Chapter 9

Yam Strikes!

~'/|\'~

The alarms began to scream in geological monitoring stations all across the planet. These places had an even more important role in the Aeon War; orbital bombardment would show up, just as earlier nuclear tests had, if the Migou were ever to escalate the war. They also functioned, on the instruction of the GIA, as watchtowers for any possible sign that the antediluvian Valusians might awaken. Those sapient reptilian creatures, to the dinosaurs as humanity itself is to the mammals, were thought to be long extinct. However, certain of their facilities had been found in the construction of the various geocities that now dotted the globe, in tectonically stable regions of the planet, staffed by automated systems watching over cyrogenic pods. Although no awake Valusians had ever been encountered (barring those individuals from the pods who were shipped off to labs, to be interrogated and vivisected), and although the discoveries had not been made public, the Valusians were now viewed as a potential threat. There was no desire, after all, for another side to join the Aeon War.

The reason for their alarm, though, was not so critical. They were detecting an earthquake, which, as the network which connected these facilities linked up their data and fed it through the processor Limited AIs, appeared to be shallow, and producing movement directly above the epicentre calculated to be categorised as a VII on the Modified Mercalli Scale.

Of course, the worry increased when it was noted that the epicentre was directly below Lake Michigan. And that was a concern, because there shouldn't be any tectonic activity in that location. Considering the proximity of such a site to the centre of government for the entire New Earth Government, there was a mass collective grabbing of secure telephones and hurried use of the emergency number to the local military.

The water purity facilities on Lake Michigan were having their own problems, of course. Quite apart from the fact that the sides of the lake were caving in, as the water impossibly swelled, flooding the flat land around it, the temperature of the water was rising precipitously, currents of heated water flowing up from the bottom of the lake. In the wild ideas thrown around by the local scientists and engineers trying to explain what the hell was going on, suggestions of a precision Migou strike against the mantle, creating a volcano by punching through the Earth's surface, were thrown about. These made their way back to the NEG military, where they matched a low probability prediction for how a Migou limited scale bombardment would begin.

Global threat levels were raised to Code Sigma to deal with the possibility that the Migou had begun orbital bombardment, with a resultant rise in the latitude for deployment of nuclear weapons. Across the world, forces moved to high alert. This build up was noted by the Migou, who began moving reserve forces forwards, from their fortified stationary bunkers they occupied on Earth as well as dispatching extra Swarm Ships from the Hive Ship in orbit. This fed back into the NEG, as the actions of the Migou raised the LAI estimates of this being a serious offensive.

Global threat levels were raised to Code Tau.

This activity looped into the Migou hierarchy, who noted that human military behaviour conformed to their predictions for a suicidal last stand, by their predictions of the psychology of those uplifted apes. As a result, they took activities to remedy that, making sure that victory would occur, despite the costs.

Global Threat Levels were raised to Code Upsilon.

A cascade of worry flowed through the machinery of the New Earth Government, slowing the cogs as the ruling authorities of humanity collectively turned their thoughts to the possibility that this was the way that the world would end; not, as the poet had said, with a whimper, but with a bang.

Fear and panic began to fill the air when, despite the attempts to calm the situation, only desolation and despair could be foreseen. The spy satellite tasked to study this phenomenon reported a Code Blue STE Rift. At the revelation that a Herald appeared, contrary to all previous predictions, to be launching a direct assault on the New Earth Government capital, it was feared that all the plans and contingencies that had been sown in preparation for a Migou assault since the Fall of Alaska in 2085 would now be swept away, quite literally, by whatever this new Herald was doing.

Control was reasserted. Humanity would refuse to let go. Globally the level of alert was lowed, even as all forces which could be spared in North America converged on Chicago-2

The presence of one of the Heralds of the Outer Gods was noted, too, by the Migou. The fungoid Yuggothians re-evaluated the situation. The reactions of the mammals below were re-examined in that light, and found to be consistent with previous behaviour. However, after the loss of two entire fleets by the treachery of the humans and the twice-traitor Nazzadi, it was decided that they would not be able to tolerate the losses from an assault on a location so close to the human capital, while retaining enough force to euthanise the monster that had just woken. However, they could not also permit such an entity to roam free, for it could wake the Hierophant, which would be a direct strike against their federation. Orbital bombardment was considered, and rejected, for the risks of such force against this planet were calculably high.

And so the Migou hung on the edge, unable to act, but also unable to let what would happen occur.
They hoped that the hominids would achieve the improbable again, for it was the lesser of two evils.

A decision was made by the sorcerer-scientists, the leaders of the Migou fleet. They began a notable withdrawal from their gains across North America, hoping that the uplifted apes would spare more troops for what must be done, loathe as were to give up territorial gains.

Of course, they left the extensive minefields and automated defences in place. It would be stupid to left the humans just waltz in to what they had sacrificed lives to gain.

~'/|\'~

The Herald, which the NEG naming convention so inaccurately called "Yam" paused slightly, as it tore through the wall that it had built, extending the gift of Yog-Sothoth, through the lacuna in what the limited beings that inhabited this world (with the exclusion of one native species) called reality. Hot water flooded through, rich in noxious chemicals and hydrocarbons, as it ceased its relentless assault on what kept it from its target destination, thick and dark currents swirling in the chill autumnal waters of Lake Michigan.

Its intellect was alien; it had last been upon this ball of iron and silicates before the Elder Things had lost control of their autonomous amorphous construction devices, and it had been aware all the time since. It had aeons upon aeons of experience in the seas of billions of planets much superior to this one, untainted by the annoyingly reactive gas that polluted and permeated this planet through unrestrained pollution by chemical factories.

And so it thought.

third|tertiary|inner iron|silicate|miscellaneous residence|dwelling|territory
disgust|disappointment|loathing ineptitude|lack-of-forethought|laziness starfish|inferior|xeno because|correlation|link solvent|water|fluid vile|polluted|toxic gas|reactive|eighth!
second|hierophant|traitor held|possessive|indicating-ownership residence|dwelling|home|territory
intrusion|impolite|offensive? dangerous|threat-to-life|risky?
possible|potential|mid-to-high.
necessary|needed|desire!
puppet|marionette|projection being|possessive|indicating-existence first|dead|rightful-hierophant local|present|resident-not-indicating-possessive now-time|now-space|all-dimensions!
necessary|complete|desire!
puppet|marionette|projection request|desire|need-indicating-other assistance|servitude|completion-of-oath!
self|ego|entity loyal|kin|vizier! negation|impossible|clarity traitor|rebel|fool!
servitude|oath|being necessary|mandated|desired!

Its path was clear. It tore through the barrier in full, the alien waters of where it had slept pouring through, volume upon volume, supplanting the inferior native ecology. Its lesser children had come with it, too, and they would sing their beautiful songs, a choir of seraphim for an angel upon high, chosen of the Outer Gods.

It spread the beauteous gift of That Which Defines Time And Space wide. Its children could huddle under its auspices, protected from the malign vicissitudes of an alien, hostile, inferior, locally and freakishly stable set of universal so-called-constants.

And the bulk of the Herald passed through the hole in space, that would take it from its home to where it would need to be.

self|ego|entity prediction|being|statement enjoy|pleasure|emotion state|future|soon!

~'/|\'~

Sirens began to wail throughout the Engel silo, the high-pitched scream of urgency deliberately akin to that of a crying infant, as a pleasant, hermaphroditic Limited Artificial Intelligence voice began to issue commands over the loud speakers.

"All Engel pilots cleared for deployment are to report to their attuned vehicle, ready for immediate deployment. This is a Gaghiel-level order; this is a Gaghiel-level order. A massive extra-dimensional entity is in close proximity to the Chicago Arcology. This is not a drill; this is not a drill. All Engel pilots cleared for deployment are to report..."

This cacophony was also broadcast into the converted Engel bays that held the kneeling Unit 02, and the two teenagers.

Shinji looked around. "What's going on? Are we meant to be here?"

"...this is a Gaghiel-level order. A massive extra-dimensional entity is in close proximity to the Chicago Arcology. This is..."

Asuka sighed at that comment, even as her eyes lit up. "Idiot. It's almost certainly a Herald." She smiled to herself. "A real one..."

"Then why don't they just tell their Engel pilots that?" Shinji asked.

Her eyes locked onto his for a moment, before leaving in disgust, to rest upon her Evangelion. "Because the Heralds themselves are classified. Well, not that there are large extra-dimensional creatures, but their nature, and that they're part of a linked phenomenon. Honestly. Don't you ever watch the news?" She waved a hand at him. "No, don't answer that."

"What should I do?" Shinji said to himself, ignoring her. He turned to the exit. "I need to get back to Misato."

Asuka made a small noise of disgust. He was getting rather sick of that; just being around her was giving him a headache from the litres of scorn poured down upon him.

"And do what?," she asked. "As far as I can recall, your Evangelion is both on the other side of the Atlantic and out of operations right now. So unless you're going to spontaneously manifest Grade-3 Somatic Teleportation, nothing you will do will matter." She paused. "Are you a parapsychic, by the way? You're not wearing the marks, but that just means you don't have Dee or Eye powers."

Shinji shook his head. "No. You?"

"No. I just like to know."

"Well, then, what do you want to do?" he asked, sarcasm creeping into his voice despite his certain knowledge that it would only make matters worse. "I mean, after all, you're the..."

She was already striding off towards a set of lockers, near to the feet of the Evangelion.

Asuka was finding this boy rather frustrating. He was so... passive. And not even passive in the "sit there and do nothing unless prompted" way; no, he insisted on arguing with her, even when he wasn't coming up with anything helpful, and making comments that she was sure that he thought were funny, even when anyone with a functioning brain could see that they were the product of a mind that thought it has a much better sense of humour than it actually did. She was sure that he shouldn't be like that. He was causing a minor headache, and it would be nice if he'd just do what he was told to.

She put it out her mind, as she headed over to the lockers, planting her hands flat on the memoform surface, which read her hand prints then shaped itself into handles, to allow her to open it. She pulled out a sausage-shaped bag, in the same deep red as the kneeling forty-metre figure beside her.

"Wait there for a second," she commanded, stepping behind one of the legs of Unit 02 for some privacy, as she began pulling the plug-suit out of her bag and stripping off her dress.

At least the plug suit will be a lot warmer than this thing, Asuka thought. Important lesson learnt; Nazzadi dresses are not to be worn outside of arcologies or Nazza-Duhni itself. Right, so underlayer first..." as she pulled out a thin black garment which looked most like a full length wetsuit.

The underlayer was one of the personal changes she had persuaded the Berlin team to implement in the design of the plug-suit. The original design had been fine if you were to only wear it in the entry plug, where the neutral buoyancy and the lack of movement were fine, but she had quickly found that it tended to leave skin raw at the joints if you walked around in it. It appeared that whoever had designed the plug-suit had cared far more about optimising the design so that it could generate the highest possible synchronisation ratios than about petty things like comfort. The scientists in Berlin-2 had waved aside her complaints, until she had pointed out, in a patronising tone, that she couldn't focus on moving the Evangelion as her body if her real skin was hurting from a badly designed suit.

She had been seven at the time.

There was a movement of feet from the other side of the Evangelion's leg. Obviously, the idiot was just going to ignore what she'd told him to do. Honestly, why wouldn't people just do what they were told?

"Peek, and I will beat you senseless," she called out, not even looking up from where she was sealing the smart material up the legs.

Shinji quite believed that. He'd moved around to see what she was doing, because she hadn't deigned to tell him, and caught a glimpse of her before she'd done up the top of the black thing that she seemed to wear under her plug suit. Asuka was very fit, in both the formal and colloquial senses of the word; she was built like an athlete with (from the brief glance he had obtained) almost no superfluous fat.

Wow...

He waited.

Asuka did up the neck seal, a slight hiss echoing through the chamber as the secondary seal rotated into place, shaking out her hair and pulling it behind her. She checked that the A10 clips were properly in position, flat against the scalp.

Yes.

She stretched out, right up to her maximum height (she wondered idly if her father had been tall; her mother certainly had been), then rotated her neck in a circle, clicking her knuckles together.

"Asuka, let's go," she said softly to herself, her voice level, calm, and filled with determination.

She reached down into the bag as she came out from behind the leg of Unit 02, noting that Shinji had his back turned, in what she judged to quite possibly be a sign of guilt.

She punched him hard, in the arm.

He yelped, and clutched at his limb, jumping away from her.

"What the hell was that for!" he yelled at her in Japanese reflexively.

"Looking," was the answer he got, in the same language. Asuka noted the slight flush, as well as the lack of protest.

So he did peek. Thought so.

She hit him again, in the same place.

"Stop that!" he moaned. "It was an accident. You didn't tell me what you were..."

"Put this on," she instructed him, a spare plug-suit in her arms. "You're coming with me on this."

"What are you, crazy!" he shouted back, clutching at his arm. "You can't just hit people and make them do what you say!"

Asuka tensed momentarily, moving her arm slightly, watching him flinch and recoil away. It amused her. "You're wrong. The whole of human society is based on a mixture of that and tribe-level altruism."

"What are you talking about!"

"Put this on."

"It won't fit," protested Shinji. "I'm taller than you."

"You're not," Asuka replied, their eyes level. Generations of good diet combined with mild sexual selection had resulted in a slight decrease in human sexual dimorphism with regards to height, which, combined with the difference in ethnicities, meant that she was in fact slightly taller than he was.

"... and... shaped differently," he continued, making vague gestures at about chest level with his hands.

"You'll survive. It'll just be a bit loose around the chest. Just do what I say and put this on."

"And tight somewhere else," he said acidly.

"You'll be fine. Just do what I say and put it on."

"Uh uh." Shinji shook his head. "There is no way you're going to make me wear that."

~'/|\'~

Commander Matthew Martensson, of the NES Blade of Athena, a Triumph-Class Destroyer, rushed into the bridge burrowed deep into the middle of the ship, his blond mane clearly ungroomed. The wail of sirens greeted him, as well as a clamour from his subordinate officers.

"Report!" he snapped at his First Mate, all traces of his normal good humour gone.

"We're under attack from... something," Kagamy stated, red eyes cool and steady. "Global threat levels pinged recently up to Upsilon; they're back down to Tau, but we received coded orders for a Grade VII."

The Commander swallowed hard, a flash of worry in his somewhat bloodshot blue eyes. "They were unsealed and the authorisation codes checked?" he asked, trying to keep his voice as level as hers.

"Yes, sir. They checked out."

Both of them knew what a Code VII meant.

"Well, have there been any signs of a Migou strike yet? What does Comms say about troop movements?" Matthew said, while authorising his command of the ship as he took the central chair.

"Negative," called Lieutenant Tonaka, over from the AR screen that even now flared massive amounts of sensory information. Communications Officers on a capital ship were a rare breed, required to handle massive amounts of sensory information. Most of them as a result came from AR gaming sub-cultures, to the extent that they came with pre-existing permanent hard AR contacts. They tended not to blink much. "In fact," a new window was maximised with a series of hand movements, "they appear to be retreating... oh. Turquoise message from NEGNC C2. Beyond my clearance. Forwarding it to central desk."

The Commander read the document that the High Command had just felt like issuing. It was short, and rather unhelpful, yet still contained a potent revelation. He blinked, heavily, then authorised the unlocking of the censored version to his senior crew.

"Short version," he said, staring around the bridge. Everyone was in position; all posts filled. "An exceedingly dangerous extra-dimensional lifeform has appeared in close proximity, somewhere in Lake Michigan. Satellite recon cannot give us more precise details; it appears to have some kind of some kind of..." he paused, "I can't believe I'm saying this. Some kind of massive force field slash arcane shield, that makes it impossible to be more accurate. No known attributes, although it does note that the entity will probably be able to take multiple shots from capital grade weapons. We are to kill it, and prevent it from reaching Chicago-2. I don't need to tell you why."

"Well, that was useful," called out one of the Sensor Officers. "Nothing more, sir? Even a profile what we should be looking for."

Commander Martensson sighed. "No." he replied, rubbing his eyes as he reached to authorise a combat stimulant to wake him up properly. "Damn useless OCI", he muttered to himself as an aside.

His hand never reached the button, as the consoles all around the room began to scream. The AR projection of the fleet bloomed in red, as one, then a second icon flashed to the "Destroyed" status.

"Report!"

"The Cybele is going down!" stated his First Officer, Kagamy, her voice as calm as ever. "The Mithras has not sighted the target."

"Damn it", Matthew swore. "Commodore Clarke was on the Cybele. What the hell is going on!"

"Vice-Admiral Xu has taken command, from C2 Fleet Command," reported Tonaka. "Patching him through to main speakers."

"This is Vice-Admiral Xu, of the New Earth Navy," the message came from, the man's voice that slightly metallic buzz that came from the massive levels of encryption used on Fleet channels. "All ships, check distance between ships. Take evasive manoeuvres, and elevate yourself from the water. I want those ventral weapons pointing downwards!"

Commander Martensson nodded. "Right, Helm." He switched to the ship-board announcement system. "This is Martensson. All hands to F-Suits and acceleration couches."

All across the ship, there was a buckling of clasps, as the crew prepared for flight mode. Most merely strapped into their acceleration couches at their battle stations, which kept them bound whatever the alignment of the ship, while those who had to move got into their F-Suits, stripped down, void-capable powered suits, designed for use even in zero-g conditions, with magnetic boots and their own integral A-Pods, enabling them to move around the ship.

"We have a clear for preparation," announced the officer at the Helm. "Permission to take her up?"

"Permission granted," said the Commander. "Let's get clear of this water and get revenge for the Cybele."

~'/|\'~

All across the lake, New Earth Government ships were breaking the water, vast volumes of water pouring off their flanks as they rose into the air. These ships were rather different in appearance to their ancestors, those ships which had been limited to the surface of the water. Modern naval ships were roughly cylindrical; vast cigars covered in protrusions in the form of missile pods, direct-fire weapons, point defence and sensor equipment. The ships with a carrier role were bulbous and curved, pregnant with offspring that they could vomit forth onto their foes, while the dedicated warships were sleek and knife-like, their front sections designed to reduce the surface area they exposed while their lethal ventral weapons were aligned with a target. The bridge was nested deep within the superstructure of the vessel, though its nerves and senses spread throughout the whole ship, so that a lucky shot or an enemy fighter on a kamikaze run could decapitate the command structure. The old balance between "weapons of war" and "weapons of terror" had been raised, and it has been decided that what made a weapon really terrifying was the ability to kill you as efficiently and as quickly as possible while taking the least possible damage.

They were more kin, in design, to submarines than surface ships, as the advent of the A-Pod opened the prospect of true three-dimensional battles at sea. Against the Migou, concealment below the waves was an advantage, because the heavy weapons on Swarm Ships, which outgunned even a Victory-Class Battlecruiser, could not be fired properly in such an environment. Against the Esoteric Order of Dagon, the opposite was true; to face them below the waves allowed them to bring the best of their assets into play, while above it they were notably deficient in things which could hit aircraft, or indeed anything which could deal with a capital-grade ship. What was being done now was a standard tactic against aquatic foes. They could only hope that the Herald would stay there.

The clouds broke above them, autumn sunlight poring through the gaps in the sky to light up the emerging behemoths. The matt paint and pseudodermal layers of absorbent memo-material, designed to minimise visibility and radio signature gave them an almost toy-like look, like some cheap plaything for infants, designed to reduce choking hazard. From above, the scene looked almost faked, like tiny scale models in some ancient science-fiction show with a poor budget and a lead actor with a toupee. That was irrelevant. Efficient design should always override aesthetics, according to the doctrine of the New Earth Navy. And with modern flesh vat-growth techniques, toupees were a thing of the past.

The Herald, of course, neither knew any of this, nor would it have cared had it deigned to tear the structure of the organic composite matrix these strange creatures, which lived in an atmosphere comprised of a deadly toxin, used to cognate (insofar as they could do that) from its protective casing, and find out how to extract the information it desired. With a flick of its tail, it drove itself through a network of mines, the charges detonating harmlessly on the surface of the AT-Field, displacing vast quantities of water which surged upwards to plume on the surface.

The Limited Artificial Intelligences installed on the New Earth Government vessels noted this pattern, and calculated the velocity and depth of the object which was causing the explosions in about as much time as the humans controlling them took to notice the blossoming explosions. These were independently verified over a tight-band combat network with the other ships, and corrections made through statistical analysis of the data points observed by each separate vessel. When they were satisfied, insofar as a non-sapient system could feel any emotion, they informed the organic beings in their chain of command of the extrapolated position of the Herald. In a show of dreadful inefficiency, it took the humans several seconds to request permission from the commanders of their ships, then give the command to fire.

A veritable shower of torpedoes descended from the elevated ships, falling as projectiles before impacting with the water and their engines activating. Explosions cascaded along all sides of the Herald's AT-Field, unable to penetrate the warped spacetime, the phase space of possible results of the explosion turned against them. However, a surprising number missed, the telemetry sent back to their ships reporting that the target was not where it had been calculated to be, and that local conditions in the water were different from what they should have been. Error reports blossomed on the feed-outs from a non-negligible percentage of the weapons, informing their operators of impossibilities, of water that did not act like water and other such things.

And the Herald itself was not passive in its effect in causing confusion. The surface of the lake bulged up, unbelievably, engulfing a low hanging frigate in a very final way. Something could be seen in that pustule of water which defied all human knowledge of fluid dynamics, a colossal, corpse-white shape which moved like some leviathan from the Permian.

Anyone who made such a comparison would be wrong, though. The Herald was considerably older than that; that era was long after this insignificant planet had become inhospitable for it and its kind after the run-away atmospheric pollution induced by the irresponsible genetic tampering of the Elder Things, and, anyway, life of terrestrial origin in the Permian had not advanced to the level where it could support such a thing. It could never support a creature of that magnitude; it never had, and never would. The laws of nature state that such a beast could never come about; the mass scales up faster than the muscle strength, even in an environment where fluid buoyancy would permit it to become larger, while the forces which its movement would subject its body to should tear it in half.

It was just as well that the favour of the Gods gave the Herald sanctity against the arbitrary declarations of this place.

The water surged again, the white shape devouring a destroyer, its path taking it towards the metal boxes which the odd creatures hid within, taking them away to be assumed for its greater glory and that of its children.

But always, inexorably, taking it closer to Chicago-2.

~'/|\'~

Shinji was grumbling to himself, even as the entry plug flooded with LCL.

"How did she make me do this? I honestly don't know why."

He shifted, uncomfortably, trying to loosen it around his groin. His prediction that it would not fit there was proving painfully accurate.

"Stop complaining," Asuka told him, as the fluid reached neck height. "Sit behind me, and keep your hands to yourself."

The unpleasant moment when your lungs scream at you that they're filled with fluid, and that you're drowning, and the feeling of the viscous LCL washing over against your eyeballs passed, for both of them.

Shinji shuddered, once he had got the panic instinct under control. Asuka, he noted, didn't react to it at all. The LCL tasted... wrong; not like how it normally was. The only component he could recognise in the LCL of Unit 01 was something like, but not quite, the metallic taste of blood, but there was something else here, some indescribable yet very familiar taste that hovered right at the edge of his tongue

How long has she been doing this if she doesn't have a problem with drowning?

He made a face. "Your LCL tastes different."

Asuka grunted, as she ran the beginnings of the start-up procedure. "Really." It wasn't a question, and there was a notable hint that any use of that as a criticism would result in conflict.

"Where do the Evangelions store the LCL, anyway?" he wondered out loud, more as way of changing the subject than out of interest. "Is there some internal reservoir or something?"

A one-shouldered uni-shrug was all he got in response.

"What is is, anyway?" he wondered. "Why don't they just use impact gel and sealed helmets, like I've heard that the Engels..."

The red-haired girl turned to glare at him, her hair waving like seaweed in the viscous orange liquid. "Stop babbling and complaining. Unless you'd like to run the start-up procedure... which you can't, anyway, as you haven't even done independent operations yet, then you can shut up while I need to concentrate." Shinji shut up.

The start-up procedure continued, until the screens that surrounded them, on the inside of the entry plug, degenerated into red warnings screaming that something was wrong.

"Have you tried turning it off and on again?" asked Shinji, innocently.

Another glare was his payment for them. "What are you, stupid? Are you trying to be annoying? You're making mental noise, which is disturbing the calibration. I told you not to disturb me!"

"So you don't think it might be because two people are in a war-machine only designed for one, and it's controlled by thought? That maybe two people aren't meant to be in an Evangelion entry plug?" he continued, in the same tone of voice.

"No," replied Asuka, taking on a similarly saccharine tone, "because I already accounted for that. For one, you're not even wearing A10 Nerve Clips, which means that any motive force you provide will be minimal. No, this is a higher level function."

"That doesn't explain anything, you know." The conversation was getting worryingly polite.

She sighed. "Of course. What language do you think in?"

Shinji frowned. "Mostly... well, I'm not even sure about that. Sometimes in Japanese, sometimes in English."

"Yes," said Asuka, poking at the screen at the front, "that would explain it. Idiot. LAI, add language slash Japanese slash standard to the active dictionary."

"Are you sure that you want to change the default language settings? Some systems may need to restart for the changes to take effect," asked the onboard voice.

"Yes. Change language then restart."

The lights in the entry plug dimmed, then came back up, the complicated flickering of the walls proceeding without interruption this time.

"Evangelion Unit 02; activate!"

Shinji groaned. That girl was giving him a headache.

~'/|\'~

The conference centre where they had been showing off the Daeva had been evacuated remarkably quickly, a considerable number of the people in the room taken directly to one of the command centres buried into the superstructure of the Chicago Arcology. The resident members of the OIS were already considering the possibility that the command structure had been compromised by cult influences, to arrange for so many high ranking members of the New Earth Army and Navy to be focussed in one place. They had watched the surge in global threat levels, after what was found to be a simple mistake ballooned into reports of Migou orbital bombardment, and attempts to clamp down on the scaremongering and misunderstandings had originated from this location.

Major Misato Katsuragi stood in a corner, and watched. She was significantly outranked here, and nothing yet could justify her involvement. She half suspected that she had only been escorted here by accident in the chaos. And if she could trust Asuka's PsychEvals, she was probably going to start up Unit 02 and try to help, without permission. She'd already gone off with Shinji to show him her Evangelion (that sounded dirty in her head), so she's wouldn't even need to go very far to get there. This had the potential to go very wrong.

A sussuration of whispers began to fill the room...

"A Herald?"
"A Code Blue?"
"A Herald?"
"Code Blue?"
"Seriously?"

... and at that cue, she straightened up. She really wished that Ritsuko was here, as together they would have backed up the viewpoint of Project Evangelion from both a tactical and scientific point of view, but the blond-haired woman had disappeared with Dr Miyakame immediately after he had come over to talk to her.

Yes, that was most suspicious. Ritsuko loathed him, Misato was sure; she had heard enough rants, but the way she had crumpled and acquiesced to his request for a talk was quite unlike how she normally was. It was worth looking into, certainly.

And, hey, Misato thought, if they do start sleeping together or something, we might be able to borrow some of the Engel technicians for an armour redesign, and ours are suffering from the constant damage which the Evas keep on suffering. It's an ill wind that doesn't have a silver lining, or something like that.

The Major stepped forwards.

"Project Evangelion offers its assistance, subordinate to main NEG command," she stated to the Vice-Admiral who seemed to have taken charge.

The naval officer, a hardened-looking man in his early fifties, of Chinese ethnicity, glanced over at her. "Aren't all of your assets on the other side of the Atlantic?" he said, bluntly. An aide leaned over and whispered in his ear. "Ah. You have one here."

The Major nodded. "It was here for a full test of its technical capacity, before it was moved over to join the others. And before you ask, sir," she continued, seeing the glint in his eye, "Unit 02 is complete and has already seen battle on the Eastern European Front. It personally took down two Migou Swarm Ships," she added, with a hint of pride.

"We have multiple impacts from the simultaneous torpedo barrage... nothing," called out an officer, from the other side of the room. "Not a damn thing."

"Vice-Admiral," the Major pointed out, "remember that it took the Ashcroft three over-charged shots from its main plasma cannon to take down the AT-Shield of the one code-named "The Kathirat", and even then it failed to kill the target, only crippling it. And it took all the spare capacity of L2 to power the laser that killed Mot." She took a deep breath. "And with all due respect, sir, as long at the Herald stays under water, we can't use the ventral plasma cannons on the destroyers against it, and the ventral lasers on the frigates aren't powerful enough."

"What are you leading up to, Major Katsuragi?" growled the Vice-Admiral.

"Permission to mobilise Unit 02, and tactical battlefield control over it. We should station it by C2, as a last line of defence."

Elements on the AR display in the middle of the room flashed red.

"That was the Southampton," called out an officer. "Another frigate lost."

"The torpedo bombers are coming around for another swing," called out another. "They're going to have to rearm after this strike."

"WQS reports massive environmental disturbance. The water is becoming toxic; there's a current flow from where that thing appeared. Sats say that it seems to be some kind of space-time rift, and it's growing."

Vice-Admiral Xu sighed. "Permission granted. I still don't approve of the use of child soldiers, but we need everything we can get, and the Evas have a record of killing Heralds. Use that station over there for TacCom; get it deployed in Sector 4." He snorted. "The Araska's in Sector 3. Who'd have thought at the start of the day that we'd get to see a direct comparison?"

"I'd have preferred not to," called the Brigadier who was trying to co-ordinate the air forces so that they'd do something. He wasn't having much luck. The weapons that a bomber mounted weren't scratching the hide of the beast, unable to even get through the AT-Field. And they weren't prepared to go nuclear in these circumstances, with already elevated tensions with the Migou and how close the entity was to the capital.

~'/|\'~

Kaji stepped outside, in a casual walk which he had been explicitly trained in. He was feeling rather light headed. Something red flashed in front of his eyes; he blinked, and it was gone.

He shook his head. He now had what was quite possibly the most valuable thing on the planet in his suitcase, folded into its own pocket dimension by the reality-breaking Bah'ri Diß artefact. If he was caught with this because he fainted after that, well, he didn't want to think about what would happen to him. Bad things, probably starting with a TSEAP and moving upwards from there. And vivisection did not appeal to him, all things considered.

He managed to make his way to the train, without showing any sign of weakness, and slumped heavily down in his seat, eyes listlessly staring out the window at nothing.

And as the train departed, something felt him go, and wailed.

~'/|\'~

Commander Martensson was not having a good day. At all. The light frigates, the only damn ships which could use their ventral weapons against the target (because some idiot designer has decided that the increased yield of a ventral plasma cannon was worth not being able to fire the goddamn main weapon underwater) were taking horrific casualties as the bloated corpse-white monstrosity seemed to take a pleasure in swallowing them whole. The larger ships were trying to batter at the bulge of water within the shimmering net it bought with it, seeing if it could be disrupted, but whenever a good few hits were landed on it, it would dive back down.

And the damn thing was constantly getting closer to Chicago. They were slowing it down, true. But they weren't killing it, and they weren't stopping it.

And it was coming for them, now.

Martensson shared a glance with Kagamy. She blinked, heavily, red eyes suddenly filled with sorrow, and nodded her head. He swallowed hard, and took a deep breath.

"Charge the ventral cannon up to full. Push it beyond the safety margins; I want everything I can get out of it. Authorisation code: Charley-Hotel-Uniform-Uniform-Tango-Romeo-India-India-Tango. Make it so that we'll get that one shot before burning out everything."

"Sir?" one of the Weapons Officers said, with a worried look on his face.

"We can't stop it from getting us. We've seen what it did to the Jupiter. But maybe, if we can fire from inside the force-field thing it has, we can hurt it." He swallowed again. "All non-essential hands, abandon ship."

Sirens began to wail, a newborn cacophony screaming for the incipient death of its ship. Lifepods began to eject from all sides of the ship, even as that horrific, impossible bulge of water bore down on them like a tidal wave.

Commander Martensson turned to his First Officer. "Kagamy. It's been an honour."

She nodded. "Likewise, Matthew."

"If this doesn't work...I'm sorry."

"Charging," the Weapons Officer called out.

"Hold her steady," the Commander replied, staring at the AR projection which gave their location.

"Charging."

"Steady. Fire on my mark!"

The Blade of Athena never got its chance to fire. Faster than the human eye could respond, the Herald suddenly surged forwards, and as the bubble of liquid (not truly describable as "water") encapsulated by the AT-Field surrounded them, the power throughout the ship suddenly ceased, the capacitor banks storing the charge for the ventral cannon discharging unequally, which tore the front of the ship apart in a blossom of internal explosions.

Commander Martensson had the chance to swear once, before the impossibly shard teeth of the entity they called Yam tore the ship in half, crushing the bridge in the guts of the ship as it took the front into its gullet, and reducing the crew within to mangled puppets.

The Herald continued onwards.

~'/|\'~

Within the entry plug of Unit 02, the walls flickered, a cold feeling blowing down the spines of both the Children. It was a familiar sensation, the feeling that occurred when the Third Phase was passed. It felt less than usual for Shinji; a reduced sensation, but what he did feel was odd.

He suddenly shuddered, overcome by a feeling like thousands of spiders crawling over his skin. It diminished as the chill in his spine went, but remained present. That wasn't usual; it was like his skin was in the wrong place, someone pulling it into positions it was not meant to be in.

Asuka made a noise of annoyance, the sound transmuted into a gurgle in the back of the throat by the LCL.

Shinji shivered again. "What now?"

She didn't glance back. "The roof is sealed. How am I meant to be able to stand up?" she asked rhetorically. The girl reached down to the AR panel before her, fingers dancing a brief waltz over the unreal display. "NEG Command, this is Second Lieutenant Soryu, assigned pilot of Evangelion Unit 02. Requesting the unsealing of the Evangelion Hangar."

There was a brief pause, then Misato's face appeared on a projected panel on the front of the entry plug. She was smiling.

"Nice, Asuka!" The Major's face became serious. "I have SubTacCom for you this mission, so I'm in charge. Follow my orders; in an emergency like this, procedure is important. I'm unsealing the roof now."

The Engel hangar, almost gutted to fit the Evangelion, had not been designed to permit something of its magnitude through the doors. Even crawling, Unit 02 would not have been able to get in. It was fortunate that the roofs were retractable. The vaulted roof split down the centre, folding and arcing down into the ground below the hangar, allowing the Evangelion to stand up.

It was a... complicated movement. From its starting position, prostrated in supplication, it almost unfolded upwards, in a way which both reminded onlookers of how a human being, scaled up to an impossible size, would do it, and gave them an impression of inestimable wrongness. Perhaps it was the way the proportions of the arms and legs were off from what they should have been; perhaps it was the way its neck hung forwards, limp and inactive without any motion throughout the whole movement. It was fortunate, perhaps, that everyone in the immediate vicinity was qualified to work on the Engel Project, and thus blasphemous hybrids of mind, machine and extra-dimensional entity were the kind of thing you saw every day.

Finally, the neck straightened, and the Evangelion gazed over the industrial district, outside the arcology proper, with four eyes that glowed a necrotic green. And while Unit 00 had screamed during the incident during start-up, and Unit 01 had roared as it tore its first Heraldic victim to shreds, Unit 02 hissed, a tumultuous escape of gas which left a smell like rotting carrion and fresh blood throughout the area, a vile stench which remained even after the creature had stepped out of the building, loping in a springy run towards the location Major Katsuragi gave them.

The Evangelion slid to a stop right behind one of the thick barrier walls that protected the arcology and surrounding areas, the contaminated waves lapping, thick with noxious, hot hydrocarbons from wherever the Herald had come from.

Shinji groaned and covered his face with his hands. "Urgh..."

Asuka glanced back at him, a look of mild contempt on her face. "What?"

He blinked heavily, the feeling of the thick LCL pushed aside by his eyelids rather unpleasant. "I..." he swallowed, "I'm just feeling a bit dizzy. It doesn't feel... it's sort of odd to have someone else moving your body... well, not my body, but that's what it feels like. And I feel like I've just been spun around."

"Don't be silly. LCL neutralises cochlear balance, leaving you with only visual," pointed out Asuka.

"I'll... I'll be fine. Just ignore me. I'll get used to it."

There was a slightly pitying sigh, the harmonics changed by the fluid. "Try not to throw up inside my Evangelion. I don't know what happens if you do that, and I don't want to find out. Even in the name of science."

The communications window appeared again. "Shinji?" asked Misato. "What are you doing in there?" The Major waved her hand. "Irrelevant. Asuka, are you able to operate at peak operational capacity with him present? If you can't I'll pull you back."

The red haired girl smiled politely. "I believe I am able to function at full capacity, yes."

The Major nodded. "Good. Major Katsuragi out."

Asuka turned to Shinji, smile gone. "Screw this up for me, Third Child, and I will personally make you regret it."

Shinji shuffled, insofar as he could, further towards the back of the entry plug.

Back in the control room, Misato could see several high ranking officers frowning at her. However, it was a civilian who spoke up.

"That is not wise," stated Tokita, the chief engineer for Project Daeva.

"The Fist of Perseus is going down!" called out someone, from the other side of the room, igniting a babble of voices.
"We're down to three cruisers!"
"That bastard is just picking off all our heavy ships at its leisure, zigzagging back and forth, but it keeps on getting closer!"
"What does it take to kill this thing!"

Misato glared at him. "Is there a reason that civilian is here, in C2 Command?" she asked acidly.

"Yes, actually," he replied, his tone matching hers in pH. "Project Daeva is managing the deployment of our Araska. We don't deny that it's still in the prototype stage, and so needs close watching. However," and at this, his voice actually became more polite, albeit the politeness that freezes oceans and burns to the touch, "perhaps we won't spend fourteen years in the prototype stage. And as for why it's not wise, you are risking two-thirds of your pilot complement here. A loss here would cripple the only thing we have right now which is certain to kill a Herald. We can't pick up your slack yet."

Misato turned her back on him, jawline locked rigid. Without Ritsuko here, to make her act as the sane one, she was succumbing to the same craziness, it seemed.

"Tokita, we've got the umbilical cable connected," called out one of his subordinates, from behind Misato's back. "Efficiency is at 90%; we lost one set of superconductors in sub-section 3, but the crew have rerouted around it and the DCS is effecting repairs. We can boost the laser with power from the C2 grid."

"Good, good," he replied. "Polana," turning his head to another one, "how does the ventral laser read?"

"It's green across the board. The coolant systems are in place and locked; power has been diverted from the cee-bees to them."

"Sustained fire is go?"

"Yes, sir. We can maintain it for 310 seconds, plus or minus 40 seconds, before we have to do a 20 second coolant flush slash refill."

"Damn. That's suboptimal." He waved a hand. "Someone, make a note that we'll need to check the heat management systems. That's less than 80% of what it should be. Nevertheless, can we greenlight firing?"

Polana paused for a moment, then nodded her head. "Yes."

"Then do it."

~'/|\'~

From the vantage point of the Evangelion, both Asuka and Shinji could see the beam that cut out from along the shoreline, on their right. It wasn't visible from what it was, but from what it did to the atmosphere, the green-blue of a naval laser scattered into the atmosphere. It was very familiar to Shinji; two weeks ago he had fired one which made that one, potent though it was, look like one mounted on the lightest of powered armours. They may have been plugged into the Chicago power network, but the Araska had not been modified in the same way as the Academia, and it would have fried had it tried to use all the power which an arcology could generate.

What it lacked in yield, however, it compensated for with duration. The laser lanced out to kiss the bulge of water which moved around, a vast mound of water akin to a hill, which shimmered with dark threads and the iridescences of a layer of oil. The familiar shattering of the AT-Field could be seen; the blue-green scattering of the laser stopped dead by the sidereal shifting shapes which layered around the impact point. And it kept steady; the beam focussed on the white shape in the water, no matter how it moved.

And the water sang, the call of the Herald echoing and amplified by the entire lake, filled with emotion, which struck all that heard it. It would have been understandable had it been a bestial roar, some hellish yell from a leviathan that had last been on Earth before the Oxygen Catastrophe. That could be conceptualised, categorised, limited. No, the song of Yam and its annoyance was one of inestimable beauty; the harmonics perfect, the melody extending far beyond the human range of hearing. And its magnitude was such that audio detection systems in NEG vessels and units burned out, tearing apart a frigate too close to the Herald, as it changed its pitch to the resonant frequency of the vessel's hull, shattering it apart.

self|ego|entity sense|behold|perceive potential|possible|inferior target|victim|threat!
self|ego|entity future|be|certain consumption|nourishment|devour.

The Herald turned, the water around it boiling off as the AT-Field shifted the phase possibilities so that the coherent electromagnetic radiation had always been absorbed by the water, and headed straight towards the shore.

Under Asuka's control, Unit 02 twisted, sprinting to the point of closest It had been another row. approach, the feet leaving massive dents in even the reinforced surface on which the shipyards were built, the reinforced permacrete crumpling under the incredible pressure of a forty metre biped. The square-cube law was the bane of mecha designers, akin to how thermodynamics had been prior to the invention of the D-Engine. Nevertheless, the floor held, even when one leap proved necessary to bypass a The others had condemned it as immature and unprofessional, but, frankly, she hadn't cared. bunker than blocked the way, its armoured bulk too slow to go around.

A few drops of blood seeped out of Shinji's nose, vanishing in the already vital liquid that surrounded them.

And then things started going really She was right; wrong.

Back in the command centre, the SubTacCom from which the Araska was operating began screaming red, alarms crying out with an urgency normally only saved for catastrophic D-Engine problems, a so-called "Horizon Event". The scientists and engineers monitoring the prototype began to babble almost simultaneously.

"Weapon emergency shutdown. Trying to reboot."
"Fluctuations in the mD/D Hybrid Engine. Connections are being cut at random and reforming!"
"Allergic reaction! Allergic reaction! DCS slash SEN nanites are being rejected by the Type-S"

"Rampancy! We have... rampancy!"

Wrapping his arms around himself, Tokita glanced from screen to screen, his eyes never stationary for more than a few seconds at a time. "Renar op camapy!," he swore. "What's going on?! What's causing this!"

"The Type-S is going rampant. It spontaneously rejected all the stabilising nanites infused through its flesh. Look!"

Indeed, the Navy project seemed to be bulging and warping, its surface twisting as the artificial shell that covered it was torn apart from within by the black, tar-like material within, its shape morphing and twisting, forming organs and organelles at random. A phosphorescent constellation of eyes gazed from the night sky of the Type-S, gazing up at the sky for the first time.

Tokita swallowed hard, running his hands up and down his forearms in a repetitive, unconscious motion. "Get them out of there!" he ordered. "Tell the crew to eject, before it breaches their capsules!"

There was a flurry of discussion between the handlers and the crew of the Araska.

"Pods G1 to G4 are away," Polana said, blinking heavily. "Crew reports that the Type-S has blocked the tubes for the central command pods. Escape pods will not fire."

"Damn," Tokita said, face suddenly haggard, as if he had suddenly aged twenty years. "They were good men." He turned to face Xu, taking a deep breath. " Vice Admiral, I regret to inform you that," he swallowed again, "there has been a catastrophic breakdown in the Type-S armour, which has renatured and returned to its original instincts." He paused and then continued. "The Araska Prototype is to be considered hostile from this moment on."

~'/|\'~

"Hey," said Asuka, frowning. "The laser's stopped."

Shinji winced. "Maybe it overheated, and's running a cooling cycle," he suggested.

"Maybe," and that was all there was to it. the red-headed girl replied, obvious doubt in her voice.

The visual display popped back into existence. It was the Major. "The idiots at Daeva have lost control of the Araska," she said, obviously biting back an invective. "Consider it hostile. Kill the Herald, then clean up as best you can."

Asuka swore. "I knew it was suspicious. She was right; the other woman was wrong, and that was all there was to it. We're going after the Herald personally!"

Shinji groaned. It really didn't seem like a good idea, and he was feeling really, really bad.

"Just watch me, Third Child!"

And with that said, Asuka bent and leapt, wrapping her AT-Field tight around herself and

This time, the idiot had been supporting the older design for incorporation into the new model. Honestly, what was she? Stupid? The upgrade to cranial firepower far outweighed the downside of the increased power consumption and reduced rate of fire.

"Look," she had said, "you're not looking at the plans for what the final model will look like. You're too limited by the incomplete Test Model and the Prototype. Just look at what the final model will look like; after all, the older ones are obviously going to be refitted."

thrust up into the air, a perfect, impossible arc that ended up with her on top of a cargo ship holding position over the coastline, out of the water to protect itself. The ship lurched hideously as the momentum of the Evangelion slammed into it, but miraculously the hull held, even as it buckled.

Blood began to flow freely from both of the boy's nostrils, the hot blood unnoticeable in the LCL, heated to body temperature. Shinji began to feel dizzy, though, and grabbed the side of the tube as best he could.

Unit 02 crouched on top of the ship, like a predatory animal, green eyes staring intently at the oncoming rush of the Herald. Asuka clenched her hands around the control sticks, and the DF Blades on the hands and feet of activated, "No," the other woman had replied. the arcane ward blending with the superior AT-field to allow it slice through the skin of a Herald with ease.

"I wish we had more guns," said Shinji, weakly.

"The DF-Blades should be enough," she replied, confidently. "And I have a little surprise for the Herald, too." And then she pounced, casting off from the dented vessel in a way that damaged it more, up into the air only to come down like the fist of an ancient god, claws aimed right for the Herald's head.

It was a good leap. All four limbs, sharpened for cutting and tearing and slicing to the limits of mundane technology and enhanced further by sorcery and the physics-raping AT-Field slammed into the Herald's field. But one was wrapped tightly around the biped, while the other was larger, holding a hill of water safe from the volatile, toxic gas that filled the atmosphere of this world, and so the Herald's protection was popped like a ripe carbuncle, jets of oily water spraying out at high pressure from the hole that the neutralising

"You're sacrificing control for something which does not optimise the mission profile. Need I remind you what would happen if control is not maintained?"

"Oh, I know it," she had said, smiling sweetly. "Control must be maintained at all times."

effects of Unit 02 had punched in the Field.

The Evangelion was embedded in the head of the leviathan, the forty metre walker dwarfed by the beast. The claws tore into the thick white skin, letting a creamy-white ichor seep from the wounds into the surrounding waters.

"You really like jumping off things so that you can kill other things," said Shinji softly, breathing deep gulps of LCL. "Are you looking for a fast-track promotion to Major, or something?"

He only received a quick glance back. "Shut up, idiot. Watch this."

And with that said, Asuka worked the Evangelion's left arm out of the thick skin, making sure to open the wound further with the exit, then, folding her fingers into a fist, punched the Herald as hard as possible in the back of what she thought corresponded to its head, triggering the PP1-P Plasmathrower, to send a rush of energetic particles deep into its body. Hopefully, it would burn out the inside of the monster, just as it had melted the first Swarm Ship she had killed.

In theory.

In practice, it went considerably worse. The sensors detected that the PP1-P was immersed in what it read to be water, and so switched to aquatic mode, taking the raw materials it would ionise from the fluid that surrounded it, turning on the suction pumps which would take in the liquid. What had not been expected was that the thick, viscous oils of wherever the Herald had come from, combined with the vile ichors which made up its blood, would jam the intake, causing it to detect a blockage and switch to internal supplies. Of course, once the pressure ceased, the fluids began to move normally, causing it to register that the error had been fixed, and switch back to external mode. This would not have been a fatal problem, except the extent to which the PP1-P had been miniaturised from its intended version, a ship-mounted weapon intended to flush out Deep One cities, meant that the tolerances had been dramatically reduced. The pumps began to heat up drastically. In addition, a build up of gas from the internal reservoir, atomised but not yet expelled, meant that, even with the magnetic containment, the weapon began to heat up.

"Then why do you insist on these changes?" had been the response she had got.

"Because it's obvious the MP design is superior!," she had replied, angrily. "What are you, stupid?"

It only took one of the superconductors to fail for the ionised gas to spill out into the main weapon, fusing the components and causing the internal D-Engine to shut down to prevent a Horizon Event. An explosion blossomed out from the left arm of the Evangelion.

And then the hydrocarbon-saturated water, oxygenated by the hole that Unit 02 had punched though the AT-Field which had kept that loathsome, reactive gas away from the Herald, caught fire. With a whoosh which surrounded and embraced Yam, the protective layer of the waters of its homeworld combusted, thick black clouds soaring forth.

Traitor|traitor|traitor! Traitor|traitor|traitor! Traitor|traitor|traitor!
Toxic|reactive|16 burns|corrodes|hurts hurts|burns|hurts!
Scars|wounds|pain back|head|centre pain|agony|hurts kill|kill|kill traitor|heretic|usurper!

It did not sing this time. It did not make a noise. It turned to get away from the agony, from the heat from inside the Guard of Yog Sothoth for the first time in hundreds of millions of years of existence, from the scars dug deep into it by the heretic that hung on its back, from the noxious, horrific gas which the monsters which lived in this planet used for respiration. It hurt so much. It seemed like it would always end up hurting.

"Gottverdammt! Scheiße, scheiße, scheiße! Sie haben behauptet, sie hätten ihn repariert, aber der Plasmawerfer ist schon wieder kaputt. Hören Sie mich,Sie Schwachköpfe?" yelled Asuka, mind overcome with rage, as she tried to contain the damage through the phantom pain in her own arm. "Sie haben die Reparaturen versaut und jetzt ist er hochgegangen. Wenn ich hier rauskomme, werde ich euch alle zur Strecke bringen, euch zu Muß quetschen, auf euren Leichen herumspringen und dann euch selbst zum Fraß vorwerfen!" she continued as the synchronisation ratio dropped and the attempts for Unit 02 to hold onto the back of the Herald became more spasmodic and jerky.

Yes, Unit 02 had its own problems. Prime among these was the fact that it was in the middle of a burning cocktail of oil and whatever the white leviathan used for its blood. Indeed, the cream ichor which flowed forth burned in the water, reacting even with the oxygen dissolved in the water. The temperature gauge was rising alarmingly. The left arm was damaged; the torn muscles on the left arm were exposed, bright red blood flowing forth, though it remained usable. Moreover, they were being dragged

Shinji sat at the back of the entry plug and "No," the other woman had replied. clutched his skull. His head was a solid lump of agony, the worst migraine he had ever experienced thumping behind both eye sockets, like something was trying to push out his eyeballs. Even his eyes were blurring; he was seeing red lines before them. Everything hurt so much, in a way that felt like it would never stop. His right wrist locked up, twisted into a claw that tore at his cheek, and Unit 02 mimicked the movement, tearing out of the hide of the Herald in a way that only released more of that reactive blood.

Before his red tinted vision, the communications window opened up.

"Asuka! Shinji!" shouted Misato. "What's going on?!" She blinked, eyes worried. "Report," snapped the Major.

Asuka forced all thoughts of revenge and rage against the designer of the PP1-P out of her head. "Beruhig dich, Asuka, ruhig Blut. Konzentriere dich. Cool bleiben," she muttered to herself. She took a deep breath of LCL. It tasted of blood... more so than usual. "The Plasmathrower malfunctioned and blew up... and we seem to be on fire," she reported.

"I know that," said the Major, with forced calm. "You've almost lost the AT-Field. Get a grip of yourself, and get it back up. Try to keep with it and do as much damage as you can."

Asuka focussed. Her mind was still. She was herself, and no-one else. She was the pilot of Unit 02. The AT-Field came back at full strength, spiking up as both the shield and the sword of the Evangelion.

Shinji screamed.

"I'm not the stupid one here. I don't have certain," and there was a pause, "proclivities MINE which resulted in something which had to be covered up at notable cost. Not to mention the long term consequences." The brunette ENEMY had smiled, triumphantly.

She hated her so much. The idiot
ENEMY didn't understand at all, and she kept on bringing it up. Everyone else was inferior; she had ensured that the negative recessives would not show, while maintaining the best common features CARE. It was necessary.

There was a hum, as the door slid open. The man WEAK who entered had flinched, slightly, as he saw the two women staring at each other.

He had sucked in the air between his teeth. "I'm sorry," he WEAK had said, "but you're needed in the main lab. I think we have progress with the neural links, with my refined design for the nerve clips.CARE"

And together they had left, the man in the middle as a barrier between the two.

BODY MINE
ENEMY MINE
SELF MINE

Shinji spasmed, autonomous, uncontrolled movements replacing any thought, blood rushing forth from his eyes, ears, mouth and nose alike. His unconscious body detached from the seat, and floated, limp, in the LCL, gravity meaningless in the neutrally buoyant fluid.

The AT-Field back active, Asuka resumed her task of dismantling the Herald, even as it tried to flee. The PP1-P may have broken, but she still had her charge beams, and she still had her claws. Digging the Evangelion's feet, and its spur, into the leviathan's back, she straightened up, relativistic particle beams lancing down from the head mounts into the wounds on the back of the beast, even as she clawed down into it, slashing down with precision, over and over again.

"Die," she muttered to herself. "Die, die,die!"

Yam twisted furiously, trying to detach the murderous being, the traitor and usurper, attached to its back. It even dared the noxious atmosphere, leaping clean out of the water, twisting through the poison that burned it, but Asuka rode the burning white behemoth, feet fastened into its body through the aerial roll. In fact, all that produced was a clean shot for the NEG ships, and they took it, nascent suns vomited forth from the surviving ships with ventral plasma weapons, which impacted against the 'wings' of the somewhat ray-like beast, burning holes which merely sped up the oxygenated fires that licked up against it.

Back in Command, a notable percentage of the higher ranked members of the NEG military watched the auto-censored image feed. Auto-censors were a particularly useful tool for individuals not stationed on the front lines, watching image feeds. The fairly smart LAIs which made up the programmes were designed to reduce the image to a form which could be dismissed as unreal by the ape-brain, thus evading some of the more blatant triggers of Aeon War Syndrome. The most common way was to render the image as if it were an animated cartoon from at least a century ago, before the advent of photorealistic computer graphics. Sadly, the loss in clarity and the image lag for each frame to be rendered made it impractical for front-line use, and there was still AWS symptoms from the higher brain functions, which realised that the images were real, even if they appeared false. To use the long-discredited psychology of Sigmund Freud, as a 'lie-to-children' to help explain the phenomenon, the auto-censor prevented AWS induced by the Id (which was responsible for the "Viewing" AWS), but left the others open to "Knowing" AWS. But it was a help.

Of course, even the conscious mind has problems accepting that you are watching a forty metre robot surf a giant white monster which is on fire, and which just leapt out of the water and did a barrel roll.

"I'd like to say that shocked me," declared Misato, "but frankly I'm getting a bit jaded about what the Evangelions do." She looked around. "It's just as well that Ritsuko hasn't shown up from that meeting with Dr Miyakame; she'd be going crazy over this," she added, sotto voce. "Possibly literally." The Major began to gnaw at a finger nail, noticing that she seemed to have ended up in a position in this room quite outside her actual military rank from the fact that the Evangelion seemed to be able to hurt the target. "Do we have any more assets at all?" she asked the room.

"All naval assets are engaged."
"Air assets have withdrawn; they're not doing anything. We have four wings of heavy bombers headed down from the NA Frontline, from the Migou pullback, but they're not going to be here for thirty minutes."
"This isn't a conventional mecha fight. They're all deployed by the waterfront; we don't have enough amphibious units stationed in C2 to make a difference."
"The Engels are there too. The Herald is out of their weight class. Even a Seraph or a Chashmal couldn't get through the AT-Field, even if the presence of your Evangelion within it is weakening it. This is a fight for ships."

A light went on in Misato's eyes. "That ship... the cargo vessel that Asu... Unit 02 jumped onto," she said, barely breathing. "Can we use that? I know it's unarmed, but..." She turned to Tokita, the Chief Engineer for the rapidly discredited Project Daeva. "We're going to need everything you can tell us about the Type-S."

~'/|\'~

Asuka paused for a moment. She seemed to only doing superficial damage; without the PP1-P, she couldn't flood the lacerations she opened in the creature with ionised gas. She needed to do more damage. Unit 02 bent down, AT-Field wrapped tight around itself, protected from the intense heat from the chemical reactions in the water, and stuck both claws into an open wound, bladed fingers thrust aside, as she pulled the wound open even further, causing a fresh rush of heat, and the white leviathan to twist and turn under water as a fresh wave of agony filled its mind.

The pain only increased when the crimson titan, dwarfed by the beast it rode, began firing charge beam after charge beam into the wound, the relativistic particles in the beam tearing worm-like tunnels into the softer inner flesh.

The Herald then knew that it had to get out of here. Its oaths to the First were not worth this pain, this agony. It would retreat and sleep beneath the waves of a planet not like this one, one with a proper atmosphere and proper, truly sapient life. And it would not even be able to return and destroy this pitiful ball of iron and silicates, for this was the traitor and usurper's planet, and such action would result in its death. If only it could get rid of the thing on its back...

It was at this moment that Asuka felt a hand brush against her breast, as she fought to retain the hold of the Herald, as it tried to spin to get her off.

"Pervert!" she yelled, pulling a hand away from the controls to slap the boy in the face. "Do something useful, damn it!"

The blow, softened by its passage from the LCL, collided with Shinji's right cheek. The body, knocked by the impact, floated gently towards the back of the plug. His unseeing eyes, pupils dilated and rolled back in their sockets, gazed at nothingness.

Asuka drew in a deep gulp of liquid. "Misato," she called, "there's a problem with the Third Child. He's unconscious or something."

There was a pause. "His vitals are stable, but weak," the older woman reported, an odd note in her voice. "What the hell happened?"

"I don't know," she yelled back, as the Herald bucked from side to side, trying to build up a resonant frequency which would throw her off. "He... argh... he wasn't sounding well a bit... maybe some reaction to fact 02's calibrated differently."

A pinch of guilt ran through Asuka's mind. This is my fault. I shouldn't have taken him in here. After all, he isn't prepared for a MP Evangelion; Unit 01 is probably different enough that there are problems with synchronisation.

No! she thought immediately. Unit 02 is mine, and I care for it. He's weak if he can't synchronise properly and faints at a time like this. It shows that you can't rely on anyone but yourselves."

But still, he did look rather pathetic floating there, in the plug suit that didn't fit properly and the darker cloud of LCL around him. It was just as well, she thought, that from what I've been told, LCL can be used as a substitute for human blood. From the change in the colour of the fluid, he's lost a lot.

No. Focus. It can wait until after we've killed this thing.

"Right," ordered the Major, "keep it in as much pain as possible. Hurt it. And be prepared to get away from the Herald when necessary."

"Okay." The clawing and mutilation of the ancient being resumed.

Back in the control room, Misato took a deep breath. "Damn. Damn. Damn. Poor Shinji." The Major shook her head. "Doesn't matter; he's still alive. I want a full medical team to be prepared for when we recover the Evangelion. How is the clean-up of the lakeside going?"

"We have the rest of the rampant Type-S contained. The Engels have it trapped within a perimeter, and they're systematically cleansing it."

"Good."

Most of the room was watching the AR map projected onto the central table, as a blue icon, marked "High Priority", pursued the Herald icon. The fires were spreading across the lake surface, the inferno of the Herald igniting the oily scum which had followed it through the hole in space, forming thick black clouds.

"One question, Major." It was the Vice Admiral.

"Yes?"

"How did you come up with an idea like that? It's almost the epitome of 'so stupid it might just work'?"

"When it was coming in, I noticed that it would devour anything that got in its way. It was the death of the Blade of Athena that really gave me the idea. I was going to suggest that we feed it Unit 02, and have it cut its way out from inside," she glanced at her audience, who were staring at her. "Don't worry. We've done something similar before." They didn't stop staring. "But then there was something else to feed it. Let's see if it gives the bastard stomach ache."

~'/|\'~

A cargo ship, with a notable dent in its side, flew over the top of the Herald, its A-Pods burning a bright blue. A fight of Auphans, the fastest of the Engels, flocked around it, firing their Plasma cannons at the surface of its hull. The miniature suns that they birthed slammed into the black, tar-like secretions which covered the ship, emerging from within the breached cargo hull through burst open hatches. More Engels stood on the surface, hand-held flamethrowers cutting a white-hot swath through the extra-dimensional entity, casting their balls of fire at the darkness.

Suddenly, they all peeled off, their own A-Pods glowing as they jumped from the carrier ship, letting the blackness well up, thick and oozing, the implicit viscera forming eyes to gaze from this new place.

The escape pod fired, expelling the last humans from the ship. The crew within the hull of the crippled Araska, as much of the ship and its Type-S armour scraped and contained within the damaged cargo ship, had been long since digested by the entity which had been intended to protect them. The ship took a tight dive downwards, into the water.

Right into the path of the Herald.

It swallowed the vessel reflexively. Why should it not? It would need nutrients to help rebuild the horrific damage which had been inflicted on it.

There was a moment, as the oozing blackness hit the back of its gullet, when it realised what the abominations which lived on this monstrous planet had done.

Just a moment, before the night-like tar-beast burst outwards, the programmed imperatives of the long-dead Elder Things still present for this particular foe.

Yam came to a stop almost immediately, as the Type-S, resplendent with its sidereal eyes, spread through the white body like a cancer, digesting and tearing apart the ancient entity from within. It now knew true pain. The agony, from the noxious gas and the burning and the high-energy particle beams; it was nothing to being digested from inside out. It could not even use the gift of Yog Sothoth, because the presence of the traitor on its back weakened it enough that the faculties which the entity had been engineered for, the ability to negative the shifting phase spaces, could allow it free reign.

The Herald did the only thing it could do in those circumstances. Shifting its somewhat protean biology (though it was nothing compared to the black cancer, which was sprouting teeth coated in enzymes designed to tear apart its flesh in the most painful way possible), it pushed the core of its soul, the glowing red orb, upwards through its body, away from the Type-S and towards the usurper that clung to its back.

Preferable|desirable|better die|cease|stop by|caused|induced specified|selected|chosen method|way|cease,

it thought, mind overcome with pain.

Asuka saw a glint of red, in the wounds she was opening, having resorted to using the Unit's teeth as well as the claws to sped up the destruction, swallowing the meat without chewing. Flexing the muscles of the Evangelion, even the damaged left arm, she tore a vast swath of hide off, pulling milky white flesh (now shot through with tiny black tubules) away. A red sphere, remarkably similar in colour to Unit 02 lay there.

And now to finish off, she thought, as she wrapped both hands about the globe and pulled it out, all the time pounding charge beam after charge beam into its surface, cutting out small chips as its surface rang like some unearthly bell. Prying it free, with a fresh current of reactive creamy blood, she lifted it up in both hands, noticing the black protrusions which grew from it, their vital vicissitudes quite unlike the geometrical perfection of the sphere. Pulling back, she slammed the forehead of the Evangelion into it.

At least, that was what she intended to do.

She wasn't quite sure what had actually happened; her jaws suddenly ached, like they had been very quickly dislocated and relocated. Moreover, her body felt wrong, as if she were subtly the wrong shape. Nevertheless, the orb had gone dim, turning grey before her eyes, flaking apart and shattering, as if something vital had been taken from it.

Then it exploded.

The explosion cast the Evangelion out of the water, hurling it through the air. It landed again, head first,in a slick of burning oils, and vanished below the surface.

It came up again, floating face down, unmoving.

~'/|\'~

Dr Akagi and Major Katsuragi sat by the window, staring out over the lake far below. Before them, vehicles scuttled over the surface of the water, trying to contain the situation. The consequences of the release of what the Araska had been using in the Type-S armour lay before them; while the entire surface of Lake Michigan was on fire, the thick black smoke roiling and burning as the polluted waters burned, a core of differently coloured flames indicating the presence of the transition metals in the water. It was like some scene out of a medieval book of the end of the world. There was a burning lake of fire beside the city, that many primitivist superstitionist groups comprised of those that dwelt outside the arcologies, called Babylon, ruled over by the Anti-Christ, leader of the New Earth Government.

Most of those groups were under investigation for Code-El cults.

Misato shuddered. The Evangelion had just devoured the black tar-like things and the Herald alike. And this wasn't the first time. That first time, Unit 01 had latched those tentacles it had vomited forth onto the red orb on the front of Asherah, and had consumed its way through the Kathirat.

They're volatile monsters, she thought. If we didn't have control of them, they'd be worse than those things from the Fall of New Kuala Lumpur. Poor Quien and the others...

She shook her head, sadly, slumped back in her soft seat.

Ritsuko glanced at her. "You did it again."

"I was stupid. This was a strategic disaster. The lake is ecologically dead, and we've released whatever the Type-S was into the wild. I saw how fast it split and grew. And on top of that, wherever the Herald came from, it was rich in oil; the entire lake is burning."

"You know, a hundred years ago, we'd have been preparing to invade." She caught Misato's glare. "Yes, I know. Inappropriate. But you were thinking it too. Even you know that before the invention of the D-Engine, everybody invaded everyone else to get oil."

"The whole thing was a farce," she continued, ignoring the doctor. "The plasmathrower malfunctioned, the C2 fleet took massive casualties, the Araska prototype went rampant. And we should have been prepared for an attack from a Herald."

The blond woman cocked her head, adjusting the AR sunglasses she was wearing. "Why? They haven't attacked anywhere else before."

"Yes, but of course," she layered on the sarcasm, "of course the first time we take time away from L2, we're attacked here. How the hell did it come here? What was it looking for?"

Ritsuko looked her steadily in the eye. "We have no idea. All we have is hypotheses and wild ideas."

"What draws all the Heralds?" continued Misato, ignoring her. "Is it the Evangelions? Are there cultists that summon them to try to sabotage the war effort? What does it all mean!"

The scientist poured out a second pair of drinks. Neither of them were alcoholic; they had far, far too much paper-work (and in the case of Misato, explanations to superiors) to be inebriated, and so ethanol was switched for caffeine.

Misato sighed. "Thanks, Rits. I'm not going to be sleeping tonight after all this... not that I'd want to, from what I've seen, even from the auto-censored TacCom data," she added darkly.

"It's fine. I'm sorry I wasn't there for everything; Dr Miyakame were in the safe null-bunker for the entire length of the incident." She coughed. "And it's not the Evangelions," she added, "since, after all, Unit 02's been active in Germany longer than either of the other two, and hasn't attracted any Heralds."

"Forgot about that. Yeah."

There was silence, as the two women looked out over the water.

Then, suddenly, Misato balled up a fist and punched it into her other hand. "Damn it! I'm really pissed off!"

Ritsuko leant back, a puzzled expression on her face. "Where did that come from?" she asked.

"I saw both the teenagers off to studied confinement. Shinji was on a stretcher; he was bleeding from everywhere on his head; eyes, nose, mouth, ears, everywhere. What the hell went on in that thing?! And what the hell did Asuka think she was doing by taking him in it!"

"Calm down," said Ritsuko, quietly, taking a look around. "You're drawing attention. And, in all honesty, we had no clue that would happen. Seriously. In retrospect, it's kind of obvious that you can't just put someone in a improperly configured war machine, but no-one really thought about it in design. We've got plenty of things that mean that only the proper user could start it up, but we never thought that the pilot would take another person into the entry plug, especially not one who was already trained to operate them and thus sensitised."

Misato made a noise of disgust. "But Asuka is meant to be a genius; she has a better degree than me, for goodness sake. And she's half my age.

"And none of us noticed it, either." There was a bitter laugh. "Really bright people can break foolproof systems in ways that fools can only dream."

"And the bastards in the Daeva team!" continued Misato. She really felt like breaking something right now, but she restrained herself. "Snide jerks who went wrong a lot more catastrophically than we ever have. Why the hell did the Araska go rampant like that, at the worst possible moment! And what the hell were they using in that thing?"

"I have no idea what happened," stated Ritsuko, her face perfectly blank. Oh, some people might have suspicions about why the event happened just as the Evangelion moved towards it, but they would only ever remain suspicions. The Daeva team certainly wouldn't have known that the biological programming encoded by the Elder Things would lead the 'Type-S' to attack what it perceived to be two of its old enemies, and she certainly wasn't about to tell them. "But for what they were using; well, I have my suspicions, and, frankly, it's a sign that you can go too far with ACXB research."

She didn't know whether to laugh or cry after saying that. She repressed both urges.

Misato sighed. "Yeah, I guess you're right." She snapped her fingers, pulling out her dark green PCPU (the secure one), logging on, and tossed it over to Ritsuko. "There's some pretty important data in there; the entire contents of Unit 02's black box. Copy and back it up, then give me back my PCPU."

The doctor started the data transfer, and began to flick through it while she waited.

Misato made an inquisitive noise.

"This is important," Ritsuko said softly, even breathing with care. "Very important indeed."

"Did they break any synch-ratio records?" asked the black haired woman, taking a sip of her drink.

"Asuka did, but that's just a normal procedure. There's a seven second period where her ratio spikes up to 99%, probably because of the danger. But look at Shinji's data," she added, eyes narrowed. "Most of the time he's tracking as normal, a good 20 to 30 points below Asuka; probably due to the lack of A10 clips and the fact that some of the things in Asuka's LCL cocktail would be bad for the concentration of anyone with a Y chromosome..."

"Wha...?" asked Misato, sitting up.

"LCL has a cocktail of various drugs designed to maintain mental stability in solution," explained Ritsuko, in a distracted tone of voice. "The male and female brains work differently. LCL-f, for example, has, well, a very large number of compounds, but examples include pherohydamulate, assorted hormone modulators, tetrapentaline benzoate, hexadasophospate rezol-3-4,4-ulate..." She paused. "You're not understanding any of this, are you?" At Misato's negative noise, she continued, "Well, all of the standard compounds given to soldiers, then a number only issued to special forces, the GIA, and certain branches of the OIS. You know, as a commissioned officer in a high AWS-risk assignment, you're on some of them, too, you just don't know their names." She shook her head. "But we're getting distracted. Look at these regions, before he drops to zero from the loss of consciousness."

A number of graphs displayed on screen were pushed towards Misato, who indicated that, yes, they were visible to her.

"Look at those points. If I run a mod function over them, they appear to be fine, and even increased over those regions, but they drop down to almost zero on the graph." She shuddered. "That's impossible. It shouldn't be doing things like that. You ... it's impossible."

"That word," began Misato, "I don't think it means..."

Ritsuko smiled excessively sweetly. "Not another word from you, thank you very much. Yes," she declared, thumping her hand down on the table, making the drinks rattle, "this is important. And impossible, yes. We have yet another anomaly with synchronisation ratios. As if that incident with Rei and Unit 00 wasn't already bad enough. And it's completely different from that."

She tapped her fingers on the table.

"This may need some further study..."

~'/|\'~

"Hmm."

"And what is that supposed to mean?", the female Nazzadi with the insignia of a NEGN Colonel asked, with a pronounced hint of irritation in her voice.

"Nothing," the blond woman replied, still staring at the computer screen. "Well, that's not strictly true."

The black-skinned woman sighed. She hated her assignment with the Special Weapons Division at times like this, she really did. The projects and developments were often brilliant, revolutionary, and had potential for paradigm shifts in warfare. This one was a particularly good example; it could massively reduce the number of recruits that the NEGA needed, by an ingenuous Command-and-Control system that would, through extensive automation and specially trained commanders, replace many of the basic infantry and power armoured troopers. But the scientists who came up with these things... well, a colleague had described them as a bunch of opera divas prancing along a catastrophe curve, and frankly, right now she was inclined to agree with him.

They always seemed to prevaricate, and took a perverse pleasure in being obtuse in ways that meant that you looked ignorant for asking them. And bloody stupid word games in coming up with names for their projects, who could forget that? It was a plague infecting the scientific community, and even the damn engineers!

Nevertheless, she bit. "Please, explain."

"The EMSS scores for these two candidates are point three zero four over what they should be. Both of them. To as precisely as we can measure it."

"So?"

"It's a common trait for that entire test group. But only that one. B2, P2, C2, T3; all of those ones have been within half a standard deviation of the expected results. But all of this group are consistently higher than they should be."

The Nazzadi Colonel stared into the other woman's eyes. "Is that a concern? What's causing it?"

The blond woman sucked in air through her teeth. "For the first question; no. There does seem to be a corresponding increase in LAAM score; three point nine one on average, but that's still safely below the safety threshold. We've screened out all the high LAAM candidates; an 83, for example, would be horribly risky. The retroviral modifications would leave them very prone to synchronisation; they'd probably lose control of the part of their brain that would permit them to distinguish between reality and psychically induced hallucinations."

"And yet I've heard it mentioned that you've tolerated the existence of single candidate with an LAAM of 100?" the Nazzadi asked, acidly.

"It is true that the Second Infant has that score. He is a one-off; the test bed, so to speak, for the technologies. At no point has he suffered a synchronisity incident, however. It was a necessary part of producing the gene templates and mapping the different nature of these parapsychic powers.

"Why then do you permit the continued existence of the subject then?" she continued, in the same tone of voice.

"He is a stable Perseus commander; you have access to his VREES records. I can assure you that we have no other subjects with an LAAM of over 50 involved in Project Perseus, and the mode is 21.41."

"And the other part of my question?"

"No, there is no theory that could explain this."

The blond woman hoped that her choice of words would go unnoticed. The ignorance so prevalent in society about the difference between a hypothesis and a theory could even be useful sometimes, annoying though it was.

"It may be an diet factor outside our control, or even something to do with arcology air quality," she continued. "All newer Batch-Types are being raised in proper control groups, but these ones are in a normal environment, and so we can't account for all the variables," she added. "The Batch-Types are promising, but the eldest candidate in that group was only born six years ago, and none of them have the mental fortitude nor the established personalities to be able to synchronise with the adult, albeit blank minds of the Type-Numerals, without, as we have found, catastrophic damage to their immature minds.

The black-skinned woman nodded. "But what we at the SWD are really interested in is whether you will be able deploy sufficient Paragon candidates as Perseus commanders for Operation CATO."

The blond woman nodded. "That is already under way. Arrangements have been made for all the batches that we're deploying, and the cover stories are in place. C2, L2 and T3 are to be put in command of the new Type VII models. Each candidate should be able to command a force about the size of two companies; this is their first major operation, and they are not properly trained. We can only justify yearly immersion sessions, beyond their normal check-ups."

"Despite the given consent?"

"Yes; it was only limited, and there are the cross-contamination effects from the other Project. Both of us need the retroviral alterations to make them suitable candidates, although we're looking for different functions in the expressed qualities. It's fortunate that the Second and the Third are what they are, which allows us to share resources."

She cleared her throat.

"Anyway, they're only serving as motive force and command, through; we wouldn't actually make them marionette the Type VII. Only the Second has displayed such abilities and survived; we lost several candidates in the old training regime. In addition, the candidate groups for B2 and P2 were viewed as too weak for the Type VII, but they will be deployed in command of the obsolete Type VI, in company sized formations. Moreover, the Second Infant, the Prototype, will be deployed with VREES, commanding a brigade level formation, as usual."

The Colonel nodded. "Excellent. The B2 and P2 groups are a bonus. I'm glad my predecessor maintained funding to keep the Type VI models in storage. And PR?"

"Cover stories are in place. By preventing new memory formation, they'll be easier subjects for trained Grade Three MMW implantation. They won't remember a thing." The blond woman's voice was tinged with regret.

The Nazzadi woman's face took on a sympathetic look. "I understand that from an outsider's viewpoint, what we're doing is horrific. But so would the casualties in CATO if we didn't do this, or the long term strategic implications if we let the Dagonites maintain control."

She sighed.

"It's all about the strategic implications. Some people would ask if we have the right to make a thousand people suffer so that one million can live. And I would argue that we don't have a right not to. Necessity is a harsh mistress. It's what distinguishes real life from fiction. If this was a story, we'd be able to wish upon a star, believe in ourselves, rescue the prince and save the world. But the world doesn't work that way. Honourable warriors are wiped out by those who use all the assets they have, and if you're hot-blooded, you can't go beyond the impossible and defy probability and break the heavens."

She turned to leave.

"What you can do is get yourself and people who rely upon you killed. I've seen it far too much."

~'/|\'~

Kaji looked away from the window, a slight grin on his face.

"Well, that was an eventful day," he said, staring over at Gendo Ikari, who stood, impassively, at his desk, his eyes concealed by the way that the artificial life in the geodome reflected off his AR glasses. The case lay on the desk, sealed, the internal wards still up.

Kaji tilted his head slightly. "It was because of that, wasn't it," he said, trying to get a response.

There was silence, as the two men stared at each other across Gendo's vast office. Slowly, Kaji walked over to the table, keeping his eyes locked on the Representative.

"It's but a fragment of the whole... but I think a fragment is enough. It's alive, I'm sure of it, even though it's encased in diamond and trapped within the Bah'ri Diß. I could feel it." He moved his gaze to the case. "It's the key to the Human Iteracy Project, isn't it?"

Gendo then flipped open the case, revealing the black and yellow of the artefact, with its Tsabian occult symbols lit on the surface as the active binding held. Within the central crystal, a figure could be seen, vaguely foetal, sealed within.

Gendo then spoke. "Yes. This is the High Priest of the Outer Gods."

They stared down at the object, as the thing sealed within squirmed.

"I shall not say his name so close to him, but you know to whom I refer."

~'/|\'~

It was Tuesday, and they had finally released Shinji from the Ashcroft Clinic, after they had failed to detect any major consequences from... well, from whatever had happened. Shinji wasn't quite sure what had happened (but how it had hurt!), and Dr Akagi, when she had come to visit him, had been remarkably incoherent about the specifics, mutterings about impossibilities.

"... and then she told me that," Shinji put on a voice, "well, of course we never put two pilots in the same entry plug. I mean, it's only a highly sensitive war machine controlled by a direct noetic interface specifically calibrated to a single pilot, so of course it will be fine when you put someone calibrated for a different system in the same machine as the intended pilot. No, of course, we just have those pilot profiles there for fun!" Shinji looked around the classroom, then sighed, turning back to Toja and Ken. "It went on like that for a while, using rather excessive amounts of sarcasm. Long story short; they're never doing that again, we're never to do that again, and what the hell were we thinking."

Ken gave a suppressed groan. "Oh man, I can't believe I missed everything. I mean, now I'm never going to get to go in an Eva entry plug. I feel like I've been cheated my look around, you know. And I missed that battle and everything!"

There was a snort from Toja. "Knowing you, you'd have been busy mourning the loss of all those ships and stuff. You'd probably have been on the floor, sobbing, one arm held in the air filming. Of course, with the other hand, you'd have been busy..." He noticed Shinji's glare, and tailed off.

"Did you even pay attention to what I was saying? What are you, stupid? You're lucky not to have to do this. It hurts. It always ends up hurting. And they ended up bringing me all the classwork I needed to catch up on in the Clinic, so I didn't even get to have a rest."

Ken's face screwed up. "But they're so awesome..."

"Then you're an idiot."

Toja patted the other boy on the head patronisingly. "Don't get upset. It normally takes him a few days to get back to his old self after this kind of thing. A bit more snappy than usual, though."

"If I'm being snappy, it's because I'm surrounded by idiots who think it would be fun to be put through a skull splitting migraine then locked up in a mental ward for a few days while they run checks for mental contamination," snapped Shinji. He held up a hand. "I'm sorry."

Toja shook his head. "You shouldn't be. Ignore him. He's just being an insensitive jerk."

"No, I'm just being irritable." He pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to change the subject. "So, what did you two end up doing while everything was going on?"

Ken shrugged. "Not much. They basically took us to a sort of games room. We played some DoEA III..."

"... which I totally crushed you at," pointed out Toja. "You were very cocky right up until I got that flank attack."

Ken crossed his arms and looked away. "I still don't get how the hell you managed that. I had your landing zones locked down. How did you managed to slaughter my main comms centre?"

Toja deliberately flashed his incisors. "Assassins, you forgot about assassins. You only had basic troopers staffing the facility, and you were too busy stopping me landing more Replicas that you didn't notice that I'd noticed the gap in your sensor grid. Stealthed right in, then hacked your sensors, which allowed me to turn off your AA radar in a narrow arc and land all those troops I'd cued up."

"No, that's not right. I had an AWACS up in the air, too. I know that you took my radar down, because that was obvious when the Comms Centre didn't let me select it, but the AWACS didn't spot it."

Toja only smirked at that.

"No, seriously, tell me that."

"I don't think so. Tell you want, we'll have another game..." he paused, "can't do it tonight, I've got the homework I didn't do yesterday... well, we'll see if I can do it, then get online." He cocked his head at Shinji. "Hey, Shinji, do you play DoEA III? Want to see if you can slap some sense into Ken, because he's an idiot. Despite being a military freak, he's actually rather bad at RTSes."

"Am not."

"Are too. Remember the last LAN game? You got slaughtered, even though we let you have extra resources at the start."

"That's because RPGs are better, anyway," retorted Ken. "Better graphics, better immersion, a proper MMO system."

Shinji coughed. "Let's back up a bit. DoEA III?"

"Doctrine of Eternal Aeons 3. It's a Real Time Strategy game for the PC. Basically, you're controlling an army. There are three factions, the humans, the not-Migou-honestly, and the orcs-in-space; pretty standard RTS fare, all in all. The AI is awesome; they've got the individual AI for your units down really well; they take cover properly."

Shinji shrugged. "Meh. I'm more a Syzergy 2 player."

Ken moaned. "Hurgh. Consoles are worse. The graphics are worse and nothing quite controls like a proper, desk-mounted AR scheme."

"Well, then, sometime you can let Misato kick your arse at... wait a moment. I'm trying not to let you anywhere near her. Ignore that. So that was it? You got to sit around playing video games while I got a splitting headache and bleeding from my eyes, mouth and ears. Pfft." He sighed. "Life just isn't fair."

"Well, someone else wanted to use the PCs after a few games, so we ended up watching a documentary on Iceland."

"Iceland?" said Shinji, in a disbelieving tone of voice, one eyebrow raised.

Ken shuddered. "Don't do that. It makes you look creepy. It was pretty interesting, not your normal InBroad rubbish. All about the Dagonite conquest from the Migou and the defences and stuff."

Toja nodded. "Yeah, all about the Dagonite conquest from the Migou and the defences. I thought it was going to be boring and rubbish, but it was pretty interesting."

Shinji grunted. "As I said, not fair."

Toja grinned wide. "I can tell you something else that's unfair. You're going to have to see more of that girl. She may have been hot, but you could use her personality to, like, cut metal. Like some kind of acid or... help me out here Ken, what's the name of that stuff you use to, like shape, metal."

Ken cocked his head to one side. "A nanofactory?"

"No, when you've got the thing out, and want to polish it."

"You recycle it, then make a new one. The 'notes you get for the recycling mean that you're only paying for the energy, and that's pretty cheap."

"No, idiot. Damn it. This is going to annoy me all day if I can't remember the word."

"What word?" called out Hikary, from the other side if the room, eyes on Toja.

"What's the stuff you use to polish and grind stuff down?" Toja replied.

She sighed, "Do you mean sandpaper?"

He snapped his fingers. "That's the word!" He saw that Hikary was still staring at him. "What?"

"It means that I know that you haven't done your Historical Literature homework, Toja", she snapped back. "If you'd been paying attention, you'd picked it up from reading."

The Nazzadi flapped his hand in the direction of the amlati. "I just didn't have much time this weekend, you know." He turned back to the other boys. "Anyway, you're going to have to spend tonnes of time with someone with a personality like sandpaper, grinding away at your nerves."

Shinji frowned. "What are you talking about? Who said she wasn't coming here?"

It was, of course at that exact moment that Asuka Langley Soryu confidently strode through the door, thus once again proving that reality was a bit of a dick, and excessively fond of irony.

Ken and Toja groaned simultaneously, bringing their hands into contact with their faces with a notable slap.

~'/|\'~

White spoke.

"It proceeds. Another Herald slain, and the chain of inheritance is pulled closer."

Blue spoke.

"Indeed."

Red spoke, a hint of agitation in her voice.

"But the way it proceeds is not liked."

White spoke.

"Explain."

Red spoke.

"How was it that it was not known what the Navy was using in that military project? That should not have been possible."

Green spoke.

"The involvement of a higher power is suspected?"

Red spoke.

"The involvement of Gendo Ikari is suspected."

Yellow spoke.

"Excessive paranoia is being displayed. Fact: we do not control everything. Fact: we must rely upon agents, who are fallible and cannot be guaranteed to be loyal to us exclusively. Fact: the security on projects, whether Naval or otherwise is immense. The plan must remain flexible."

Green spoke.

"That is true. Excessive rigidity will only lead to breakage. A failure, and that which shall be broken shall be humanity."

Red spoke.

"Then how did Project Daeva get its collective hands upon the extra-dimensional entities known as Shoggoths? Consider this; in the Necronomicon, Abdul Alhazred denied most feverishly..."

Green spoke.

"... that they could exist on this planet. Yes. It is known. Alhazred was wrong. Empirical evidence exists that they were present in Antarctica; both the Dyer Papers and the Danforth Notes confirm this, and let the First Innsmouth Incident not be forgotten."

White spoke.

"Yet it would not be wise to dismiss Alhazred so quickly. Remember the name appears in the ancient histories of the unknowable Tsab. Policy must be to note correlations whenever they occur. A precipice is being walked here; a fall, and all shall fall."

Blue spoke.

"Agreed. And this is what is worrying. It should not need reminding that Antarctica is solidly under Migou control,and has been since the start of the Second Arcanotech War. The New Earth Government Navy would not be able to extract arcanoxenobiological samples from there."

Red spoke.

"There is a ninety-seven point zero one three percent probability that the Migou have cleansed the site in its entirety. That is why the subject was raised."

Yellow spoke.

"Nevertheless, the paranoia displayed is excessive. There are no known links links to Gendo Ikari, when there are so many players in this game; albeit so many unaware of their participation."

White spoke.

"Absolute control is impossible. Absolute precision is required. Absolute knowledge is required. Absolute knowledge is impossible. These facts must be faced, and overcome them as best as can be achieved, by eliminating as many variables as possible. Control must be maintained"

There was silence.

Green spoke.

"Do the Nine Daughters of Ægir still slumber? Does control still remain?"

White spoke.

"Control remains. The Nine Daughters of Ægir must be concealed until they are deployed, so that the Texts are fulfilled. Remember this; the Texts are not our prophecy. We seek to corrupt them from their original meaning, and for our control over the Celestial Concordance to come about, the initial conditions must proceed as prophesied. Hence, the Nine must wake before the One, and if we have replaced the Nine with our own, who fulfil the criteria, then the One cannot wake."

Green spoke.

"Agreed."

Blue spoke.

"Agreed."

Yellow spoke.

"Remember; CATO is soon. Only one more."

Red spoke.

"And then Xue'Vehulu'Ia'Ia shall be made whole, and under control."

Green spoke.

"Not to mention the peripheral benefits. CATO shall remove one major threat to the plan."

Yellow spoke.

"Indeed. It need not be reminded that the consequences should anyone else control Apotheosis be dire."

White spoke.

"Everything we do. Everything we have given. It is all for the species as a whole.

~'/|\'~