(it’s First Gundam fanfic.)

Petty Officers Adler Aguilar and Ray Knight watched the last officer leave the maintenance hangar after the post-combat inspection, dug out a box hidden behind a set of heavy wrenches and complicated-looking wires, and pulled out a mini-fridge. Aguilar and Knight had met at Loum, both rookie mechanics fresh from training. Loum began as one thing and ended as a full-scale fleet battle.

Inside the fridge were the finest home-brewed beers they’d managed thus far. After Loum, they began a tradition. The night after they finished a combat operation and had begun maintenance and refitting, they would each pull a bottle from the fridge, sit down at the foot of the suit they’d just docked—a Zaku II today, one that had out-performed the others yet again—and toasted each other.

“Sieg Zeon,” Aguilar said after they’d clinked the heads of their bottles together. Knight agreed with a grunt, the neck of his bottle already at his lips. They’d been mechanics for what felt like forever now, shifting from station to station, keeping all the aces who kept the Zeon hope alive the same as the grunts who took one hit and never saw their families again.

Knight burped, looked at his bottle, shook it a bit to gauge how much was left, and said, “Sieg Zeon.”

They sat there in silence for a while, the Zaku resplendent in shades of green above them. Knight loved the shape of the thing, the way it mixed curved lines into a brutal design, the way the shoulders said everything you need to know about what was to come. He swore he could hear the mono-eye shifting from side-to-side sometimes during testing, though it was designed for silence. It scared him, in a thrilling way. On the other hand, Aguilar appreciated the shades of green, but was less enamored of machines than his friend. The Zaku was a machine, a project, not art. It was a job.

Knight lit one of those new synthetic cigarettes that were making their way to the front. “So, are we gonna talk about what happened today or what?” He exhaled and asked the question simultaneously, filling the air with a disconcertingly sweet smell.

“You mean our overwhelming victory against the Feddies yet again? Our ace somehow taking down a cruiser with a grunt unit that took almost no hits at all? Another brave and fortunate step forward for the Principality of Zeon’s war for independence?”

“No, I don’t mean any of that.”

“Then no, Knight, I don’t want to talk about what happened today.” Aguilar took another sip of his beer. “I want to talk about winning this war and going home.”

They grabbed their second beers of the night and enjoyed the silence of the hangar. “A cruiser, man,” Knight said. “Never seen anything like it. That’s like, Red Comet-level stuff. A battleship next, I bet.”

“No kidding. Anything will break if you hit it hard enough, but to see it happen with your own eyes…” Aguilar finished his beer and set the empty bottle with the others, floating and bobbing in a little huddle between the two of them. Knight pushed the butt of his cigarette into the neck of one with a corkscrew motion, and smiled at the little spiral it caused.

“Round three,” Aguilar said, and pulled two more bottles from the fridge. At one point, he grew the habit of keeping the caps to the bottles in his pockets. It was to preserve the secrecy of their meetings as much as it was to reuse the caps later. Materials were hard to come by sometimes. There was a war on. As he stuffed the two new caps into a chest pocket, he said, “I think the lieutenant is a Newtype.”

Knight nodded sagely, sipping his beer. “You know that I don’t really understand that stuff. But I mean, he was screaming in the cockpit for most of the fight. They dragged him out of the Zaku on a stretcher, after dragging the Zaku in here with a net. He’s toast, right?”

“I was looking at the telemetry, reviewing the transcripts after the battle, just to get ready for the inspection,” Aguilar said. “His stats have been rising for a while, so we’ve been giving him and that ol’ Zack Two they put him in a little extra TLC. But even then, this was off the charts. It literally blew the curve.” Another sip, another pause. “Did you see those MPs in the hangar earlier?”

“Yeah,” Knight said. “I was face-deep in the Zaku’s electronics though, so I didn’t see what was up.”

Aguilar finished his bottle and aimed it at the others, tossing it soft enough to not send them flying like bowling pins. “They took the data while I was looking at it. Said they came on behalf of the admiral, that the data was classified now.”

“Which admiral?” Knight asked.

Aguilar paused. They hadn’t said.

Knight laughed. “Man. That is the blackest of black ops. It makes sense, though. He didn’t take a single hit, nothing that mattered. I keep coming back to that. It’s like he knew where they were going to fire.”

“I think he did. I think he knew, and that’s why he was apologizing on the radio.”

“First, apologizing? Second, radio doesn’t work during fights. Minovsky Effect. I don’t think he cracked in the cockpit and got lucky, but something definitely happened out there.”

“Yeah, but the suit still records everything said into the comms, whether it’s broadcast or not. It’s all data. But the stuff he was saying…he was apologizing to the people as he killed them, like he knew them or something. He didn’t even take down that many units this time, maybe five or six, but it really had an effect. I don’t really get it, but he was just sobbing by the end, when the cruiser’s engines finally went up.”

Knight knew that three each was about as good as the night was going to get, so he set about wedging the mini-fridge back into relative safety. Finding a place where it wouldn’t be noticed even during combat maneuvers or a complete teardown and rebuild of one of their mobile suits was tough. Being careful about it was paramount. It wasn’t quite as important as caring for their machines, but Knight, in his heart, hoped that no one would ever ask him to rank them.

Aguilar gathered the bottles and Knight’s caps, tucking them into a nondescript duffle bag that was otherwise filled with oily rags and tools. Perfect camouflage, he thought, then frowned. Kind of obvious, actually. It worked thus far, though.

“The Newtype thing, this next evolution that Zeon Zum Deikun talked about,” Knight trailed off. “I don’t get it. What’s the point of a sixth sense that burns you up? It’s like if you only used your eyes for looking into the sun. And if the lieutenant’s stats are top secret now, then that probably means they want to see if they can make it happen again.”

“Probably.” Aguilar finally laughed. “Bigger, better, badder soldiers has been the dream of mankind since the first time two Neanderthals got together to fight two other Neanderthals. I wouldn’t be surprised if they saw the lieutenant like that lucky wrench you’ve been hauling around since Loum, just some tool to be used.”

“Hey, that wrench saved your life,” Knight said, dead serious for a moment.

“No,” Aguilar said. “You used a wrench to save my life. It’s different.”

They walked from the foot of the Zaku II toward the elevator, with food from the canteen’s vending machines to soak up the alcohol on their mind, and then the mechanics quarters and sleep in the distance.