The GINN, forced down by the Strike, was kneeling on the ground and still stood nearly ten meters tall. Siegfried climbed up to the cockpit without any tools, while the Strike Gundam retracted its blades and made no further move.
"You're not mercenaries, are you?" In the strange silence, Cagalli found her voice again. "From how he acted, he's never fired a gun before. That panic when pointing it at someone for the first time." Having grown up outside a sheltered life, she easily spotted the flaw in their story.
"So who are you really, and why do you know Orb's secrets? Tell me!" Unlike Siegfried, Hilde did not try to lie. She only recalled Haro back to her hand and opened its panel in response.
"Can it start?"
"Give me a moment. The circuits are overloaded from damage, I need to reboot the whole system," Siegfried's voice came from inside Haro. "Luckily, that pilot seems to have pulled the self-destruct switch, forcing all power into the core, and then Haro interrupted it. Otherwise an explosion would have made repairs impossible." For some reason, Cagalli found this "communicator" a little cute.
Inside the cockpit, Siegfried had worried that mobile suit controls in this world would be completely different from what he had learned. After some familiarization, he found that while details differed, he could still handle it with some adjustment. The interface responded smoothly to his inputs.
"Wait, does that mean I'm a Coordinator?" During the reboot, a troubling question surfaced. Early mobile suits were supposed to be usable only by Coordinators, so why was he adapting so easily? Was Hilde's intense three years of teaching that effective, or was this body itself genetically modified?
Given that Hilde never had answers to such questions, Siegfried knew this was not the time to dig deeper. The Archangel would be coming out soon, and staying any longer would only make escape harder against a crowd of Alliance soldiers.
"Okay, done." After a short time, the GINN's systems lit up again. Sitting in a mobile suit cockpit of this era for the first time, Siegfried familiarized himself with the controls and pressed the pedal, and the damaged GINN rose from the ground with a deafening noise.
The movement startled the nearby Strike Gundam into a reflexive response. Kira ignored the unconscious Murrue, drew his blade, and took a combat stance toward the mobile suit that had just been his enemy moments ago.
However, the GINN showed no intent to attack. It waved at the Strike, and as if afraid that was not clear enough, even made a "YEAH" gesture. The exaggerated motion felt almost comical in contrast to the battlefield.
Seeing no hostility, Kira still did not lower his guard. Under his tense watch, the GINN pilot activated the external speaker. His caution did not fade easily.
"Hey, Alliance over there. I've got a civilian who needs evacuation. Can you help?" Since they had already broken out of Dawn Society, Siegfried did not want to keep dragging along Cagalli, who was nothing but trouble. Handing her back to Kira was the best option, and unable to match radio frequencies or approach safely, he chose a broadcast instead.
"I'm not going! I won't…" Before Kira could even find his own speaker controls, the GINN reached toward the truck. Cagalli had no time to voice her opinion before Hilde pushed her straight into the GINN's hand.
Carefully controlling the grip to avoid crushing Cagalli Yula Athha on his first mobile suit operation, Siegfried extended the hand toward the Strike Gundam and opened the palm. The moment she was free, Cagalli ran along the GINN's horizontal arm.
"Are you insane!" From this height, Siegfried could not guarantee he could catch her in time if she fell. With the cockpit hatch still unable to close due to Miguru's forced opening, Cagalli ran all the way to the top of the cockpit and jumped down without hesitation.
Because the seatbelt limited his movement, Siegfried took her full weight head-on, the second time in one day he was sent reeling by her impact. His vision went dark again, and for a moment he even felt like he was being deliberately targeted.
"Go back to your Orb, and we'll go back to our home, isn't that fine?" Siegfried shouted in anger. "Is something wrong with your head? If you fall from this height, there won't even be a whole body left!" He was so furious he wanted to open her head and see what parts were missing.
"I'm definitely going with you. You took Orb's things!" Cagalli shot back without hesitation.
Left speechless, Siegfried waved toward Hilde in the truck. If they did not leave now, things would get even messier once the Archangel emerged. After giving the Strike a meaningless hand signal, the GINN picked up a nearby machine gun, secured its heavy sword, and began escorting the truck toward the port.
Inside the vehicle below, Hilde seemed unaware of the small incident that had just occurred. The white-haired girl pressed a hand tightly to her chest and quietly repeated words without clear meaning. "The timeline is beginning to change. Protection is required."
This was the first time Hilde had shown something abnormal.
The port area of Heliopolis Universe had been wiped clean of living people after the earlier raid by Cruze Team. Shattered debris from explosions covered the entire gravity zone, and a GINN was forcing a narrow path through the wreckage. At this moment, Siegfried truly wanted to praise Hilde for her foresight, because without grabbing a mobile suit halfway through, the two of them would never have made it out before the colony collapsed.
After working for a while, Siegfried chose to fix the cockpit hatch first, and it was not only for possible fighting later. In his memories, perhaps limited by how animation portrayed things, there had been little mention of civilian deaths during the fighting inside the colony. Here in the port, however, as the GINN kept shifting broken debris, mangled bodies appeared again and again right in front of his eyes with no screen to soften the sight, forcing the cleanup to stop. If this kept going, Siegfried felt that the sandwich he had eaten that morning was about to come back up.
"Hey. I am talking to you." Seeing Cagalli still refusing to leave the cockpit, Siegfried kicked the freshly repaired hatch hard, as if testing its strength.
"Do not call me hey. I have a name. I am Cagalli." The blonde girl tried to show some friendliness, but in the next second she felt that goodwill being stomped flat by his attitude.
"My name is Reynard."
"Can you stop treating me like an idiot?"
"Fine, my full name is Reynard-Testarossa. I even told you everything, see how sincere I am."
"That is enough!"
"This is barely the start."