It was definitely time to return to base. I flipped a switch, and several smoke canisters fired out of my right shoulder. They exploded after a few seconds, and red smoke began to filter outward. That was the signal for Oracle Squad to fall back.
I hammered on the throttle once more, sending myself "down" relative to the 4th Fleet. When I temporarily arrested my downward momentum after traveling a kilometer, I could see that two Zakus had followed me.
Looking closely at the two other mobile suits, I could see that a small white marking had been made on both of their chest plates. In all caps, the word "ORACLE" had been written on the other two Zakus. I hadn't looked too closely at my own Zaku before heading into battle, but I suspected my own chest plate carried the same marking.
After attaching my Heat Hawk against my hip, I held a giant metal hand out toward my two squadmates with the thumb pointed upward. They copied my gesture after a second before one of them pointed back toward the 2nd Zeon Fleet.
We flew back to our fleet with our prize in tow. The heartening weight of the Admiral's escape pod weighed my Zaku down as we returned. There were no bright flashes of light emanating from either fleet, so the nuclear exchange was over at least.
As we arrived at the location where the Nordhausen should have been, there was nothing left. Everything on the fleet's eastward flank had been completely obliterated. Looking over at the 2nd Zeon Fleet as a whole, approximately half of the ships had been destroyed including the Nordhausen. As I saw when fighting against the enemy fleet, a single nuclear rocket to a cruiser was enough to completely destroy it.
This battle would go down as a victory for Zeon, yet we had sustained such grievous casualties. We couldn't recover from such losses like the Federation could.
Chances of victory aside, I had to worry about things in the short-term. My mobile suit would run out of oxygen eventually, so I needed to get into one of the ships. I fiddled with my radio for a minute, but all I got in response was buzzing static.
After a few more minutes, the static cleared just enough that I could vaguely hear people speaking over the channel for mobile suit pilots.
"Enemy ca… reported… seventy percent," a voice said over the radio, breaking up every few seconds.
"Hello, this is Lt. Sebastian Dogwood, squad leader of a mobile suit team. I am requesting clearance to board a ship, any ship. I have captured the enemy fleet's commander."
"Say… capture…?" The man on the other side of the call only spoke two words that I could fully comprehend, but he spoke them with the cadence of a question.
"This is Dogwood. I'm a Zaku pilot. I captured Admiral Tianem."
"Wh…?"
"Enemy admiral captured. Let me in," I said, losing my patience.
"Roger!" The radio operator finally said something that I fully comprehended, and I was at least mollified in the knowledge that my message had gone through.
After a few more minutes, a small fighter jet called a Dopp floated toward me. I held the ornate escape pod out for the Dopp to see, and it turned around at a lazy pace as if it wanted me to follow. The Dopp led me to the fleet's flagship, a Gwazine-class battleship called the Gidoru. As we approached the Gidoru, three Zaku-sized hatches opened, revealing mobile suit docks contained within.
Shrugging, I said, "I guess that's our red carpet."
I floated into a dock, and several clamps quickly fastened against my Zaku's joints. Though my Zaku moved into a stand-by posture, its grip on Tianem's escape pod remained firm. The hatch closed, and the static over the radio instantly disappeared.
Now fully comprehensible, the man on the other side of the call said, "Zaku pilot, can you repeat your earlier message?"
"Yes." I cleared my throat. "This is Lt. Sebastian Dogwood. I have captured Vice Admiral Tianem."
Loud cheering came from the other side of the call, and I could tell that several men had gathered around the radio when they heard that the admiral of the enemy fleet had been captured. After a moment, the radio operator responded. "Just stay where you are. I'll send three squads of guards immediately."
The call cut out, and I leaned back in my crash harness. The adrenaline was starting to flood out of my bloodstream, and the events of the past hour finally caught up with me. I sank a cruiser and disabled three battleships. How many men were aboard those ships?
That wasn't all. The realization that the Nordhausen had been destroyed suddenly hit me like a truck. Every crewmember save for Oracle and Sparrow squads were dead. Roth and Donnelly were snippy jerks, but they were still on my side. They didn't deserve to die in some unnamed battle alongside a hundred thousand others.
I flipped over to my squad's channel and immediately heard Vultee's exhilarated voice say, "We got him! We actually got him! We're going to be heroes!"
Ramos, just as excited, said, "Hell yeah, brother! How many ships did you get? I took out six. Call me Diego Ramos, ace pilot."
"Just three on my end, unless you count the shot I took on the flagship. I was too busy following the Lieutenant to focus much on shooting cruisers," Vultee said.
That was the privilege of technological advantage. Our mobile suits gave us such a leg up that it would inevitably change the course of war forever. Eventually, the Earth Federation would create its own mobile suits, and every battle from that point forward would involve teams of mobile suits fighting one another.
For that moment, we held the technological edge, and we would have to press our advantage if we had any chance of winning the war. Vultee, Ramos, and I came out of that battle with quite a few kills, but Zeon couldn't sustain such losses. Eventually, we would end up like Carthage, dead in the ground beneath salted fields.
A team of Zeon soldiers wearing body armor and wielding shotguns floated into the hangar. I didn't see what happened from inside the cockpit, but they floated back into my view after a few minutes with the admiral and his guards in tow.
Tianem was officially a prisoner of Zeon.