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It is the year 80 of the universal century, the first day of which was the end of the One Year War.
Humanity had moved the majority of its population into enormous colony cylinders in space at the LaGrange points of Sol before the start of the one year war. It was the first war in space and the first use of giant man-shaped machines of war, called Mobile Suits. The war began when the colony of Side 3, known as the Principality of Zeon, declared war on the Earth Federation with the stated cause of declaring freedom for Spacenoids from the rule of the Earth Federation. But the leadership of Zeon cared only for its own people and used deadly gas attacks on colony cylinders to empty them out for use by their own population, or outright destroyed colonies, killing billions. The Earth Federation retaliated with its own weapons of mass destruction in space, causing immense collateral casualties. The final use of WMDs had been the Principality of Zeon dropping an entire colony cylinder to earth from space, destroying the city of Sydney and permanently changing the climate for much of Asia and completely ruining the habitability of Australia. Half of all humanity died before a treaty was signed banning the use of WMDs and chemical weapons, and this was all in the first few months of the one year war.
But now the one year war that resulted in the extinction of fully half of humanity is officially over. The Principality of Zeon falls with the death of its autocratic leaders, the Zabi family, at the hands of the ace Zeon pilot Char Aznable "the Red Comet", and so the Republic of Zeon takes its place. The Earth Federation and the Republic of Zeon sign an armistice and the war officially ends. But, not all the fighting has ended quite yet...
The federation war hero Amuro Ray, pilot of the legendary mobile suit the Gundam, and his fellow crewmates from the now destroyed space carrier ship the White Base cannot relax just yet. While the leadership of the Principality of Zeon is dead, many pockets of Zeon soldiers fight on in the name of the dead Zabi family. The crew of the White Base are assigned a new and improved ship, The White Base Kai, given new crew to replace their losses during the war, and the Mobile Suit Gundam is replaced, before being sent on a mission of crushing leftover pockets of Zeon resistance. Months pass of relatively uneventful combat, the new White Base Kai and the replacement Gundam more than enough to destroy the odd guerilla fighter piloting outdated Zeonic Zaku II mobile suits, when the Earth Federation gives them a new mission...
Kai is actually rather alarmed by the prospect but way to much of a Cool Pilot TM to show it.
Amuro is busy trying to figure out if ftl means time travel is a thing or if general relativity is just totally out the door.
Bright and Mirai continue to make grim yet stoic facial expressions while guiding the ship into incredible danger because it's the only strategically viable option. This is sort of their thing as a couple,
As they approach into the same distace towars the relay the Zeon ship had reached, the blue core of the relay starts to speed up its spinning again and the blue glow intensifies. The relay is activating again, and with a flash the White Base dissapears from sight.
From the perspective of those on the ship, the black of space has been replaced by blue smears of light going from the front of the ship to the back, giving the impression of forward travel. This keeps up for a few hours.
Eventually, they must have been decelerated by the mechanisms of the relay because they return to the sight of realspace, to a whole other solar system and different constelations. A little green pebble of an alien planet can be seen with the naked eye relatively close by, close by by the scale of a solar system at least. There is no time for wonderment at the fact that they've gone to a whole other alien star system because the Zeon commanders ship shows up on scans.
It doesn't appear to be ready for them, it hadn't layed down mines or anything, Maybe the commander did not expect them to be able to follow.
The White Base is much more prepared. Obviously multiple hours is too long to stay at 100% readiness but they are pretty close. All of the crew are exprienced with hurry up and wait. Fraw Bow has made multiple trips around with the refreshment cart, and Amuro has sketched out a completely false theory of how all of human history is the result of the closed time loop they are at the lynchpin of.
Bright immediately orders the crew into action. This obviously includes launching all mobile suits, but also includes directly preceding them with a barrage of missiles. Partially this is to screen the launch, but it is also because the Zeon’s lack of an I-field makes them incredible vulnerable to radar guided weaponry.
After this initial assault the I-field’s from the White Base and its mobile suits make radar again unusable.
On principle Bright will have Mirai move the White Base off its last radar detectable vector, but he isn’t too concerned about return fire. The surprise barrage was massively damaging by itself and the mobile suit are engaging before the Zeons have finished getting their bearing.
Alarms blare on the bridge of the Zeon warship, half the bridge crew lays dead, this does not stop the commander from screaming at his crew to keep going. He is told the engines are crippled, using them at all might blow up engineering section completely, this does not phase him and he orders the crippled ship onwards. Leaking atmosphere and with its superstructure barely holding together, the ship limps towards the relay.
The engines explode from being pushed too far, vaporising the engineering bay and irradiating much of the ship and the surviving crew. The commander orders them to vent the air from everywhere but the bridge to keep the ship going. One of the bridge crew protests this order and is summarily shot by the commander for insubordination, he tells the crew they should all be prepared to die for the glory of Zeon. The remaining air is vented towards the aft, leaving the rest of the non bridge crew to asphyxiate, and accelerating the ship towards the relay that slight bit more, inching towards it.
The commander rants over the comms. “The Earth will be destroyed! Superior Zeon Spacenoids will be free to rebuild in the ashes! Without the rule of Earth and its inferior stock polluting humanity! I give myself and my crew as a sacrifice to the future of Zeon! Our ship itself will be the mighty thunderbolt of Zeus smiting the Earth! Sieg Zeon! Sie-“
Char fires a long distance shot right into the bridge of the Zeon warship, vaporising the commander and surviving bridge crew. The damage starts off chain reaction in the already heavily damaged vessel and it breaks apart, pink mega particle clouds erupting from its reactors as they go critical.
”You can die for the glory of nothing, achieving nothing, you fat fool.” Shooting another round into the debris to break it up further and push it further off course from the relay. “I thought he would never shut up.”
Just in case Bright will have Mirai position the White Base to intercept any remaining debris.
He'll also have Marker and Oscar scan the planet as best they can from this distance and ask Fraw Bow to scan for any comms signals. For all he knows there are still aliens lurking around.
Back in Sol, Jacinda and the others have been decoding and decrypting the info from the alien systems controlling the relay, and the Zeon computers hooked up to them. And after Friedrich beats down a Zeon fanatic scientist who tried to stop one of the captive ones from talking, the captive scientists feel a bit safer spilling the beans.
With all these sources together they discovered that the Zeons had heavily damaged the targeting systems on the relay, specifically for physical objects coming through to this side from elsewhere. The Zeons damaged the targeting in a way that objects coming through would overshoot the relay and hit earth. They also damaged the parts that handle the mass altering calculations to make things coming out of the relay have extra mass so they would impact the Earth harder. The relay can be aimed away from earth easily enough but anything physical coming through is going to be heavily compacted due to the mass altering fields giving those objects extraordinary amounts mass when they come out of FTL.
Obviously this is very critical information to give to the White Base so they don't try to come back and become compacted. A probe is sent through the relay, screaming a warning on all communications channels about why the White Base shouldn't try to come back through the relay. And that they were fixing it as fast as they could and had sent a message to earth asking for more expert technicians they could trust. Rather than having to rely on a team of Zeons, half of whom kept screaming about dying for the glory of Zeon when questioned.
The Comms sent from the White Base might have reached the crew left behind on Pluto if they had finished fixing the targeting so the relay wasn’t aimed at the Earth anymore, but right now the only people who could get the White Bases message is whoever on Earth happened to be in the path of their message when it exited FTL.
While in the new star system, scans show the planet has an nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere, the green colour is probably an ocean because what looks like water vapour clouds can be seen forming off of it. There are small landmasses with smatterings of colour on them that might be vegetation.
They might, in fact, have found the first life bearing planet other than the Earth. The terraforming projects planned for mars barely count, this could be the real deal.
No alien signals however, no signs of technology or radio wave use or anything that would signify aliens other than the mass relay hanging ominously in space.
Until suddenly, ALL the radio waves and laser comms, coming from a probe that came through the relay. The probe was even using ultra bright LEDs on its surface to flash its warning in morse code.
"Recall the mobile suits.
We'll give everyone a short rest here then make plans for exploring the planet if they haven't fixed the relay."
Once the pilots and crew have had some minimal decompression time and it is clear that no rescue coming on in the next few hours Bright will have a strategy meeting with what passes for his senior staff, and Char.
Mirai and the operators will also be able to stay at their stations on the White Base's usually spacious bridge.
The other federation pilots and a few other also fit on the bridge. It's already planned to make the bridge smaller and add actual meeting rooms in later models, but the Pegasus class combines both functions.
"It appears that we can not use the relay to return to the solar system and are limited in our ability to communicate through it.
The process of modifying the system into a weapon means that the Earth side array can not decelerate us and additionally causes anything with mass to be compressed. We can still send signals through but it appears that the people we left on Pluto have not yet set up equipment to intercept them so we're just sending them in the general direction of Earth.
In better news it appears that this system contains a habitable planet, and we brought enough supplies for a round trip as well as an extended engagement at Pluto. We will be leaving a radio relay here then making our way to the planet."