CH 10

10. Lalah the Spectator

“Ngha!” Seeing the Trojan Horse firing its beams and the mobile suits taking action, Inspector Cameron Bloom made a gurgling sound. Even if he believed the reason Zeon hadn’t attacked was because he had gone out ahead, a direct hit from one of their ships would mean the death of that lovely, proud woman, with her pretty eyes and full lips. The man was nothing but sincere, and the thought of that happening caused him to cry.

A television station’s broadcast relay boat passed by the inspector going the other way. The sight of the Trojan Horse exchanging fire with the Zeon troops was honey to the station staff gathering footage to air. They turned their camera on the ominous imagery, without any thought that the event was a matter of life and death for the people involved.

“What you are currently witnessing is a real battle. These images have not been created by a computer! There is a possibility of beam fire in the direction of Side 6’s Metiva district. We strongly urge the people there to evacuate to the neighboring blocks.” The announcer shouted his report, and the citizens of Side 6 recoiled at the news that the battlefield salvos could reach their colony’s outer wall. Thanks to the vacuum of space there was nothing to fog up the telephoto lens, and the graining and residual images from the beams of light only stirred up people’s fear. There were also shouts of surprise when the full size of the red mobile suits standing on the deck of the Trojan Horse was revealed.

“Those are the Federation’s new models!”

“They don’t look like they’re made for close up fighting.”

It was a moment for people to show off their own expertise. However, whenever the image went blank due to the flash of an explosion, those watching in front of their televisions would fall into an uneasy silence.

“…The white mobile suit is going to win.”

“Is it? Even though they aren’t showing it?”

“I can tell. Isn’t that why you took in a woman like me, Colonel?”

Lalah had been watching the TV in Char’s room from the time they showed the Trojan Horse leaving port. She wondered what that incredibly guileless boy was going to do now that he had departed on a ship in danger of being sunk. Standing heroically on the catapult deck of the strange looking warship, she could see the boy’s bluster through the white mobile suit. He wouldn’t be able to fight his way out of this acting like that, she thought. It looked like an outcome that couldn’t be stopped…

I’m here together with the Colonel, so I should embrace this reality.

However, a moment later she saw the white machine launching from the catapult. Its demeanor seemed terribly soft. Hmm… The machine looked like it was the boy’s unadorned, natural body; free of any bravado. The white machine did not appear on the TV again after that, but it was when the first beam traced a long line from the Trojan Horse into the ship on the left flank of Conscon’s forces, destroying it, that Lalah made her declaration.

The boy’s white machine had tormented Char, but she didn’t dwell on the facts of the past. Amuro is…! Lalah could feel the boy’s vigorous spirit.

“Watch carefully…a real battle isn’t as cool as they make it look in fiction,” Char told her. Lalah’s prediction could have been taken as a slight against him, but he ignored it.

“I understand that.”

“Mm…it’s something like this…” The reason Char was kind was because he had no desire for chance encounters with the people leading the forces he was fighting against, be they superior to him on the battlefield or not.

Even though it was a coincidence, the explosion from the cruiser lit up the TV screen, showing the silhouette of the white mobile suit. Lalah felt relieved. However, realizing that was not an emotion she could allow Char to sense, as her guardian, she said, “See!? Colonel…?” bragging that her prediction had come true.

“I already told you, right? It’s because you’re clever, Lalah.”

“I don’t like the way you say that.” She had to show that she was pleased by Char’s compliment, so she responded in an appropriately convincing manner. As the residual glare faded, she could see the outline of the white machine drifting downward. “Ah…” She could sense that the pilot was lamenting the sadness that had turned into reality.

{Enough already!} He was terrified of the people who were dying by his own hand. It should have been an inevitable fact of war, but the boy knew that he had no right to eliminate people who were the same as him, and so he wept. It’s a person’s nature to try and unite and assimilate with their own kind.

Despite that fact, you’re wounding and erasing those very people, and that turns into your own pain, Amuro! Those who didn’t feel that pain were people like Lalah as she was in the past; rejected, excluded and continually belittled by their own. Who would otherwise seek idle comfort by removing their congeners. Who were otherwise able to use their to bodies practice the certain kind of misfortune known as “insanity,” due to the wisdom they possessed.

With intelligence, you could use self-centered greed to justify your own base actions. Knowledge was a tool which could turn the human body into something lower than an animal.

Amuro did not possess that wisdom.

Lalah finally understood the reason she was so drawn to the boy. I see…gentle Amuro…you are a Newtype.

“Amazing…that pilot has started to awaken as a Newtype. He’s on the same level as you are, perhaps even higher.” Char had grasped the boy’s abilities.

“…Yes…” She tried to respond, but she felt sick. Char’s understanding made things harder on her. The boy had survived the battle, but would he tell himself he would never meet with her again because of it? She wanted to think so. But she was anxious, because even she was unable to sense the answer. Extremely anxious…

⌘

Watching the TV broadcast, Amuro’s father Tem Ray was exhilarated at the announcement of the Trojan Horse’s victory. Whooping for joy, he ran out of his prefab room, slipped and fell down the metal stairs outside, and died.