EXO did not like the Caribbean. The sticky air clung to their skin when they were used to the more temperate weather in Korea or China, and the comforts of home were conspicuously absent in the crooked streets built of delirious conquest hundreds of years past. They were hard-pressed to find a phone or Internet signal, the roads were rough and jostled their van too much for their bodies already abused by the long journey from space, and when they arrived at the UNPC base the rooms were cramped and bare, the food unfamiliar.

Suho barely had time to settle into the bunk he shared with Sehun when they received a message requiring them to be ready for duty the next morning at 0900 hours. Then he ordered a lights out for all and pondered whether EXO would ever sleep in the same beds for more than a few nights.

He had looked at the mission plan for the next day. At 1000 hours Big Bang and the Wonder Girls would be deployed to the American Islands to quell the worst of the fighting through disarming and incapacitation techniques. U-Kiss was headed to Samana and SHINee was going to St. Martin under the same orders, with EXO, 2PM, After School, and Miss A remaining on standby at strategic air points around the islands. If any of the standby teams were ordered to sortie, they were to move in in waves of one long-range suit and one heavy suit, with melee units following up. At that point the mission would turn to destroying all enemies, regardless of the safety of their pilots. The leaders of the coup d’etat valued impressing the public over international treaty regulations, and a flashy massacre of the villains responsible for civilian slaughter would accomplish just that.

…

Sehun had cereal, which was soggy by the time he forced himself to finish it, for breakfast. Then EXO left as a team for the hangars, though it was mostly because there were few cafeteria tables, and no one wanted to sit with pilots from more experienced teams.

“Bet you think you’re more experienced than me now that you’ve been in a real battle,” he teased Luhan as they walked.

“Oh, I’m more experienced than you,” Luhan replied. “But not in a good way.”

He punched Sehun’s arm playfully but his expression was strained. “Try not to get killed, okay?”

Sehun was too jittery to think of a response to that. He only shrugged and grinned at Luhan, bouncing from one foot to the other because the pace Suho set at the front of the group was too slow.

“Make sure you keep your shields system up,” Luhan said as they entered the hot, dry air of the hangar. “And don’t ignore the computer’s warnings. They help you.”

“Okay!” Sehun replied, but he was too preoccupied with the way Tornado’s armor glinted in the bright tropical sun to pay attention.

…

Luhan knew the others were sweating from the relentless sun, but his back was soaked with sweat before he even stepped inside the cockpit of Telekinesis. When he the air conditioning his teeth began to chatter uncontrollably, so he settled for being uncomfortably hot rather than unbearably cold.

Activating EXO-002 Telekinesis. Transferring power to Lu Han.

“Ready?” Sehun’s face appeared on his computer’s screen over their shared airwave. Luhan nodded and flapped his hand at Sehun, motioning for him to get away and concentrate already.

EXO-002 Telekinesis ready for launch. Launching in 3.....2.....1.....

Luhan shut his eyes involuntarily, and by the time he opened them the system’s autopilot was already sliding him into place in between Chanyeol and Xiumin.

The sky was blindingly blue that day, nothing like the drizzling blue-green they had landed in the day before. According to his computer screen, there was an hour of pre-programmed flying before they reached the standby point.

…

Chanyeol stifled a yawn as Suho finished reading the latest update of the battle to all the members of EXO.

“Why were we even called here?” Baekhyun complained. “We’ll never get to see any action at this rate.”

“Not true,” Kris pointed out. “There are reports of reinforcements coming from the Atlantic. The battle for St. Martin could continue for days, which means we’ll definitely be deployed.”

D.O. sighed. “I’d rather them decide to deploy or not now. Anything is better than all of this waiting. It’s boring.”

“Your life is so hard,” Sehun teased, his voice whispering through his teeth on the s sounds.

“It is,” D.O. agreed. “I have to take care of you kids.”

“You would do well to remember that I’m taller than you!” Chanyeol bellowed into the microphone, causing the rest of the members to wince at the static feedback.

“Guys,” Kai interrupted suddenly. “I just got a distress signal from 2PM.”

“What?” Chen asked. “I’m not receiving it.”

“I got it,” Tao said.

“I didn’t,” Luhan piped in.

…

“There must be some interference with the radio waves,” Kris mused. “But who has the technology to do that? It wasn’t in the mission briefing, that’s for sure.”

“The problem is,” Xiumin interrupted, squinting at the information displayed on his screen, “now that the communication isn’t working, we can’t contact command with whether or not to deploy to 2PM’s site. What if Miss A or After School decides to go too? Then this area will be vulnerable.”

“It’s a risk we can’t take,” D.O. decided. “If both Miss A and After School assume that one of us is deploying to reinforce 2PM, and we don’t deploy, they’ll be screwed. We can’t let the enemy capture a UNPC mobile suit.”

“We don’t have clearance to make that decision though,” Kai said.

“Weren’t you listening to TVXQ’s speech?” D.O. snapped. “Whatever we have to do, we need to make this mission a success.”

“We could leave half of us here,” Lay suggested. “You know, split it up EXO-M and EXO-K.”

Xiumin shook his head to himself and was opening his mouth to respond, but Tao beat him to it.

“No way,” he said. “Six of us won’t be enough to help 2PM at all. Besides, we are one, remember?”

…

Earthquake’s controls were familiar under D.O.’s touch, and it was easy to maintain his position in the formation even after autopilot was turned off. Traveling at highest speed, EXO reached 2PM’s waiting point about half an hour after they departed their own waiting point.

When they got there, a battle was raging. The Russian suits were easy to pick out from the UNPC suits because while the UNPC suits were colored silver and blue and grey and other colors, the Russian suits were all a solid, muted red like dried blood. D.O. leaned forward to speak into his microphone.

“Formation Omega, right guys?” he asked.

The screen crackled with static and an error message popped up. Communication lines down.

“Damn,” he muttered to himself, really hoping that it was Formation Omega.

He pushed a lever forward and Earthquake dropped from the formation, circling under the battle to emerge on the other side. At the same instant, Kai appeared next to him, and he knew that it was indeed Formation Omega when the younger boy activated his shields system and began charging his beam cannon, protecting Earthquake within Black Hole’s range.

…

The blast radius of Black Hole’s cannon was thirty feet, more than enough to incinerate any known mobile suit model. Any suits that weren’t completely reduced to ashes were severely damaged, and any pilots that managed to avoid the blast were thrown off and scattered. Black Hole’s computer automatically checked for any UNPC suits in the line of fire so Kai could readjust his aim, which took a few tries. Immediately following his first shot, Kai began recharging the cannon and watched Earthquake shoot forward along the path of destruction, slashing right and left at the Russian suits.

Charging beam cannon....48%......53%.....67%...

Kai jerked the controls around, constantly glancing at the numbers and data fluctuating on the computer screen as he looked for a clean shot. He found it at two o’clock high, where three Russian suits were being pushed back by the combined efforts of Sunburst and a 2PM suit.

86%.....94%.....charged.

Kai clenched his left fist on the control, pulling the trigger that gave the command to fire. Two of the Russian suits narrowly avoided being destroyed by the blast, escaping with only arm and leg damage, but the third was caught head-on, the metal of the suit blazing white-hot before it exploded into shrapnel and ash.

At that point the battle had become too muddled to use the beam cannon any longer, so Black Hole slid out its sniper rifle, smaller and less accurate that Phoenix’s. Kai expanded the shields system to let Dragon into its protection, and he squinted through the lowering eyepiece for his next shot.

…

At close range, Kris was able to latch a communication wire onto one of Black Hole’s open ports, opening up communication between himself and Kai.

“We’re breaking formation,” he shouted through the microphone as he shot at an approaching Russian suit. “We can’t afford to continue the battle without any communication ability.”

“Reinforcements?” Kai predicted.

“Yeah,” Kris replied. “I’m sending up a flare so the others know, but in case they don’t see it you should fly above the fighting and send up another one. We’re retreating with 2PM as long as we have the element of surprise, and hopefully we’ll be able to re-establish contact with command as soon as we’re far enough away.”

“Did you tell a 2PM member yet?”

“Yeah, Taecyeon! Go now and prepare to head northwest. Tell anyone you meet on the way.”

“Okay!”

Black Hole’s rifle went back onto its back and it maneuvered slowly over the battle, any shots aimed at it glancing off the particle shield that protected it. Kris waited until he could spot its distinctive swirling triangle far overhead. Then he pulled up the signal screen of Dragon’s computer, selecting the signal for retreat.

…

When Chen saw the distinctive blue flare shoot simultaneously from above him and underneath him, he knew they were making their retreat as quickly as possible. After securing seven o’clock of Formation Omega, he had moved onto stage two and went to assist Baekhyun at six o’clock, where they were back to back while defending themselves from their enemies. As soon as they saw the signal however, they dropped out of the battle, plummeting down towards the tropical ocean below. It took their opponents a moment to realize what had happened, and in that moment they both took off in opposite directions. The Russian suits, large and bulky, dove, but could not match the superior maneuverability of the UNPC suits as they sped away at top speed, circling to discover which direction they would retreat in.

From the direction Kris was flying, it seemed to be northwest. Chen wrenched the controls around and steered Lightning towards the stylized wings welded onto Dragon’s fuel reactor. It was reasonable for them to be retreating, he reasoned, given that they had no way of communicating with each other or with command. But he found it a little too simple. If the Russians knew the position of one UNPC team, they certainly would know the position of EXO. Why would they attack 2PM if they knew reinforcements were so nearby? The only answer was that they wanted to gain the airspace 2PM was defending. Through disrupting communications, they could force a UNPC retreat and gain the strategic point.

About three miles away from the battle, communication was restored, and they counted their damages. After determining that nothing was critical in either team, the communication line fell silent, and Chen took the chance to voice his opinion.

...

“It is the only answer,” Lay agreed. “We should have foreseen something like this, but how could we have known about this communication disruption technology?”

“We should assume that the communication is disrupted by the mobile suits themselves,” Nichkhun said. “We were fine until the Russians were about three miles from us.”

“That’s true,” Kris said. “But we were more than three miles from you and we were having scattered communication problems. There must be another disrupting factor. And how did you get a message to us with disrupted communication?”

“Wooyoung took his mobile suit out of the disruption range, but we lost communication with him too. Hopefully he finds his way back to the Cuban base,” Junho said, his voice worried.

Lay chewed his lip as he looked around Unicorn’s side cameras and realized that, indeed, 2PM only flew with five members.

“So we’re dealing with a close-range disturbance device, probably on the mobile suits themselves,” D.O. mused. “And a long-range one that’s slightly faulty, and that we have yet to discover the source of.”

“That’s right,” Nichkhun replied. “The only answer is to capture a Russian for ourselves and see.”

Lay was skeptical about that; he had heard of the self-destruction mechanisms common on newly developed mobile suit technology. The explosion from the mechanisms often severely damaged whatever mobile suits were nearby as well, and the UNPC needed every mobile suit it could muster if it was to pull through against both China and Russia.

His sigh whistled over the communication line and someone laughed.

“Right,” Taecyeon said. “More work.”

…

Kris received a reply from command just as they were nearing After School’s point. 2PM was to return to base immediately, rendezvous with around twenty mass-production mobile suits for backup, and attempt to regain the airspace lost to the Russians. EXO was to return to their own airspace, where intelligence had determined there were Chinese mobile suits encroaching. Both teams were to establish signal systems in case of communications being cut off again, based on codes programmed into their mobile suit computers.

Tao rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands as he heard their leader read command’s orders.

“Any news about the land battles?” he asked.

“SHINee has secured the ports of the Dominican Republic, but Big Bang is still having trouble with forces around the American Islands. The Wonder Girls and U-Kiss are steadily pushing forces towards Big Bang from the south, and the sandwich maneuvering should scatter the enemy and allow them to finish them off.”

“So we’re winning?” Sehun asked, sounding almost surprised.

“Loosely, that is,” Suho answered. “But yeah. Our first battle as EXO, and we’ve almost made it through alive.”

Saying good-bye to 2PM and heading back to their airspace and the approaching Chinese, Tao couldn’t help but think otherwise.

…

About halfway to their assigned airspace, in the vicinity of Miss A’s airspace, communication problems began again. Most members were able to contact each other, but half were unable to receive nearby messages, and none could contact command, so far away at the Cuban base. Baekhyun was only able to know this by docking a communication line with Chanyeol, because he was one of the members with no communication ability whatsoever.

Chanyeol was relaying information to him in small bursts as he received it from the others.

“The detour to Miss A’s airspace should only take us fifteen minutes longer, if nothing’s wrong over there.” A pause. “If there’s fighting, we’re going to do the same thing as with 2PM--Formation Omega with a standard retreat signal.” Another pause. “Pay attention to the other signals we send out, and use the guide on your mobile suit computer to decipher the signal code.”

Baekhyun ground his teeth as he nodded to Chanyeol’s face on his screen. He hated not being able to know anything, but he was going to have to it up. EXO finalized their mission plans and Chanyeol detached from Baekhyun’s mobile suit. Then they all headed south, towards Miss A’s airspace.

And though he was finally going into battle, Baekhyun never suspected that he would be going alone, cut off from the other EXO members.