Nearly an hour later, I was staring up at Shima Garahau's roof with a new cigarette in my mouth. That definitely wasn't regulation, but it was a special occasion. I checked my watch and saw that it was 1926 hours, which meant that I had a bit more than an hour to get back to the Gidoru. It was a thirty minute walk there, so I would need to leave within thirty minutes.
"We might never see each other again," I said to the ceiling as Garahau put her clothes back on outside of my vision.
"I know that," Garahau said. "Does it matter? Animals don't make long-term connections, anyway."
"I get the strange feeling that you're making fun of me," I said as I got out of bed and started putting my uniform back on.
"Did you mean everything you said?" Garahau asked.
I paused for a long second before saying, "I don't know. I mean, what else is there for people like us? We did things that can't be forgiven, but we have to keep on living. If I stopped to consider the full weight of my sins, they would crush me."
"So that's the secret? You just try not to think about it?"
"I don't know," I said, trying to buy myself a second to think. "There's no right way to be a war criminal."
"Is that it? For some reason, I expected the Hero of Operation British to have more answers," Garahau said, frowning.
I looked at myself in a nearby mirror. There were a few new bruises around my neck, but the tension in my expression was gone. I might have still been carrying anger around with me, but at least it no longer showed up on my face.
"There is one more thing," I said quietly. "There was a single survivor at Santiago Colony, right? His name is Shiro Amada, and he's a Federation soldier. I don't know if you'll find that information helpful, but he'll be able to move on from the destruction of his home colony within a few months."
"How did you know that?"
"Maybe I'll tell you next time," I said with a smile.
It was 2005 hours when I returned to the Gidoru. The officers standing at the passageway to the battleship glared at me for cutting it close, but I just waved at them as I floated by.
After returning to the crew quarters common room, I realized that I finally had some time to think about my next move. It was clear that the Federation had no interest in giving up after Operation British, and they would need to be beaten some other way.
Theoretically, there were two options available to me at present. In practice, there was only one option. Either I could let the Battle of Loum occur naturally and kill the entire Zabi family before the Antarctic Treaty, or I could do my job as a soldier of Zeon and assure that the plan to drop a second colony was successful.
I could try to run and live out my days as a janitor on Side 6, or something. That didn't work for me. If I was being chased down by the Federation either way, I would rather defend myself with a mobile suit than hide behind the veil of anonymity.
I was in too deep, and defecting would just end with my own death. My only option was the second colony drop. It was the only way to assure that neither Garahau nor I ended up in a Federation blacksite getting hanged at the neck until dead.
With a few quick commands to my tablet, I brought up a blueprint of Axis, a colony in the asteroid belt. It was my Plan E if everything else failed. If I couldn't bring the war to an end by the end of January, and I couldn't win the war during the invasion of Earth, then my only option would be to flee to Axis with the other remnants of the Zeon military. I would have to deal with Titan, but at least fleeing there would buy me a few more years.
Using my tablet once more, I pulled up the briefing for the assault on Loum. In total, we had 139 ships organized into the Zeon 1st Combined Fleet and a total of 2,920 Zakus. The plan was to attack Side 5 and start preparing to launch its capital colony of Wathort at the Earth. When the Federation fleet inevitably attacked the Zeon fleet, the amassed mobile suits would launch a surprise attack.
It worked perfectly in the original timeline, but Wathort still wasn't launched at the Earth. Why? I was starting to reach the end of my Gundam knowledge, but I vaguely remembered that Dozle Zabi immediately began chasing down the fleeing Federation ships as soon as the Battle of Loum was over.
The Gidoru left Solomon Base while I was planning Oracle Squad's strategy for the upcoming battle. I kept getting stuck on one point. What was I going to do differently compared to the original Battle of Loum?
I couldn't protect the nuclear pulse engines myself, since more than 300 Federation warships would be aiming at them. Oracle Squad would be destroyed before the enemy fleet came anywhere close enough to our mobile suits' maximum range.
The only option, I realized, was to split the fleet. Half of the warships would engage the Federation fleet while the other half guarded the nuclear pulse engines. In the original timeline, the 1st Combined Fleet of Zeon only lost six ships. Half of the fleet would probably be sufficient to buy enough time for the mobile suits to launch their sneak attack.
The downside was that I would need to convince Vice Admiral Dozle Zabi that splitting our fleet in half in the middle of a major battle would be a good idea. Perhaps I could sell it to him as a pincer attack to prevent the enemy fleets from fleeing.
My plan was set, and now I just had to actually do it. The plan drew my thoughts to Hannibal at Cannae. There, the Carthaginian troops slaughtered 20% of Rome's military-aged men. Despite the genius of Hannibal and the massive losses he dealt to Rome, nobody ever talks about the great Carthaginian Empire. The superior industrial base of Rome was too much for Carthage to overcome.
My eyes once more turned to the diagram of Axis displayed on my tablet.