Disclaimer: I do not own Noir or Evangelion

The Black Hands of NERV

By bissek

Chapter 11

Mothers

Something about the third document that Kaji had received was bothering him. After tracking down more information of the Greone family and the circumstances behind the deaths of three of its leaders in rapid succession, he learned that one of the deaths was the result of an internal dispute – one that lasted maybe ten seconds. The other two deaths were accredited to the internationally wanted criminal known by the alias of Noir.

Had Noir attacked the Greones in order to acquire that document? What was the connection between the DGSE and Noir? Kaji ran a data search on the mysterious killer and quickly got a list of his most prominent killings.

The leader of a revolutionary force in North Africa, with a sizable portion of his headquarters staff joining him the next day. Two fifths of the UN forces that had been sent to contain the insurrection he led were French.

The head of a Triad clan, along with several dozen of his subordinates, and his top assassin. The clan in question was involved in the smuggling of heroin into Europe through French ports.

The leader of a group of extremely corrupt members of the Parisian police force. The night after he died, the judge who kept coming up with highly dubious reasons as to why the evidence compiled against the corrupt officers by Internal Affairs was inadmissible in court was also killed.

An entire cell of terrorists operating in Paris. This group had been able to identify and kill undercover counterterrorism officers at will. Along with the terrorists, a very senior counterterrorism officer was killed as well. Later investigation showed that the officer in question had been taking bribes from the terrorists to sell out his men.

As Kaji looked over the basic information he had found, the connection between all the cases came to him. In every single case, the deaths brought advantage to the French government. The DGSE had been removing threats to their country and its citizens by creating the ultimate 'black' operations unit. Kaji chuckled at the inside joke that he had discovered.

Looking at the dates of the killings, Kaji noticed something else. The first Noir killing happened less than two weeks after Mireille Bouquet became the guardian of Kirika Yumura. The connection between Mireille and Noir was rather simple. She, or rather, they, were Noir.

The sheer complexity of the planning behind this scheme was boggling. Breaking into the highly classified records of the Marduk Institute (Which was getting more mysterious by the day. By his count, at least 105 of the 108 companies that formed the Institute didn't exist). Finding out that Commander Ikari's son was chosen to be a pilot and gambling that the other child could also become a pilot. Tracking the girl down to wherever she had gone (Kaji had looked into the official explanation of Kirika's disappearance and quickly learned that she had never been sent to the deceased acquaintance of Gendo) and making her disappear without leaving any evidence as to where she had gone, or even that she had ever been there to begin with. Investing years of effort into training the girl until she was capable of killing seven people and crippling an eighth in seconds without hesitation or remorse. And then, as an encore, sending her and the person selected to be her partner out to eliminate various enemies of the state while they were waiting for NERV to take the bait. The only thing that didn't fit was Kirika's apparent amnesia. Was that intentional, or an accident? Or a ruse? If so, for what purpose?

There was only one possible explanation for why the DGSE wanted to infiltrate a pair of elite assassins into NERV. They weren't there to track down the agents of this 'soldiers' organization, they were there to track them down and exterminate them. Kaji was suddenly very glad that he had decided to try to work with Bouquet instead of against her. The alternative could have been lethal.

Another day, another sync test. This time, Ritsuko had come up with another idea for something more exotic than the regular tests. Unlike the previous idea she had come up with and attempted to implement the day the 11th Angel attacked, this idea didn't involve personal embarrassment and had the potential to have an immediate payback if successful.

The theory behind the experiment was simple: In times of war, both people and equipment get damaged. There was also no guarantee that an Evangelion and its pilot would both be out of commission at the same time. As such, it was possible that NERV could end up in a situation where one Evangelion could not deploy even if it was operational, simply because the pilot was incapacitated.

To avoid this possibility, Ritsuko proposed to have the pilots attempt to sync with the Evangelions nominally assigned to the other pilots. If the experiment worked, then the potential problem could be resolved by shuffling the pilot roster until every active EVA had a pilot, even if its usual pilot was unfit for duty for some reason.

In order to reduce the potential problems should an Evangelion go out of control as EVA-00 did during Rei's first attempt to synchronize with it, only one pilot was going through the experiment at a time. As an additional precaution, a second pilot was observing the experiments in his or her normal EVA to be ready to contain the unit under test in the event of a berserker incident.

The first test was to see if Kirika could pilot EVA-00.

"EVA-00 has activated," reported Maya. "The pilot's synchronization ratio is five points below her current level in EVA-01"

"That's acceptable," Ritsuko decided. "It's still high enough that she can pilot. We now have a pilot who can use multiple units." Ritsuko opened a communication window. "How are you doing in there, Kirika?" She asked.

"This unit feels… strange." Was the reply.

"Strange? What do you mean?"

"It's much less friendly than EVA-01 is."

Ritsuko and Maya exchanged a confused look. 'Friendly' wasn't a word normally used to describe a 100 meter tall war machine, even ones that were technically alive.

"Friendly?"

"Whenever I sync with EVA-01, it always seems that it recognizes me and welcomes me. EVA-00 just seems to acknowledge that I'm here and is willing to put up with me."

Misato walked up to the microphone. "Don't worry, Kirika-chan." She said teasingly. "EVA-00 just met you. I'm sure that it will be friendlier when it has the chance to get to know you."

"If you say so, Misato-san. But Unit 01 has always been that way, even the first time I piloted."

None of the women in the control room caught the glance that Gendo and Fuyutsuki exchanged at that revelation.

"We've learned all we needed to know from this experiment." Gendo announced. "The Fourth Child can stand down. Prepare the First for the activation test with Unit 01."

Within the massive frame of EVA-01, the soul of Yui Ikari drowsed. For ten years she had been trapped inside the enormous biomechanical construct, unable to do anything but watch as the world progressed around her. The thing that bothered her the most about being trapped in the Evangelion was being separated from her children. To her, the selection of her children as pilots meant the end of ten years of separation. And now that they had been reunited, her heart ached to see what had happened to them.

In addition to being separated from his mother, Shinji had also forcibly taken away from his sister. And even though the two were now reunited, in a way they were still separated. Yui had tried to comfort her son, but the only time she had ever been able to reach him was when she had intervened to save him from the Fourth Angel. The rest of the time, he just couldn't hear her. At least his sorrow had lessened with the hope that he might one day help Kirika remember the girl she had once been.

But Kirika's scars were even deeper than Shinji's. Her daughter had had her capacity for caring peeled away over the course of the years, leaving an emotionless killer behind. Only over the course of the past year had she slowly regained the ability to be an actual person instead of a living weapon. And over the course of that year, she had been steeped in pain, grief, and betrayal. The poor girl was trapped between the fear of loneliness, the fear of being betrayed by those she approached to ease her loneliness, and the fear of losing those same people to death. Yui had been able to contact her daughter, but only for a few brief moments every time she synchronized with EVA-01, not long enough to communicate anything of significance.

Yui sensed a second presence touching her mind. Was one of her children visiting her? Yui turned her senses to the visitor.

The visitor was not one of her children. Yui wasn't even sure if the visitor was human. There was something decidedly off about the girl who was trying to synchronize with her. Looking deeper into the mind of the visitor, she saw an unwavering loyalty to her husband.

Yui may have loved her husband once, but that was before she learned what had happened to her children. Gendo was at least partially responsible for their suffering, and she couldn't find a single piece of evidence that he had ever attempted to make amends to them for that. Someone who was absolutely loyal to a man who could allow that much harm to come to his own children and show no remorse for the consequences was not someone she wanted to know.

"We're getting unexpected feedback from Unit 01!" Maya shouted.

"Asuka, get ready!" Ristuko barked. "EVA-01 may be going berserk!"

"I'm on it." Asuka replied.

EVA-02 got into position to intercept EVA-01 in case it broke free of its restraints and attacked the observation deck as EVA-00 had the first time Rei attempted to pilot it. Unfortunately, that wasn't what happened.

EVA-01 abruptly ejected the entry plug. As the Evangelion was still bound by its restraints to a wall, the plug rapidly bounced between the machine and the wall as it worked its way free. The continual impacts cracked the plug, causing LCL to spray out of the leaks. Then the plug finally worked its way free and rocketed towards the ceiling, slamming into it at high speed. After a few seconds, the jets propelling the ejection gave out, and the plug crashed to the floor.

Gendo ran out of the observation deck and made his way towards the test room. He didn't make it. Someone in Section 2 had apparently remembered what had happened the last time Rei had been injured in an activation test, and two agents tackled the Commander to prevent him from trying to force open a superheated entry plug a second time. At the same time, a team of men with hoses started spraying down the plug so that it could be cooled enough to safely open.

The first time that Rei had been in an accident like this, the integrity of the entry plug had not been compromised. As a result, the LCL in the flooded plug had absorbed a great deal of the impacts. She wasn't so lucky this time. With the LCL drained from the plug due to all of the cracks, there was no liquid to act as a shock absorber. Rei Ayanami had been repeatedly slammed against the control console and sides of the plug at high speed, and the results were not pretty.

The remaining tests scheduled for that day were canceled.

"This was not in the scenario." Gendo commented.

Fuyutsuki could only nod in agreement.

The knowledge that the Fourth could sense the souls with the Evangelions, if only for a brief instant at activation, was intriguing. Even more interesting was the fact that Yui apparently recognized her daughter whenever she piloted. But the incident with Rei was far more important.

While Yui was apparently willing to allow her children to pilot EVA-01, she was less willing to allow others to do so. While the Second Child had yet to even attempt to do so, what had happened to the First made the prospects of that test less than promising. And since Soryu couldn't be replaced like Ayanami could, it had been decided to not take the risk at this time.

Having Rei unable to use EVA-01 reduced the flexibility of the scenario considerably. In addition to not being able to use his most loyal pilot in his most powerful Evangelion, Gendo also lost the option of using the dummy plug to control Unit 01. The prototype plugs were all based on Rei's data, and Yui had made it quite clear that she would not accept Rei. And there was no way to get any of the other pilots to go through the dummy plug imprinting process without inviting a large number of questions.

At least one setback from this incident could be remedied easily.

"Have Doctor Akagi activate the Third. Have her isolated from the remainder of the pilots to keep anyone from wondering why she isn't injured."

Ritsuko entered the ready room where the pilots had been told to wait while Rei was taken to the emergency room.

"Rei will recover, but she'll be in intensive care for some time. It will be at least a month before she's ready to pilot again. In the meantime, Kirika will take Rei's place as pilot of Unit 00."

As the pilots absorbed this, Kirika recalled what she had seen of Rei as the girl had been carted away. Kirika might not be qualified to perform medical treatment more complicated than first aid, but her knowledge of anatomy and how it acted when abused was quite extensive. Knowledge of how the body worked was quite useful in figuring out the best way to make it stop working, after all. And her diagnosis of Rei's battered body was that her injuries were permanently crippling, if not outright lethal. She had seen the way Rei's head had flopped around as the gurney turned a corner. Human heads only moved like that when they had broken necks.

How could Rei make a full recovery from that? Did NERV have some method to repair a critically damaged spinal cord? If they did, why hadn't this treatment been discussed in every medical journal on the planet? And that didn't even begin to cover the internal injuries implied by the large number of red splotches on Rei's white plug suit and around her mouth. Kirika wouldn't have been surprised to learn that the injuries the other girl had received while knocked around extended to ruptured organs. By rights, Rei should be dead within hours, assuming that she wasn't dead already.

So why was Dr Akagi claiming that a person who was either dead or dying would be perfectly fine within a month? Something was definitely wrong with this situation.

Kaji finished checking the motel room he had rented for bugs and waited for his guest to arrive. A few minutes later, she did, and performed her own check. Then she turned to face him.

"Was there a reason why you passed me the note requesting this meeting by kissing my hand in the middle of a crowded break room?" Mireille asked.

"I'm known throughout NERV as a notorious flirt. If people see me flirting with someone, they'll just assume it's more of the same and ignore it." He explained. Mireille slowly nodded, accepting the explanation.

"Well, then, since you wanted this meeting, would you care to explain why? I've already given you a show of good faith; it's about time that you return the favor."

That was fair enough. Kaji gave the woman an overview of what he knew about SEELE.

"So, what is the connection between this SEELE group and Les Soldats?" Mireille asked.

Les Soldats? Kaji wondered what that term meant. Oh, wait. That was the French term for 'the soldiers'. Apparently he had translated those documents he had received a little too thoroughly.

"I'm not sure. I'd never heard of Les Soldats until you gave me those documents. They could be different names for the same group, allies, operating in ignorance of each other, or enemies. I can't say for certain. Are you sure they're connected with NERV?"

Mireille nodded. "Quite certain."

"How do they operate? What are their goals? Is it possible to get the rest of that strange book that talks about them?"

Mireille snorted. "Good luck finding a complete copy of the Langumal Manuscript. It took me six months just to find those two pages, and it cost me the life of my best informant. Every known copy in the entire world has been stolen or destroyed over the past ten years."

Kaji made a mental note of that. The title of the book was known, but these Soldats were going to extraordinary lengths to keep the book out of everyone else's hands. That proved that the contents of the book were valuable – and that the Soldats could be quite dangerous when they chose to be.

"As for their goals," Mireille continued, "They claim that they want to shape global society to some ideal state. Only they know what that state is. They do this by recruiting people all around the world, in politics, organized crime, industry, sciences, and the military, and arranging for them to achieve key positions.

"They start by recruiting promising individuals, say a charismatic city assemblyman, for example. They use their existing influence to see that he gets the funding and support to run for a more important position at the regional or national level. Once there, more senior politicians, also Soldat agents, take the newcomer under their wing and see to it that the new recruit gets into some important committees. Over a few terms, the recruit gains influence in the government in his own right. That's when they ask for payback. Payback comes in the form of backing legislation that furthers the Soldat agenda and helping along the careers of new Soldat agents who have just entered politics to become key agents for the next generation.

"Their methods vary slightly depending on what field the agent is planted in, but the principle is the same. Les Soldats uses the organization's power to further the careers of its agents, and in return the agents use their positions to further the goals of the organization as a whole. They've been doing this for centuries now."

Kaji whistled. These people had a smooth operation going on. Especially if they had kept their organization secret for hundreds of years without anyone suspecting. Or had they simply managed to co-opt or eliminate those who figured it out and posed a threat?

As he considered this, his guest took the offensive and started hitting him with questions concerning SEELE and its connections to NERV. After prying a considerable amount of information from him, Mireille checked her watch and noted that it was time for her to pick up the pilots that she was assigned to guard.

Before she left, she commented: "If you're planning to look into Les Soldats, be careful. They will find out about you, and won't hesitate to kill you if you become a threat."

Kaji raised an eyebrow. "Why haven't they tried to eliminate you?"

"Who do you think was behind the attack on my apartment back in Paris? They know who I am, where I live, and exactly why I hate them. But by now they've also learned that attacking me directly is a very expensive proposition. You don't have that protection."

With that, Mireille left, leaving Kaji to consider her final words and figure out exactly how to report this to his superiors in the JDA – and hope none of them had received career boosts from a Soldat.

The pilots never got a chance to see how well they worked together in the new roster. Two days after Rei's disastrous accident, another Angel attack occurred.

The Twelfth Angel was a large black sphere that hovered over the city, waiting for something. Nobody was entirely certain what. After a period of observation in which the Angel made no offensive movements, Misato decided that they would take the offensive in this engagement. Selecting three map coordinates, she ordered the pilots to surround the Angel and attack with ranged weapons.

Kirika was the first to reach her position. She carefully aimed her positron rifle, and then opened a com channel to the other pilots.

"I'm in position. Ikari-san, Soryu-san, what is your status?"

Two replies came back.

"Almost there." Came Shinji's voice.

"Don't be in such a rush, Fourth Child." Asuka snapped.

Kirika remembered that her position was closer to her entry point than the others were. They had further to go, and had to swap out power cables before reaching their destinations. A few minutes later, all three pilots were ready.

"Alright," Asuka said. "Everyone fire on my mark. Drei, zwei, eins, MARK!"

Fire from three points launched at the Angel simultaneously. But just as they were about to hit, the Angel disappeared. At the same moment, something strange started happening around EVA-00's position. Everything started sinking into the ground for no reason – including the Evangelion.

"Kirika, get out of there!" Misato shouted.

Kirika started to run. But every step she took went deeper into the invisible sinkhole, which reduced the forward distance achieved by the step that followed it. It quickly became obvious that she wasn't going to make it to the edge of the sinking area.

"Imouto!" Shinji cried. He jettisoned his power cable and started to run towards his sister.

"What are you doing, Shinji? Get out of there!" Misato demanded.

Shinji ignored her and kept running.

"Shinji, get clear of the Angel, now! That's an order!"

Shinji continued to ignore Misato and reached the edge of the sinking area. Reaching out, he grabbed the arm of the struggling Unit 00 and started pulling it out. He succeeded in pulling Kirika out, but ended up losing his balance in the process. EVA-01 fell into the sinkhole, quickly disappearing. After it vanished, the black sphere of the Angel reappeared over the center of the sinking area, and the sinking stopped. Everything that had been partially embedded in that area had been sliced through with an impossibly clean cut, leaving no evidence of the portions of the objects that had sunk beneath the street level.

Kirika sat by herself, thinking of what had just happened. Shinji had just sacrificed himself to save her. In her entire life, the only person to have ever placed themselves into peril for her sake before this day was Mireille.

Kirika looked down at her hands. She had yet to figure out if the black gloves of her plug suit were a subtle message from Ritsuko that she knew about Noir, or just a coincidence. But there was one person in NERV who she knew could not possibly be involved with Les Soldats now – Shinji.

Shinji had gone against orders to save her. From personal experience with Mireille's uncle, Kirika knew full well that if a Soldat agent was ordered to abandon their family to death, he or she would do so. To refuse would simply cause them to join their families in death. Though that might explain what Ritsuko was setting up at the moment. Dropping a thousand nukes on someone's head simultaneously might be the most extreme execution in history, but it would get the job done. And she would have to participate in the execution, or risk dooming every person on the planet.

All Shinji had wanted was to be with his sister. And Kirika had pushed him away, fearing that it was all some kind of trap. She hadn't even been able to bring herself to address him by his first name. Now she knew that what Shinji had been offering was genuine, but it was too late to do anything about it.

Kirika felt like the biggest fool in the world.

Even with power expenditures cut to an absolute minimum, the emergency batteries of an Evangelion couldn't hold out forever. Shinji could attest to that, as he was seeing it happen.

The filtration system was starting to fail, causing the oxygen level in the LCL to slowly drop. The heaters were also failing. Shinji was slowly drowning and freezing to death at the same time, and he had no idea which would get to him first, the CO2 rich LCL depriving his brain of oxygen or the slowly dropping temperature.

How long had he been stuck in this flooded metal tube? He could probably figure it out quickly enough by checking the digital watch built into his plug suit, but it seemed like he had been trapped for weeks from his highly subjective viewpoint. It wasn't as if there was anything to do in a dimly lit capsule with all computer functions not related to life support shut down. He was going to die. If rescue was going to come, it would have arrived by now. At least he had managed to protect his sister one last time. Kirika was safe. That was what mattered.

It bothered Shinji that he still knew barely anything about the person his sister had become. In the months since they had been reunited, she had never addressed him by his given name, only as Ikari-san. He knew nothing about what hobbies she might have, what friends she had had other than her guardian, her life between the point when she lost her memory and the point when she came to Tokyo-3, or anything else for that matter. It wasn't that she was rejecting his attempts to get closer to her, it was more like she was ignoring them completely.

Why was she acting like that? He knew that she wanted to remember her past, the fact that she had taken that photograph proved that. So why did she act like that? What could bring her to avoid someone who wanted to help her regain something she wanted?

Whatever was holding her back, Shinji wanted to help her with it. After being separated from his little sister for ten years, it was the least he could do for her. But he couldn't do anything while he was trapped in this strange void the Angel had created.

Shinji didn't want to die. He still had things to do. His sister still needed him, and after ten years of forced separation, he did not intend to fail her. But he didn't know how he was supposed to escape from his current situation. He wished that someone, anyone, could help him, somehow.

Through the blurry unfiltered LCL, Shinji thought he saw something. He shrugged it aside as a hallucination due to the cold and lack of clean air. But the fuzzy image kept approaching, and then slowly embraced him. Though he couldn't make out any features of the person who had come to him, he somehow recognized her anyway, and knew that his prayer had been answered.

"Kaa-san?" He whispered.

The clock slowly ticked down to the planned assault time. Two Evangelions were positioned on either side of the Sea of Dirac, readying their AT fields. In a few minutes, it would rain N2 mines, and the combined explosions would theoretically destroy the Angel and expel the matter that it had absorbed. The theory was much thinner on whether or not living matter that had been trapped inside, such as a young pilot of EVA-01, would survive this process.

But before the planes carrying the mines arrived, a miracle happened. A bulge formed on the side of the sphere that was the true Angel's shadow. As the bulge swelled, cracks started forming in the Sea of Dirac beneath it. Finally, the bulge started to tear, and the arm of EVA-01 burst out of it. The berserk Evangelion tore open a breach in the floating sphere, and then leaped out of it, drenched in the blood of the Angel. Then it crashed to the ground, shutting down as the Angel's actual body shattered into pieces.

As calls were sent out to cancel the bombing run, a medical team rushed to the fallen Evangelion. The entry plug was quickly extracted from Unit 01's body, and the pilot was removed and rushed to an ambulance, where treatment was immediately begun for hypothermia and oxygen deprivation.

Shinji awoke to find himself once again in the NERV hospital. Sniffing, he found that he still smelled of blood. He didn't realize that he had commented on that out loud until he heard a reply.

"The nurses here use the wrong kind of soap. I know something that can get any kind of smell out." Kirika said.

Shinji turned to see his sister sitting beside the bed. Judging by the schoolbooks and completed assignments by her chair, and the empty meal tray, she had been there for some time.

"Kirika… are you…" He said.

She nodded. "I'm fine. Thank you, Shinji."

Shinji smiled. Kirika had used his first name. The hours-long ordeal in the entry plug, the aches he felt now, the dressing down for disobeying orders he was likely to get in the future, they didn't matter.

The reward he had received was worth it.

After being released from the hospital, Shinji asked Misato to take him and Kirika to the place she showed him after he had fought the Third Angel. They arrived there around the time that Ritsuko's team finished securing what was salvageable of the Twelfth Angel after Unit 01 was done with it. And so Kirika got to see Tokyo-3 shifting between fortress and city modes from the outside for the first time.

The view from that small park was impressive even at normal times. Watching an entire city slowly rise from the ground as one looked out over the valley was a truly breathtaking sight.

For the first time since Milosh's murder, Kirika wished that she had brought her sketchpad with her.

Chloe worked her way through the kata, gliding through the training dummies and throwing knives at high speed. When she finished, she examined the dummies critically. Every single knife was embedded in a point that would have been lethal within seconds had they been actual people. It had taken weeks of myostimulation treatments and training, but she was once again in top condition.

The other effects of her illness had lingered. Her hair and eye color had never returned to normal. She had eventually given up and used dye and tinted contacts to return them to their original appearance. That option wasn't available for her skin, unfortunately. Several sessions in a tanning bed had left her skin just as pale as it had been before the treatments. It seemed that her unnatural paleness would be staying.

Far more worrying to her were the dreams she had been having since she had woken up in the hospital. They always depicted her at about the age she was when she first met Kirika. In the dreams, she was always with a group of people she didn't know, but felt that she should know for some reason. The dreams mainly focused on a young girl with red hair and blue eyes. Who were these people? Who was the girl? Why did they all seem so familiar? These questions kept coming to her mind, but she didn't know the answers.

As Chloe started retrieving her knives, a man entered the practice room. Chloe recognized him as a senior leader of Les Soldats and set aside her task to greet her visitor.

"Mr. Breffort." She said.

"Hello, Chloe. I'm glad to see that you've recovered." He answered.

"Thank you, sir."

"I'm afraid that I'm here to deliver some bad news. While you were ill, the manor house where you were raised and trained was attacked. There were no survivors."

The manor, attacked? No survivors? Did that mean that Altena was… dead?

"Was… Altena…"

Breffort nodded. "She was there at the time of the attack."

"Who… Who…"

Breffort handed her something. "The killers accidentally left this behind. You have my condolences." With that, he left.

Chloe wept. Altena was dead. Her leader, her mentor, her mother was gone. Her entire life had been centered on helping Altena achieve her dream of restoring Les Soldats to its original state. What would she do with her life now? Who had done this? Chloe looked at the item in her hand, the sole clue to the identity of Altena's killer and gasped.

The object in her hand was a silver pocketwatch. The watch was dented, as if it had been dropped at some point. On the cover of the watch was engraved the image of two kneeling women saluting each other with swords – the symbolic representation of Noir. A tune started playing when she opened the watch to look at the cracked glass covering the watch hands. She recognized this watch. The watch belonged to Kirika.

How could Kirika do this? How could she betray Les Soldats, betray Altena, betray her like this? Then Chloe realized exactly how this could have happened.

Mireille. She had hated Les Soldats since the moment she learned that they had ordered the death of her parents as punishment for defying them. She and Kirika had been living together ever since the trials had begun. Without Chloe being available to counter her influence, she must have succeeded in poisoning Kirika's mind against the people that had raised and trained her.

Chloe knew what she had to do. Altena had always said that if love could destroy, then surely hatred could save. It was time to test that theory. Chloe would see to it that her hatred of Mireille would enable her to save Kirika. To destroy the interfering bitch that had turned Kirika against her own people and get her partner back.

As Chloe's left hand clenched the watch, her right hand grabbed a knife and threw it. The knife struck the head of a training dummy between the eyes, and embedded itself into the dummy up to the hilt.

"You will pay for this, Mireille Bouquet." She snarled.

Breffort smiled to himself as he left the room. His reborn Noir was coming along quite nicely. The information he had just passed on would get her into a state where he could get her to eliminate the renegade Noir at a time of his choosing. It would also get her in the habit of taking orders from him instead of the late Altena. Even if tradition called for two Noir, having control of one Noir, especially one who could be resurrected an indefinite number of times, would help solidify his control of Les Soldats nicely.

Dr Descroix approached him. "Sir, I think there is something you should see."

"What is it, Doctor?"

Descroix produced two photographs. "This is what the original Chloe looked like, and this is what the new Chloe looks like without cosmetic alterations."

Breffort looked at the photos, noting the change in hair, eye and skin color.

"What is your point, Doctor?"

Descroix produced two new photographs. "This is a picture of Kirika Yumura, Evangelion pilot and renegade Noir. The second photograph is of Rei Ayanami, another Evangelion pilot. One who apparently appeared out of nowhere four years ago."

Apart from the change in hair, eye and skin color, the resemblance between the two individuals was considerable. Too considerable, when one took into account the fact that according to intelligence that Breffort had received, Kirika Yumura had once been Kirika Ikari, daughter of Gendo Ikari, former commander of GEHIRN and current commander of NERV, the organizations that had developed the technology that had been used to create the new Chloe.

Breffort thanked the doctor and headed back to his office, still looking over the pictures. There was only one possible conclusion – Ikari was holding out on him. Whether he was doing this to aid the group he was supposed to be infiltrating or to further his own goals was unknown, but he was definitely withholding information from his superiors.

Breffort knew there was only one punishment for betrayal – death. Unfortunately, there were complications. Gendo Ikari rarely left the underground fortress that was NERV HQ. When he did, it was to travel to another highly secure facility. The only plants he had in Tokyo-3 other than Ikari didn't have assassination skills. In addition to this, Breffort wasn't sure that he could control the selection of Gendo's replacement if he died. The information from Ikari had been shown to be at least partially tainted, but it was the only source that he had. On the other hand, sparing Ikari would indicate that treason was acceptable. That could spell the end of Les Soldats.

Breffort needed more information. He needed to know exactly what Ikari was up to. He then needed to respond in a way that the influence of Les Soldats was increased, or at least in a way that the influence of Keele's group was decreased. Then and only then would Ikari die. He knew just the person to do the job, too. And getting her in position to do it would also position her to eliminate two other threats to his plans…

Perhaps he should start by sending Ikari a message. Something that would get his attention and disrupt his plans at least slightly. What could he do…

Breffort took another look at the pictures, and then started to laugh.

A/N: To those who didn't get the joke that Kaji thinks he found, 'Noir' is the French word for black, while in government parlance, 'black' refers to something that is so classified that it doesn't officially exist.

While Chloe has also gone into battle to help Kirika, these incidents were during the trials. As such, they were partially done because Altena ordered her to, not just because Chloe wanted to help Kirika. So Kirika isn't counting those. Chloe probably would place herself in mortal danger to help Kirika even without orders though.

Mireille and Kirika's normal firing range is a bull's-eye chalked onto the wall of a sewer tunnel. They have to have something capable of getting rid of strong and unpleasant odors, both on themselves and their clothing, or everyone they ran into in Paris would notice that they smelled of sewage on a regular basis.

Before anyone asks, Chloe will not become a pilot. Shinji might be willing to share Unit 01 with his sister, but I doubt Asuka would be willing to share Unit 02 with anybody unless she absolutely had to.

Last chapter set a new personal record for reviews. My thanks to Kiros Razer, Taeniaea, James Axelrad, Dookie Overlord, DarkJackel, Devavrata, gunman and Ominae.