The sun hung high and merciless over the South Atlantic, a white disk that bleached the ocean and made every ripple glitter like a shard. On the water's surface the world looked deceptively calm: fishing boats carved lazy wakes, gulls wheeled above distant freighters, and the horizon shimmered like a heat-mirage. Beneath that placid skin, steel moved silently.
A submarine breached the surface as if it had been waiting for permission from the sea itself. Its conning tower broke the light, a dark fin against glare. It rode low, almost respectful, then eased into its assigned position beyond the last shipping lane. Around it the water closed over the deck like a secret.
Inside the command room, holographic maps bloomed—three-dimensional lattices that showed tunnels, intake shafts, relay farms, and the complex arteries that made Jaburo a fortress. Lelouch stood before the light, still as a statue, pale hands folded behind his back. His face was an unreadable plane; his eyes were the only part that moved, darting with quick, cold calculations.
The room smelled of oil and disinfectant and the metallic air of the submarine. Officers waited in the hush; their breathing seemed loud. Lelouch's voice finally spoke, quiet but precise, carrying no urgency but a blade of certainty.
"We will not assault their surface. We will not seek glory. We will enter the beast and cut its throat from the inside. Focus on infrastructure, on silence, on damage that cannot be reported quickly. Jaburo survives pain badly because it breathes through networks. Stop the lungs, and the body chokes."
Rezen's reply came in clipped, professional tones. He wore the scars of past undersea fights like medals. "Understood. Goggs are primed. We hit the southern intake and sweep inward. No unnecessary transmissions. No prisoners that will radio home."
Lelouch nodded once and set the tempo with nothing but a hand movement. "Coordinate with Shin on the eastern maintenance tunnels. Liam's teams will surface where the swell hides their approach and take the relay bunkers. Johnny will open the inland breach with maximum spectacle to draw their armored response. Timing is everything."
Outside, the sea answered in a long, low breathing. The sub's planes tilted and then the launches began—hatches splitting open, amphibious frames rising silently, bubbles tearing into vapor as units slipped into the light. Men checked visors, grips, seals. The world above was oblivious to the metal moving within it.
Rezen's Gogg caught the sun and spat it back as a red mono-eye. It was an ungainly silhouette at first, then a thing of coiled muscle and hard angles, hydrodynamics made brutal. He felt the water resistance like a hand on his suit and welcomed it. The sea was an old friend in whose belly Zeon had hidden many secrets.
He pushed his controls. The Gogg's limbs unfurled, thrusters breathed, and then it erupted from the wave. Water cascaded, a geyser that scattered gulls and made men point in instinctive alarm along a distant pier. Rezen tasted salt and adrenaline and the calm that only a veteran finds in violence.
Goggs slapped against GM marine hulls with the quiet brutality of falling trees. Rezen's first strike crushed a cockpit hatch and sent a spray of seawater and hydraulic fluid into the light. The GM's pilot never had the chance to scream. Under the noon sun, the sea boiled with oil and broken hulls.
Shin's Z'Goks moved like pale ghosts. They had come from history—aces who flew in an era of greater reckoning—and his hands were patient. He thought in geometry; his strikes were angles and arcs that carved pathlines through the enemy's lines. He found maintenance tunnels where rust had been promised and detonated possibilities. Steel bent under his claws in corrugations of failure.
On the submarine, Lelouch watched the feeds stitch themselves into a story he had written in a dozen cold, sleepless drafts. He listened to the comms tick in and out: short, encoded bursts only when required. When a pilot's voice rose above the measure, he clipped it with a single word.
"Silence."
At the command console, a young officer's hands hovered over the relay map. "Commander, they have prepared anti-ship netting and—"
"They will not have it here," Lelouch cut in. "Their defenses are designed for the obvious. We are not obvious."
The sub shifted gently; its hull slid like a whale's rib against current. Below the floor the Zakus and other frames waited in dim bays, engines humming like sleeping beasts. Liam checked his line again, fingers running over bolts and seals. He thought about his orders—surface, take, hold—and felt the reasonable, cold knot of duty coil in his gut.
When the first Gogg struck, sonar operators at Jaburo registered it as a jagged, unnatural noise and misfiled it as mechanical disturbance. An error cascade began. The base's undersea sensors were keyed to expected patterns; they had not been taught to parse the rhythm of a Lezard wave assault.
On the pier, a lieutenant stared at his screen and shouted. "Multiple contacts at the southern intake! They're—" The message cut like a bad line. Something in the comms system ate his voice.
Rezen eased his suit's hand outward and jammed a collector arm into a relay box. Sparks said language in flashing red. His technician units—small, tethered devices—swarmed like insects and began to sever fiber and fry nodes. Rezen's voice, when it came, was humorless. "Cut everything. If they can't report, they can't call for reinforcements."
A GM squad tried to bring up guns, but their beam rifles chattered impotently against the Gogg's armor. It was not that Zeon's tech was unassailable; rather, it was that the plan had beaten the response before the enemy could make a strategy. The first tide of Goggs struck like a breaking hand along the ribs of Jaburo.
Shin worked in the tunnels like a surgeon hollowing diseased tissue. Ceiling lights showered sparks as his claws tore generator housings. He had been in the guts of other strongholds, and he knew the terrible, small things that could ruin a facility's day. He left behind nothing but cold, precise ruin.
Liam's Zakus surfaced through concealed coastal chutes, their tracks slipping into sand, their rifles raising with purpose. They moved fast, not seeking glory but function: relay bunkers, redundancy depots, field amplifiers—nodes that would reduce Jaburo's ability to awaken its full wrath to a whisper.
Above them, Johnny's Dom squad did not try to be stealthy. Johnny liked noise. His Doms bore scars and paint, and their hover-boots kicked up brine and debris as they levered their way forward. Where Johnny moved, something broke. Where he laughed, lines of command staggered.
Johnny's voice crackled over the minimal net, not hidden now but proud. "They'll expect a hole. They won't expect the hurricane. Enjoy the prickle, boys!"
Lelouch watched all of it like someone watching pieces move against a board he had already solved. He was unemotional, but his skin felt the cold pleasure of a plan enacted with exactitude. Still, the operation was not mere spectacle; it had teeth and a schedule and the fragile clock of extraction.
"Remember," he said to his commanders, "we are not conquering. We are a blade. We cut and we withdraw. Each team that stays beyond the mark risks annihilation."
Rezen replied once, voice dry. "We can leave the parts of them that can't run away."
The attacks unfolded with brutal choreography. Maintenance towers collapsed into the sea; emergency buoys detonated under shrapnel and flame; pipelines that had carried coolant and data became cracked conduits for chaos. The undersea junctions were severed with methods that were surgical: explosives set to specific frequencies, cutters tuned to vibrate with the cable's resonant hum.
Inside Jaburo's command center, feed screens jittered, then bled syllables of static. An old colonel pounded the console and barked orders that went unanswered. People who had trained for decades to read the signs were baffled; the signs did not look like anything they had been taught.
"Where are our divers?" someone demanded. "Where is the harbor patrol?"
The answers were drowned by another explosion. Because the assault came in a way that was not accounted for—because the enemy had learned to exploit the seams of their doctrine—the Federation's ability to marshal was slow and pained.
Back on the surface, where the sun flayed the water, Zeon's amphibious units clawed their way into position, and the sounds of metallic bodies grinding matched the cries of men. Rezen's Gogg raised a mangled antenna and, with a casual violence, crushed its base. The resulting cascade of data loss spread like a technical infection through Jaburo's networks.
Shin's Z'Gok took a low, architectural route through the pipeworks and engineer bays. He found and breached a pump assembly that fed emergency lighting. The lights died, and corridors that had been mapped in hundreds of drills suddenly became places of shadow and rumor.
The Federation scrambled counter-squads—GMs that had not been allowed to die in Odessa, tanks that had been kept in reserve in deep caverns beneath the base. They roared from under stone and soil and flung themselves into the tunnels like desperate measures. The fight there was claustrophobic and bitter, metal on metal, sparks hissing in the dark.
Lelouch's fingers found a marker on the three-way projection. He did not enjoy the suffering. He catalogued it. For him, wars were an accumulation of choices that bent reality. This move bent the resources away from Jaburo's outward shields and toward internal patchwork. That gave the main strike—whenever it came—an extra breath of surprise.
An officer from the sub reported in, voice thin with the knowledge of being in the belly of a beast. "Commander, they've mobilized a surface division from town sector three. Movement is heavy. Reinforcements could link within thirty to forty minutes."
"Then we do what we came to do and vanish," Lelouch answered. "Phase secure; prepare charges for the lines that must not be fixed. Withdraw patterns: staggered. No signal unless necessary."
On the shore, Liam watched a relay bunker spit a dying light and then blacken. His Zakus set charges with efficient hands and then backed into cover. He was not sentimental about terminals; wires were as ordinary to him as the dust that collected in his boots. He thought of the marines that would never make it to the surface again and did not squander feeling on them now. Duty was enough.
Johnny's Dom took a direct hit from an artillery piece and rocked, its aft thruster searing with a bloom of smoke. He cursed in a way that made the pilots grin—it was the profanity of men who had been given a show. He pushed the Dom forward anyway and smashed a satellite dish into uselessness with the shoulder of his suit.
On the net, an alarmed voice from Jaburo's central tower asked for any identification. The response the colonel received was an incomplete band of code and static. The ability to relay a full report had been lacerated mid-word. That injury was more dangerous than a casualty because it hid the pattern of the attack.
Rezen read the scoreboard as it scrolled in his heads-up displays. He had taken damage, a hydraulic reservoir punctured by shrapnel from an EMP charge, but his systems compensated. His Gogg fought like a caged beast when the tunnels narrowed, using its bulk to wedge open doors and its claws to smash machines and fingers alike.
Shin, ever exact, planted timed charges that would render the maintenance tunnels unusable for hours. He used the tunnels' own gravity to collapse parts of them inward. "Make them dig for their machines," he said once into channel, and the engineers heard cold meaning in the words: make them dig with hands and not computers.
The air in Jaburo grew thick with power loss and the smell of sealing foam. In the lower levels, backup batteries sang low, then dropped one by one as each node was taken offline. Where once the base spoke with the loud confidence of an industrial city, it now coughed.
Lelouch allowed himself a half-breath, and for a second his face was almost human. Then he watched as a line of blue light flashed across his console—a new ping rising from the far end of the map.
"Report," he instructed.
A young tech's hand trembled as she keyed a feed. "Sonar blip at bearing zero-nine. Large contact moving. Speed is high—"
Lelouch's gaze narrowed. The room paused. Soldiers in the command room felt a little of the world tip. "Hold frequency," he told them. "Do not respond yet."
The contact drew closer with an indifferent, slow hunger on the sonar. It was not an obvious craft for surface skirmishes. Its signature was heavy, like a leviathan turning. The undersea idler made a soft mechanical sound and then another ping confirmed size and mass.
Across the network, Rezen's voice came sharp. "We're starting to see increased return radiation on the coast sensors. That could be—"
Lelouch answered before the question finished. "Then we cut charges now. Prepare for extraction. Move to fallback points Alpha through Delta. Johnny, keep them busy until we can break line."
Johnny's laugh was a knife. "You want picture frames, Commander? I'll give them fireworks they'll remember."
Liam's Zakus moved like ghosts wrapped in sand. They took the charges and placed them where a repair unit would first crawl. They did not linger for the stories the soldiers would tell later; this was a job like any other.
At Jaburo's command hub, voices became frantic as the sonar became a forest of echoes. The defenders began to piece together the truth not as a clean pattern but as a ragged series of interruptions. Patrols went to see pockets of fire; engineers moved like sleepwalkers to link two nodes with manual cable runs; they did what they could with hands that remembered the old ways and minds that despised improvisation.
The tide of battle shifted as Federation units gathered strength and pushed into the tunnels. Rezen's Gogg found itself wresting with a GM in a corridor too narrow for either to move well. The two machines clanged, sparks flying, and the operator in the GM fought with the bitter, animal aggression of someone forced into a bad dream.
Shin's Z'Gok took a glancing blow in the thigh and felt the thrum of a damaged servomotor. He compensated with micro-adjustments and kept moving like a man who had stitched together his life in a thousand precise moves.
Johhny's Dom hit an AA battery that had been hastily set up on a ridge. The explosion threw concrete in a spray and set flame to stacked supply crates. For a moment the air filled with odd orange. Johnny grinned into his comm. "Taste the heat, boys! Keep punching!"
Time zipped like wire. Lelouch checked the timer again. The mark—four hours—was a horizon he could see but not touch. He thought of the Odessa front and how his strike here had to be a gale that bent the Federation's attention, stripped its reinforcements, and opened a narrow, bloody corridor for whatever decisively dangerous move would later be attempted.
His mouth formed a line. He could not afford sentiment, not for the men and not for the machines. He could only afford outcomes.
"Phase complete?" he asked, not because a confirmation was necessary but because he wanted the room to breathe with him.
Rezen answered with mustered calm. "Primary objectives met: southern intake disabled, two relay farms severed, dock-side control systems offline. We have losses: one Gogg—severe hull breach—and several minor damages."
Lelouch's face remained still. "Begin fallback sequence Beta. Leave charges set to create lasting trauma to the network—collapse the tunnels, fry the short-range comm arrays. Extract in convergent timings. No solitary returns. No transmissions unless on my voice."
He watched as units executed, the way a conductor watched musicians bring a violent sonata to its close. Then the sonar chirped again, louder, insistent. The initial contact had multiplied into several signatures, each heavy enough to suggest armor and mass and perhaps another fleet's engines turning.
Rezen's voice was a gravelly thread. "We're getting moving contacts at bearing zero-five and zero-seven. Not small. Multiple signatures. Could be support—"
Lelouch's jaw tightened imperceptibly. He had expected counters, of course; strategy is the art of expecting the unexpected and using it anyway. But the speed—there was urgency in the way those pings ate the map's quiet.
"Hold extraction," he ordered, measured. "Shift to evasion pattern Delta-One. Keep charges that must remain and disable others for the final sweep. We will not be trapped."
Liam's fingers creaked around a manual trigger. "Sir, if we delay extraction, we risk being cut off on the beach. My Zakus will not hold against concentrated armor."
Lelouch did not hesitate. "Then we stagger withdraw. Johnny will cover the eastern egress. Rezen, you and Shin take the inner corridors; Liam and the Zakus cover the rear. We can buy time, but we must assume they will pursue. Prepare the submarine for emergency recovery."
Johnny's voice, the only warmth in the grid, said, "Let them come. I like a good chase."
The tactical map filled with red paths as rebel engines crawled toward the battlefield. The Federation was, belatedly, rising to punish the blind spots. It was the sound of heavy things turning toward a wound and not letting it fester.
Lelouch looked at the timer again. The retreat from Odessa was still four hours away. His assault at Jaburo had begun to take and to bite, but it had not yet broken the beast. The Federation was not a city that could be felled by a single hurricane. It learned and it responded.
He tapped a control and the periscope blended the surface glare into data. "We leave on my mark," he said. "And if they follow, they do so into a storm of our making."
Outside, the noon sun shone down on a sea that had been turned for a few hours into a battlefield's stage. Smoke rose in islands. Men and machines tasted blood and exhaust. The hum of a submerging fleet thrummed like a beast pulling itself back under.
Deep within the sonar, a new signature approached, slow and purposeful. It was not a ripple but a weight. The technician raised a hand. "Commander, bearing zero-six — large acoustic dipolar signature. Speed increasing."
Lelouch's mouth was a thin slash. He felt the gravity of the moment, the tightness of calculated risk pressing like a glass. He imagined faces on pieces of a board. He considered options, exit vectors, sacrifice points, the fractal of consequences that would bloom from this afternoon.
"Prepare for contact," he instructed, voice even. "If they engage, withdraw on my second tone. If pursuit is lethal, abort interlocks and disperse. Do not allow anything to be captured intact."
Steel and water and light moved according to that cold will. The world tightened to the sound of distant motors and the smell of burning copper. The first true counterattack rolled through the ocean like a wall.
Lelouch watched the screens. The pings multiplied, the map filled with hopeful numbers. He allowed a carved, private smile, not of joy but of completion: what he had done had been enough to draw out a reply. A reply would mean that Jaburo's defenders were no longer blind or puzzled; they were moving, focused, dangerous.
He thought of all the windows across time that could have been closed with different decisions. He thought of the twin at Odessa—of orders that would shape their future—and he steadied his hands.
"Mark the second tone," he told his officers. "We end this phase regardless. We have what we needed."
Around him the men—Rezen, Shin, Johnny, Liam—tensed like coiled springs. The world narrowed. The ocean roared. The battle that had been a letter written in burning cables and smashed