Uc 0079: Mobile Suit Gundam

The Zaku pilot paused. The battlefield was silent. The fires were dying. He saw the crippled Ball (Darius) and one surviving Ball (Milos) fleeing in the opposite direction. But the third one—the one that had thrown the rock—was gone. No heat signature. No comms. Just a ghost.

“Holy… shit,” Milos breathed.

She saw it. The second Zaku had overcommitted. Its back was to a steep crater wall. She had one shot. Her Ball’s cannon was slow to reload. Instead, she did the unthinkable. She jettisoned her weapon—the only thing keeping her alive—and used both claw-arms to grab a loose boulder the size of a car. mobile suit gundam uc 0079

The first Zaku, painted in desert yellow, pivoted with terrifying speed. Its 120mm machine gun barked, and tracers the size of Aris’s arm ripped through the formation. Maggot Four—Ensign Pavel—simply vanished. One moment he was there, the next his Ball was a cloud of shrapnel and vaporized coolant.

“Maggot Six, maintain formation,” Lieutenant JG Darius Croft’s voice crackled over the encrypted channel. Darius was a former cargo hauler, a man with the patience of a saint and the tactical brilliance of a desperate cornered rat. He was their leader, not because he was brave, but because he was the only one who had survived three previous Ball sorties. The Zaku pilot paused

As the Zaku turned its back to search for Milos, Aris fired her emergency cold-gas thrusters. The Ball launched silently, like a fist from the dark. She slammed into the Zaku’s back, her claw arms latching onto its backpack thrusters.

The Zaku pilot thrashed. He slammed his mobile suit against the crater wall, trying to crush her. Armor buckled. Alarms screamed in Aris’s cockpit. But she held on. And she pulled. He saw the crippled Ball (Darius) and one

With a screech of tortured metal, she ripped the Zaku’s primary thruster housing open. The reactor went critical. The Zaku pilot had three seconds to eject. He didn’t make it.

They drifted in on thrusters set to minimum, looking like a cluster of asteroids. The Zeon outpost was quiet. Two MS-06J Zakus stood at idle, their reactors humming a low thrum that Aris could feel through her seat. Their pilots, confident in Zeon’s space superiority, were probably playing cards.

Aris woke up in a Federation field hospital aboard the carrier Troy Horse . A nurse told her she had three cracked ribs, a concussion, and mild frostbite on her fingers. She also told her that Lieutenant Croft had survived—his Ball had crash-landed, but he’d been pulled out by a recovery team.

That was three months ago. Now, in November of UC 0079, she found herself staring at a different kind of grave: the lunar surface around the Zeon stronghold of Granada.