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Lilienthal knew it was over. Their battered forces had sustained too much damage from the days of bombardment by the Federation forces. The city he had hoped to protect was in ruins, despite his precautions, and the morale of his troops was the lowest he'd ever seen it. Of course, they would fight when he told them, but they would not fight with the sparkle of Zeon Freedom in their eyes. They had been broken by the siege as much as the city had. He had known this push from the Federation would be coming, and he could not bring himself to surrender the base his men had fought so hard to protect - not that he had any orders to do so. Orders from high command had slowed to a trickle lately; things were entirely in his hands. He would make the Federation pay for the suffering they had inflicted on the civilians of Baikonour, and for the war that they had felt it necessary to start. When the dust had cleared, there were no Zeon soldiers standing. Those that had survived were kneeling in front of their Federation captors, while the dead hulks of ships and mobile suits littered the battlefield. They had not held anything back in the final assault - neither side had - and the decimation showed that fact plainly. The men and women who had evacuated Baikonour were not sure what to do; their homes had been destroyed, their governor killed, and the Earth Federation was now in control. Some returned, to rebuild. Others left, swearing vengeance on those who had taken everything from them. The assault on Baikonour, not long when compared to other historical sieges, had changed almost everything about the place. Tin Cods, GMs, a Big Tray and Don Escargots hammered the Zeon base at Mexico city. Zakus and Dopps fell like flies before the relentless assault, weakened by the recent bombardment. Command was in disarray, thanks to a well-placed salvo, and the loss of the base's remaining Gallop weakened their ability to return fire to the Big Tray considerably. In a day, Mexico City changed hands. In a day, hundreds of men died, some for causes they believed in, and others, merely because they were gears in the machine of war. Banners of red were replaced by the blue-green of the Federation. Cleanup operations began to clear the streets of broken Zakus and collapsed buildings, and a temporary command post was set up in the room where Zeon officers had once plotted to protect their holding The constant wind blew a steady cloud of dust and tumbleweeds through the base. Mexico City was simply the latest in a string of Federation victories on Earth, and perhaps one of the last. There were really no major holdings left on the Earth, and those that were quickly fell, as the Federation consolidated their forces, previously spread out to deal with a multitude of Zeon threats. What had started in space would end in space, it seemed. Zeon would either triumph, keeping what it had started with, or it would be utterly crushed. The world waited to see what would happen. |