Pseudo Gospel, Vol 1: Fly Me to the Moon

by Dee Arris

First segment of a revisionist story in which the action takes place largely in London. Priority on characterisation to distinguish my own cast from Anno's originals.

1. The 5th Kind, Impossible Things P1

NOTES FROM THE AUTHOR & LEGAL DISCLAIMER:

Inspired by NeonGenesisEvangelion and RebuildofEvangelion, which is copyright© Hideaki Anno, GAINAX, Studio Khara, etall. 1995-2011.

All original characters herein are the intellectual property of the writer. Special thanks go out to Hikari, Anne, Ben and Em for the inspirations they provided. All music and cultural references cited are the property of their respective artists, authors, publishers, etc. and are used with the greatest respect. No profit was made by any party as a result of this writing.

PSEUDO GOSPEL EVANGELION
Vol. 1: "FLY ME TO THE MOON"

[E.S. Posthumus – "Ashielf Pi" – Cartographer, 2008]

Alternatively, YouTube user geekyfandubs' wonderfully rendered English adaptation of, "Cruel Angel's Thesis," by Yoko Takahashi.

Prologue
"Antarctica, 2000A.D.: The Fifth Kind"

No matter how much preparation you put into it, nothing short of being a seal can prepare you for the sheer biting cold of Antarctica. Fields of pure, pristine ice stretched out in all directions, beyond the scope of human vision, like a living canvas waiting for the stroke of God's brush. Professor Oliver Haddo thought it an appropriate description. The cable car offered precious little warmth and even through their thick parkas, he and his three companions felt the harsh wind redden their ears and cut away the moisture from their skin. Haddo easily ignored all these organic complaints by casting his gaze upwards towards the peak of Mount Sidley. Base camp was situated a short distance from the volcano's maw and stood out starkly against the white of the tundra, its orange tents and green-clad staff darting in and out like rabbits through their burrow. Towering above that miniscule inkblot of civilisation was the Egg. Titanic, crystalline, plugging the volcano as if it were a cork. From here it was the same featureless white as its surroundings, but upon closer inspection, when touched, its surface rippled and flexed with a perpetuating aurora.

Doctors Mabon and Ceinwen Silence were the first to disembark from the cable car when it reached its terminus, followed by elderly Professor Fordyce and finally Haddo and his wife Leah. The four of them crossed the grounds to the main tent. Printed on the front, as with the other tents, was a uniform crimson emblem displaying a simplistic profile of a human brain. The frontal lobe curled into a stylised, "G," and emerging from it along the right side were the letters, "ehirn," in a no-frills typeface. The Silences wrinkled their noses at it, not for the word itself, rather the fact they had not been allowed to name their own group. Haddo seemed to be bending over backwards to please whoever their benefactors were without question, which contradicted everything they knew about the man. Fordyce had started some absolutely blazing rows over their insistence to remain behind the scenes, convinced it was all some kind of cover-up for a mob operation. It only took a quick glimpse at the steep dome of the curious irregularity, the Egg, to remind them why their association had not collapsed in on itself. The five of them went inside to meet the last two of their number.

Standing behind a bank of machinery, jotting notes on a P.D.A. was Doctor Sternsinger of the Austrian Institute of Technology who was brought onboard the project by their benefactors, and to her right was Doctor Barnabas F. Creed, nursing a mug of coffee between his mitten-covered palms. Only a year previous Creed's research into theoretical physics regarding new kinds of energy had made him unpopular in scientific circles and was the target of much name-calling by the journals. Needless to say he was not the only one wondering about his recruitment, but took solace in the idea that obviously someone, at least one person, believed in his life's work. To that end, he did not question it. He was a man of few words anyway, so nobody thought this strange. He nodded his acknowledgement as they came inside, shaking hands only with Fordyce, whom he had the pleasure of first meeting during their student days.

"I see the committee got you out of your shell," said Fordyce good-naturedly. "What'd they use this time, crowbars?"

"Dynamite, I think," replied Creed. "I'm amazed they let you out of the old folks' home without your carer."

"You reckon they'd want this old hell-raiser around people with sensitivities?" smirked Mabon, pulling the woollen hat off his shaven head and stuffing it in his parka pocket.

"Less of the old," said Fordyce, cuffing the younger man while Creed poured them each a cup of coffee from a tartan thermos.

"Yvonne," said Leah Haddo, offering a hand. Yvonne Sternsinger looked up from her notes, brushed some of her reddish curls out of her face, and accepted the gesture with a sour smile.

"Leah," she responded, because they had already dispensed with formalities and agreed to call each other by their given names on the day they were all brought together. That was five or six months ago for her, but for the rest it was closer to a decade, when Fordyce was a university teacher in Edinburgh and Creed had just moved overseas to obtain funding for his doomed Super Solenoid Foundation.

"It's nice to see you out here with us," said Leah, "we really thought your work in Austria would keep you occupied."

"My team made progress faster than expected," explained Yvonne nonchalantly, not believing that her work on the MAGI project was important to the topic at hand, "anyway, I didn't want to turn around fifteen years from now and realise I missed this."

"Has there been any change?" asked Haddo.

"U.T.," Creed reminded her.

"Thank you, Barnabas," Yvonne nodded. "Our sound equipment did manage to pick up a rather interesting piece of evidence, if you'll please all gather 'round…" They did, and she pressed a switch on the console in front of her. A monitor lit up with a green sine wave displayed on its surface. A few seconds passed in absolute silence, then sharp points began to rise and drop, always at three second intervals. The volume and pattern were both constant, and when they realised they were listening to a heartbeat, the five arrivals were stunned into speechlessness. Fordyce turned his head slightly towards Haddo and immediately recognised the look on his former student's face. The flash in his eyes, the way his smile nearly split his face like a taut razor wire. It was a look of triumph.

"So there is something alive inside it," he said, maybe a bit unnecessarily, but it eased the tension of the words building up in all their throats.

"We were right to call it the Egg," noted Ceinwen. "So can we estimate when it'll hatch?"

"Not within a satisfactory timeframe," said Yvonne.

"Can we crack it open ourselves?" asked Haddo eagerly.

"We've tried," said Barnabas, voice never rising above a level monotone, "men have been at it using high-intensity flames and diamond- and haverite-tipped drills for days. Even sitting in the volcano seems to have done absolutely nothing. The core temperature's as low as it ever was. We've yet to even figure out what the wretched thing's made out of."

"Well, whatever's in there," Ceinwen sighed, exasperated, "I guess it's not coming out until it's ready, and we apparently have no possible way of telling when that'll be."

"Soon, I'm sure," Haddo murmured, turning back to the opening in the tent and the residual glow from the Egg coming over the caldera, "I can feel it in the air." Some of them chuckled to hear him make such an unscientific statement, but Fordyce and Barnabas did not share in their humour. Haddo pushed his dark glasses up the bridge of his nose with the index and middle fingers of his left hand and said, "Excellent work, everyone. We'll begin preparations for the contact operation on the Key at 0800 tomorrow. Good night, ladies, gentlemen."

Beginning at one minute past eight o'clock the next morning the Egg hatched. In the hours that succeeded it, the Earth was jolted violently from its axis. Three billion people died.

The event went down in history as the Second Impact.

Chapter 1
"London, 2015A.D.: Impossible Things, Part One"

The world was slowly recovering.

Nature was reasserting herself to repair the damage done to her eco-systems, but the oceans were still swollen, prompting the erection of protective sea-walls around the lower-sitting landmasses. Great patches of it had been dyed blood red and were no longer able to support life. Temperatures drastically shifted all around the globe. Some climates were only affected marginally, others more distinctly. Japan, for example, fast became a tourist favourite for its permanent summers. Cooling rain broke up the droughts that once riddled Africa. Natural disasters that followed in the tumultuous years following the event had forced an uneasy friendship between the governments, who had to put aside their pettier rivalries to focus on the great work of rebuilding their wounded planet.

In that respect, Second Impact was the firm hand that mankind needed. Conflicts still arose, as they probably always shall, but even more militant nations were agreed they had felt the wrath of a vengeful God, or at least that was the Church's stand. The alternative theory was a severe meteor collision, hence the popularly used name, First Impact being the event that wiped out the dinosaurs.

Whatever the reason, as eye-opening as it would doubtlessly be if someone could prove it beyond scrutiny, it presently meant nothing to the adolescent boy sitting on the steps outside the Borough High Street exit to London Bridge tube station. In his simple black zip-up jacket and battered trainers he looked at home in the metropolis, but he was really overwhelmed by it. Back in Cardiff he barely grasped local geography, so why the hell was he here in the easiest city in the world to get lost in? He could find a hotel, or at least go down the road to a café and grab a sandwich, but if he got out of seeing distance of the station he knew he might never find his way back to it. A feeling of inadequacy welled in the pit of his gut.

Where was his pick-up? The one with the nice tits who led him on with a time and date scrawled on the reverse of a vaguely promiscuous holiday snap included with his summons?

"This is dumb," he lamented quietly, hugging his rucksack to his chest. He checked over both shoulders to make sure nobody was watching him, then fished the picture out of the inside pocket of his jacket. The woman in it was standing on a beach. Ibiza or the Seychelles, he wasn't overly certain, but she was wearing trendy sunglasses, a summer hat and a showy swimsuit, and holding a fancy smoothie in one hand. She was attractive, certainly not supermodel proportions, but a far stretch from plain. Sort of comfortably in the middle. The words, "See you there! Love Abbey!" were scrawled in black marker to the left of the woman alongside his initials, with love-hearts under the exclamation points and a line arcing cheekily towards her exposed cleavage. He thought it was cute. A little bit like something out of CarryOnCamping. When he spotted the black car pulled up by the kerb, he stuffed the picture clumsily in the pocket of his jeans and started to get up, stopping at a half-squat upon the realisation the people climbing out were most definitely not Abigail Creed. They couldn't be there for him. Not a chance. He was just being paranoid, intimidated by his environment.

"Michael Prester Silence?" asked one. He said nothing.

"Come with us, please," said the other. The politeness was a formality. He said nothing. The second man made a grab for his arm. He would have had him if not for a sudden intense quake beneath their feet. Something clicked in Michael's brain, and though he was confused by the uproar, he decided to seize this opportunity to escape, pounding his way through the crowds of Londoners and along the pavement towards Great Dover Street. The agents, to their credit professionals, were quick to find their balance and chase after him.

[Klaxons – "Atlantis to Interzone" – Myths of the Near Future, 2007]

"Get your arse back here, kid!" one of them yelled.

"Kiss it first, slap-head!" Michael shot back, adding a meek, "Oh, shit," when he saw how much this agitated the closer of the two, who was indeed as bald as a bollard. Michael made a frantic scramble off the pavement, across the street and down an adjoining road, leaving the man to stumble painfully into a lamp-post. He also incited some very colourful language from the drivers who screeched to a halt to avoid running him over. This was nuts! Who were they? MI5? 6? Flying Squad? What had he done wrong? Well, apart from nicking a few sweets from the supermarket when he was eight, and sneaking his own food into the cinema, and that one time he did pot at his mate Ianto's birthday bash last year. None of that seemed to him that it would ruffle Military Intelligence's feathers, so either there was someone at dispatch who was really bored or leaving crafty Haribo packets on the floor had been declared a violation of the cleaning lady's civil rights. He almost tripped a couple of times, since he was still clutching his bag to his chest, and since he did not want to look back over his shoulder, he could not tell if he had time to slip it onto his back before the suits reached him. The third time he actually did lose his balance and went rolling along the tarmac.

He came to a stop beside a light blue car. It was a Nissan Z, a bit beaten, probably from the '70s, the ones with the big, round, sunken headlights. The driver's side door popped open and out stepped Abbey Creed, wearing a bright red uniform of vaguely military design and a beret on her raven-haired head.

"Get in!" she yelled. Michael knew it was a very silly thing to hop in a car with a woman he never really met, even if she was a friend of the family as he was told, but with the agents rapidly encroaching on him, he easily deemed the lesser of two evils and did as he was told. The car peeled away before the doors were shut. Michael curled up on the back seat when he heard bullets ring off the rear of the vehicle. He gathered up the courage to peer through the window and saw the men heading in the direction of their own car. One was talking actively into a featureless black mobile 'phone.

Another quake helped him find his voice. "What the hell was that about!" he shrieked.

"Exciting, ennit?" Abbey beamed at him. "Buckle up an' hold on!" Michael would have protested had the car not skidded so suddenly into the next street, plastering his face comically across the window. After a few moments, they were travelling at a high but steadier pace. "Now what were you saying, love?" asked the driver. Michael unstuck his mush from the fibreglass and shook it back into shape, gingerly testing every contour with his fingertips.

"What…?" he started, but she had already taken one hand off the steering wheel and was fishing for something in the glove compartment. She found what she was looking for and passed it over her shoulder to him.

"Might wanna read through that," she said. It was a green book wider than it was long and made from a material that felt like plasticine but had the consistency of ordinary paper. Printed on the front cover was a big red emblem resembling one half of a fig leaf, tilted at a downward angle, and four large letters in a Roman font spilling out of the left edge, which was flat. Framing the image in two crescents was the phrase, "God's in his Heaven. All's right with the world."

Michael read the name composed by the four letters, "NERV. So you really do work for my godfather's agency." He imagined it should put his mind at ease to know that, but it didn't. All he really knew about it was that his godfather was a long time colleague of his late parents, and that they were involved in some kind of government contract. He was spared all the boring details, by which he meant all the details full stop.

"We're a private security service of sorts," Abbey said wryly, "sanctioned by Her Majesty's government and funded by the U.N. Those Military Intelligence gorillas desperately want us under their jurisdiction. Of course it'd never happen through proper channels, so they wanted to use you to coerce us."

"What if they had caught me?" Michael dared to ask.

"They wouldn't have," Abbey insisted, "but hypothetically, we never negotiate with bullies. Ever."

Michael gulped and decided to change the subject, "What are you sanctioned to do?"

"Remember that quake a few minutes ago?"

"Yeah."

"That's not what we're sanctioned to handle."

"Oh."

"But what caused the quake's a different story."

She might have continued if not for a sudden outburst from the public tannoy system. Small circular holes opened up along the length of the pavement on either side and the speakers grew up on metal stalks, each easily about twenty feet in height.

A crackly, recorded voice emitted in a cheery tone that could only be described as patronising, "Attention, everyone. As of 3.30 p.m. today a state of emergency has been declared for the Central London area. All citizens are advised to head to their designated shelters or evacuate the area within twenty minutes or risk exposure. Barriers will be erected as per regulation ordered by the Home Office. We repeat…"

The message droned on for a second time. The corner of Abbey's mouth twitched. "Whoever they got to recite that wants a slap. Right in the gob," she said, taking one hand off the steering wheel to mime-smack someone with the flat of her palm. Michael managed a quiet chuckle and the woman smiled. Outside, people swiftly disappeared down alleyways and into nondescript doors between the buildings, or clambered onto busses and into cars faster than usual. Abbey, not missing a beat, manoeuvred her Z-car onto the vehicle-path of London Bridge just as the air was filled with a thunderous, "wohm-wohm-wohm." Michael bent double and covered his ears as the repetitive snarls of mighty engines vibrated in his skull. He risked a peek, and his eyes bulged in their sockets as a squadron of helicopter gun-ships swooped in above them.

"Why's the Air Force here?" he asked. "They wouldn't be doing exercises this far into the city, surely?"

"Why don't we find out for ourselves?" came the cryptic reply as Abbey brought the Z-car to the side of the vehicle-path, so as not to hinder fellow motorists. Leaving the motor running, she got out a pair of binoculars. Michael remembered the alert and regretted his question, because he now had a very dreadful sense of exposure.

A dull hum emanated from the water below and everything around them; the river, the bridge, the car itself, even the fillings in his teeth, rattled. Something was growing up from the belly of the Thames. Something big. Gargantuan. Michael was about to find out exactly why the Air Force were there. The mystifying part would be deciding if he could believe it.

XXX

It was an act of incompetence to alert the civilians with only moments to spare. Once they caught sight of the invader, there was sure to be a panic. The Ministry of Defence had dispatched troops to aid the police in the task of evacuating the danger-zone, but considering this stretched from around Paddington to Blackfriars, from Birdcage Walk up as far as Regent's Street, it looked much easier on paper. Understandably the decade-and-a-half the enemy had given them allowed the brass to develop a certain complacency towards the enormity of the threat. A war council were assembled at Whitehall, including two men dubbed experts on affairs of this arcane nature among their number. The younger of the two wore amber-tinted glasses and a white jacket and gloves over a seamless black outfit. His hair could do with combing, and his jaw was accentuated by a beard, while his elder deputy was clean-shaven and presentable in a maroon uniform of the same manufacture. The two sat, unreadable and almost grimly quiet, as they watched the wall-mounted screens with their counterparts from the various defensive branches.

The abomination on the monitors tore the Apache battalion to shreds in record time. It was bombarded with the very latest in hard light photon weaponry and missiles from accompanying aerodynes, but still it was unscathed. It just continued its lurching path along the length of the Thames, smashing Tower Bridge like a rotten wood gate and raining debris, vehicles and pedestrians into the unforgiving, overlapping currents.

"They've not lost their edge," said the bespectacled man with more than a hint of smugness. His fingers were knitted across his face, supported by his elbows on the table, obscuring the devilish smirk on his chiselled face.

The creature raised one gangly arm as long as the rest of it, the proportions making it even more hideous, and a sharp bone protruding from its elbow slid easily into its flesh, only to emerge from its palm and spear the nearest aerodyne, crashing it into an Apache. They both tumbled into the river and were crushed under the weight of the thing's toe-less foot.

"Mobilise all available Challenger-3s and Stormer teams!" the Chief of General Staff barked into a telephone. "It cannot be allowed to get onto land! I don't care if the C3's not set for deployment yet, this is an emergency situation! Do it or I'll have your plums!" He slammed the receiver down roughly in its cradle and looked to the rest. "Now we'll give that hell-spawn a taste of real power."

The bespectacled man ignored this act of posturing and turned to the most important figure at the table. "Milord Secretary," he said with utmost respect, "though I don't doubt the Chief of Staff's men or their abilities, it was my agency who were given authority in these situations. Why not allow my people to go on standby, should the Challengers fail?"

"An upstart group of bookworms and shut-ins?" the Chief took the bait. "NERV, indeed! A tragic waste of time and resources that would have been better used in our overseas campaigns! I ask that these men, not even military personnel, be removed from the council room this instant!"

"Hear, hear!" chorused the First Sea Lord over his seventh cup of coffee for the day, along with several other indignant men.

"Enough," scolded the Secretary of State for Defence, "we are men of prestige. Now's not the time to squabble like wretched schoolboys, for God's sake." He turned to the bespectacled man and his deputy. "Professor Haddo, Professor Fordyce, the Prime Minister and Her Majesty have both spoken to me favourably of your organisation. You are fully certain that you're equipped to engage this enemy?"

"That, milord," replied Oliver Haddo, pushing his glasses up the length of his nose, "is why NERV exists."

"We already have the backing of the appropriate authorities," Fordyce put in, "all that remains is the necessary permission to act."

The Chief of Staff excused himself from the room on pretence of lavatorial obligations, but once he was out of earshot, he took a mobile from his pocket and rang a number. "Prepare an N² imploder," he ordered in hushed tones, "we're going to hit the bastard with the strongest controlled blast known to man."

At the exact same moment, Oliver Haddo said into the telephone on the table, "Doctor Sternsinger, ready Unit-00 for sortie."

A regiment of experimental C3 combat tanks and Stormer tracked platforms rumbled along either side of the river. Some took up positions on the nearest available Thames crossing that would give them distance to make their long-range weapons effective, which was Southwark. The rushed evacuation procedures had made Cannon Street Railway Bridge unusable due to the sheer amount of emergency activity occurring there. The priority of those stationed at Southwark was to halt the target's rampage as far from the tracks as possible, limiting the volume of displaced water that would wash up and cause floods. The on-site officer in command gave the order and the army unleashed their entire collective fury against the creature. It stumbled, dazed but somehow protected against the onslaught. Any solid projectiles detonated harmlessly before entering range while photon energy bolts dissipated pathetically in mid-air.

It brought up its arms again, treble-digit hands splayed, and caught two incoming Storm Shadows. One split like tissue paper through its fingers, the other stretched its arm back behind its head, or what constituted its head. Its torso was a single bulk, flat on top with a small, white face resembling a bird's skull just above its chest, in which was embedded a glimmering scarlet orb framed by a dozen external ribs. The ruined cruise missile fell into the river and exploded, belching water onto the roads. An unearthly low rumble that might almost have been a growl rose from inside the monster. It shifted its centre of gravity, pitching the second missile into the C3s, demolishing them as well as a prodigious section of the south bank. It let its hands dip into the water, cooling its scalded skin. Then a light shone behind its pinprick holes, and a massive surge of energy cut through the river on every side of it, slicing the remaining vehicles and the soldiers manning them to ribbons.

The bridges trembled on their foundations. Some of the people onboard the trains started praying or huddling their families close.

"Photon throwers, plasma fragmentation grenades," the Minister for Technology croaked as he watched from the war room, "even guided missiles and artillery fire. We've given it our best."

"Don't feel bad, Minister," said Professor Fordyce, "the Angel is using an Absolute Terror Field. Conventional weapons stand no chance against it."

The Secretary of State for Defence sighed, rubbed his temples and turned to the man in the white coat. "Your move, Haddo. I hope you haven't overestimated your own capabilities. So far as I've seen, that monster's an immovable object."

"We will meet it with an unstoppable force," chuckled Oliver Haddo. "Your cooperation is appreciated, milord. Please inform the Prime Minister that we will soon have this situation well under control. Ensure the area is properly converted to civil fortress formation."

"Doctor Sternsinger's on the line," said Fordyce, passing him the telephone receiver.

"Launch Unit 00," said Haddo.

XXX

Michael wound down the car window as fast as he could and hung his head out to retch up his guts. The flares of light caused by combusting vehicles blinded him, the bangs deafened him and the unseen waves the monster was sending out nauseated him as much as the stench of gunpowder, O-zone and death. The bridge was engulfed in a shadow, and Michael turned his gaze upwards to stare in horror at the towering abomination. It didn't seem to notice them, if it did it might have let them live a little longer, but he knew it would just plough through the supports, crippling the bridge and sending him and Abbey both into their watery graves.

"Ooh, lookee!" his companion whooped. "Here's the best bit!"

Michael gawked as the second impossible thing that day popped up from behind some buildings.

[The Prodigy – "Invaders Must Die" – Invaders Must Die, 2009]

The new arrival was a head shorter than the monster. It stood with a slightly hunched over posture. Its frame was lithe and pliant, with slender limbs and a broad chest. From top to toe it was covered in bright orange, segmented armour, with plenty of discernible cusps and flections, so onlookers could see how it slotted together over the layer of spongy mail underneath. A glassy, black patch on its leg shoulder was marked with the designation, "EVA UNIT 00," in neon green text. Printed in a thinner, narrower font across its left pectoral was the name, "LAHASH." Coming out of its back was a thick, brown cable that trailed away through the streets like some enormous earthworm. The head was encased in an open-fronted helmet, and was devoid of facial features save for a long, angular chin and a single red eye.

"Now that Angel's got it comin'!" Abbey grinned.

"Angel?" Michael squeaked, befuddled, scared and excited all at once. "An Angel and a robot are about to have a fight over the Thames…is this normal in London?"

"Makes you wish you'd moved here earlier, eh?" said Abbey.

"Uh…"

"Let's get out of range. Can't distract the pilot by sitting here like a pair of lemons, can we?" Flooring the accelerator, she made a beeline for the marginally more stable ground just beyond London Bridge's far gate. The sizes of the combatants meant that even blocks away they could still watch the sparks fly relatively unencumbered. Lahash stepped off the platform that had ferried it to the surface and took several heaving strides towards the Angel. It descended into the river up to its waist and hefted its weapon, a double-barrelled firearm of a type Michael had never seen before even in action films, and he had seen plenty of those. It loosed a round of incendiary bolts, and for a moment it looked like they ignited short of their destination just like the previous attempts, but upon closer inspection, there were small shapes materialising just in time to defend the beast; a series of hexagonal ripples, fizzling in and out of vision with great rapidity. The Angel blinked in a manner that was almost cute, casting the whole of its attention on this latest antagonist.

Lahash lowered its gun, the pilot deciding it was a useless practise, and its eye rotated in its socket as if considering its options. It raised its free hand and the fingertips shone with pale yellow energy as it called up its own, more vibrant version of the Angel's protective barrier. The two fields met in the middle and Michael knew that at this point, the outcome would depend upon which one crumbled first. Another helicopter broke through the cloud carrying a white, keg-shaped device on one of its hard-points. Abbey's face twisted in confusion. She peered through her binoculars and at the moment she recognised the helicopter's payload, the colour drained from her cheeks.

"Idiots!" she cried. "They're dropping an N² mine! Get down!" She pinned her teenaged charge to the floor of his seat as the device was dropped straight towards the Angel. Lahash had also spotted the incoming object, pulled itself free from the fight and broke into a dash back towards land, but the water slowed its pace. The device went off in a magnificent outpour of fire and light, and the resultant shockwaves brutally shoved Lahash forward. It crashed down onto the street, flattening barriers and levelling two warehouses. Abbey and Michael cried out as the Z-car was sent rolling one way from the initial explosion, then was sucked back through the air and bent against a lamp-post as the mine's delayed implosion reaction drew it in. They were pelted with debris, pipes, bricks, wooden planks and even lumps of tarmac and scraps of rubbish. Lahash's weight kept it from being hurled into the heart of the implosion, but it was still dragged enough to collapse belly-up in the water.

XXX

"Ha!" boomed the Chief of General Staff, pointing a fat finger at Haddo. "I knew you were all bluster! Your oversized tin-can did beggar all against that thing, but my lads proved why it's the job of the real Armed Forces to defend crown and country!" There was a deal of protest from the other military commanders who had not thought of it first. The Secretary was livid, even outraged, and was soon caught up in a ferocious argument over insubordination. When the smoke cleared from their screens the noise was sucked into a devastated abyss. The Angel had indeed sustained damaged, but was still standing. The mine had caused more harm to Unit 00 and the surrounding area, turning a whole section of the Thames into a near-perfect circle. Gills opened wide in the monster's chest, raking in as much oxygen as they could. Its porcelain face cracked and splintered apart, a new one growing in as fast as a shark grows new teeth.

"It can't be," choked the Chief.

"But it is," said Haddo crossly. "All your stunt did was delay the inevitable." He addressed the rest of the conclave and the Secretary. "Gentlemen, my people will continue to endeavour to stop this threat. On the off-chance we can't, well you all saw who exactly ballsed it up for you by compromising us."

"NERV will be submitting a formal complaint against the Chief of General Staff, Sir Neville Festing," said Fordyce gruffly, "for gross misconduct and unnecessary endangerment before the week is out. Happy birthday." The men left to plot their next move. This left a very flustered Secretary thankful he wasn't going to be for the chop and a very nervous Chief dabbing his forehead with a handkerchief and bumbling his way through what nobody could work out was an apology or an excuse.

CLOSING STATEMENT:

To purists, I understand if you would have preferred to see Anno's original cast playing their traditional roles, but I hope, and would appreciate if, you still enjoy my take on the material. I respect the fact I can't please everyone but if you don't like it, at least don't ruin it for people who did by filling the review section with flames. Any constructive criticism or suggestions for future chapters is both encouraged and welcomed.

In the meantime!

The Angel continues its rampage through London, and while paramedics race to rescue the pilot of Unit 00, NERV reveals its secret weapon. Michael faces his godfather and is forced him to make a choice that will forever affect the course of his life. The great battle for the Earth, fifteen years in the making, begins now.