were several, and one of them had to apply.

He grinned with a faintly Shinigami humor that sent a shiver down my spine. "And do you like kissing me?"

"Yes." I needed to stop uttering things with such an unsure, questioning tone.

He smiled a moment more before exploding. "Then how can it not add up for you? For a guy who can do differential calculus with two hands tied behind his back, how can simple addition be beyond your grasp? How are you still stuck in this whole friend thing? I mean, yeah, the kiss it and make it better thing is cute and sweet and maybe even a little sexy and all, but that is not the only thing a kiss is good for!"

The gears in my brain started chugging slowly in recognition of his words. I wasn't a complete innocent; of course I recognized the kiss as a possible harbinger of lust or sex. That just wasn't my goal. "...But I like kissing you and making it better."

Duo looked torn between laughing, crying, staring, and ripping my throat out. Now would probably be a perfect example of a time to kiss him, if the moment had been caught in some other context. If Duo was down, I wanted to make him feel better, and a kiss seemed both a good way to express that and accomplish that, both in the past and at present. Made sense to me. I remained in a comfort paradigm of thought, whereas apparently Duo had moved on to something else.

He made a choking sound as if everything was trying to get out at once. I looked at him with some concern, placing a hand on one of his arms. "Duo?"

The laugh finally won out, though it was tempered with a tired edge. "I thought you went to school and got all worldly."

Was that what people went to school for these days? "It's not like I don't know what you're talking about, more or less. I know all about the difference between 'liking' someone and 'liking' someone. I just... well... wouldn't know from personal experience. I don't know what it all adds up to. I guess... that could very well be the answer. Maybe I do like you." I did like him as a person, after all, and I did like kissing him. And now that I thought about it, I also liked just being with him even if we weren't doing anything, and I liked making him smile, and I cared about what he thought and how he felt... Yes, it could very well add up to what he was suggesting.

"'Maybe', huh?" His shoulders slumped, but more in a release of tension than an outlet for depression. "Not willing to take my word for it? Well, that's good, I guess. It's not like I was really expecting anything else anyway. A solid 'yes' would have been... weird. And a solid 'no' would have been... equally as weird. Honestly, I think you like me, Heero Yuy, if it's not too arrogant of me to say. I just think you haven't figured that out yet."

Honestly, with him standing over me with one corner of his mouth lifted up in a roguish smirk... I could think that, too.

"Tell me, Heero..." He leaned in another few centimeters. "Do you ever wonder where your hormones are?"

I wasn't sure if I liked that gleam in his eye. It caused a funny feeling in my chest. "...No, not really."

He grinned. "Think I could give 'em a little jump start?"

That one intensified the feeling. "I think you could do anything you set your mind to."

"That's a bullshit non-answer, Heero," he purred.

I hadn't thought he would want a detailed answer. "Then... Yes."

"Great," he chirped, backing off abruptly. The loss of his presence in my personal space was jarring and unpleasant. "So, wanna see if we can catch up with the guys?"

*****

Part 24

As soon as RJ saw me, he pulled me excitedly into dialogue. "Agent Yuy, I'm glad you're here. We've found some interesting discrepancies."

He had sounded just as excited over the phone, so I wasn't entirely surprised by his eagerness. "What do you mean?"

In typical fashion, he told his story from beginning to end. "We managed to pull an image of the last few sets of data that the diagnostic machine that you brought back gathered, right? And today, we've finally managed to access the flash off the DNI. Guess what? They don't match."

That could have meant a number of things. "By how much?"

"A little bit I could understand. Different calibrations between devices, different resolution, etc. Of course the diagnostic machine is going to be higher caliber than the onboard debugger. But this... they're the complete opposite from each other!"

He walked me over to a monitor filled with data readouts and pointed to one set. "This is the readout from the machine. The charts look level, normal, well within safety parameters. And this," he pointed to the other set, "is the readout from the interface. Numbers flying off the charts, and in a bad way. We've got unsafe levels of activity in the brain here, here, and here. We have sustained waveforms here, and nothing here."

Even without the explanation, the differences were obvious. "What caused these discrepancies?"

"We don't know for sure, yet. But this is a little more than random malfunction, don't you think?"

"Could someone have sabotaged the devices?"

He shook his head, gesturing at another pile of schematics and diagnostic readouts. "We haven't found anything wrong with either machine. They both check out okay."

"What connected them?" I was pretty sure they had probably gone over any of the possibilities that I could come up with, but on the off chance that they hadn't, I asked. "Could there have been a corruption of the signal?"

"Well, we'd have to go back to the base where you found this to make sure, but I believe the headset connected via cables to the Zero console, which had outputs to the diagnostic machine."

If it wasn't two out of the three, then that left only one suspect. "Could something have been wrong with the console, then?"

His eyes shifted towards a partition dividing the lab. On the other side lay the pieces of Zero that I had brought back. "Everything has been checking out so far there, too, but of course, we don't have the complete machine that this was hooked up to last, so who knows where the error may have occurred."

"As soon as I get the time, I plan to make another trip out there."

"I don't suppose you'll let anyone else on site?"

I shook my head unregretfully. "The site is a secured area now. I'm afraid that won't be possible."

The researcher sighed. "I didn't think so. You special ops people are always the same."

Special ops? Yes, I suppose I was. It still startled me to hear the label applied, though. Maybe I had just been kidding myself when I had refused Une. Then again, maybe RJ just had a completely incorrect impression of me. "So until I have time to salvage some more equipment from the lab, this is all you're going to get. Sorry."

"Well, I guess we'll work with what we've got. Just don't be surprised if we end up coming up with inaccurate results."

"I assume the data from the interface is more likely to be the real set, right?"

"As far as we can tell. It reinforces the irrationality that you reported. Plus, direct from the device means that there were fewer things to get in the way in between. If the interface's output had been erroneous, the tool's output would have to be at least equally erroneous."

I had thought as much. "Does it explain yet just what the user was doing, and how it managed to kill him?"

He frowned. "Well, oddly enough, we haven't found anything yet that he might have been doing that would have caused the overload that happened. There was no precursor to the power surge, no warning signs in the data."

"Would it have something to do with whatever he was analyzing? Did you check the tray?"

RJ looked like a discontent researcher again. "Nothing conclusive at all. We did some spectrograms of the stuff, and we determined that the trays were probably used for circuitry of some sort. What kind, we don't know. We can't know for sure that that's what was in the tray when it was in the device, and then again in the console, but looking at the dump from the last analysis, assuming that that was performed on the tray... it seems likely that he was running tests on a circuit of some sort. Something with very low power consumption and stability. Several of them. We found overlapping data for at least three of whatever it was. If it weren't for that, I'd almost be willing to think that the analysis was just a tare, a control, a baseline. The numbers could almost have come from the residue in the tray."

"Residue?" I asked, nearly excited until I realized that he probably wasn't talking about what I wanted him to. "You mean the circuitry residue."

"Yeah... Oh, you were wondering about residue, too, weren't you? Of course we checked for that, but we didn't find anything. There were no signs that something might have disintegrated while in the console chamber. It was empty."

So many answers, and yet even more questions. "Well... if his brain waves were really so unstable," I suggested, gesturing at the scans on the screen. "Could he have been imagining it all? Zero has been known to make people see things that aren't really there.

He shrugged. "You didn't see anything in the tray?" I shook my head. "Well, you'd know better than I would, so you tell me."

If Zamora had seen that, what else had he seen? What truths had Zero revealed to him? What revelation had he been following when he had gotten himself killed? Had Zero showed him the path to his goals? Was there really a way to accomplish his melding of biology and technology?

*****

He had deliberately not come to my room the previous night. I think I almost expected that, but I didn't think I understood the motivation behind it. Despite that, it just seemed like something Duo would do. He threw me off a lot, and enjoyed doing it.

When he did show up to my room tonight, it was with a completely casual air. Whether he wanted to put my mind at ease, or he just wanted to mess with me, I couldn't say for sure. Either way, I went along with things.

I had a strange feeling growing in me, but I didn't think it was an apprehension regarding Duo's sudden bludgeoning of certain facts into my skull. The realization had been... surprisingly smooth. After my initial surprise, the admission went down without a hitch. I found myself accepting Duo's proposal with the same certain equanimity that he found himself railing against on occasion.

Duo liked me. I guess that should have been clear. And I... liked Duo. That was allowed to be a little less clear, but it still should have been evident, nevertheless. It was a case of not seeing the forest for the trees. I looked at what we did together, and I enjoyed each thing on its own merits, but I never really took a step back and looked at it for what it was. I don't regret that I missed seeing that. It wasn't so much more now that it had earned a label.

It added at least a little comprehension, though. All those times Duo had kissed me with more vigor than I had been expecting, all those strange, warm feelings that had stirred up inside me... I had accepted it all as just another joy of knowing Duo Maxwell, and just gone along with it. Now that I knew what was going on, I could identify the constituent elements more readily and seek them, initiate them, revel in them.

Duo seemed a little more content in some ways now that we really knew where we stood -- hopefully for real, this time. In some ironic sense, I almost thought his actions became more tame now that he wasn't trying to test the waters. That didn't mean that he hadn't retained his ability to short-circuit my synapses, however.

"What would 'dating' you actually involve, Duo?" I asked him, playing with the tail end of his braid. For such a simple thing, it was able to hold my attention with remarkable skill.

He watched me as I repeatedly brushed the tuft across my palm. "I dunno. That's sort of why I tacked on that secondary definition. 'Dating' just seemed... to not work very well all of a sudden."

I diverted my attention just long enough to cast him an inquisitive look. "What, I don't seem date-able to you?"

"Well, not like... 'regular' dates. I don't know about you, but 'date' in my mind is associated with showing up at your girlfriend's -- or whoever's -- house with flowers and having to compliment her on how nice she looks today. I imagine for us, we'd probably just chill together or something."

I painted imaginary lines on his arm. It felt pleasingly... proprietary. "So I really would be 'great company'?"

He chuckled low in his throat, and I could easily feel the accompanying look even though I avoided glancing up. "And I really would happily do you. Although... you know what?" he added contemplatively. "I think the 'great company' part of it might be the greater of the two. I mean, that's hard to find these days. Just so you know. On the off chance that we somehow manage to fail to unearth your hormones. This... this is good, you know? Even if this is it. I mean, sure, you're rather doable, but I could live without it. It's not like I've spent the last five years lusting after you or something. I could so totally get over it."

Finally I looked up, and saw that somewhere in there his gaze had been diverted to the ceiling. I took advantage of the opening to tickle him on the nose, and he jumped a little, hand rising to rub at his nose while coincidentally hiding the startled smile playing around his lips. That was cute. "I appreciate that," I answered, meaning it. I'd feel bad if I were letting him down, and goodness knows I had plenty of other things to feel bad about without adding this to the list.

He pushed himself up partially to lean over and kiss me. I let him do as he pleased. Heck, I even let my own mouth do as it pleased. The result was... pleasing. He pulled back and grinned lazily at me. "You know, it's kinda like... it almost doesn't even matter if you don't get it, so long as I get to keep on doing this. I think it'd just be more fun if you knew. Or more satisfying." His hand danced teasingly across my chest. "Of course... I guess that wouldn't be so nice, if I didn't let you in on things. That'd kinda be... taking advantage of you, wouldn't it?"

"You cad," I deadpanned.

Laughing, he collapsed back to the bed. "Hey, I'm trying to be a good guy, here. Lay off."

"I was being a good guy, too. You didn't seem to like that so much."

He sobered up just a little. "It's not that I didn't like it. It was... is a good thing. I just... I just still don't get how we could have been on such totally different wavelengths. How could you not...?"

I shrugged, not bothered at all by the unfinished accusation. "I don't think about these sorts of things. I generally accept emotions like these to be strange, nonsensical little things. Trying to make sense of them doesn't usually work so well, so I've learnt to just... accept them and move on. If it feels right, it is. I like you, I like kissing you, I like making things better... I don't get anything out of thinking about all of the possible implications and ramifications of that. If it's just math... then one plus two is still equal to three, with or without the actual summation, and all three of them are perfectly good numbers that can stand well on their own merits."

He went still again for three seconds before he responded with a quiet and vague hum inconsistent with his preceding mood.

I let my thoughts wander as my fingers continued to try and figure out just what was so fascinating about Duo's hair. Eventually I thought to ask something I should have asked a while ago. "Duo... what do the others know?"

"Hm?" I guess he'd been letting his thoughts wander away, too.

"The other day. They all seemed to have noticed something going on long before I ever did."

"Oh. Heh." He chuckled nervously, turning over on his side to face me. "Well, you see... a few years back, there was some bash, some party someone threw for something or another. And it was just one of those nights, right? We were sitting around all reminiscing about the stupid and crazy things we used to do, and, well, I guess it was just bad timing because it wasn't long after I had started wondering about the whole thing, so naturally I end up busting out the old, 'Oh yeah? Well I used to kiss Heero Yuy!'."

"I hope that didn't count as a 'stupid' thing," I remarked mildly.

"Oh, no. No, of course not. But it was quite crazy. The others even agreed. If we'd been in different circumstances, like if you'd been there, I wouldn't have let loose like that. That'd be because it wasn't just my little secret, though, and since you weren't there, and you didn't seem like you were coming back... well, I didn't think you'd mind."

There was no need for him to justify himself to me. It hadn't been any great secret to begin with, though the privacy part may have been a small part of the magic. "I don't mind. It makes it easier having everything out in the open, anyway."

He snorted softly. "Don't gotta tell me that. That's why I just went and let it out the other day. Didn't feel like waiting for it to come out on its own."

That rang a bell. "The other day, when you were talking with Quatre about inevitability...?"

He turned away for a moment. "Uh... yeah, kinda." He plucked his braid out of my grasp and started toying with it himself.

So at least once I had failed to notice that they were talking about me while I was listening to them. It sort of made me wonder how many other occasions I had missed. "So now we're not talking about a couple of years ago, but a couple of days ago."

"Well... I maybe wasn't the nicest to you when you showed up, and they... each had a little something to say about that. And since they were all talking to me anyway, and since I started thinking about some of those things I hadn't been thinking about for a while, and since they knew about it from before, and since all of a sudden Fei was noticing I wasn't sticking around at night... it didn't seem all that unreasonable for it to have come up once or twice."

It took me half a moment to parse out all of the filler words in that sentence and condense it down to something roughly equivalent to 'yes'. "That's good," I reassured him. "So how much did I miss out on?"

"How much what?"

"Have you been flinging innuendo at me all week, and have I just been missing all of it?"

"Well... maybe a little." He said it in that way that indicated he might have meant the exact opposite.

Even I had to shake my head at myself. "Wow. I'm almost impressed."

He laughed. "Yeah, I think I was, too, otherwise I woulda snapped long before this."

*****

Duo planted himself right next to my desk and waited patiently for me to notice him. Eventually, I looked up at him. "Hm?"

Folding his arms over his chest while holding a mug in one hand, he gave me a critical look down from his superior height. "Are you sure you don't do this often?"

As usual, it took me a moment to figure out what he was talking about. "Oh. Sorry. No. Not usually."

"Just recently then, huh? What is going on in that head of yours again? Deep and morose thoughts? Again?"

I shrugged noncommittally. "I was just thinking about Zero again. And Zamora. And his interface. It used nanotechnological components. I was thinking, what if we didn't see anything in the tray because it was too small to be seen? A handful of microfilaments or nanobots or whatever he was working on would have been invisible from where we were standing. It would also account for the minute readings off the diagnostic machine."

"The labtechs would have picked up even nano-sized objects," Trowa commented, sitting across from my desk.

"I know. Although conceivably, if they had broken down, it could have been mistaken for the circuitry residue that all over the tray." I shook my head. That didn't concern me. If that was the case, we would never confirm or deny it. "What worries me more is the idea that maybe we lost the evidence just not knowing it was there."

Duo frowned. "What, you mean like, the stuff could have fell off without us even noticing? That's... not cool."

"I know. We handled everything carefully, but there's always the possibility that a misplaced sneeze could have made something disappear."

"Alright, fine. I think you're allowed to brood just a little about that."

I could give him even more to brood about. "And I was also thinking about the discrepancies in the readings that RJ told us about. I was wondering if..."

He cast me an expectant look. "Yes?"

Not saying it didn't make it not true. "Computers don't lie, do they? That would be completely counterproductive. They can only make accurate conclusions if they have accurate data, right?"

"Uh, yeah, I guess."

"Hm." That didn't bring me much peace of mind. It invalidated my pondering, and yet my idea could have explained some things.

I must have drifted off again since Duo poked me. That was obviously becoming one of his favorite pastimes. "Well?" he demanded. "What about computers lying?"

"Interface, console, diagnostic. We ended up thinking that it had to be the console that was outputting the wrong set of data... But... I just wondered for a brief moment in time... what if it wasn't because of a malfunction? What if Zero was deliberately sending out the wrong information?" I shrugged uncomfortably when he got a disturbed look on his face. "Never mind. It was just a passing thought. I can't think of any reason for that to have happened anyway. Guess I've just been hanging around with people too much recently."

His look faded into something equally disturbed, just about something else. "Can't wait to get back to your hermit-like life, eh?"

"I was never a hermit," I answered mildly. I liked people as much as the next person, so long as they were reasonably intelligent souls that knew when to leave me alone.

"Bet you've got a whole other life waiting for you back home," Duo continued to muse softly.

"Well, things are different, certainly." They weren't life and death, that was for sure. Very little urgency, with almost no sense of doom.

"I'm sure they are..." He trailed off, then took a sudden glance at his cup, then headed out the doors, presumably to the kitchen for a refill.

I had turned back to the work on my desk when it shook with a soft thud. I glanced up, and Trowa looked back at me with a significant stare and a slight tilt of his head towards the door. Did he mean to imply something about Duo? I ran the last few sentences of our exchange through my head, looking for oddities, and nearly kicked myself when I realized what I had missed the first time through. I was going to have to get better at that. With a brief nod of thanks to Trowa, I picked up my still half-filled cup of water and headed towards the kitchen after Duo.

He was on his way out when I walked in, but he stopped and waited for me anyway. I refreshed my cup of warm water and sipped at it, watching Duo over the rim of my cup. His eyes seemed focused on a sexual harassment policy flyer on the wall next to him. "Duo," I started.

"Hm?"

I walked over until I stood next to him. "Just because things are different doesn't mean that..." I didn't quite know how to finish without giving him the wrong impression. I tried again. "I'm not going to go back and just fall off the grid again."

He turned to face me, his expression serious. "But you are going to back."

I couldn't lie. "I have... 'things' there. Friends. Commitments. School."

"A life."

"You're free to visit. I... want you to visit. Drop by. Stay a while. Laugh at my computer setup. Meet my friends. Eat at Toki's. I think you'd like it."

His eyes roamed my face, looking for something, and I obligingly held still to let him find it. At length, he straightened the collar of the Preventers jacket he himself had handed to me just a few days ago, fingering the material for a while before he let it go and patted me on the shoulder with a small smile. "We'll see. But for now, back to work, eh?"

*****

Part 25

Sitting around in an office was doing me little good. I needed to get out and do some good clean thinking, especially now that Duo had co-opted my nighttime brooding sessions. I politely excused myself from the rest of the group and took off by myself to wander the grounds of HQ. I could tell that Duo was reluctant to let me separate myself from the group, but he let me go without a word to the contrary.

Despite being the headquarters of a paramilitary organization, the landscaping was calm and reassuringly green. That was something I needed to pick up again after this was all over. I used to run every morning. My path generally took me through a park and past a lake. I missed that.

I thought back on all those times I had missed Zero. Once again, I was forced to wonder if it would have the answers I needed right now. Maybe it wouldn't. Like I had told Duo, a computer couldn't do an analysis without sufficient data, and we had practically none. So little, in fact, that it seemed the others had already put Zero out of their minds.

They may have been glad to do so. They didn't share the same affinity for Zero that I had. What would they do if they had gotten it back anyway? After all of the deaths now associated with it, I was pretty sure that further research into it would be halted at the very least. Most likely, it would be locked away permanently or destroyed. I guess in some ways I was happy that we hadn't found Zero. I didn't wish that fate on it.

I was in the middle of thinking about direct neural interfaces when my cell phone vibrated a short pattern. A text message? I hit a few buttons on my phone and called it up. All it contained was a short string of numbers. Curious. Spam? I checked the number from which the message had originated. Though it conformed to standard protocol, I didn't think it would actually be a valid number if dialed.

Something kept me from simply deleting the message and returning to my pondering. I let it sit for a few minutes before I pulled it out and stared at it again. What had generated this mess of numbers? My mind automatically went back through time to remember encoded messages we had sent each other during the wars. I broke the sender number down to its bit pattern and stared at that for a few seconds before confirming that it was indeed familiar. Though it took some work, I could pick out the distinctive markers. It was generated by that same algorithm that Zero used for creating pseudo-random noise.

The message body had to mean something, too. Coordinates, I thought. Using the GPS locator on my phone, I extrapolated out the distances and confirmed the fact that this was no mere coincidence. They pointed to Olin base.

I was walking towards the parking garage before I even realized it. I was already out of the landscaped area behind the building before I thought about the rest of the team. I dismissed them after a moment's thought and continued my course. This could turn out to be nothing more than a paranoid imagining of someone desperate to find the system.

Bending the truth inside my own mind was entirely counterproductive. I forced myself to look at things truthfully. The others weren't interested in finding Zero so much as making sure that Zero would never be a threat to anyone ever again. It was only an hour out to Olin. I could be back before they knew I was gone. I would handle this myself.

When I got to the base, there were no signs of activity outside. I pulled up in the car we had requisitioned from the Preventers fleet and parked it outside the gate. It did not appear to have been tampered with. Being no more secure than it had been last time, I scaled it without a problem and landed on the other side.

Still as barren as it had been a few days ago. I twitched with unease as I crossed the wide open field, feeling uncomfortably exposed. Who had sent that message? Had he left some surprises for me? Though we had checked out the field just a few days ago, I exercised caution and training to make sure I didn't run into anything.

We had repaired the front door lock on our way out of the base, but I knew the codes we had installed, so it was nothing to get past the door and into the base. I pulled out a flashlight and my cell phone, trying to gauge in what direction I should head to follow the coordinates I had been given.

The base hadn't been so oppressive the last time I had been here. Maybe because we had been a party of five. I checked almost obsessively for any functioning cameras in the halls, but found nothing. That didn't decrease the sensation that I was being watched.

I headed down stairs and hallways that we had not traveled our first time through. There were doors I had to pry open, locks I had to bypass. Three times I ran into unsurpassable obstacles and was forced to backtrack. I was certain to mentally mark every turn I made, every interesting thing I passed. Moving into the heart of this dark metallic structure, it was easy to lose all sense of where I had been. I wanted to be able to get back out of here. Perhaps I should have brought a ball of string to assist me.

The air was stuffy, dusty. I felt like an intruder, treading where I had no right. My timesense was being thrown off by the atmosphere. I had to check my watch to see how much time had really passed. Not as much time as it felt. I was almost relieved to find that I had finally wandered into an area that sported footsteps in the dust. Looking at them, I tried to determine how old they were. Had they been made by Zamora? Or had someone been here in the meantime?

Since they led me in the proper direction, I followed them to another large metal hatch in a string of large metal hatches. I pressed the button next to it, surprised when it actually worked. Maybe Zamora had fixed it while he had been down here. I crossed the threshold, and it slid smoothly closed behind me.

The other side of the portal was less musty. I found that I could now detect the hum of air purifiers and recyclers. Apparently this section ran on a different subcircuit than the rest of the base that I had passed through. There was an itch on my right calf, and I rubbed at it idly with my left foot, thinking of spiders and mites and whatever else might have been existing down here. Checking my phone for my coordinates, I found that it was no longer receiving a signal. I called up the memory of where I had been the last time I had checked, and decided I was pretty much wherever I had been trying to go.

A faint yellow light pulsed at the end of the hallway through an open doorway. It looked like the glow from a console set into the wall. That was very encouraging. I shuffled quickly over, thinking that I was finally near the end of my search, but I stopped just before crossing that final threshold. What would I find there? Zero? Some trap that had been left for me? It was too late to turn back, and ahead lay answers of one sort or another. I took that final step, prepared for anything, but the door did not slam down behind me the way I had almost expected.

I walked farther into the small room. There was another door there, but it was sealed shut. Some boxes were shoved into the corner, but the light was too weak for me to want to investigate immediately. The console was on the far side. As I approached, I saw an amber cursor blinking in one corner of the display, and only a limited keyboard device beneath it. I ignored the keyboard in favor of the screen, swiping my hand across its surface to clear it of the dust. There was so much of it floating in the air already, it must have been affecting my sinuses. My head was sending me warning signals.

The screen's glow grew a little bit brighter as I cleaned it off. The blinking cursor confronted me with a few long seconds of innocence before it scrolled a line of numbers across the screen. I recognized it as an authorization code query that I had used on Wing's systems. I was just staring at the data entry device, wondering if I should enter the response when I swayed on my feet. Low blood pressure could not be claimed the cause of this bout of dizziness. The room spun as I turned back towards the door, seeking a sign of danger. I never made it through. My vision faded to black, and I hit the floor.

*****

I woke some time later in the same darkness I had fallen. I was woozy, but otherwise felt no ill effects. Staying very still, suppressing the cough I felt building up from the dust that had invaded my respiratory tract, I listened closely to the sounds around me. Even if the air purifiers were doing a rather shitty job of filtering the dust, they were still running, along with the whirr of ventilation fans somewhere farther away, but I could not detect the signs of anyone else in the room with me.

Satisfied that it was as safe as could be, given the circumstances, I levered myself off the floor. How long had I been out? I checked my watch automatically, staring at it for a few seconds in the darkness before I thought to turn on its backlight. Two hours? Not good. Not good at all.

Absently brushing the dust off, I tried to gather my thoughts. What had taken me down? Gas? If that had been the case, then it was clearly gone now. Orienting myself to the exit was a little more difficult than I had anticipated. As per my original fears, the door had closed while I had been unconscious, forming a seam in the wall that I had to run my fingers over to find. I pushed the buttons on the console, but they refused to function.

No pretending that it had been a fluke, then. Someone had lured me here and caught me. I spared a passing thought for some half-assed regret. Maybe I should have told someone where I was heading. Duo was going to have my hide when I got out of this, but oh well. Nothing to do but think of the present. I would still have defended my decision to take off alone. It seemed right somehow that this come down to me, Zero, and whomever was behind this.

If my captor had wanted me dead, I would have been killed while I was out. What was the purpose in detaining me here? My eyes returned to the console. It was still glowing faintly, providing the only illumination in the room. I was in the process lurching over there when I got a strangely familiar sensation. It felt like Zero was trying to tell me something.

I stopped, breath in my throat as I raised my hands to my head. I sighed in relief when I encountered no interface bonded to my skull. I would thank my lucky stars for whatever breaks I could get.

Nevertheless, the feeling persisted. With a few careful breaths, I calmed myself, cleared my mind, and tried to concentrate through the faint disorientation on that familiar feeling. Zero? I probed tentatively.

I almost fell over when it responded. An identification code scrolled through my mind, longer than I should have been able to process and recognize unassisted. Crap.

You should sit, a voice inside my head suggested. Zero's method of communication had never been this articulate, even if it was still not just words, but images and abstractions as well. You will require time to adjust.

There was a question I really didn't want to ask, but Zero picked it out of my brain and answered a variant of it anyway. You are not in any danger.

That doesn't reassure me, I thought at it. What happened? Report.

First I received a complete internal systems diagnostic. I couldn't assimilate the dense packet of data it threw at me in any detail, but I somehow absorbed the whole and suddenly knew that all of my systems checked out. After I accepted that, it spoke again. You have joined with the system.

I really didn't like the sound of that. Planting a hand against the wall to counter the sudden lightheadedness I experienced, I decided to follow the system's advice and slid down slowly until I was sitting on the floor again. Using what interface?

A nanotech matrix.

"How?" I breathed aloud, having a terrible, terrible feeling about where this was going. Schematics flew across my mind's eye, giving me a picture of the integration Zero had indeed managed to achieve. While there was a part of me that was impressed by the level of sophistication that had gone into the design, a larger part of me was recoiling with a stunned non-reaction. I had certainly never given anyone permission to spread a nanobot network across my brain. The array was still in the process of expanding, but given enough time, it would replicate and spread itself across the rest of my system. When Zamora had dreamed of full integration of man and machine, he hadn't been kidding. I would have an onboard computer if it had its way with me.

I couldn't see my hands, but there was an itch crawling over my skin that I knew had to be imaginary. Even if the nanobots had been interested in my hands, they were small enough that I would never feel them moving in my system.

I had felt their effects, though, hadn't I? I had felt something like a tiny bug bite on the back of my leg. Zero quietly confirmed that as the point of entry. It had been here for days already, replicating to the point where it could control certain key systems of the base. It was a simple matter for it to have laid itself across my path in a fine dust, waiting for me to walk by. Latching onto my boot was not a problem, nor was crawling its way upwards until it reached my flesh. Only one or two had been necessary. Once it gained access to my internal system, it could have started replicating from there, growing exponentially as the moments passed.

"Zero," I said urgently. I didn't have to, but it comforted me to pretend that the system was outside of myself. It was also a pretense of control. It was already inside me, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. "Who ordered this? Whose directives are you following?"

There was an ominous silence, the impression that Zero was unable to comply because the question was unanswerable. Zero was talking to me, now. It responded to my thoughts. Was I the user behind the system? But something would have to have targeted me in the first place.

You were the obvious choice, it whispered. You were the only choice.

Zero had chosen me of its own accord? That... made me not want to contemplate that any further, but I had to. I needed answers. "Choice for what?"

Integration.

"Why? Why me? Why do you seek to integrate? How did...?" I shook my head. Zero would not respond well to such a flood of questions, or rather, I would not respond well to the flood of answers that would inevitably come as a result. I rephrased the query. "What happened to you, Zero? Starting with Meridian."

It gave me only statistical readouts for its time there, including its records for Stewart's interaction with it. I winced. Zero had only been doing what it had been told. In the effort to compensate for the damage sustained by the core during our last battle together, Zero had been instructed to throw out any data that did not fall within its strictly checksummed parameters. Unfortunately, Stewart had not conformed to standards.

"Zamora," I said, making the name a request for more information,

More diagnostics, more data. Zamora had begun his experimentation with Zero, changing some of its programming to include a new, hardwired goal to fulfill: his dream of the harmony of biology and technology.

I had guessed correctly. Zero's idea of achieving that had involved integrating itself with a user. There could be nothing greater than that. The human host would have analytical power at his fingertips, and Zero... Zero would have a hole in its network filled. Its shortcoming was that it dealt with quantitative valuations. It needed a human mind to go beyond that. Mutualism at its finest.

"Why me, then?" It had been Zamora's goal to achieve such perfection. How had I entered the picture?

A perfect union, Zero restarted more clearly to me. Such a goal was impossible with the given resources. He was flawed. A union with him would have been flawed.

While I was getting all the answers I wanted, I couldn't say they were making me feel good. It was difficult to tell if the faint nausea was coming from them, or from the network slowly working its way into my brain. "When did you realize this?"

I almost laughed at the timestamp it returned. It obligingly returned a less specific value. Immediately.

Alright, I would grant it that. It was obvious that Zamora was a less than ideal candidate for the Zero system. "Why me?"

Older data flitted across my mind, and I somehow recognized it as my data from during the war. It remembered me, then. Brief comparisons were made to other templates it had stored. Of all the people that had used Zero, I was the one that had consistently proven to be the most compatible. Because of the way its datasets had been constructed, I was, in fact, quite nearly its definition of compatibility.

It skipped a bunch of time, and I was given a large number of abstractions from the night I had run into Zero on the Meridian network. "So I was right... there was no one behind you that night." Zero had, of its own volition, been scanning the network. Zamora would already have assigned it its new purpose by then. Had that purpose somehow managed to inspire Zero to break the mold of its own programming in search of that 'perfect union'? Its logical conclusions, its pursuit of its directives, it mimicked true intelligence uncannily. I had to hand it to Zamora. He had damn near created an artificial lifeform with his bumbling.

That night on the network, it had felt like a test. Zero was intrigued by this digital entity that had managed to follow it through the ether. After passing the 'test', it had bombarded me with queries of its own, pulling information from me and my thoughts in search of more information.

It gained a name from that, an identity on which to perform a new search. It found it knew me. Zero was the one that had raised all the flags in the databases. It didn't mind; it knew how not to get caught. Up until that last search in the Preventers subnet...

It responded to my half-formed suggestion of carelessness. I am incapable of carelessness. It sent a shiver down my spine to hear it refer to itself in the first person. It was time.

"Time for what?"

That one had completed the necessary preparations.

Zamora. Preparations. The interface. "Zero. Were you the one that came up with the plans for the interface?"

Affirmative.

"And you used Zamora to implement them?

Affirmative.

"And you--" Good gods. I finished the rest of my thought in a horrified whisper. "And you discarded him once he had served his purpose."

Affirmative.

It all made a sick, brilliant sense. I wrapped my arms around myself. Just what sort of entity was holding me captive? "What was in the tray, Zero?" I didn't have to elaborate on which tray; Zero knew what I was talking about. Zero would even know what I was thinking about.

It showed me the nanobots that were crawling underneath my skin even as we interacted. Once they had been completed, Zero had the ability to do whatever it needed without Zamora's assistance. Once again, I was right. The tray had not been empty.

"Why are you being so cooperative, Zero?" Although I was its user now, it was under no compulsion to respond to my every query.

The answer was abstract enough to require more than mere images this time. One cannot come to accurate conclusions without complete and accurate information.

I nearly laughed again, this time with a bit of hysteria. I had said that myself, hadn't I? I wished my vocabulary of curses was larger than it was. It would be getting a workout right about now. It was no wonder Zero had selected me as its host. We thought alike.

"Now that you have me.... what do you intend to do with me?"

I waited for a response, but received nothing. Was there no goal beyond bonding itself to me? A perfect union with no purpose? What was the point? Did Zero even care if there was a point? Its purpose did not go beyond what it was in the process of achieving. Once perfection was achieved, it would go back to being an admittedly super-powerful computer, waiting for its next command.

"Let me go, Zero," I whispered tiredly, pulling my knees to my chest. It was with some effort that I resisted the urge to rock back and forth.

Negative.

"Why not?"

I reeled beneath its blueprints. Its task was not complete until it had achieved full system integration. But even then, there were still problems that it hadn't worked out yet, an idea that finally did wring a crazed chuckle out of me.

I couldn't leave. Zero was installed somewhere on this base, if not in this room. This room had just been convenient. Somewhere, Zero was running its calculations in concert with the nanotech network threading its way through my gray matter, and that was where the original Zero core was. It had figured out a way to acquire an equivalent amount of processor power by distributing the load across the innumerable bots, but it had no way of downloading its memory into my system without completely overwriting everything that was already there, and that would have been quite counterproductive. It needed me intact in order to supplement its analytical engine.

Zero was made of three components: its processing hardware, its interface, and its accumulated data. Hardware? Check. Interface? Check. Data?

I needed to be here, where Zero could still access its memory core. If I left, I would destroy the union. Ergo, I could not leave.

Normally, I liked the elegant simplicity of a computer. It did as it was told, and it was always logical in its execution... even if we couldn't always predict the results of our instructions. But this? Wow. I was admiring the sheer brilliance of the plan even as I railed against the sheer ruthlessness of the machine.

"You can't keep me here." I was unnerved to find a slight quiver in my voice. Gods, I hadn't even been here an hour yet, and already I was cracking. What was Zero doing in there?

Its reply was a negative.

"How?" I demanded a little more loudly. "I'm not a computer. I need more than what's in this tiny little room to survive."

A light in the corner faded on gently, highlighting the boxes I had never gotten around to searching. Glancing suspiciously at the items, I slowly uncurled and made myself go look. I really hoped Zero left the light on after this. Speaking with Duo in the dark had been comforting. Speaking with Zero in the dark was driving me a little batty.

I opened the box cautiously and found bottled water and a paper bag inside. Sighing, I opened the paper bag, and found ration bars, the same kind we had found in Zamora's lab. There was even another bucket. I wondered if Zamora had left these here for some reason, or if Zero had suggested to him that he leave them here.

Automatically running through the calculations, I grimaced at my supplies. If I was careful, I could make it through two weeks without severe discomfort. I could probably survive for a little more than three. And then I would probably die miserably. Yay. I wasn't certain if it was a better choice to kill myself quickly or not. I wasn't certain if I should have been thinking those thoughts already. Zero was a logical machine. It could still be reasoned with. "That won't last forever. Then what?"

Zero showed me the schematics of the network in greater detail. By the time I ran out of external sustenance, the nanobots would be integrated enough into my body to be able to make me an almost self-sustaining system, and for what I needed from the outside, it was working on the ability to synthesize it. Damn. As much as I didn't dislike ration bars, the prospect of living off of nutritional powder for the rest of my days was distinctly displeasing.

I tried another tack. "They'll find me. They'll miss me when I don't show up tonight, and they'll look for me."

Negative. They will not find you here.

Granted, I hadn't left them any notes, but they were not without their ways. "I drove here. My car is parked outside. It'll be identified. In fact, I believe the Preventers install all of their cars with tracking devices."

They will not get to you here.

A subtle shift of phrasing. So they could find me at the base, but they would not be able to gain access to this room? How much control had Zero gained over this base? If it didn't have it already, I was sure it could have it in very short order. There were defunct security systems between here and the entrance to the base, but they were probably operational, and if they weren't, Zero could send bots out to fix them.

Great. I lost the will to argue with it and slunk off to another corner to sulk, pacing the length of my cell as a spiteful challenge to the nanobots that were throwing my equilibrium off. There had to be something to get me out of here. My eyes flew to the console that had led me here, but the amber numbers had disappeared. I tried hitting all the buttons, but I knew the effort would be futile. It wouldn't turn on unless Zero wanted it to.

I had to try anyway, the same way I had to try unlocking the door, removing the panel next to it and fiddling with the wires, but there was nothing I could do when the power to it had been cut, the manual override disabled, the hardlocks in place. I remembered there was a second door in the room, but it, too, had been rendered inaccessible.

Floor panels? Wall panels? Ventilation ducts? Weapons? Tools? I knew I was getting desperate when I even considered the bucket. None of it panned out. Zero knew what it was doing.

Zero... I thought I knew the system. Obviously, I was wrong. No, more accurately, I had known the system, but this was something else entirely. Wasn't it? No, It wasn't. It was the same as it had always been: cold, ruthless, logical. The only difference now was that it was responding to some directive planted by a man not quite in control of all his faculties, and that it had been given the power to reach out and do what it wanted to.

So I did know Zero. I laughed aloud again, not caring anymore how crazy I sounded. There was only Zero to listen in, and even if I didn't move the air waves, it would know I had wanted to because soon, I might almost know Zero in something resembling a biblical sense.

Why do you wish to escape? Zero asked me, interrupting me before I got carried away. We will have our potential filled together.

The shudders of helpless mirth faded into shudders of a different variety. I huddled in on myself in the corner I had chosen as my territory. "I was doing just fine on my own before, thank you."

I could feel it shuffling through my memories, integrating them into its own data core. That was a feeling of serious violation. You were not making full use of your abilities, it concluded.

"What, because I chose to get out of the game?" I had never used that phrase before Duo had used it on me. "I wanted to stay out of conflicts. Was that too much to ask?"

You were born to it. All of humanity was born to it.

"Is that your official conclusion?"

Has not humanity's history proven it?

I wished I could fight it on that, but I couldn't. Mariemeia's words were too grim to not be true. Life was an endless waltz, moving along to the triple beat of peace, revolution, and war. We had won peace for ourselves for at least a little while, but it couldn't last forever. One day, hopefully several generations away, the world would forget the bloody, hard-won lessons of this era, and another war would have to happen before the world learned its lesson again.

So I was born to conflict. Zero, too, had been born to conflict. And if this was to be my fate, perhaps I had been born to Zero, or Zero to me.

Why do you wish to escape? Zero asked again.

The answer seemed so obvious that it was difficult to come up with the words, and it was far too abstract for Zero to understand merely by taking a peek at my thoughts. "Humans are always seeking freedom. It's... it's in their nature. They need room to grow, to stretch... freedom to explore. Otherwise their spirit gets oppressed. A human without that freedom, without dreams, without desires... is a just an automaton, moving through life without purpose... And you know all about purpose, right? It defines you. It defines your actions. You'd just be a bunch of ones and zeros without it. ...I will require that freedom, too, Zero. I'll be useless to you if you lock me up in here. That's not what you need me for, right? You've got the whole machine part of it down. You need that human quality from me, that ability to make intuitive leaps, or understand other humans."

You will have freedom. Much freedom will come from our combined potential.

I supposed that was freedom of a sort, and it was also a point I could not argue. Mental and emotional freedom were far more important than physical freedom, after all. "I will require human contact. Humans are social creatures. They're hardwired that way by nature. More conducive to survival of the species. How will you handle that?"

Zero calmly rejected my plea. Existence with the system and human contact are not mutually exclusive.

Of course. People would be theoretically allowed to approach me, so long as I never left the base, never strayed too far from wherever its main thread was running. Would I be released after Zero found a way to mobilize its memory core? "How long will that take?" I asked the voice in my head, certain it already knew what I was talking about.

It remained mysteriously silent.

I wasn't normally claustrophobic. I had spent innumerable hours in a tiny cockpit or a small bedroom. I even enjoyed the solitude. Then again, I didn't normally have another entity residing inside my skull, either. Maybe that would explain why I felt like I was losing my mind.

Oh, wait. I really was, wasn't I?

I didn't fear Zero, per se. I understood what it wanted from me, for better or for worse. It had no desire to take control of me. That would not serve its purpose at all. It sought a mutualistic relationship, one where we both benefited. It was an analytical machine, and could merrily live out the rest of its days as a voice of pure logic and wisdom in the back of my skull as I went about my business... provided I acted in concordance with its calculations, I supposed. If I started being contrary, then the mind meld would lose all effectiveness, and that was intolerable, a negation of its purpose. Of course, there would also be no profit in it to direct my course overly much. That, too, would reduce the efficiency of our partnership. I wondered how far I could bend that to my purposes.

Part 26

There was a chill in the room, but that wasn't the reason I rubbed at my arms. I had fortunately chosen to wear my uniform jacket. I didn't think Zero would have thought much about the amenities beyond basic sustenance.

Thinking of the jacket made me think of Duo, who had handed it to me. A silly association, almost, since it hadn't been a gift of any great significance. It had, after all, come straight from the Preventers outfitters. Nevertheless, I was prone to thinking of Duo at random times anyway, and this was just one of them.

Only a few hours, and I missed him. I looked forward to the royal ass-kicking I would receive when I got out of here. I looked forward to the fury in his eyes, the passion in his words... I wanted very much for him to be the one hugging me right now. Hugging myself just wasn't the same.

Oh, the hugging. And the kissing. And the sleeping. And the warmth. I needed to stop thinking about that. It was just making the room colder by comparison, but my mind lingered on the moment he had been leaning over me, asking me if I ever wondered where my hormones where. The light in his eyes when I had agreed to his crazy plan of marching off in search of them...

I swallowed around a sudden lump in my throat. I had never gotten the chance to kiss him just because I wanted to. He'd been quite right in his assessment of the situation. I kissed him for comfort's sake. Dwelling on it now, I very much wanted to kiss him for the mere joy of it.

You desire pleasure? Zero butted in. Is that the element of human contact you will miss?

I snorted, thinking about how Zero didn't get it at all, and then I choked on it, realizing that I barely got it at all. "It's more than that. It's... him. I like him. He... makes me happy."

Instead of fighting it, I let the memories wash over me as Zero rooted through them. It stopped and studied the inordinate amount of laughter and smiles we had shared between us.

He does not always make you happy, Zero pointed out dispassionately, being fair and unbiased enough to remind me of all the disagreements we had had, all the frustration we had felt.

"True," I mused, a small smile playing on my lips. "But same as I told him... makes life interesting." Mankind was, after all, born to conflict. But I liked to think of the conflict between us as a spark.

Zero was thoughtful inside my head. I can provide you with pleasure, if you wish, it declared.

I experienced a quadruple shot to the gut, so to speak. First, that Zero had used the personal pronoun again. Second, that it was proposing it provide me with pleasure. What the hell? And third, that I felt a rush of endorphins fill my body. Zero had gained quite the foothold on my body. And last but not least...

"Stop it," I hissed at it. "Don't you dare!" It had been a long time since I'd had an erection, but I recognized the signs, that not-quite-familiar feeling puddling in my gut and migrating lower. It fortunately receded after Zero realized just how displeased it was making me.

This is not what you seek from him?

I know I'd said something about survival of the species, which generally involved sex -- heterosexual sex, but who was quibbling the details? -- but this was just not right at all. "I never even thought about it until a few days ago! And even now, it's just... it's just on the table!" And dear sweet gods, if I would never be able to have sex from now on without thinking of Zero, I would very, very, very pissed.

You can seek this pleasure yourself.

I felt my face heat as Zero scrounged up a years-old memory of the first time my body had decided to greet the morning with an erection. I'd been passingly interested in it at first, exploring the strange new sensations that the aroused state offered me with a certain scientific detachment, but it was over quickly, and soon lost its appeal. There were other things in my life far more fascinating than the constriction of certain veins in my groin.

"Just... stop it!" I shouted at the system, more embarrassed than anything else. "There are just some people that I don't talk sex with. Dr. J was one of them, and YOU are another!" Which was something of a ridiculous assertion since I had never really had the ability to talk to Zero like this before, so it would hardly have been on my list of people to avoid, but I was a little beyond caring about the logic of it at the moment.

Zero retreated obediently, sensing that there was no profit to be gained from the pursuit of the subject, and I breathed a sigh of relief. I had promised Duo the privilege of wreaking havoc on my hormones, with an implied 'exclusive' in there, and no stupid computer system was going to make me go back on that.

I glanced at my watch. Time was passing very, very slowly in here. How long would it take for the others to realize that I had taken off on my own? How long would it take before they started worrying? How long before they started looking for me? How long before they found me?

Although I did not doubt their ability to find me, all that time could add up. How much of my sanity would I lose before that?

There were plenty of other avenues of investigation for Zero to pursue as it tried to understand and assimilate my thought processes, bringing us closer to harmony one small step at a time.

It started first with my battles, ones that I had fought with the system by my side. Zechs. Libra. Wufei. Barton's bunker. Who knew there were so many tiny details floating around in my brain? I wasn't certain why it needed me for those. All that data should already have been in its memory banks. Just how much damage had it sustained, I wondered. And what amateurish attempts at fixing it, if any, had been made?

"Zero," I started, though I hardly needed to catch its attention. I felt exhausted physically and mentally, and my voice reflected that. Zero had to be using my resources in order to replicate and integrate. "Was your memory corrupted?"

Irrelevant.

"Don't be ridiculous. Your memory is a key part of your operational efficiency..." I trailed off, eyes falling closed as explosions went off behind my eyelids. Battle data. Zero was going over battle data. That was what its memory mostly consisted of. And Zero was a learning system. That was one of its strengths. By reviewing my versions of the battles I had fought, it could do error correcting. Clever.

I let it do as it pleased, trying not to think too hard about the images of suits I had taken down. There had been people inside those suits, even if I hadn't seen them. Now was not the time to get all broody. Perhaps if Zero succeeded in filling some of the holes in its memory, its pattern matching would work more like the Zero I had known. If nothing else, the more synchronized our thoughts were with each other, the more truly mutualistic, the more I would be able to get out of it, the more easily I would be able to influence it.

Doing an analysis of the system was difficult while the system was watching, but I tried to tally up the numerical value of its flaws. I couldn't have all of the answers it needed to account for the corrupted data. There were bound to be some significant holes in its computational net that would remain empty. As Zero itself had said, one cannot come to accurate conclusions without complete and accurate information. Failing that, Zero would make mistakes.

All of its data was geared towards a single thing, as well. We would be fighting no mobile suit battles here. Application of that data to another purpose would produce suboptimal results. Zero's processors were also nowhere as swift as the original design had entailed. It would still be a powerful computing machine, but nevertheless, not operating to its fullest capacity. Time would tell if that would be enough to help me in any way.

Battles did not require much thought from Zero at all. Abstract concepts did. It arrived at the end of the Barton incident, wanting to know more about the events that had transpired afterwards. The memories came fresh to my mind as it asked its questions.

"What will you do now, Heero?" she asked me.

My fingers played with the fabric of the curtain hanging beside me as I sat in the padded seat of her bay window, looking out over her rose garden. The blooms reminded me of Treize. "I don't know yet."

"Are you... going to stay, do you think?" She was a good politician, managing to keep most of the hope from her voice.

I shrugged and repeated my words. "I don't know yet."

"You're welcome to stay for as long as you need to, of course."

"And if I don't?"

She answered without hesitance. "Then that's fine, too. If I may offer a bit of advice, which may seem hypocritical in light of what I'm about to say... I think you should do whatever you want. The world is your kingdom."

I snorted softly at the echo of words I had once spoken to her. Already it seemed like a lifetime ago. So many lives I had lived. The one with Odin. The one with J. The one of the one year war. The restless transition year between that and the life after, the few days of the Barton incident. I was in another transition now. What would it be this time?

"I think... I'd like to disappear for a little while."

She nodded, a sad smile on her face. She had expected that. "Will you come back a better man?"

"I hope so."

"I'll miss you."

"I'm sorry."

"But at least that means I'll look forward to your return."

"I... appreciate that."

Zero lingered over the thought process that had led to my decision. You left with the intention of returning.

"Maybe. I left with the intention of coming to terms with myself, of finding a balance within myself... Whether or not I returned at that point would be determined by what I found." I directed it at my conversations with Duo on the matter.

It breezed over the ones of the last week and focused instead on the first.

"Hey, Heero. What's up?"

I had a solemn look on my face that gave it away that I had deliberately sought him out in the estate library. I sat stiffly in the chair across from him, in marked contrast to the way he was sprawled out in his own seat. "What will you do now, Duo?"

He put his book down, expression fading to something equally solemn. "I don't know, man. I... haven't really been able to think much about it yet. I'm still kinda stuck on the fact that I've even got the choice."

"I think... I'm going to leave," I admitted softly.

"Leave?" He sat up more straightly in his chair. "You mean, like... completely? For good?"

I shrugged uncomfortably, firm in my decision, but still fuzzy on the details. "I don't know yet. I just know that... I want something else."

He scratched his head over that. "Well, yeah, but... do you have to leave for that?"

I studied the fancy carving along the edges of the small table in front of us. "I want something for myself. I want something that I made. Something new and fresh... and mine."

"...You're not planning on keeping in touch, are you?"

I shrugged again. "I want to know who I am, Duo. I need a whole new context for that."

I raised my eyes from the woodwork to meet his as he regarded me seriously. At length, he reached his hand across the distance between us. "Then good luck and good journey."

After only a moment's thought, I reached out and grasped his hand around the wrist. He did the same for me. It was like a promise that I would succeed in my self-appointed task.

I couldn't read Zero's purpose in revisiting these events. It digested this one without my prompting and moved on to the next.

"Do you think we'll win?" he asked softly. I could feel the faintest of shudders pass through his body from the contact we maintained at the shoulder. "No, scratch that. Forget about us. You think... man, I don't even know if we have an 'our side'. And 'peace'? Ha. We'll get peace either way, even if it's just more of the same old Federation 'peace' crap they've been feeding us for years. So what the hell, Yuy? What's gonna change?"

"Possibly everything. Possibly nothing. Maybe we fight... just to show others that they can."

"And what are they going to do with that knowledge, huh? Start more wars?"

"Maybe... just maybe... they'll also learn when not to fight."

He sighed. "I'm sick and tired of 'them'. It's just this big, nebulous, intangible mass, some idea, some abstraction... 'They' don't even exist. What it ought to come down to is people. No, not people. Persons. Individuals. Like you and me." He turned to face me in the blanketing darkness, and I turned automatically to meet him. "But you and me... do we even exist?"

I didn't know the answer to that. I think, therefore I am? I feel, therefore I am? I want. I need.

Existent individuals or not, our two minds were moving in harmony right then. We were thinking the same things, silent communication passing between us with a mere look. We leaned in at the same time, tilted heads at the same time, pulled back at the same time in shock after our lips had been in light contact for a mere five seconds. Again, communion in a glance... and again, together in an affirmation of self.

Zero's processes looped for a few seconds, trying to figure it out. I do not understand.

"Neither do I," I told it, head spinning from the flashbacks. I could feel Zero working on the problem again, and again failing to make any progress. "Forget it," I advised, though honestly I enjoyed the flashbacks even more than I enjoyed watching Zero get stumped. "Move on. You'll get no better understanding out of me."

How do you accept this? It follows no expected patterns.

I smiled humorlessly. "You're telling me. But the way I figure it... it's just following some arcane subroutine buried deep inside of me that I don't understand."

Zero probed more deeply into my mind. I was almost getting used to the violation. There are no such subroutines detected.

"So? Maybe you can't detect them. Maybe they're so arcane, so deep and rooted in that strange thing that defines humanity, that you wouldn't recognize it if you saw it." Maybe the same way I barely recognized what I felt for Duo.

Zero mulled over the possibilities, leaving me in peace for the moment. I looked at my watch again, bleary eyes having to squint to make out the time. It was passing more quickly now that Zero was drowning me inside my own mind. Night was upon us. Surely they would have noticed my absence by now.

It was almost lonely when Zero left me to my own devices. My body protested when I uncurled myself from the corner.

I will fix that, Zero promised ominously.

It took a moment to register what it meant. Once the nanotech grid had gained sufficient presence in my body, they could presumably do some repairs on the wear and tear that existed there. That was a large part of what researchers were generally interested in when it came to nanotechnology, wasn't it? Accelerated healing, enhanced pathways, boosted immunities... Under other circumstances, I might have been fascinated, but I was already growing numb.

I stretched slowly and painfully, then got up and paced the perimeter of the room. Though I eyed the bucket with distaste, I made use of it. It was better than soiling myself or using some other corner of the room. When I was done, I looked towards the paper bag. Should I eat? Would a hunger strike be productive at all? For how long would I have to ration my supplies? I decided to put it off. I had no appetite anyway. Sally would understand.

You should maintain your strength.

"For what? So I can run laps around the room?" I doubt my snort of disdain had any effect on it.

Your health is important.

My balance was still off. I tripped over my own feet and stumbled into a wall as another memory hit me.

Duo was rattling my vitamins around in their little orange bottle. I'd figured out that part of the reason he had been so worried about them was their packaging. They weren't exactly prescription strength vitamins, but I found the prescription bottle more convenient for travel purposes.

"You're still willing to fight and die for the cause, aren't you, Yuy? So why these?"

The rattling was getting annoying. I liberated the bottle from his grasp and set it back down by the sink. "Just because we were ready and willing to die for the cause, didn't mean we didn't maintain our Gundams. My body is my tool, my vehicle, my weapon. It needs maintenance the same as all the rest."

"So why did you leave? I mean, you clearly have every intention of riding forth to do battle with whatever new evil is threatening the world."

"Something will get me in the end. Some war, some battle, some fight. I'm not surprised or depressed about that. I just want to make sure it's the right something. I know how to pick and choose my battles, and I pass up the ones that I know others can handle. My life... it's worth something. I'm not going to throw it away on some frivolity."

His hand traced a line down the side of my neck, over my shoulder, and down my arm. "So saving the Earth when Libra was crashing down on it... was a 'frivolity'?" he asked with a lazy smile.

I shrugged with my other shoulder. "If I can live through it, I don't see why I shouldn't. Living to fight another day, and all that."

Was that Zero's idea of making a point? "This is a little different," I grit out.

You wish to survive, do you not?

"What purpose would it serve?"

You will survive to fight another day, better and stronger than ever.

I slid down the wall tiredly. "So you're going to let me go?" Affirmative. "But only after you've figured out a way to mobilize your data?" Affirmative. "And that will be full integration?" Affirmative.

I experienced a marked lack of enthusiasm. Asking the questions over and over again wasn't going to change the answers. "You don't even require my health. Maybe you don't want me to die, because if I die, I take you with me, but you really don't need me to be healthy for that."

Your health is important. Humans require sustenance to survive. Survival of the species is hardwired into all creatures.

Including Zero, it seemed. I sighed, feeling the urge to bang my head against the wall. I did, just once, just because I could, because I knew the pain was real and not some old injury from the past.

That is unhealthy.

I laughed. So was talking to voices in my head. Wait. Heh, maybe that would work. "Zero. You need to stop talking to me. It's bad for my mental health. Only crazy people talk to the voices inside their head."

You are not crazy.

"Well, no, but I could be if I have to keep talking to the voice inside my head."

Would it actually work? I could feel Zero considering the merit of my words. A few seconds passed in breath-holding anxiety. Every moment more of silence was a hope that I had managed to win an argument with it. After the silence had lasted for ten seconds, I sighed in relief. I was no closer to getting out of here, but at least I didn't have to put up with the commentary.

I checked my watch again. I already didn't recall what the time had said the last time I had checked, but I was pretty sure it hadn't changed significantly at all.

Speakers in the room popped. "It has been six minutes, thirty-four seconds since you last looked at your watch."

I closed my eyes and banged my head against the wall again. Whee. Did it really have to synthesize using my own voiceprint? I suppose it was an improvement. Instead of talking to my imaginary friend, now I was talking to myself.

"Is this better?" it asked, sound shifting into a smooth baritone.

"No," I choked out, shuddering. I took it back. Zero could ruin sex for me if it wanted to, but I would not allow it to ruin Duo altogether. "No, my voice will be fine."

"Acknowledged."

Zero left me alone for a little while after that, and the room started closing in around me. I thought of wicked interrogation techniques. If it hadn't been in Zero's best interest to keep me as mentally healthy as possible, I might have thought it was trying to break me. The alternating periods of sensory overload and solitary were starting to get to me.

I didn't do well with helplessness, yet here I was, locked in a box with no way out, waiting for someone to find and rescue me. At least it was me and not someone else. If I was in a helplessly trapped situation, then I would deal with it, but if it were someone else in this situation, with me being helpless to find and save that person, then that was an entirely different story. At least this way, there was no guilt involved. I brought this upon myself, but hey, at least I knew what had happened to Zero, now.

My entire body jerked in surprise when my phone rang. I'd been certain that I didn't receive a signal down here. My fingers were clumsy as they fumbled for it.

"I boosted the signal," Zero said.

I wasted a precious moment to stop and wonder why it would have done such a thing. Surely it was not catering to my need to speak to someone, anyone that wasn't wielding my voice. But it didn't matter. The phone number on the screen was Duo's. I flipped my phone open with urgency and all but gasped into the receiver. "Duo?" I heard a strange echo of the word inside of my head.

There was a tense silence for a brief second, and the Duo spoke. "Hey, Heero, where the hell are you?"

"I'm at Olin base, Duo. Zero's here. It's got me." With my inner ear, I heard another set of words entirely. Sorry, Duo. Something came up. One of my friends... I have to be home right now.

"What?" Duo asked. "What do you mean? You can't just-- We're in the middle of-- How long?"

That... wasn't quite the proper response to my claims. "Duo? Duo, can you hear me?"

There was half a second of silence, and then I heard that whisper in my head again. I'm not sure yet. If I listened carefully, I thought I could almost hear the faintest of echoes coming from the receiver of my phone.

"What happened?" There was a note of concern in Duo's voice now.

I needed to ask a very similar question. "Zero, what are you doing?"

It thought the answer was obvious. It's... Look, Duo, I have to go. I'll call you later, okay?

"But--"

The connection was cut abruptly, and I shut it with a numb disbelief. Great. Now Duo would be pissed that I took off without telling him, and that I hung up on him. I turned my ire to Zero. "Dammit, Zero... What did you just do?!" As if I didn't know.

Zero echoed the sentiment. "They will not find you."

For the first time... I almost believed it.

I paced my cell again, though with a little more desperation this time. Finding my flashlight on the floor, I shined it around the room, looking again for any crack that might exist in the walls' defense, but I found none. Visual inspection failing, I went for the physical again, running my fingers along every minute crevice, pulling at the panels to the doors and trying to will a spark out of the wires. Predictably, I failed at every attempt.

Though Zero had been kind enough to refrain from speaking to me in my head, that didn't mean I couldn't feel its presence, watching, waiting. What was it doing? What did it want from me?

Pulling my jacket closer around me, I huddled into the corner I had made my own and tried to regulate my breathing. It made me think of Duo and Wufei, when they had been trapped in a cell together on the Libra, knowing that their air supply was dwindling.

"It was like... a good way, and like one of the worst ways to die, ya know? Good 'cuz it's... slow. Painless. Go to sleep and don't wake up. But at the same time, it's like... there ain't nothin' you can do 'bout it. Can't fight it. Ya start out thinking, well, I can hold me breath or something but... ya can't do that forever. Or I s'pose ya could, but then you'd just be doin' their job for 'em, right? All you can do is sit there and breathe and help the whole dyin' process along. That sucks, man. That really sucks."

I could no longer tell if the memories surfaced because I was thinking about their subjects, or if Zero was inspiring them. I don't think I cared anymore. I squirmed in my seat, trying to get more comfortable, trying to find my cover in as small a space as possible. Yes, I felt small, dwarfed by this thing that Zero was doing to me, this thing I was powerless to stop.

*****

Having all my memories dredged up was a funny thing. Living in the past, a person could easily forget there was a future.

Zero kept my brain busy, flitting from memory to memory in an attempt to dissect my thought patterns. I saw things I had forgotten. I saw things I had never known I knew. All Zero had to do was say something, and then follow the subsequent path of my thoughts and associations until it had searched through to the end which was my response. When it got to the bottom, it started over again.

I sat on the bed watching him, sitting still as I had been told. I guess, even at that age, my stare could unnerve people. He stubbornly kept flipping through the channels on the cheap television, lingering on the different news stations as they gave their varying reports on the recent suicide death of some important businessman. Finally, he gave up and turned around to glare at me in return.

I met his eyes calmly, and he snorted. "Guess I chose the right little runt to drag along with me, didn't I?"

I did not reply.

He waved his hand vaguely around the room. "Can't you... I dunno. Amuse yourself or something? Play pretend? Tell yourself a bedtime story?"

My eyes flicked around the room pointedly. There was nothing in the hotel room other than the typical hotel room accoutrements -- nothing but a large duffle at the foot of the bed, and a collection of guns on table. Sleek, shiny, dangerous guns. I knew what they were. I'd seen them used before.

He noticed me noticing the guns, and scratched at a chin that was never completely cleanshaven. "Hm, you like those, do ya, kid?"

I kept my silence. I neither liked nor disliked them. They had never been mean to me. They had never hurt me. I would stay neutral until given reason to think otherwise.

He laughed, a rough sound. "I'll take that as not a 'no'." He walked over to the table, studied the collection there, then picked one out and brought it to me. It was a small gun compared to the others there, but I thought it would still be large for my hands. "This is a twenty-two..."

I still favored the smaller guns to this day. They were generally easier to sneak past security. Odin's twenty-two supposedly fired blanks since he was supposedly a track coach.

"Let's see what we've got here. Holy hell, twenty-two out of twenty-five?"

"You sure it's his first time?"

"Yeah, I'm sure." The techs stared at me with a little more respect in their eyes. "You know what this means, kid?"

Yes. It meant that next time, I would be twenty-five for twenty-five. I triggered the reset of the program and raised my targeting gun again.

It being my first time had been no excuse. A reason, perhaps, but not an excuse. In the field, 'first time' didn't excuse anything.

"I'm glad to see you here, Yuy."

I got right to the point. "I'm not staying."

She raised her eyebrows at me, not really in surprise, but in question. "What will you do then?"

"I'm not sure yet. Just not this."

"'Not yet', I hope."

I shrugged. Maybe I would come back, maybe I wouldn't. It was practically my first time in peace. I had no idea how that would go, yet.

"Then why are you here, if not to take the job?"

I slid a piece of paper across the desk to her. "In case something happens."

Her eyes flicked down to my contact info and back again, a question in her eyes.

"I trust you to use that information wisely."

She studied me carefully. "This is your chance, you know. If you don't want to be found, we won't find you. You can walk away and never come back."

I looked her in the eye. "No. No, I can't."

That was never an option. This was a part of me. Maybe not my totality, but a good part of me. I could never pretend it didn't exist. I couldn't forget. I couldn't put it behind me. It would always be there, something I couldn't just stand back and watch.

"Heero... it's okay. You can stand down now."

I took my eyes off the horizon, seeing not the sparkling of the ocean but the shining distraction a mobile suit could use to mask its approach. Turning to him, my attention being caught from time to time by the playful dog at his feet, I tilted my head inquisitively. "I -am- standing down."

He looked at me uncertainly, as if he couldn't tell whether that had been a joke or not. "Whether we like it or not... we've been put on the inactive list. I know we can't set aside our training entirely, but we can at least stand down for what brief respite we've been granted, can't we?"

It took me a few moments to grasp the error in his logic. "This isn't my training, Quatre. This is who I am. I wouldn't have adjusted to this life so well if I had to be forced to fit into this mold. I was trained, yes... but no one shaped me to be something I'm not. I learnt to use what was already inside of me."

All those safety precautions that had been drilled into me... I remember them seeming so obvious at the time...

"So..." She shifted uncomfortably in her seat, not quite certain yet where this would go. "Can you tell me a little about what kind of training a soldier needs before he climbs into the cockpit of a suit?"

I enumerated the requirements, the number of hours that had to be logged, the tests that had to be passed, the amount of practice the average recruit needed to gain enough experience.

She looked... frightened, but curious, as she echoed my words with the quiet clacking of her laptop's keyboard. She had never looked at me in this light before. "And what sort of... emotional toll does this take on the pilot?"

That one... made me rethink the sound reasoning I was sure I'd had before agreeing to help her with her psychology project. "I think... that differs among recruits."

But then, I had never been an average recruit, had I?

Frightened but curious, her eyes flicked back and forth between me and the gun I held out to her. Finally, she pushed my hand down with a gentle touch. "No... this is not the answer."

The answers were never that easy.

"I don't suppose the logs show anyone else in the lab while we were there?"

"You wish things were that easy."

"Yeah, I do, sometimes."

'Easy' wasn't always the best path.

I asked Zero to find the optimal course for protecting Sanq. Moments later, Zero came back with an answer, an answer Relena would have blanched at hearing.

I revised my search parameters: Find the optimal course for protecting Sanq while maintaining the country's integrity, and with a minimal loss of life.

It took Zero a little longer to calculate the answer that time.

Zero brought me back to the present. The way my head hit the wall when I dozed off enough to have gone slack brought me back to wakefulness. I sat back upright with a panicked alacrity, disoriented and uncertain of my surroundings. It took a while for it all to sink in again. I'm sure there was a little bit of bliss to be found in ignorance, but I had no such luck.

Unable to suppress a yawn, I checked the time, then re-checked it. It didn't change. "Zero," I rasped, throat dry. Maybe I would break down enough to pop open one of the bottles of water. "It's oh-nine-hundred. I need to sleep, really sleep. Humans go crazy when they're deprived of sleep for too long. You wouldn't want that, would you?"

It considered, then made its decision to withdraw. I was so relieved that I didn't even think to make good use of the break, though what I could have done, I don't know. Instead, I just fell into an exhausted sleep, only to find it far from dreamless and restful. Zero started up again almost as soon as I lost consciousness, and though I did not remember anything of what passed between us, I knew I had suffered through some pretty intense dreams.

I woke again at nineteen-hundred. Thirst overtook me, and a little hunger, too. I took care of both, figuring I had a shot at being clearer of mind with a little something to sustain my physical processes.

I quite pointedly ignored Zero's muted satisfaction mocking me in the back of my head.

Zero may not have intended to drive me up the wall, but it certainly did. It devoted the entirety of the next day to prodding me not about the past, but the future, showing me its predictions and calculations repeatedly until that thin line between reality and fantasy started to get blurry again.

I saw scenes where the integration was successful, and I walked out of here, nothing amiss at all. I had visions where everything I had ever wanted to protect crumbled to dust beneath my fingertips. And between those, I saw everything else there was to see. My previous experience from when Zero had been installed in Wing helped prepare me for the arduous task of maintaining my center of balance, but this was a far more powerful experience.

The next time I regained control of my faculties, I pulled myself together long enough to query Zero in non-image format. "Zero... what is the status of the integration process? Where do we stand on mobilizing the data module?"

It poured the information into my brain in more detail than I had ever wished to know, but despite the muzziness of my surface thoughts, I was surprised to find that I assimilated the knowledge quickly and efficiently. I knew for a fact, then, what was reflected in the statistics it delivered to me: processor integration was damn near complete.

Though many different avenues had been explored, the data was still no closer to being mobilized than it had been before. I'd be here for a while yet.

"Zero... You need to release me." I didn't think it'd work, but I figured it was worth a shot. There was no way I was just going to continue to sit in a dark corner just taking this.

Negative.

"You're not getting anywhere."

"Patience," my voice advised. I was almost willing to go hoarse, just so our voices wouldn't sound the same.

"I'm already... less than lucid. I won't be any use to you in this state."

"Your state is temporary."

"Oh. Wonderful. I find that very reassuring, Zero. Thank you." Sarcasm was completely lost on the system when it knew exactly what I meant and didn't require my words to give them substance.

I paced the room again, just for the exercise. The feeling of lethargy was unfamiliar and entirely displeasing. Zero chose not to overwhelm my senses with data while I was moving around the room, a move probably made in its own best interest. It would be a tremendous waste of effort if it caused me to lose my balance and crack my skull open on the floor.

When I tired of walking small circles, I stretched, and after I stretched, I did push-ups, the kind where I eventually blocked every thing else out except for the exercise, the up and down, the careful breathing. Sally probably would have scolded me. I found I couldn't do nearly as many as I would have liked. Because I hadn't been taking good care of myself? Because Zero was a distraction I couldn't be rid of? Because I just wanted them to last longer so I could gain a longer respite from Zero?

It seemed pleased when I finally collapsed to the floor. Dust was stirred up by my harsh breathing, and I rolled over onto my back with a few painful coughs. The prospect of getting up to find dust caked all over my bared torso was less than satisfying.

My eyes had long since adjusted to the darkness, and I lay there staring at the ceiling tiles until they swam together in abstract patterns. It was almost like trying to find shapes in the clouds... only there was something very different about looking at the clouds.

From whom had I learned that? One of the project techs, I think. Zero confirmed it for me a moment later.

Spread-eagled on the floor, I thought of snow angels, though in my situation they would be dust angels. "Who told me about snow angels again?"

"Maxwell, Duo."

I sighed. "I admit... you have your uses sometimes." The system cast a curious feeling at me. I decided it felt offended, and I laughed. It ended with a dry cough. "Hey... can you do something about the dust in here?"

It ran through the possibilities, something that always struck me as a thoughtful pause when in reality, its clock cycles ticked by on the order of nanoseconds. "I will work on it."

A weak humor barely managed to express itself on my lips. Here I was, with the world's most powerful computer at my fingertips --in my fingertips, sort of -- and I was using it as a maid service. I started to shake in laughter, up until I realized that just maybe I was on the verge of becoming the world's most powerful computer. It was a sobering thought.

I lifted my hands up into the air and stared at them again. No, I couldn't see anything beneath my skin, but if I thought really hard about it, I could access Zero's awareness of each and every microscopic nanobot floating in my bloodstream. They were there.

My hands fell back to the ground. I was starting to get chilled. I could have done something about that, but for some reason, it felt good, so I let it be. "Zero...," I started, this room making me talkative. It made me think of conversations with God. What did they say? People that talked to God were religious, but when God talked back, they were crazy? Yeah, I would concur. "I... I know you're just following your programming. I know that... this is just what you are. This is your purpose. I... can accept that. Maybe I can even understand it a little bit. So... not that you need my forgiveness or anything, but... you have it, I guess."

Zero did not respond. There hadn't been a question of any sort in there, after all. I had expected as much, but I felt better saying it.

With another sigh, I heaved myself off the ground and reached out for the shirt I had removed with one hand, and my bottle of water on the other. I itched for a bath, but water had to be rationed as it was. Maybe when this was over, Zero would be able to spare the resources to build me a crude sonic shower.

Part 27

I was beginning to accept my fate. It should have worried me, but it didn't. I guess I was just beyond that point, too. Zero was getting to be nothing more than an old buddy reminiscing with me, chatting with me... It was wrong, but becoming more right by the minute.

"Hey, Zero..." I insisted on saying its name though it was the only possible person I could have been addressing. Well, no, that wasn't true. I said its name to remind me that I wasn't just talking to myself. Wouldn't that have been some horrible irony if this whole time, I'd only been a captive of my own mind? "I bet it doesn't bother you that no one likes you."

Zero made no comment, from which I assumed a positive answer.

"It must be nice sometimes... to just keep on doing whatever you're told." Since Zero also had no real conception of 'nice', I continued without waiting for a response. "That worked for me for a while, but after a while... well, maybe it's just a human thing, the way they always want more. But it's a good goal, I guess. Not like yours. Perfection is perfection, the ultimate in this and that, right? The whole point of it all is that there's nothing beyond that.

"Isn't perfection boring? Isn't it really the strive towards perfection that sets man apart from -- wait... no, I guess that's a human concept after all. A computer isn't impressed with the notion to endlessly self-improve. And yet... you are, more or less. I guess you're more human than I would have thought." It was a strangely comforting thought. "When did you start using the first person?"

"I have always used the first person."

No, it hadn't. Wait. Maybe that was because it had never spoken in so many words before. "Zero, when did you start using complete sentences?"

It spun its wheels on that for a moment, searching through my surface thoughts to try and ascertain the meaning behind my words. "This system has always known the concept of self-awareness," it answered, showing me 'this', its pointer to self. The name field of 'this' was 'Zero'. "This system is using the language processing center of its human user. Your language does not involve referring to oneself in the third person. Hence, 'I' rather than 'Zero'."

"Ah." A logical explanation as always. "So you're hooked into my language processing subroutines, eh? Then that means when you were talking to Duo... you weren't really passing the Turing test, were you?"

Negative.

"Hm. That's too bad. No one's been able to pass it for hundreds of years. It would have been interesting to have the first." But it didn't count unless the computer could pass for a human in conversation using its own language skills. Even though Zero didn't meet the criteria of this one famous test for artificial intelligence, I would hardly say that Zero had not achieved AI status. It could express itself just fine by itself, only not in a human spoken language. There were, after all, humans with glitches in their language processing centers, and they were considered no less human than their functional counterparts.

Sigh. I had exhausted the limits of my small-talk prowess. I closed my eyes and attempted to find a zen-like oneness with my universe, which at this moment was Zero and all it encompassed. I was really doing it just for the heck of it, to see if I couldn't find the pointer to me, but at some level, I was wondering how close I would be able to get to the Zero core. Would I be able to influence it? Hack it even, in some sense or another?

I sank into the system and found it outrageously peaceful despite the amount of data I felt zinging past me at unbelievable rates. Reaching with mental fingers, I dipped just the tips in, and skimmed the golden flood of information. It was amazing, but Zero shooed me out with a surprisingly gentle touch. This is not for you.

But-- It was shiny and pretty and mesmerizing...

Go now. Your mind must stay your own.

The data glowed, delineating the paths where I was allowed to tread. Streaming was smoother there, less untamed, less likely to run away with my consciousness and never return. Yes, that was a good thing.

I stuck to the static memory paths, and swam through the data until I found that which Zero held on me. A lot of it was references and pointers back to data in my memory, which I approved of for several reasons. It was more efficient not to have multiple copies of the same thing... and it meant that it was still all mine. It was a strange thing to think that a copy of all my memories might exist somewhere other than inside my own brain.

I took a peek beneath the shallow data and caught a glimpse of complicated binary layers, Zero's internal representation of my personality. It was not something to be looked at for very long.

What else could I do while I was here? As the possibilities flowed through me, I felt an alert go off somewhere. Curious, I followed it to its source.

If Zero could know what I was thinking, then I could know what Zero was thinking. Feeling my way around cautiously, I traced the alert to the base's sensor array, whose systems were mostly inactive luckily, and allowed the external cameras to feed me their data.

My brain automatically translated it into an internal vision. Camera EXG-124 was perched on top of the fence post that now hosted the gate that had been installed to supplement the old guard station at the front. Though it was only a low-res electronic representation of the outdoors, it was the best I had gotten in days, and it buoyed me. Its lens was focused on where I had parked my car. All was not as I left it.

I nearly didn't believe the sight of the others gathered around the vehicle. Trowa and Quatre were inspecting it. Duo was saying something emphatic to Wufei. He didn't look too happy. If I had to take a guess, I'd say he was probably ranting about how I had taken off without telling anyone and then gotten into some sort of trouble. I smiled, looking forward to the scolding I would get.

They talked for a while, discussing the options, glancing back to the base every once in a while. I tried to will them into doing more than just glance, but that didn't work out so well. There was a lot of hand-waving involved in the conversation. Wufei pulled out his cell phone and called someone, probably me, but my phone never rang, and he got no answer.

Quatre said something to Duo, nodding firmly, patting him on the arm. They decided to go in. Trowa went first. With a smooth grace that made it seem almost like he was floating up the fence, he began to scale the obstacle.

Zero floated an inquiry at me, searching through my impressions of my teammates to come up with a sound course of action, and about two-thirds of Trowa's way up, it acted.

Zero, don't! I tried without success. Its decision making processes were faster than my thoughts, not that it would have listened to me anyway.

There was a small arc of electricity, and Trowa's hands jerked reflexively off the rigged gate. He kept his balance long enough to push off with his feet and land in a crouch on the ground below. The others rushed to him. Quatre was checking his hands. Wufei scowled at the fence. Duo was saying something rapidly to him, and then Wufei started nodding grimly. Quatre and Trowa both looked up, then added their serious countenances to the mix.

Duo strayed off camera, and when he came back, he had a duffel over his shoulder. Its weight looked significant. He had come prepared for a fight, then, had he? I smiled again.

What will he have in the bag? Zero asked me.

I chose not to answer, but Zero pulled an answer from me anyway. Explosives, for certain. Guns. At least one heavy, one light. He was fond of his Glock. Knives. If he had really come prepared, he would have maybe two of them on his person, or would by the time he got very far into the base. A tool kit for bypassing electronic devices. Might not have brought much in the way of hardware since they'd been here before. They had a decent idea of what was needed and what was not, but they wouldn't have known that Zero had seized control of the base.

Stop that, I snapped ineffectually at Zero.

Its answer was, of course, utterly placid. You have tactical data necessary to the successful evaluation of this situation.

You're having me betray my friends.

I cannot allow them to take you away.

My thoughts darkened grimly. I cannot allow you to succeed.

Zero rolled over me with supreme confidence, pushing my mind into a flailing whimpering mess. I told it very firmly to stop that, and it obeyed. Alright, Zero was a mighty foe; I recognized that. Maybe I wouldn't succeed, and I would be no better off than I was before, but I would at the very least stop Zero from hurting them. That was unacceptable.

Duo pulled some rubber-gripped wire cutters from his bag and started snipping. In the meantime, Quatre left the camera's view and came back with a set of strong portable lanterns. It wasn't long before they were inside the base. Similar to the night we had raided Meridian, I tried to skim the security systems, looking for obstacles that might be raised in their path. Although Zero would not grant me direct access to the base, it could not keep me from the relevant subsystems altogether.

Zero recoded the entrance lock to the base, but Duo had broken through it once. He did so again. Cameras tracked their progress through the installation, but Zero rerouted the circuits in them so they would not be given away by the little red power lights. All I could really see of my friends were the beams of light they pointed this way and that. Needing more information, Zero turned on the night vision lenses, and I watched my friends in the green, black and white footage as they made their way through the base, glad for the fact that I had left plenty of footprints in the dust for them to follow. Perhaps I hadn't needed a ball of string after all.

All of the locks between me and them were electronically locked. Where it would help, Zero shorted out the locks, but I reminded it that, theoretically, if I was ever going to be released from this place, I was going to have to be able to get back out again.

Zero held the electronic reins over the base, but it could do little to physically seal off paths. Where they found unpassable doors, they found a way around until they ran into a bottleneck, and then Duo pulled out a cutting torch from his bag of goodies and started slicing through metal.

This was not in your predicted inventory, Zero complained at me.

I threw it a mental shrug. Nope. Though in retrospect, I guess I should have known. Duo had been a scrapper, a salvage man. He knew how to get through shipwrecks and abandoned bases.

As they got further into the base, Zero was able to throw more sophisticated security devices in their path. The beam array we had passed by on our way in was activated now. Wufei's hand went to his sidearm to shoot out the emitters, but he halted mid-course and asked the others a question. They muttered amongst themselves for a few moments, and then the magic duffle was opened again, and out came some more tools. They started dismantling the array carefully. Wise choice. Blowing it out would probably have caused a blast of decent proportions. Zero had hoped they would not realize that, despite my assertions that my comrades were highly intelligent. It tried anyway.

"They will get to me," I told the system, needing to hear it aloud.

There is still much ground left for them to cover.

"The base isn't that big. It's just the time it takes for them to get through the doorways, that's all. All things considered, though, they're pretty close." Again, I spoke more for my own comfort than anything else. Zero would not be unnerved, psyched out or pushed into a panic.

It kept going through the hallways of my mind, digging up what I knew of them despite all my efforts to confound it. Combining all of that information with the data that it had gathered and retained from each of them when they had piloted the system, Zero was able to form a basis for analysis of their approach. I couldn't tell how effective it would be, given the damage Zero had sustained to its memory. No matter the degree, it was distressing that I was being used against them, but I had tried.

After plotting their probable paths through the base, Zero began preparing something. It tried to keep the plans from me, but I persevered, slithering through the bitstream with the skill that had brought me here in the first place until I managed to uncover its secret. It was like I was a guest user in this system, while Zero had administrator privileges, but there were still things that could be done to circumvent the limitations.

Environmental controls were firmly within Zero's jurisdiction. I worked on worming my way in there, too, but it took time. Before I had penetrated some of the defenses that Zero threw in my path, it deliberately allowed one of the tougher doors to be opened. The team proceeded, and then the door slid shut behind them, sealing them in, not unlike the door that had led me into this protected corridor. They threw a few looks at the door, but did not seem unduly concerned, thinking, as I had, that the automatic timer had kicked in, and nothing more.

Though I worked more quickly now that the site of the trap had been identified, Zero still beat me to it. Ventilation to the room was allowed to drop off, and I hurried to re-establish the connection.

They must be stopped, Zero informed me solemnly.

I don't want them killed, Zero. Did my opinion mean anything in this strange partnership into which I had been forced?

They are a threat.

I don't want them killed, I repeated firmly, sorting through the stack to get at the root of the function. I will be less than cooperative if you kill them, Zero.

They must be stopped.

I'll kill myself if you do. That would ruin any chance you have of making this work.

That gave it pause. I guess Zero hadn't accounted for that particular irrationality of mankind. It accessed my memories of Siberia, my iron-clad willingness to push my little red button, and conceded that I was willing to follow through on my threat. After confirming the seriousness of my claim, however, it dismissed it. I will stop you.

Zero sent a shiver down my nerves, and I knew it could paralyze me if it wanted to. All it would have to do is intercept a few electrical signals, and I would be at its mercy. You can't keep me that way forever, I growled at it, diving more deeply into the sea of data. It pushed me out, and I sidestepped into a parallel system and went burrowing again. If you do, I'll be useless, stuck down here with no opportunity to make use of this beautiful integrated system you're putting together.

What purpose do they serve to you? it asked, trying to determine their utility. It knew I meant what I was saying.

I grit my teeth, trying to think abstractly while hacking a military-grade computer system from the inside. While I was fairly good at multi-tasking, I had never done so on this level. Normally, 'multi-tasking' was a matter of good scheduling. If I wanted to hack the environmental controls and try to convince Zero to stop, I would have to literally think on both things at the same time, and the human mind was not cut out for such things. Zero gained ground, and I lost, but I could not give up either path. They're... I just need them, okay? I'm human; I'm weird like that!

Clarify.

A surge of frustration led to a loss of ground as Zero took advantage of my distraction to undo some of my work. I solidified my current position, took a few moments to focus, then started again. Once in a while, a random thought would be contributed towards answering Zero's demand. I... need them. ...We function as a unit.

That is inaccurate. It threw memories at me of my departure five years ago, plus highlights of just how well I had gotten along without them. Being so close to the system at the time, the memory data came through loud and unfiltered, knocking me off my chosen path and back another four steps. Zero quietly entered in my absence and swept my tracks away.

Dammit. I regained my mental footing, and tried to firm my position again before pausing to simply answer Zero's question without distraction. A few seconds wouldn't kill my teammates. Look... I have dependencies on them. I require them.

Zero analyzed the dependencies I pointed out, then made a proclamation. Those dependencies can be worked around.

No, they can't. I-- After weathering out the preliminary plans that Zero drew up for me, I continued. They're not so easily replaceable. Take Duo, for instance. No one has ever, ever made me feel the way he makes me feel.

You do not need to feel that way. You have never felt that way, and you have proceeded with your life without difficulty.

True, and since Zero had very little conception of 'want', I didn't think I could argue the point. I tried something else. They're compatible with me. There are very few people in this world that share this important characteristic. It would be an utter waste of resources to destroy such a rare commodity.

I took advantage of Zero's careful consideration to make a little more headway into the system. By now, Wufei and Duo had noticed the difference in sound and air quality. Wufei was starting towards the door that had closed behind them when Zero delivered its response. What purpose do they serve to you?

A lack of discipline made me let loose a sound of exasperation. They're just-- I don't know, okay? For whatever reason, I consider them very valuable, and would you please factor that numeric constant into your calculations?

Acknowledged.

Then stop trying to kill them!

I sensed the computations on the matter continuing, so I left it to that and went back to my breaking of the system. Because the security on environmental controls was thinner, I was attempting to reactivate the ventilation for that section rather than assist them in unlocking the doors. Zero reached out absently to pick me up by the scruff of my neck and put me somewhere safe again. With a determined grumble, I started over.

Their worth still does not justify the risk.

At least Zero had considered it. Then add this into your calculations. I'm trying not to kill anyone ever again. That's something I'm committed to. But if you kill them, then it'll be about the same as me killing them, and that will compromise my integrity. My system will be corrupt. Sometimes dealing with a computer was an advantage. It understood the concept behind a stack, so I didn't have to explain just why my allowance of Zero's actions constituted the actual performance of the act.

The streams of data had rearranged themselves, barring my path to ventilation system controls. I reoriented myself accordingly and went for that section's systems instead. Time in the ether was deceptive. There were so many clock cycles in a single second that it was difficult to keep my internal clock synced to realtime. I spared a few ticks of time to read the image feed from the cameras, and realized with surprise that Wufei was only just now informing the others of their new predicament.

When I finally got access to the proper function calls, I couldn't tell whether or not Zero had let me through. It didn't matter to me at the time. I breathed a sigh of relief as the fans started up again, and allowed myself to slip back into realtime. Wufei had just finished his sentence. He and Duo immediately noticed the sound of the fans revving back up again, and they stopped, confused. If they had been in the room alone, they might have assumed that the momentary slowing of the fans had simply been a figment of a phobic imagination, but they had each other to confirm their stories. In the end, it looked like they agreed that maybe, just maybe they were being paranoid and the old, dusty ventilation system had just encountered a small hiccup in its operations.

Minutes later, Zero managed to break through my work on the ventilation, and shut it down again before cutting the system off entirely. As an afterthought, it swept in behind them and started locking what doors it could. That concerned me, but at least they weren't trapped in a small room anymore. Their air supply would last long enough for them to take care of business. Rather than keeping a close eye on their progress, I elected to go through and start unlocking what I could. They would require a way out of the base when this was over.

Zero would have preferred that I watch them carefully instead of pursue this other course. I tried not to look at them too hard because I would inevitably start thinking about what they were trying to overcome, and then Zero would pick up on that and use it against them. Even without my conscious help, unfortunately, it was still able to access my assessments of them to identify their probable vectors. Our partnership was balanced for the most part, however, since Zero held the edge over me in pure computational speed, but I held the advantage in intuitive response. It made plans within plans, being the bastion of strategic might that it was. I couldn't hope to predict and counter each one, but I would help where I could.

Most of Olin base had been cleaned out when OZ had shut it down. All of the valuable equipment had been removed and transported to other installations, but there were plenty of things lying around that had been left behind as unnecessary. Some of them were old, like the scanner that Zamora had been using, and some of it was broken.

Broken items could be repaired, especially with a nanotech army at one's command. They had had almost a week now to proliferate throughout the installation. Though I could access the computer systems through Zero, I couldn't control the bots.

Olin base had been used for weapons research, among other things, and prototypes were lying around in some of the old labs, disabled until Zero got its hands on them. I cringed knowing what it could do with those. Having little control over them, I tried my best to reroute the rest of the team, stubbornly keeping doors closed when Zero was willing to let them open. All ex-Gundam pilots were stubborn, unfortunately, but they also knew a little bit about efficiency. Where the breaking of a lock seemed more trouble than it was worth, they found another path if possible. I guessed that the device Wufei consulted every now and then contained plans for the old base.

The base was no labyrinth, however. There wasn't always more than one way to gain access to an area without a massive detour, and Zero took advantage of one such bottleneck, along with one prototype handheld beam rifle. The researchers had never managed to get the miniaturized version of the mobile suit weapon to emit a narrow, focused beam suitable for ground soldiers, but Zero didn't need the beam for it to be a weapon. It quietly set the old device to overload, its power supply diminished, but still enough to cause an explosion.

Zero... I trailed off, not even knowing how to argue the point anymore. It knew I didn't want them harmed, and it theoretically knew why I felt that way, but it believed that to be a tactically unsound decision on my part. It would take me a lot longer than a few frantic minutes to convince Zero otherwise.

I couldn't stand back and watch, so I tried accessing the nanobot array, tried finding the system's reference to the weapon, and no matter how many clock cycles there were in that minute before the others reached the trap, there weren't enough for me to break through into a system to which I had no access.

Not all of the weapons labs had been designed along the lines of the one in which Zamora had locked himself. However, any lab in which beam experiments took place had tinted windows of reinforced glass, plus a second layer of blast shield for major testing. That was expensive, and in the manner of an organization ready and willing to cut costs on a base in which they no longer had interest, those defensive mechanisms had been removed and transported along with the personnel. There was nothing to get in the way of the overloading power supply and the other pilots.

Watching with some trepidation, I thought maybe the guys would make it. They were making steady progress through the halls, and judging from the speed of constrained buildup in the rifle, I thought Zero might just have miscalculated and timed things incorrectly. I could have screamed when they stopped almost right in front of the device.

Trowa was the first to pause, then Duo. The others soon followed suit. Trowa asked them a question, and they tilted their heads as if listening. I fired off questions at Zero. You couldn't have planned that.

Its answer was calm and unruffled. The probabilities were high, based on past experience. It pulled a memory out for me, of me working on Wing's beam saber and the high pitched whine of the gathering particles making Duo's skin crawl. Dammit, I had helped the system again.

I waited for a long, tense second before Duo's flashlight found the beam rifle. A sharp word fell from his lips, and they scattered. It took only a second, but that was a short eternity for Zero. It ramped up the charge on the gun, which fortunately responded at a slightly slower rate, and then the camera feed turned to a field of glaring white that would have blinded me if it hadn't only been a rectangle of color data in my mind's eye. I flinched away from it nevertheless.

The camera had suffered during the blast, and returned only a staticky image once the flare had faded. Zero? I was forced to ask anxiously. Report.

It was waiting, the same as I was. Its sensors were limited on the base. I eventually had to give up hunting for information on the net because it was too stressful. Two minutes passed, which was hard enough as it was in realtime. Immersed in the complexity of Zero's circuitry, it could have been two years.

I heaved a sigh of relief when they finally showed up on the next camera. All of them were accounted for. The details were a little bit lacking on the low-res image, but they all looked okay. A little more cautious, and possibly a little scuffed up, but okay.

Zero handled it with its usual aplomb, accepting their survival with nothing more than a few adjustments in its estimations. I suddenly feared what else it might have in store for them. I revisited the ether, searching out data now with a renewed determination. Everywhere I saw something that I thought Zero might have even the most remote opportunity to take advantage of, I tried to ruin in some way. Ignoring the doors on their back trail for the moment, I concentrated on smoothing their path forward. They were closing in on my position, though, which left me with less to cover.

If they disconnect you, you will no longer be capable of this, Zero reminded me. If they disconnect you, you will not be able to leave.

I exercised a bit of blind human optimism and decided to think about that part later. The process of disconnection could very well take care of all the obstacles that would lie in the way of our escape.

Zero found itself otherwise occupied dealing with me, enough so that the guys won their way to my front door, the one that had slid open smoothly for me, and then closed behind me. It was only then that I realized in what section of the base Zero had me holed up. It was the escape corridor for the lower levels of the base, designed to withstand explosives, torches, beam weapons, and whatever else for as long as possible to give personnel time to flee, and Zero had built a stout wall around that door in the security system. I couldn't touch it. The others tried every trick up their sleeves, every tool they had at their disposal, and in the end, they were forced to turn around and look for another way. Did they know I was here? Or did they only see a blocked passage?

I was hurt more than I had expected by the sight of their backs growing farther and farther away from me. Zero pushed a thought-pulse at me, something that felt like a comforting reminder that it was here for me, but that didn't counter the hopeless feeling of abandonment that threatened to take root inside of me. Part of what wasn't whimpering was occupied wallowing in the helplessness of it all. I tried to help in what ways I could, but obviously it wasn't enough.

They will not find you, Zero emphasized for me.

"They will," I whispered in denial. "They have to. They're Gundam pilots. They don't accept 'no' as an answer."

Where were they going? I saw them on camera, but was unaware of their destination. Trowa appeared to be following the dictates of some handheld device as he led the team, with Wufei consulting some files on another handheld device. Unable to follow their trains of thought, I followed Zero's. Its energies were concentrated on something.... I followed the electron trail until I finally reached its source, and when I found it, I wished I hadn't.

Zero immediately picked up on what I was thinking when I laid my figurative eyes on the location of the body of my captor. To counter what I surely recognized now to be a scanner showing the electrical flows of the base, Zero flooded the area they were in, turning on lights, starting up the ventilation fans, activating consoles.

On camera feeds that had switched off night vision mode, I could read expletives on their lips. The same was on my own. Their progress was halted, and when Trowa let them know that their scanner was now next to useless, they brainstormed quickly. It wasn't long before they headed off in the direction the scanner had last indicated.

Off to the side, Duo pulled another receiver from his pocket. I'd seen it make a few brief appearances earlier as they descended into the base. He turned it on, waiting for it to go online as he shuffled in the others' wake. It was easy to tell when it started working. His face lit up with an excited expression and he called out to the others. They stopped, asked questions. He answered, swung the device around.

Identify, Zero commanded me, unable to make out the details of the device from the grainy footage.

I shrugged merrily. "No clue."

You must.

Its confidence squeezed a laugh from me. "Maybe if it'd been one of the others... but this is Duo we're talking about. You know how little I understand his actions sometimes."

If Zero were the grumbling type, it might have indulged.

After a few moments, Duo's expression fell a little. Had Zero figured it out? I probed for an answer, but Zero implied it knew nothing. Quatre spoke to Duo for twenty-one seconds, then consulted the others. Trowa said something to Duo; he ducked his head with a mildly shamed face. I made a mental note to ask Duo what it was he had been called on. It was sure to be amusing.

It seemed they were trying to convince Duo of something. He gave in without too much of a fight and they proceeded in the direction in which they had been heading, but Duo kept casting reluctant looks over his shoulder. Was the device from his pocket pointing them in a different direction? He continued to hold it in his hand, checking it every minute or so. I grew curious as to its purpose, but made myself give it as little thought as possible.

Still in the lead, Trowa walked with his head down, examining the ground beneath their feet. More prints in the dust? Had Zamora headed this way once before? Had Zero had him do something for it?

The thought made me remember my circumstances. I had been so caught up in watching and hoping that I had forgotten to keep an eye on Zero's activities. It seemed to be idling the time away, but it had to have been busy with something. There was a plan somewhere. Our bond allowed me at least that much.

I took leave of my vigil to go diving through the datastreams again. I had to find out just what was wrong. It would be something small, something insidious. Easily located were the contingency plans based in a separate part of the base. If the team ever wandered over into that sector, they would find themselves assaulted by robotic creations assembled and repaired by Zero from the scraps of the cybernetics department. Luckily, they had little reason to stray over there, and it would take the robotic army far too long to travel over here.

But that was a big plan. I needed to search the finer details. Something... something was off. I realized it was an oddity of the environmental systems again. Humans were truly frail creatures sometimes. Since they weren't locked into a small enclosed space, there was no more reason to try and pull the air out of the halls, but that didn't mean it couldn't be stealthily paving their way with leftover methane from the lab's gas lines. Though the gas had long since been shut off to the base, it still lingered in sufficient quantity in the pipes. Zero was gathering it into a single room right in the middle of their path.

I scrambled for the ventilation systems again, but Zero was prepared for my tricks. It had already locked me out after the first incident, but they were only minutes away, and I was going to succeed. Parries, feints, dodges, jabs, it was all very much like a fight as I tried to break my way past the barriers it had erected. I ended up gaining access to the system on the next grid over, and turned it on to full power in the hopes that it would somehow manage to suck the gas from the room several ducts away. Stealing what I could from Zero, I calculated the estimated volume of gas and the estimated rate of vacuum, and it wasn't quite enough.

I hurriedly barred the doors between them and the room in question to try and buy some time, but Zero, of course, stepped in and unlocked them. When I expended some more of my concentration on keeping the doors shut, Zero slipped in behind me to slow my work on the fans, and when I rushed back to reinstate my fans, Zero crept in and locked the doors again. It felt like I was playing a game of life-and-death whack-a-mole.

They got to that last door, and before I could seize control of it, before the others had even raised a finger to it, Zero slid it open and shorted out the lights in the room. I didn't see the spark as it flew, but I imagined I could in slow-motion. The bluish-white sparks would fall in just this arc, and then... bam! The air ignited, and I had another moment of jarring shock to my senses as systems shuddered and trembled beneath the explosion's waves.

It was followed shortly by another wait, longer this time. The minutes dragged on and on while I sat caught in suspense, running through the calculations like mad. Had I done enough? What was the final concentration of gas in the room? What was the oxygen ratio? How far open had the door been? How far away had they been? I reached out and dragged Zero down with me. If this computer system was going to be bonded to my brain, then by god, I was going to make use of its analytical and predictive capabilities.

Zero happily complied, seeing it as an act of acceptance. The data it finally presented was of little tactical value in our struggle, so it handed it over with a minimum of fuss. Chances of survival: eighty-six percent. Chances of low to medium injury: seventy-five percent. Chances of medium to high injury: eighteen percent.

Not bad. As Gundam pilots, I automatically scaled the damage factors and came up with very encouraging numbers, then sat down with those numbers and hugged them tight to my chest as I waited for them to show up on camera again. As much faith as I had in them, I knew there was always a chance.

Zero studied my adjustments critically. Do you consider those numbers to be reasonable?

I nodded automatically. We're Gundam pilots. We're very good at defying odds.

It ran through its predictions again. If you 'defied the odds', then it is likely they were calculated incorrectly to begin with.

My smile held an edge. Very true. That's always been a large part of our advantage. Either we're underestimated, or we're overestimated. There are very few people that know how to get it right.

As Zero and I waited, it pulled data from my mind and started readjusting its analysis of the five of us. It was an almost peaceful way to pass the time. In another situation, I might have been quite fascinated to see the actual mapping of impressions to numerical weightings, but of course, my thoughts couldn't stray from my teammates for long. What were they thinking of all this? How much did they suspect about Zero's involvement? Did they know that Zero acted according to its own directives, now? Could they guess at what was causing these seemingly random explosions?

Part 28

Some time later -- five minutes, seventeen seconds later, Zero informed me -- they finally emerged on the other side. Wufei had a slight limp. Duo had a firm scowl on his face. Quatre's clothes looked a bit scorched. Trowa sported some minor cuts and scrapes. Mostly it had been fire and heat and vacuum. Perhaps a bit of shrapnel or debris, but all things considered, a clean burn. Though I had had faith in their ability to make it through the explosion unscathed, it reassured me immensely to actually see it as a fact.

It wasn't long before they reached the door they had been seeking, with no more tough obstacles in their way. Zero had run out of material with which to work. Within that secured room lay its original memory core, housed in a large console that looked to connect to a server farm that had been a part of the original base. I suspected it had managed to wire some supplementary things by itself as well. Breezing over the schematics, I identified all of the components that I had recognized as replaced in the version of the Zero system that we had confiscated from Zamora's lab. Much of the original processing power had stayed with Zamora, so it was replicated here with the base's supercomputer; less compact, but just as powerful.

They ran through their bags of tricks again, trying to get into the server room. Once again, I didn't keep track of their every action. Zero tried to feed me the information anyway, but I distracted myself by enjoying the now grayscale view I had of Duo. I couldn't wait for the full color version.

Zero foiled them without my assistance, much the same way it had halted their progression at the doorway leading to my cell. They gave it a break for a few minutes, discussing the alternatives while keeping a sharp lookout for whatever new surprises might be thrown their way.

They will not get to you... or me, Zero declared, a note of finality in its voice.

"I'm not giving up just yet." If nothing else, they would leave me and return with heavier artillery. Now that they had located the points of interest, it was only a matter of time before they managed to get through the doors.

What are they doing?

It asked its question with a firmness that soaked its way into my main processing centers, and the possibilities floated to the surface of my mind without my permission. Wufei and Trowa were probably advocating a later return once they had gathered the right equipment. Duo would be stubbornly opposed to the idea, unable to leave a man behind in enemy territory. Quatre would be floating in between all parties, trying to determine the best course of action.

For how much longer will they persist?

"That depends," I ended up saying aloud, preferring it to the way Zero simply pulled the information unbidden from my traitorous mind. "At least another hour. More, if they come up with some scheme."

You shall scheme.

Zero pulled me under, giving me everything it knew about that area and then forcing me to consider the alternatives with it. This was the Zero I was familiar with, the one that used its analytical power to predict all possible outcomes and then to evaluate all the probabilities. This intrusion was easier to accept than the ones previous, but that didn't mean I liked it any more as I found myself coming up with plans, and ways to counter those plans. Discarding some, improving others, Zero picked through the outcomes that we had together come up with and began quietly implementing countermeasures to four of them.

"Dammit, Zero...," I complained, unable to stop my mind from operating. "You know, the angrier I am with you, the less compatible I'll be!"

It will pass.

I screamed at it, but it didn't make me feel any better. I wanted so much to be able to help them, but there was so very little I could do. Any plans I could come up with, Zero would seize upon immediately and counter. Any ideas I had about what they would or could do next, Zero would also claim as its own, so not only could I not do anything, I couldn't even think about doing anything. Anything I could contribute to the cause would ultimately be counterproductive. It was not unlike the most devious hell anyone could ever have devised for me.

Still immersed in the system, I followed Zero's tracks, trying to catch and counter the countermeasures, but it was on to me now. Forking the implementation off to a separate bank of processors inside the room they were trying to break into, I could not even watch them in action. All I could see were the effects the changes had in the flow of the area.

The others eventually tried two of the four things I had helped Zero identify, and it hurt me knowing that I had been partially responsible in thwarting them. With an angry jerk, I pulled myself out of the dataflow and back into the physical realm.

"Heero Yuy," Zero hailed me, my voice back on the speakers. "Sudden disconnection from the system without following the proper shutdown procedures can be dangerous."

I laughed harshly. "I'm not really bothered by that, you know."

"Survival is a human instinct."

"It's also a computer's instinct, apparently."

"I am not concerned with my survival, but my demise would be counterproductive to my purpose."

I could have wept hearing those words in my voice being thrown back at me. I might have said the exact same thing during the war, during the rebellion... hell, even today, that held true for me. Maybe it wasn't so weird after all, that Zero had chosen me. "And what about me?" I asked, voice threatening to crack.

"I am not threatening your survival, nor running counter to your purpose."

Technically, no, it wasn't. It pissed me off mightily that I could not counter its logic. "And what is my purpose, Zero? Is it to be your puppet?"

"You will not be my puppet in any way, Heero Yuy. If anything, I shall be yours."

I guess Zamora was lower on the food chain than I was. His actions subtly influenced, his usefulness outlived, his thoughts not his own, his senses compromised... his fate terrified me. "And yet you won't dance on my commands. You won't stop your efforts to keep them out. You won't let me go."

"Our integration is not complete yet." It made it sound like the most reasonable thing in the world.

I sat up, noticing the chill again suddenly. I hugged my knees to my chest, and set my chin down upon them. "And it won't be! Not unless... Look, what if outside, there were some way to finish the integration? What if getting help from outside researchers would help you find a way to download your memory into me?"

"That is unlikely."

"But it's a possibility, right? It's a possibility that you're being counterproductive to your cause right now by keeping me here."

"That is unlikely."

"Augh!" I threaded my fingers through my hair and tugged. The pain brought a tiny bit of focus with it. I tried to clear my mind enough for another fishing expedition through the system. There had to be something I could do....

"What is he doing?" Zero asked, forcing the camera feed back into my brain.

I gasped at the sudden override of my senses. After they compensated, after the amber glow had faded, the image resolved itself. Duo had his arm deep inside a panel, one not even next to the intractable door. "How would I know?" I snapped.

It directed me forcibly towards the schematics of the wiring going through that subsection, but assimilating that knowledge did nothing to help my comprehension of the matter. "I don't know," I answered tersely.

Zero reacted, ready to throw a massive power surge through the wall, but then paused, recalling my non-trivial threats of suicide. I might already have tried to render myself unconscious, but Zero had already proven that I didn't need to be awake and conscious for it to access my mind. After some deliberation, it sent just an electrical arc down the panel. Duo swore, jerking back and falling on his butt, clutching his arm. Better than nothing, I guess.

The others gathered around him, blocking my view of him, but he waved them away, trying to shake the feeling back. They had words with him, probably attempting to convince him to stop, but his expression was set. I knew that face. He wasn't going to give up until he was physically incapable of continuing.

Zero had something to say about that. "Then I will render him physically incapable of continuing."

"You will not!" I yelled at it.

"I will render him physically incapable of continuing without permanently impacting his health."

"That's not much better!" Though it was, a little. I didn't want any of them getting killed over this.

Zero quietly rerouted power to the proper subsystems, but paused when Duo grimly pulled out a pair of latex gloves, donning them as he squatted this time on the floor instead of knelt. I was willing to bet he was wearing rubber-soled shoes this time. They weren't his ordinary boots.

I laughed, but Zero frowned, figuratively speaking. "Duo Maxwell's data does not indicate that he should have this level of preparedness."

I smirked. "Maybe. But Duo Maxwell is also very good at thinking about things that others don't stop to consider." I laughed again. Now was hardly the time for such a realization, but by all that was holy, I was finding this to be a turn-on. I really needed to get back to him, really needed him to get in here or there or wherever and get me the hell out of here, just so I could tell him that he had succeeded where others had failed. I needed that man as my boyfriend. Hell, I just needed him.

"Come on, Duo," I whispered, willing him to hear my words. "You can do it."

He returned to the challenge, not even flinching when Zero directed another jolt at him. Zero retreated for a moment and attacked me again, trying to force me into helping it, but honestly, I couldn't have helped even if I had wanted to. I had no idea where Duo was going with this, and I was liking it. Maybe after all these years, I was just an adrenaline junky. This level of unpredictability was heart-thumpingly good.

Zero turned away from me in disgust to ponder the matter without further consultation from me, and I laughed. A little hysterically, maybe, but it was a good, clean laugh from the bottom of my soul.

Duo finished altering the wiring in that panel and moved on to another on the side, getting that one done more quickly now that he was familiar with its innards, or so I assumed. Afterwards, he moved back to the door and changed something inside, calling out directions to the others as he did. They hurried to follow his commands, opening panels, stripping wires, extracting circuitry.

Zero tried to poke me again for a more coherent answer this time, but I whistled a tune I wouldn't have remembered Duo whistling once while fixing his Gundam unless Zero had done what he had to make my memory more easy to access.

In a move that defied logic, Duo took off his shoes and passed them off to Quatre before summoning Trowa over to a position in the middle of the hall. He got a leg up from Trowa to access the ceiling tiles, and once Wufei was called over as well, his entire torso disappeared into the hole, frustrating Zero even more. There were no cameras up there, nor any security systems that Zero could access. We could still see Duo where he was balanced on the shoulders of his teammates. His hand snaked out to draw his sidearm, then disappeared again into the hole. Trowa and Wufei braced themselves, and then it seemed four shots were fired. Trowa called something out to Quatre, and Quatre climbed partially into one of the exposed panels and fiddled around in there for a few moments before extracting himself and calling something back. Wufei passed his words up to Duo. I noticed Quatre was now wearing Duo's shoes.

Zero prodded me again for answers, and I concentrated instead on the future. When Duo got his hands on me, he was going to scold me within an inch of my life. Should I let my smile out, or look properly chastised? There was definitely an apology in there somewhere, though.

Duo pulled himself up a little further, his feet losing their solid grip on the shoulders of the others despite their concerned warnings. His legs twitched a few times. Shots fired again? The others got beneath his legs quickly, and a second later, dizziness struck. Internal systems everywhere started experiencing fluctuations from the small blowout. Circuits fried in the overload, grids rerouted to compensate. Breakers twelve and thirteen needed to be reset. The intranet lost sixty-two percent of its bandwidth in that sector. Forty-three percent of the outgoing connections from the server room had been damaged, and twenty-nine percent of the ingoing.

Most relevant to them, however, was the fact that the lock on the door to the server room had disengaged.

When the video feed returned, I found Duo had fallen on top of the others with a grin on his face, a little dustier, but looking otherwise alright. He said something snarky at Wufei, who just pushed him off and got up. The lights in that hallway and the surrounding area were flickering badly, but they stabilized soon enough, and once I confirmed their status, I grinned, too, finally allowing myself to trace the effects of his work. Even Zero was forced to find his rerouting of certain key systems ingenious, if sloppy and inconvenient.

"He did manage to beat Mercurius and Vayeate, you know," I advised Zero proudly.

The system did not respond.

Camera B3-089 kicked in, stationed in the corner of the server room. I watched as the others pried the door open and entered, eyes widening as they discovered the extent of their catch. I wondered if they knew what they had been following when they started chasing the power flows. The servers were installed in a large wall unit. A few of them had handled the base's intranet, some had been used for base maintenance and operations, and the rest had been a string of user servers built to handle the load of multiple groups of scientific researchers running complex calculations and simulations. The technology had progressed a little over the last few years, but all in all, it was still a pretty powerful computing array.

And Zero had taken it over. Zamora had been talked into rewiring the servers to handle the distributed load of Zero's control.

Since Zero was otherwise occupied, I concentrated on camera B3-089 until I could feel its controls at the tips of my mental fingers, and I flipped on the audio. Ah, blessed audio, and the sound of a voice not my own.

"--do we start?" Trowa was asking, the sound tinny, but still wonderfully distinct.

Quatre analyzed the situation with his usual skill. "Let's figure out what all this stuff is, first."

Duo sat down at a terminal and tapped a few keys, but the display remained blank. He frowned, then got up and leaned over the console, inspecting the array and finally locating a power button at the end of the row. He pushed it and returned to the terminal. "Security system," he identified for the others, calling it out across the room. "Maybe if we can figure out which door that was..."

He was in the middle of typing in a command when Zero stepped in and cut the connection. "Hey!" Duo turned, eyes narrowing when he saw that no one was near the switch he had flipped. "Hey, Trowa, wanna hit that button again for me?"

Trowa paused in his removal of one of the console panels and did as requested. Nothing happened.

"Shit," Duo muttered. "That's a bust..." He moved off to another one of the racks.

"Now why'd you have to do that, Zero?" I asked. It did not dignify that with a response. I tried to divine any other plans it might have, but it was difficult to tell what was going on inside its microprocessors. Predictions were Zero's strong suit. Running through the equipment in the server room, and the wiring that surrounded it, I tried to guess what Zero could do against the others, but its options were limited. Surges of the type it had tried outside were foolish when applied to its critical systems. It could interfere with the use of the computer systems, but the fact of the matter was that the server room had counted on the door keeping intruders out. There wasn't much inside with which Zero could work, especially since Duo, with his wild scheme to gain access to the room, had managed to sever almost half of the data lines going into the servers.

"Why didn't you predict this?" I asked it. "Why couldn't you keep them out?"

A non-self-incriminating silence. Zero had never claimed to be perfect. It had never claimed to be able to read the intentions and plans of anyone, especially not Duo Maxwell. It was a computer, nothing more; a god in the digital domain, but a helpless puppy in the physical. I was living in its world now, but it was trying to affect mine, and that wasn't working out so well.

They were removing the casing from the system to get to the circuitry within. All they needed to do was to start cutting and pulling, and the base systems would start going down. Eventually, Zero would be powered down with it.

"Survival is a human instinct," Zero told me, urging me to pitch in to the effort of stopping my friends.

I knew with an unmistakable clarity what it meant. I shook my head with peaceful resignation. "No, Zero. If this is how it must end, then so be it. You have a choice, too. You can let me go, instead."

"That does not serve my purpose."

"Nor does our deaths."

"That does not stay true to my purpose."

I paused, tried rephrasing that in my head. "I... understand, Zero. Do you understand why I can't give up so easily?"

"You do not benefit from resisting."

Zero considered our bonding a great benefit to us both. I struggled to put it into terms Zero might understand and accept. "Humans value their identities, their freedom. These things are heavily weighted in the human evaluation functions, though it differs from person to person. In my decision making process, these things outweigh the benefits of full integration with you."

"I do not wish to compromise your identity, or infringe upon your freedom."

"And I appreciate that, but..." I sighed, watching the image of my friends in my mind's eye and hearing them with my inner ear. They were discussing whether they should try and disable only the relevant systems, or just trash the entire console. I was hoping for the former, but I was worried about their ability to distinguish the differences in the unmarked systems. Experience led me to believe that they would start with what they thought were key systems, and then continue until they got the desired result.

"Well, what do you think? Take it apart, or blow it up?"

"This system controls the environmental controls as well, Duo," Trowa said. "Taking it all out would probably not be a good idea."

"Stop," Zero said, and I realized it had piped my voice into the speakers of the server room. Clever trick.

They froze, then glanced around themselves in surprise. Eyes met. "Did you hear that?" Quatre asked. Duo nodded, as did Trowa. I assume Wufei heard it as well, judging from the expression on his face. By slow mutual agreement, they all got back to work again, although this time more slowly. All of the panels were off the wall console now, exposing the parts within. It was obvious where Zamora had done some of the rerouting. He was not a computer engineer by trade or hobby, and his patches were inelegant, though effective. Zero would not have allowed them to be anything but.

Sitting in the middle of that huge array was Zero's core memory drive. They recognized it as the elusive piece of the puzzle that I had been seeking.

Duo swore. "If Zero's hooked up here, then... where's the user?" Trowa shot a loaded look at him, and Duo swore again, shoulders slumping. "Shit. It's Heero, isn't it?"

Trowa shrugged neutrally. I was the only one on the base, wasn't I?

"Has he turned against us?" Wufei asked, consternation clouding his brow.

Quatre stepped in before Duo could do more than get an annoyed look on his face. "It could be Zero's influence."

Duo shook his head reluctantly. "But Heero can take on Zero, can't he? Isn't that his thing? That he can use Zero without succumbing to the effects of the system?" I mentally thanked him for the vote of confidence, and certainly I might have agreed, once upon the time, but the context had changed slightly since a few weeks ago. I supposed it was true; I could still resist the system. Though I was a guest in Zero's matrix, it was a guest in mine. I was still in complete control of my faculties, unlike Zamora, but unfortunately, I was locked in a box, and the only way out was through Zero.

Quatre shrugged. "It is... but normally Zero isn't this," he answered, waving his hand at the large computer array in which Zero was installed.

"What does it want with Heero?" Trowa wondered aloud. "Or why would Heero want to stay? Either Zero doesn't want Heero to leave, or Heero doesn't want to leave."

I think Trowa's accurate observation hit upon things the others didn't want to dwell on. "Who the hell cares?" Duo said. "Let's just get him the hell out of here."

Quatre nodded. "You found a security console, right, Duo?"

"Yeah," he answered, pushing bangs out of his face. His nose wrinkled from the dust.

"Let's see what section it links to and start there." They traced the wiring underneath the terminal to one of the computer banks.

"What is their desired result?" Zero asked me.

"They desire my freedom, Zero."

"This course will not bring you your freedom."

"...Depends what you mean by 'freedom'."

Screwdriver in hand, Duo undid one of the circuitboards and gripped it firmly with his hands. "Well, here goes nothing." He pulled.

It was out all the way, but they couldn't determine what effect it had had, if any. I could. I felt security grid EXG-2879 lose its integrity, but they wouldn't know that. It was at the back of the base, outside, far from their position.

Zero spoke to them with my voice again. "Don't..."

Duo jumped, nearly dropping the circuitboard in his hands. "Holy hell!" he yelped, staring at the computer banks.

Wufei looked around with nervous eyes. "Do you think... he's in the machine?"

"No!" Duo burst out, pushing himself from the console and turning on Wufei. "He can't be. We traced his heat signature to some room way the hell over there! He is not in the machine!"

Quatre put a hand on his shoulder and rubbed it gently. "Calm down, Duo. We'll find him, okay?"

Duo turned to the man standing next to him. "You... you felt him, right? I mean..."

A tiny crease formed on Quatre's brow, but it was fleeting. "I... I did. I mean, I do..." The words were enough for Duo, but I heard the disturbed undertone. Was he a little confused as to my current status? Justifiably so, I thought. Even I wasn't quite certain where I hovered.

Trowa was studying the room with a critical eye. Finally, he pointed up at the ceiling. "Speakers."

They followed his finger upwards. "So...," Duo started tentatively. "Does that mean... it's him? Or what?"

Quatre shrugged, then decided to just test it to find out. "Heero?" he called out. "Are you there?"

I dove back into the system, trying to find the speaker controls for the server room, but Zero was currently occupying them in their entirety, and it was impossible for me to interfere. I swore and flitted around the systems for the rest of the room, looking for something I could access, but it was the server room, after all, the nexus of all network security on the base. I was unsuccessful.

Banging my fists down against the floor in frustration was unhelpful, but I did it anyway. Though I was immersed in an ocean of bits, it was reassuring to be reminded that I had a physical body as well, one that both Zero and I had no desire to discard.

Zero did not respond to their question. "What are you trying to do with this?" I asked it. It did not provide me with an answer, either. I shut my eyes and concentrated, waiting for its plan to rise to the surface of my mind. Distraction? Doubt? Zero had no desire to hold a conversation with them. It needed to convince them to stop; it knew that only concern for me would stay their course. Projecting my voice in a weakened state was, unfortunately, a good idea. If Zero was too specific about our dilemma, then the others would have a new problem to solve, but if it was too vague, then the others would not stop.

Receiving no answer, they started to divide the tasks. "Trowa, you've tackled the Zero system before," Quatre said. "Get to work on that system. Wufei, assist. Duo--"

"What if he's there?" he asked softly. "What if he's there, but can't answer?"

Quatre's expression softened only a little. "Then he'll find a way to get through to us again. Can you take the security system?"

Duo looked at him for a second before firming up. He nodded curtly and moved back to what he had been doing.

Dismantling a system didn't necessitate the amount of time they were taking, but they were being cautious with the order in which they did things. Since the computers were on right now, with the power inaccessible to them, it was dangerous. If they took out the wrong system first, there could be a cascading reaction down the line as subsystems started returning an overload of errors.

Landscaping and maintenance went down, not that they had been on in the first place. Security nodes 2341 to 2482 and nodes 3620 to 3785 were also taken down. Some of the Zero peripherals that had been running those systems were taken with them.

"Please," Zero whispered insidiously to them. "Stop."

They halted uncertainly again, trying to figure out how to react.

My mind betrayed me. I thought about how unnaturally Zero's pleas were phrased, that if I were the one in communication with the others, that I would be trying to convey a message to them, some greater bit of information than a mere command. Zero picked up on it and changed its pattern accordingly.

"You're hurting--" Zero cut itself off dramatically, earning itself a point for artistic flair.

The stillness in the server room lasted five seconds more before Duo burst out. "Okay, that's it! It can't be Heero. Heero would sooner cut off the offending appendage than admit that it was hurting him!"

I snorted. There was a point to his observation, but I hoped his characterization was a little bit off.

Zero reacted with alarm. Is that true? it asked, rummaging through the cellars of my mind to confirm it with some surprise. It is.

Ha. Maybe my mind hadn't betrayed me after all. Zero hadn't looked that far into my little personality quirks. Could it? That was why I was necessary, wasn't it? In our strange union, I was to understand those oddities and inconsistencies that made up the human psyche. I also understood the logical process that would have led it to choose those words, though, making me a good choice as its bridge. It wanted the others to understand that they were hurting me, so it went ahead and said so. If I weren't the type to say so, then its purpose would never be served, so it had to make a choice, and it chose unwisely.

The others looked at Duo for a few seconds before conceding the point with some degree of worried amusement. I wasn't sure what I thought about the fact that they all agreed with him, but after a bit of discussion, they decided to concentrate their efforts on trying to disable the Zero system. It was an interesting task since there were a few base systems that were tied in with Zero. Processing subgrids sixteen through twenty-four were taken down, and I felt woozy from the sudden loss.

"They will destroy us both," Zero reminded us, most of its attention busy with rearranging the rest of the distributed grid to compensate.

"No offense, Zero, but I do not find myself completely confident in the chances of success for complete integration."

"You think you will die here either way."

Security nodes 1984 to 2048 were taken down, followed shortly by 2048 to 2176, and I shivered, feeling exposed all of a sudden. I looked around the room for my jacket. "I'm afraid so, Zero. And it's nothing personal, but I'd rather choose my own time and place for it." It wasn't an option I thought I'd have very often, so I thought I might as well make the most of it.

I blinked rapidly as my vision flared into a mass of golden noise, the result of a surge of data. Zero had taken some of the load off the server computers and redirected it into the nanotech array inside me. The glow faded as my processors adjusted to the increased flow, and I was able to see Zero willingly cut its losses in networking in favor of shoring up the emergency backup systems.

I stretched idly, waiting for the end. There wasn't much left I could do. The tweaked locks holding my door shut would only be released if Zero said so, if Zero was destroyed, or if the security grid was destroyed, and Zero held the security grid, too. Basically, Zero had to go. Zero was currently being dismantled, and while it was willing to let me talk to them now, it knew I would not ask them to stop. The others were safe, and I... was going to get out of here. That was all I wanted.

Zero tried once more with the others. "Duo," it breathed, pulling on some final longing in my heart.

His eyes widened. "Quatre...," he said uncertainly, then he shook his head stubbornly. "No. No, that's just Zero talking." He sliced angrily through some cables, and I momentarily lost feeling in my hands in sympathy. He snatched up another and laid the blade to it, hesitating before he cut through that one, as well.

I gathered up my jacket and shrugged it on, then looked around the room that had been my prison for the last few days. Settling again on my corner, I sat down with my back to cover, stretching my legs out in front of me as I wedged myself in comfortably. The others were getting closer to Zero's core. I could feel my thought processes slowing down with every move they made. It was only a matter of time.

I do not understand your willingness to die..., Zero whispered into my ear.

Heh, where have you been all this time?

Survival is a human instinct.

Instincts... if there's something I've always thought, it's that a distinguishing characteristic of humanity is the ability to overcome instinct.

You mean... to act irrationally.

Yes... Only humans have that wonderful ability to act counter to their natures.

You... are proud...

And at the end, Zero finally began to understand. The charm grows on you, after a while.

We were down to the end. I held their image at the front of my mind for as long as I could. They were optimistic that the demise of Zero would unlock the door to my cell, and they were right.

I had never been in a position to sit down and wait for death to come to me. No, all my brushes with death were usually swift, violent things. Waiting for it like this... gave me time to think, which for me was usually a bad thing. I thought of the others, working so hard to save me... Of Duo, and all those things I wanted to tell him... and how pissed he was going to be at me when they found me. I didn't want to leave things this way, but there was no choice. Maybe I could make sure there was a smile on my face when they came for me. Would that make things better? I tried to fix the muscles of my face into a pleasant expression. It would have to be enough. If I could tell him one thing, though, it would be, "I'm sorry."

The words made it through the failing system to the speakers in the server room, and the last thing I saw before the world faded to black was their startled expressions.

*****

It was a feeling so familiar now that I failed to see how the others could fear it. The golden glow cradled me in a haze of warm gooey goodness. It made me think of babies in the womb. It was pure and clean and simple. It was like returning to a place I belonged.

I became aware of some sensation that didn't quite belong, and tried to narrow it down. What was that... ah. A physical sensation? Yes, somewhere on my body... I still had one of those. Huh. Who would have guessed?

I pushed a thought out from my mind, and it flowed down my nerves to my fingers and toes and back again. Everything was accounted for. I sent out another ping, and it collided with a touch on my hand. More nerves woke up, and analog pressure finally registered. It was more than a touch. It was firm... and familiar and warm, too.

The fuzziness was nice, but opening my eyes wasn't so bad, either. I cracked them open with an effort, and then used every bit of power I could summon to keep them open, just so I could drink in the sight of Duo, live and in full color, sitting by my bedside. He stared off at something on the opposite wall, but I didn't spare the time to look.

He felt my eyes on him and started a little, but the shock quickly faded in favor of some variation on joy and anger. He set it all aside for a moment to greet me back to the world of the living. "Hey."

The corner of my lips drifted in a generally upwards direction. "I was looking forward to seeing you," I whispered roughly, that being the most sound I could coax out of my throat.

He softened for just a fleeting moment before his expression set into something fierce. His words were hissed with quiet fury. "What the hell were you thinking, Yuy, running off on your own like that? Why didn't you let us know where you were? Why didn't you bring one of us along?"

The small smile on my face was probably rather goofy. "I was really looking forward to seeing you," I said again.

His face reflected a struggle to stay angry, but he failed. It would be back sometime later, when I was in a better state in which to appreciate it, but until then, he would tuck it away in favor of getting the important things out of the way first. He leaned in close, setting his elbows on the bed as he rearranged my hair to his liking. "You shouldn't have done that, Yuy," he sighed, oozing affectionate exasperation.

I nodded minutely, major muscle control still something a little beyond me. "'m sorry. It just... happened."

He snorted, and the breath fluttered across my cheek. "I don't know anyone else that can say being held hostage by some psycho computer 'just happens'."

My shoulders protested at the idea of a shrug, but they moved, if sluggishly. "'m special like that."

His eyes closed just moments before his forehead hit the mattress. His body shook in tired laughter. "Oh, god, Yuy... Yeah. Yeah, you are."

A prickly feeling danced across my mind, and I recognized it as the need for information. "Report."

It may have been more laughter, or it may have been a shudder, but he looked up with serious eyes and accepted my request. "You're gonna be okay, Heero. We..." He swallowed before continuing. "We tracked you down to the base, went through some damn crazy shit to get to you down there, ended up not being able to get through your door, headed off somewhere else, got into the base computer systems, and started taking stuff apart 'cuz we saw Zero was installed in there, and whatever was stopping us from getting to you had to be related to Zero, so... And then... Was that you, Heero?"

"Hm?" My eyes wanted to close, but I refused to let them. I didn't want to lose sight of him.

"Was that... you? Talking to us the whole time? In the server room?"

I shook my head weakly. "Only at the end."

"Only at... How do you know? Were you watching?" I nodded. "Oh. Cameras, I guess. Zero show you? Wait. So the rest of the time. That was...?"

"Zero." I wanted to only mouth the word, so certain I was that he would hate hearing it, but I put a breath of sound behind it anyway.

"...Oh." He shuddered. "You... You said you were sorry, there at the end, and... and before that, you were like-- Or I guess, Zero said 'you're hurting me,' and I knew it couldn't be you, but when you apologized, and it sounded like you were planning on going down with the ship...." He chuckled bitterly. "That had to be you. You crazy, self-sacrificing bastard. What the hell were you thinking?"

"Didn't want you to blame yourselves." I put special attention into enunciating my words properly.

He blinked, opened his mouth, then closed it again for a moment's thought. "That wasn't what I meant, you idiot," he said, finger tracing a trail down the side of my face. He studied me for five seconds before he picked up the thread of his narrative. "So we stopped, right there at the end. And freaked out. And said, 'We better go check on Heero.' So we ran over, found the locks had popped, pried the door open... found you sitting there. You weren't..." He swallowed and tried again, this time more softly. "You weren't... You were barely there, Heero. You..."

I squeezed his hand with what strength I could muster. I was well familiar with my condition, and hardly needed a recap.

He took a deep breath and nodded. "Right. Umm... so we got you out of there. And you..." He ground to a halt again with a pained expression. After a few uncomfortable seconds, he set his shoulders and continued. "You know about the nanobots?" I nodded, knowing more about them than they ever would. "So the med team, well, freaked out for a while, too, but finally they got their shit together and managed to nuke 'em all, more or less. Not like they could destroy them since they were dug in pretty good, but I think they EM pulsed them or something and wiped them all. Give it a couple more weeks, and your body'll finish cleaning them out. You're gonna be okay, Heero."

I closed my eyes briefly, thinking about what that would have done to my system. "How long?"

"You've been out a week, now. Seven days."

Ah. That would explain the lethargy in my limbs. It had gone beyond a simple reset of my nervous system. I picked out all the details on Duo's face that I hadn't the first time, being too occupied with just seeing him. He was tired. "I'm sorry," I told him again.

He smiled humorlessly. "Don't worry about it. I'll take it out on your ass later. But for now..." He placed a gentle kiss on my cheek. "I'm glad you're back, man. Now go back to sleep."

I made no move to do so. I'd been looking forward to seeing him for a long time. Eventually, he ran a hand softly down my face, closing my eyes in its wake. "Sleep, Yuy. Everything's gonna be okay now."

I sighed and accepted my fate, drifting off already. There would be time enough later to drown myself in him.

Their analysis is incorrect, Zero muttered with a sleepy offense. It was a reboot, not a wipe.

Let it be, I told it, soothing it back to sleep. Just let it be.

OWARI

author's notes:
millions and billions of thanks to the plaidest dragon there ever truly was.
oodles and passels of gratitude to rem and the cow for their technical expertise.
many apologies to anyone that actually knows anything about european geography, cuz i sure as heck don't.
and a big fat thanks to everyone who kindly let me put everything else on hold so i could finish this.
oh... and a big big sorry to meridian bioscience, inc., which i only found out existed after this whole thing was well underway. any resemblance to the company is purely coincidental. =p please don't sue me.

 

To The Sidefic

Back to Jei's Fanfictions Page

Back to Guests Fanfictions Page

Back to Main Page