1. Part 1: Chapter 1 (1/1)
the worst thing is that i cannot recall the moment that the colony exploded. i was there before the blast, fully aware yet not fully myself, doped up on a cocktail of adrenaline and a potent drug aptly named quell, which flattens emotion while leaving cognition intact, and whose effects are dramatically heightened by the bastardized, unstable zero system clone to which i was subject. i remember pulling the trigger, watching as the incendiary missile fired from the left shoulder-box of the mobile suit and pierced the thick steel shell of the new m-204 colony. when i came back to myself the explosion was still blooming, soundless and formless in the vacuum of space. the flames lingered just for a moment, just long enough to consume the leftover oxygen, and then the colony was gone. obliterated. shrapnel and ash floated along on a spherical trajectory, propelled by the force of the blast. bodies, mangled and dismembered, drifted along the way, though if they were real or imagined i do not know.
i believed in that moment, emotionless yet somehow vaguely disturbed, that this was a moment of divine retribution, punishment for finding some happiness in a life otherwise overwhelmed by death and war. i had fought so long ago, played no small part in victory over tyrannical would-be rulers of earth and space, ascended the ranks of the united earth sphere military force, test piloted nonmilitary mobile suits, was promoted some more, and then vanished mentally, if not physically, suddenly and quietly to seek some solace in the openness of space, to find something—some integral part of my being—that had been lost in the senselessness of constant war. i am not sure i ever found it. and this was my punishment.
when asked to lead a new, lucrative test flight i did not think that anything could go wrong. i accepted happily and with full understanding that i was in the good graces of a lord who would not lead me into more senseless violence and a crew of friends who would cover my back without error. i had no reason to worry, not with more than two hundred flights under my belt. i accepted with false confidence. i was shot. i was enslaved. i was numbed and hidden away. and at the moment that m-204 was destroyed so, too, was what remained of my life. so, too, were the lives of more than thirty million innocent civilians. in an instant i was a killer. more than that, i had committed the largest mass murder in human history.
-msgt. duo maxwell