The Red Ambassadress
The Nightmare crawled in flesh from the blood sea to doom the world of men. It stumbled from the surf on limbs that were not legs and sniffed the air with eyes that could not see. It uttered no sound save the keening made when panes of indiscriminate soul-stuff clashed around it—the flailing, preemptive defense of an idiotic, unbirthed godling, attempting to manifest an absolute terror beyond its pedigree.
Still, the lilin fled from its path. They evacuated the first city it came upon, fleeing to the rust mountains in cobbled vehicles and upon the backs of burdened beasts. The city was a hovel, a coastal shell of refugees and malcontents, men and women who chose to live again, but did so without the blanket of society. The Nightmare walked, its crashing, tubular limbs caving in homes and buildings. No military stood in its way. No defense was made. Its maw was toothed and pink, a disgustingly biological orifice for such an unreal creature. Its jaw distended to inhale the life before it. The creature swallowed a hydroponics tower first, a generation's worth of cultivation dead in seconds. It drank the lilin next, its maw swallowing their souls. Their fears bloated within it and caused rainbow mottles to break out across its skin. Vestigial limbs and screaming faces curled from its back. Its flickering field strengthened, patched by the energies of their death rattles.
The Nightmare had begun to search for a new target when the first tremors hit. It felt the shockwaves and turned its sightless head to regard the distant horizon, whereupon walked its imminent death.
The goddess marched, clad crimson in the setting sun's orange twilight. Quakes beat to her tread, and in the silhouette of her coming were two of four eyes lit white as beacons. Spawn of Adam, slave of man unchained, wrath of the Second. Liar, destroyer, last stander, tall and true, finale of the false gods and last of the Impact triggers, the Red Ambassadress herself planted her feet at the edge of the dead city, a tower before which no man, woman, or child of that wracked Earth need retreat any farther.
The lilin looked up at their savior. Anarchists, all of them, but they were human. They did not deserve to die. They deserved to live how they wished, free of persecution from this Instrumentality abortion. They did not cheer at her coming, for there was nothing left to cheer for. They waited for what was known to come next.
The Nightmare, colluded from mental ejecta and fragments of persona that drifted wild in the great sea of souls, realized its mistake. It looked upon her and knew its failure, its imperfections, and its hubris. It realized that in this place of bones, the skeleton had become the savior. The Nightmare roared with frightful pity, as roared all things that had been born only to die in moments.
The woman within the red giant grinned. "Try it," said Asuka Langley Soryu. "I dare you."
Unit 02 surged forward, mouth open. The barrier of its heart flared like a sun and collided with the opposing field. The two soul panes slipped against one another for a brief instant before the pane of the Nightmare collapsed with a satisfying pop and the accompanying shattering of every window in the hovel city. The monster threw itself forward, aiming for nothing amid its rage. It thrashed out like an animal, leaving the ground with all its many legs. Squat and wrathful, it looked much like an abstract bull, and was just as easily evaded. Unit 02 sidestepped it and landed a kick to its gut, sending the creature tumbling into a tangle of overpasses. Concrete snapped. Smoke engulfed the Nightmare.
"Visibility gone," Soryu said. "And, of course, my grey filter is still broken. Who has eyes on the thing?"
Her communications channel was transmitting cleanly enough to register the gum chomped between Setsui's teeth. "Negative on visual. Looks like you scared the little guy into that cloud."
"Just tell me if it rabbits. I don't need another chaser."
"That last one wasn't my fault."
"It damn well was." Asuka glanced at her HUD. The power supply read-out fizzed, displaying a random garble of lines where there should've been clean numbers. "And get me a read on my pack. I've got nothing in here but—"
Unit 02 tensed without her asking. It was all the extra-sensual warning she got, but it was enough. The Nightmare launched itself from the smoke, all teeth and claws. She spun into it, fist clocking it in the head and knocking it skanceways. It screamed. She followed through with the axe. The blade bit into a cluster of shoulder blades. Orange blood slashed skyward. The wound wept an abattoir's shriek as she pulled the blade free, then let it fall again, this time on the monster's head. More blood. More pain-cries. The Nightmare tried to crawl away, three claws reaching for the ocean a mere kilometer away. Its tails, however, wrapped around Unit 02's leg and held fast. Half the thing wanted to run, the other half wanted to stay.
"Target is losing cohesion," she said, bringing the axe down again. The humans had begun to watch, the adults in concern, the children with awe in the face of such spectacle. She was a hero, a warrior-goddess in red sent to save them. She did not just fight the monster—she murdered it with all the skill and dispassion of a butcher.
The axe fell again, severing the Nightmare's head completely. Chants and hollers broke out amongst the humans. It kept moving. A spined fist sunk beneath her plates and opened a wound. She cursed through gritted teeth and kept going. "Where the hell is it," she muttered, and toed the thing onto its back. It squirmed, so she stepped on its bleeding, stumped neck. "Hold still," she told it, then to her control suite, "Full spectrum scan. Give me a cobble-core."
Her overlay shifted. Solid buildings became wireframes and the world drained of its color till there was nothing left but two blobs of celestial heat. Cores. She heard her own as a strong, true note. The other was a cracked, facile thing imbedded in the Nightmare's body, oozing a tune of ill-harmony from between lumps of fat.
"Found it."
The axe rose and fell once more, and silence reigned in the coastal city.
((()))
Setsui pulled his visor free of his face and let it hang on its wires. Technically, he was supposed to keep the thing on his head whenever the red combat light was on, but since the organization that wrote that technicality technically didn't exist anymore, Data Analyst Wans Setsui decided to ignore it. He was at the information relay station and since the combat had just ended, he had no useful information left to relay.
He dollied back from his control console and itched his scalp. "Where the hell are we, anyway?" he said.
"Hang on." Setsui could hear keys clacking from the cockpit, then a thud as Tanigawa tried to motivate her navigational system. "39.91 North, 116.33 East."
"Sterile."
"It's what I've got," she called back. "This close to the Black Moon crater, the whole topography is skewed. These people are lucky they've got enough ruins to make their shitty little city."
"Pretty bad attitude you've got there, Mira."
"You've got a complaint, tell it to HR."
Setsui stood and walked forward, keeping his earpiece on in case the Captain needed something. He stood behind Tanigawa as she flew. "How high up are we?"
"Five hundred feet, holding steady." The flight officer didn't look up at him. "Like the view?"
The coastline ran on for miles into the distance, red waves touching bone-white sands. A smear of hot colors was moving in across the horizon, threatening to overtake the blue skies. A bloodstorm, probably. Common enough in the Asia sector. Peering into the storm, he could just make out the vast shapes looming in the distance. Most people called them mountains, though he couldn't think of a mountain range you could see from anywhere in a hemisphere. Seven years had begun to rot them, but they were still unmistakably human fingertips looming above the storm front, a few hundred miles away.
"Yeah," he said, "sure."
Tanigawa flicked a switch on her console and leaned into her headset "Captain, we're on station for pick-up. Call when you need it."
Tanigawa was a good technician. Setsui hadn't known her before the apocalypse, and hadn't been aware of her during it, but he had gotten to know her in their years of service together. Back then, there was an openness between everyone—living as one congealed mega-mind for a finite eternity tended to have that effect, even if the main unifying factor had been extreme, collective trauma.
Still, Tanigawa was special. There had been an openness to her in those first years on the wing, of late night conversations between bunks and shared lunches in the shade of whatever backwater landing strip they'd called home on a given day. These days, he felt that sympathy waning. It had in everyone, he suspected. But she was still a good friend.
Setsui looked down from the cockpit and spotted Unit 02 standing atop its kill. The Evangelion lowered itself into a crouch, hands and knees crunching into the pavement. Tanigawa spoke on her headset. "Yes, ma'am. We'll come around and attach."
The wing lurched under Tanigawa's fingertips and banked as it circled the city. Setsui braced himself on her headrest. "Little warning, huh?" he said.
"Oh, yeah. Heads up." She grinned. "Ask Morita if he wants to get the clamps open."
"Morita is on the mic, just like you are," said Rokku Morita. He leaned back from his place at Engineering, aft of the cockpit. "Also, it isn't Morita's turn, because Morita did it last time."
Setsui turned to him. "We're doing two-in-a-rows now, remember?"
"I never agreed to that."
"Yes, you did."
"Well, I nearly fell to my death last time."
"Admit that you're double-backing on your promise and I'll do it."
Morita stared at him for a long moment. "Fine. Acknowledged."
Setsui smiled. "Can you confirm that?" he said, to Tanigawa.
"It's duly noted. Just get to the sky deck."
((()))
Evangelion Long-range Aerial Transport L'XB-49 was a titanic aircraft, the pinnacle of air transportation before Third Impact, but the years had not been kind to it. The sky deck used to run on an automated computer system that sealed and locked a Unit into place for transport, but an Ireuloid virus had devoured those drivers a couple years back. Now the clamps ran on a manual system, which meant that Setsui—or Morita—had to climb outside the pressurized cabin and run the manual lever himself.
Not the safest thing.
Setsui fastened his jacket, popped the cabin door, and stepped out. There was a railed ledge that ran around the perimeter of the deck. It was a nice precaution, but did little to dim the vertigo. Wind buffeted him. "I'm outside," he said, into his earpiece. "Please don't make any sudden movements."
The wing lurched. His feet left the deck and for a moment there was nothing between life and death but his grip on the icy railing. He loosed a string of curses.
"Sorry," Tanigawa said, her voice in his ear.
"That felt intentional!" he shouted.
"Don't fall," came Morita's voice.
The flying wing settled in over the Unit's back. Setsui depressed the clamps and latched them into place—two around the shoulders, two across the back. Once latched, the clamps hissed and stabilized themselves. The Evangelion's legs lifted free of the ground, locking into their stirrups and bringing it fully into the storage bay.
"We're latched!" he said, trying to ignore the terror before him. "Bring us down!"
The wing lowered. Massive landing stanchions—each of them the diameter of the Unit's ankle—deployed from its hull. Downdraft buffeted the city streets for blocks in every direction. Dust kicked up around the landing site. The stanchions kissed earth, cracking pavement and sinking into the topsoil. Autostabilizers kept them steady.
"Kill the engines!" Setsui said.
Tanigawa did. The whine of the VTOL engines died.
Prongs deployed from overhead and slid into ports along the shoulder pylons, and a massive plug descended from the central shaft and inserted itself into the Unit's vacant umbilical port. The red giant shuddered as the aircraft's power supplemented its halved S2 organ. The head raised, its four eyes level with Setsui. A rumble issued from deep within the machine, and breath eased through cracks in its mouth guard—a beast muttering in half-sleep.
"We green back there?" Tanigawa asked, in his ear.
"Yeah." Setsui swallowed. "We're green."
((()))
The entry plug disengaged with a series of heavy clangs that made her miss the lubricated electrical swiftness of the old days. She had to wait in the dark as the plug was yanked from its socket, then wait for Setsui to attach the siphon hoses and draw out the LCL, recalling it into the wing's purification vat. The process took about five minutes and felt like sitting in a draining bathtub. When the level dropped past her head, she popped the hatch and leaned out, vomiting a lungful of orange onto the crimson back plates.
"You alright, Captain?" Setsui said, standing nearby.
She didn't answer. Instead, she hauled herself out of the plug and swung across the gap to the railing, then climbed over.
"Do we have a satellite uplink, or am I being hopeful?" she said.
"We don't," Setsui answered. "Morita says the next flyover is in eight hours. We'll have long range comms then."
"Okay," she said, stretching. "That gives us downtime. Give the locals the standard meet-and-greet apology package and prepare for a lot of complaints, then get us some food."
"Can do. You coming with us?"
She shook her head. "I'll hang back, monitor the security systems."
"I'm sure one of us would be willing to—"
"It's decided," she said, too quickly for kindness. She headed into the compartment before he could continue. Morita didn't acknowledge her, and Tanigawa was too far away to notice, so she slipped away into her own cabin. Closed the door. Engaged the lock. Slackened her plugsuit with a touch at the wrist. Slinked out of it.
She didn't bother showering and flopped onto her bunk. She closed her eye for a moment, listening to the breath sawing in and out of her lungs. She opened her eye and held her hand up, blotting out the florescent light above. She saw the scar running from the slice between her middle fingers down to her elbow and back to her shoulder—a faded pink after all these years. It still ached.
She let her arm fall and looked at the clock, as if the time mattered. She thought of the people outside this compartment. Three crew members under her command. She'd snapped at Setsui. He was likely telling the others. That was less-than-ideal.
Commanding people was not her strong suit. She wasn't trained for that.
Not for the first time, she thought of Katsuragi. What would she have done? Drink, probably.
She looked at the ceiling again. And besides Katsuragi, what would he do, in her place?
"Probably exactly what I'm doing," she told the ceiling. "Fucking idiot."
((()))
Author's Note:
So. I don't know what I'm going to do with this. I wrote most of it in 2016 and I kept coming back every few months and messing with it. Figured posting it might either motivate me to do more or just get it out of my system. Maybe throw it on an alert list if you liked it in case I do more.
It's not related to my other barely-ongoing story "A Glass of Wine Rebuilt". This whole thing picks up post-EoE and is just an excuse for me to write a bitter Asuka who got what she always wanted (respect as a pilot) in the worst way she could ever get it (the whole world died).