Arlette Almage once engineered mobile suits for the Principality of Zeon, and Danton Hyleg once test-piloted them for Neo Zeon. In U.C. 0096, months after the affair of Laplace's Box closes, the Earth Federation hires the two civilians onto a survey team sent to Axis, a severed asteroid fragment drifting outside the Earth Sphere. The base they board should be empty. It is not, and the ambush waiting inside drags both of them back into a war they had already left behind.