The PEACE project, part 4
Water streamed down Theta's metal exoskeleton, forming a large puddle at its black feet. Shinji looked at Theta with some apprehension, for several reasons - not the least of which was the pilot. He felt Nicolas Rivers was the person least qualified to pilot an Eva unit, even one as strange and disturbing as Theta.
Asuka, however, feared Theta for a different reason. It wasn't Nick that worried her, but the way her Eva reacted to him. Every time Unit Two saw him or Theta, it was filled with a nearly overwhelming desire to kill him. She didn't know where the feelings came from. That scared her almost as much as the feelings themselves. Her Eva's mind was quiet and out of the way, merely a feeling of being watched. Now, though, it was almost a tangible force. Hate and rage seethed in the LCL around her, the feelings seeming to radiate from every surface.
The opening ceremonies carried on for quite a while. Too long for Nick's taste. They ended about an hour after the sun had set, climaxing with a fireworks display that lit up the sky with streamers of light in every color of the rainbow. The crowds dispersed, the mecha returned to the docking bay provided for them, and the pilots had a little get together. Nick was the life of the party, knowing nearly every pilot - most from having met with them in person before. Shinji, Asuka, and Rei lingered at the outermost edge of the crowd. They seemed to be trying to keep away from everyone else without seeming totally antisocial.
"I can't believe they forced us to come to this stupid party." Asuka pouted. She didn't want to be anywhere near the gathering, but had been ordered to by Misato 'for Olympic spirit'.
"Well, it gives us a chance to get to know the other pilots before we go up against them." Shinji replied.
"Oh? Then why are you sitting here if you want to get to know people? Idiot." Shinji blushed, embarrassed, and looked down into his drink for a long moment. He saw only his own reflection in the liquid.
"And what if an Angel attacks Tokyo-Three while we're here? We would never get back in time to do any good!" Asuka continued.
"What do you mean?"
"You know perfectly well they can't fight Angels without Evangelion units."
"Well, they did manage to beat the first two somehow."
"Maybe we'll be able to have more friendly political relations with other counties now." Misato commented. "Maybe we won't have so much to worry about."
"That's wishful thinking." Ritsuko replied. "It's very doubtful. NERV isn't very good at making friends, only enemies."
"I know. It's our greatest weakness."
"No. Our greatest weakness is our leadership."
"It's better than -" She stopped talking, scrambling for support as the entire island shook, as if it had been hit with a gigantic hammer. "What the hell was that?"
"I'm not sure. Let's get to the command bunker." Ritsuko motioned to a set of stairs. "This way!"
"Blood pattern blue. It's an angel, alright." Said a comm officer, an American. Most of the staff in the command bunker were American, only a few from other nations. Still, Misato outranked most, if not all, of them. As operations director for NERV, she had an authority few could match.
"Get a visual on it! I want to know what we're shooting at." She snapped. Misato was in a bad mood, and it was getting worse. A flat-screen plasma screen took up a large part of the north wall. It was on this screen that the image of the angel appeared. A gigantic ball of water. It was hovering over the ocean by unknown means, flying towards the island at high speed.
"The angel will arrive in two minutes." An ensign stated, calmly.
"I advise we launch the Eva units." Ritsuko said, looking away from Misato and at the image of the Angel. Misato thought to herself for a moment. Why was the Angel attacking here? They had attacked Tokyo-Three almost exclusively. In fact the only times she could remember an Angel not doing so were when they had been transporting Unit Two on the ocean, and when one had attacked Theta on it's return to the US. And on the latter time, it had presumably been headed towards Tokyo-Three, but had been intercepted in midair by pure luck.
"Order the pilots to launch!" Misato ordered. She could think about unimportant things later. Right now, it was more vital to act. Several officers scrambled to get the three mecha ready to launch. Before they were even out of the door, the island shook again.
"It's using some kind of energy beam!" Reported a tactical officer. "But we can't seem to get a concrete reading on the energy type!"
"Get all civilians to shelters, activate what defenses you have, and get those Evas out there!"
Kevlar-layered ceramic armor plates sprang up along the island, each one as tall as an Eva and several hundred feet long. They were intended as a barricade, and to provide cover for defending units. The three Japanese Evangelion ran out of the docking bay and took up positions under the cover of the heavy plates near the beach facing the Angel's approach.
Shinji glanced around the edge of a plate just in time to see the Angel fire at him. Shinji was stunned just for a moment, before the pain hit. The right side of his face felt like it had been dipped in Hydrochloric acid. Shinji screamed and threw himself back behind the armor plate. Although he couldn't see it, and probably wouldn't want to, the angel's beam was eating through the plate he was hiding behind. The tough metal-free ceramics seemed to be slowing down its effects. Regardless, the plate was being destroyed. It almost seemed like it was eroding away into a cloud of mono-atomic particles.
Even before Shinji screamed, Ritsuko was moving to cut the nerve impulses before the beam weapon killed him. As she did, she saw a meter jump and the right side of Unit One's face erupt in a dust storm.
"That's no particle beam!" Ritsuko exclaimed.
"What is it then?" Misato demanded.
"That beam is suppressing the negative charge on the electrons of atoms! The positive charge on the nucleus is unaffected, but positive repels positive so the matter..."
"...Tears itself apart." Misato finished. "A disintegration ray."
Asuka glanced towards Unit One. The side of its face looked like it had been sandblasted away, leaving a lump of tortured flesh and steel. The armor plate he was cowering behind started to buckle under the force of the Angel's beam. Asuka began yelling a warning when she saw a blue and gray blur from the corner of her eye. Rei. She scooped up Unit One and managed to get both of them out of the way before the ceramic plate broke under the strain of the attack.
"Damn! How are we supposed to fight against that thing?" Asuka said.
"What weapons do you have?" Asked a familiar voice - Nick. "I'm powering up Theta. We should be out there in just a few seconds. Jet Alone is coming as well."
"All I have is my progressive knife." Asuka replied, trying to sound cross. She was thankful that more help was arriving, but her personal sense of pride wouldn't allow her to say so.
"It may just be better than nothing." Theta emerged from the docking bay, moving more slowly than the Japanese Evangelion units. It's heavy armor caused it to nearly sink into the sand, but Nick kept it moving at what must have been a torturous pace for the mecha. "I and Jet Alone will distract the Angel while you go around and flank it."
Asuka fought down her Eva's homicidal urge towards Nick and answered.
"Fine. Whatever. Rei, you circle around the other side."
"I cannot. Unit One is unable to fight and I have been given orders to protect it. I must stay and defend it."
"What?! Fine. I'll take care of it myself. I am, after all, the one best qualified for the job."
Jet Alone, in its shining golden armor, was easy to spot. Even in the darkness of the night, what lights there were shone from its mirror-like surfaces. It stormed over the island's beach, doing it's best to avoid the Angel's disintegration ray. As it dodged through monolithic alloy plates, a memory file opened without prompt. Last year, Cain had been 'born'. It had been programmed as an AI, and abandoned as a failure. Nick had bought the project and continued work on it. He had given Cain the freedom to reprogram itself, to grow and change. It's first actions, though still below a true level of sentience, had been to make itself faster and smarter. It had basically programmed itself. Cain had been given to the Jet Alone project after their first failure, and was now considered a great success the world over. All because Nick had seen some potential in the research.
Cain put the file away. There were far more important things to worry about. Like not dying.
Nick ran directly towards the Angel, hoping his matter-repelling field would offer some protection from the target's matter-annialation beam. He jumped, waved his arms around, and generally did what he could to gain the Angel's fire. Unfortunately for Nick, it worked.
The Angel's beam lashed out. Theta's Iron Curtain could do nothing to stop it. The first thing to go was vision, Theta's eyes destroyed in an instant. Nick was unable to even react as the angel's beam played over Theta, the Iron Curtain serving only to keep the vaporized material, flesh and metal alike, from escaping. Seconds after the attack, Theta was obscured by a mist made of it's own blood. Nick forced Theta into a turn, putting its heavy wings between it and the Angel. The main body was safe for a few seconds while the beam ate through Theta's wings. Nick used the time he had bought with the sacrifice of his wings to throw himself away from the beam, getting behind an armor plate before the Angel killed him. A huge pool of blood formed around Theta, while it lay unmoving.
The ceramic plates frustrated the Angel. They weren't able to hold an electrical charge, and greatly impeded the use of its beam. It was fairly sure there wasn't much of a threat left, though. None of its enemies had yet demonstrated a method of attack that was effective on it. It thought it was safe. It was wrong.
With a jump and a splash, Unit Two entered the Angel's watery body and pierced its blood-red core with her progressive knife, killing the angel. It hovered for a few seconds, as if it couldn't believe it had been killed. The Angel dropped into the ocean, with Unit Two inside.
Dawn rose on Midway Island before the recovery teams could raise Unit Two from the depths. The giant mecha seeming to come out of the water like some sort of mythical sea god. Asuka switched her Eva from life support mode into minimal running mode, giving her just over a minute with what was left in the internal batteries. She hustled to a power station and hooked its line into her Eva's power socket. After checking the connection to the external power source, she moved over to where Nick's Eva was collapsed.
Theta was little more than bones. The Angel's beam had a devastating effect on Theta. It had stripped armor from flesh, then flesh from bone. Asuka knew well how an Eva's injuries were reflected on the pilot, causing great pain. She didn't see how he could have survived. If the Eva suffered a wound that would be fatal, like having it's head cut off, than the pilot would die as if he or she had suffered that same injury. As she turned away, Asuka caught a glimpse of movement. Theta's right arm weakly raised, tried to get her attention. Nick's face appeared on her screen.
"I don't think Theta can walk right now. Mind dragging me back to the docking bay?"
Several cranes supported the tattered bulk of Theta, suspending in inside a service gantry. Nick was looking at the damage, estimating how long it would take to repair. Aside from the machinery buried deeply inside its body, nearly ninety percent of Theta's operating systems were off-line.
"Hey, Nick!" Someone yelled. From the condescending tone, German accent, and female source of the voice, it could only be the third most annoying thing in the universe. The second was the sound of fingernails scraping on a chalkboard, and the first has been erased from all time and space. "Did you see how MY Eva defeated that angel? I told you I didn't need the hero and wondergirl to beat it!" Asuka continued for some time about her own personal greatness. Nick considered the virtues of slamming his face into the nearest bulkhead for a while, at least until unconsciousness set in, then thought about slamming Asuka's face into a bulkhead to shut her up, then decided to ignore her.
At some point, hours later, Asuka had finally finished with her speech on her awesomeness and powerfulness. Nick was still there, almost ready to write a report on Theta's damages. All he had left to do was to check how long it would take to regenerate the biological components.
Asuka watched Nick suddenly stop moving.
"Did you fall asleep or something, Idiot?" She walked over to him and saw he was reading something from a screen. Asuka read over his shoulder.
[Regeneration Time: ERROR]
[ERROR 491: Biological systems inactive]
Nick looked up at her.
"It's... dead."
"The games have been called off, obviously." Misato said, looking at each of the two Eva pilots in the small cafeteria to gauge their reactions. The small eatery was just off to the side of the mecha bay. Rei and Shinji didn't look sad, or really anything. Just tired of fighting. Quite tired, indeed. Misato had been hoping the games would be a nice break for them, but it turned out otherwise. "We will return to Japan tomorrow morning. Get some sleep."
"Dead?" Asuka asked, not quite understanding.
"Biologically, anyway. Mechanically, it's as good as can be expected for something that just got the crap beaten out of it." Nick replied. "I think I can get it running after a bit, though."
"How long is a bit?"
"Call it a few weeks."
"That's pretty quick."
"Well, there are a number of benefits to being in charge." Nick smiled, and Asuka could tell that he wasn't going to be getting into any more detail than that. "I'll be returning to the American branch of PEACE to oversee the completion of Evangelion Units Three and Four. I just know they'd screw something up without me to keep them in line."
"Another two Eva units? Where will they be deployed?"
"Unit Three will be transferred to your branch of NERV. Unit Four is just a prototype for a new type of power source. It'll just be a test bed for it's entire operating life."
"And the pilots?"
"I'm not in charge of that. If you see him, ask Kaji. I think he'd be quite surprised you know any of this."
To be continued.
Water streamed down Theta's metal exoskeleton, forming a large puddle at its black feet. Shinji looked at Theta with some apprehension, for several reasons - not the least of which was the pilot. He felt Nicolas Rivers was the person least qualified to pilot an Eva unit, even one as strange and disturbing as Theta.
Asuka, however, feared Theta for a different reason. It wasn't Nick that worried her, but the way her Eva reacted to him. Every time Unit Two saw him or Theta, it was filled with a nearly overwhelming desire to kill him. She didn't know where the feelings came from. That scared her almost as much as the feelings themselves. Her Eva's mind was quiet and out of the way, merely a feeling of being watched. Now, though, it was almost a tangible force. Hate and rage seethed in the LCL around her, the feelings seeming to radiate from every surface.
The opening ceremonies carried on for quite a while. Too long for Nick's taste. They ended about an hour after the sun had set, climaxing with a fireworks display that lit up the sky with streamers of light in every color of the rainbow. The crowds dispersed, the mecha returned to the docking bay provided for them, and the pilots had a little get together. Nick was the life of the party, knowing nearly every pilot - most from having met with them in person before. Shinji, Asuka, and Rei lingered at the outermost edge of the crowd. They seemed to be trying to keep away from everyone else without seeming totally antisocial.
"I can't believe they forced us to come to this stupid party." Asuka pouted. She didn't want to be anywhere near the gathering, but had been ordered to by Misato 'for Olympic spirit'.
"Well, it gives us a chance to get to know the other pilots before we go up against them." Shinji replied.
"Oh? Then why are you sitting here if you want to get to know people? Idiot." Shinji blushed, embarrassed, and looked down into his drink for a long moment. He saw only his own reflection in the liquid.
"And what if an Angel attacks Tokyo-Three while we're here? We would never get back in time to do any good!" Asuka continued.
"What do you mean?"
"You know perfectly well they can't fight Angels without Evangelion units."
"Well, they did manage to beat the first two somehow."
"Maybe we'll be able to have more friendly political relations with other counties now." Misato commented. "Maybe we won't have so much to worry about."
"That's wishful thinking." Ritsuko replied. "It's very doubtful. NERV isn't very good at making friends, only enemies."
"I know. It's our greatest weakness."
"No. Our greatest weakness is our leadership."
"It's better than -" She stopped talking, scrambling for support as the entire island shook, as if it had been hit with a gigantic hammer. "What the hell was that?"
"I'm not sure. Let's get to the command bunker." Ritsuko motioned to a set of stairs. "This way!"
"Blood pattern blue. It's an angel, alright." Said a comm officer, an American. Most of the staff in the command bunker were American, only a few from other nations. Still, Misato outranked most, if not all, of them. As operations director for NERV, she had an authority few could match.
"Get a visual on it! I want to know what we're shooting at." She snapped. Misato was in a bad mood, and it was getting worse. A flat-screen plasma screen took up a large part of the north wall. It was on this screen that the image of the angel appeared. A gigantic ball of water. It was hovering over the ocean by unknown means, flying towards the island at high speed.
"The angel will arrive in two minutes." An ensign stated, calmly.
"I advise we launch the Eva units." Ritsuko said, looking away from Misato and at the image of the Angel. Misato thought to herself for a moment. Why was the Angel attacking here? They had attacked Tokyo-Three almost exclusively. In fact the only times she could remember an Angel not doing so were when they had been transporting Unit Two on the ocean, and when one had attacked Theta on it's return to the US. And on the latter time, it had presumably been headed towards Tokyo-Three, but had been intercepted in midair by pure luck.
"Order the pilots to launch!" Misato ordered. She could think about unimportant things later. Right now, it was more vital to act. Several officers scrambled to get the three mecha ready to launch. Before they were even out of the door, the island shook again.
"It's using some kind of energy beam!" Reported a tactical officer. "But we can't seem to get a concrete reading on the energy type!"
"Get all civilians to shelters, activate what defenses you have, and get those Evas out there!"
Kevlar-layered ceramic armor plates sprang up along the island, each one as tall as an Eva and several hundred feet long. They were intended as a barricade, and to provide cover for defending units. The three Japanese Evangelion ran out of the docking bay and took up positions under the cover of the heavy plates near the beach facing the Angel's approach.
Shinji glanced around the edge of a plate just in time to see the Angel fire at him. Shinji was stunned just for a moment, before the pain hit. The right side of his face felt like it had been dipped in Hydrochloric acid. Shinji screamed and threw himself back behind the armor plate. Although he couldn't see it, and probably wouldn't want to, the angel's beam was eating through the plate he was hiding behind. The tough metal-free ceramics seemed to be slowing down its effects. Regardless, the plate was being destroyed. It almost seemed like it was eroding away into a cloud of mono-atomic particles.
Even before Shinji screamed, Ritsuko was moving to cut the nerve impulses before the beam weapon killed him. As she did, she saw a meter jump and the right side of Unit One's face erupt in a dust storm.
"That's no particle beam!" Ritsuko exclaimed.
"What is it then?" Misato demanded.
"That beam is suppressing the negative charge on the electrons of atoms! The positive charge on the nucleus is unaffected, but positive repels positive so the matter..."
"...Tears itself apart." Misato finished. "A disintegration ray."
Asuka glanced towards Unit One. The side of its face looked like it had been sandblasted away, leaving a lump of tortured flesh and steel. The armor plate he was cowering behind started to buckle under the force of the Angel's beam. Asuka began yelling a warning when she saw a blue and gray blur from the corner of her eye. Rei. She scooped up Unit One and managed to get both of them out of the way before the ceramic plate broke under the strain of the attack.
"Damn! How are we supposed to fight against that thing?" Asuka said.
"What weapons do you have?" Asked a familiar voice - Nick. "I'm powering up Theta. We should be out there in just a few seconds. Jet Alone is coming as well."
"All I have is my progressive knife." Asuka replied, trying to sound cross. She was thankful that more help was arriving, but her personal sense of pride wouldn't allow her to say so.
"It may just be better than nothing." Theta emerged from the docking bay, moving more slowly than the Japanese Evangelion units. It's heavy armor caused it to nearly sink into the sand, but Nick kept it moving at what must have been a torturous pace for the mecha. "I and Jet Alone will distract the Angel while you go around and flank it."
Asuka fought down her Eva's homicidal urge towards Nick and answered.
"Fine. Whatever. Rei, you circle around the other side."
"I cannot. Unit One is unable to fight and I have been given orders to protect it. I must stay and defend it."
"What?! Fine. I'll take care of it myself. I am, after all, the one best qualified for the job."
Jet Alone, in its shining golden armor, was easy to spot. Even in the darkness of the night, what lights there were shone from its mirror-like surfaces. It stormed over the island's beach, doing it's best to avoid the Angel's disintegration ray. As it dodged through monolithic alloy plates, a memory file opened without prompt. Last year, Cain had been 'born'. It had been programmed as an AI, and abandoned as a failure. Nick had bought the project and continued work on it. He had given Cain the freedom to reprogram itself, to grow and change. It's first actions, though still below a true level of sentience, had been to make itself faster and smarter. It had basically programmed itself. Cain had been given to the Jet Alone project after their first failure, and was now considered a great success the world over. All because Nick had seen some potential in the research.
Cain put the file away. There were far more important things to worry about. Like not dying.
Nick ran directly towards the Angel, hoping his matter-repelling field would offer some protection from the target's matter-annialation beam. He jumped, waved his arms around, and generally did what he could to gain the Angel's fire. Unfortunately for Nick, it worked.
The Angel's beam lashed out. Theta's Iron Curtain could do nothing to stop it. The first thing to go was vision, Theta's eyes destroyed in an instant. Nick was unable to even react as the angel's beam played over Theta, the Iron Curtain serving only to keep the vaporized material, flesh and metal alike, from escaping. Seconds after the attack, Theta was obscured by a mist made of it's own blood. Nick forced Theta into a turn, putting its heavy wings between it and the Angel. The main body was safe for a few seconds while the beam ate through Theta's wings. Nick used the time he had bought with the sacrifice of his wings to throw himself away from the beam, getting behind an armor plate before the Angel killed him. A huge pool of blood formed around Theta, while it lay unmoving.
The ceramic plates frustrated the Angel. They weren't able to hold an electrical charge, and greatly impeded the use of its beam. It was fairly sure there wasn't much of a threat left, though. None of its enemies had yet demonstrated a method of attack that was effective on it. It thought it was safe. It was wrong.
With a jump and a splash, Unit Two entered the Angel's watery body and pierced its blood-red core with her progressive knife, killing the angel. It hovered for a few seconds, as if it couldn't believe it had been killed. The Angel dropped into the ocean, with Unit Two inside.
Dawn rose on Midway Island before the recovery teams could raise Unit Two from the depths. The giant mecha seeming to come out of the water like some sort of mythical sea god. Asuka switched her Eva from life support mode into minimal running mode, giving her just over a minute with what was left in the internal batteries. She hustled to a power station and hooked its line into her Eva's power socket. After checking the connection to the external power source, she moved over to where Nick's Eva was collapsed.
Theta was little more than bones. The Angel's beam had a devastating effect on Theta. It had stripped armor from flesh, then flesh from bone. Asuka knew well how an Eva's injuries were reflected on the pilot, causing great pain. She didn't see how he could have survived. If the Eva suffered a wound that would be fatal, like having it's head cut off, than the pilot would die as if he or she had suffered that same injury. As she turned away, Asuka caught a glimpse of movement. Theta's right arm weakly raised, tried to get her attention. Nick's face appeared on her screen.
"I don't think Theta can walk right now. Mind dragging me back to the docking bay?"
Several cranes supported the tattered bulk of Theta, suspending in inside a service gantry. Nick was looking at the damage, estimating how long it would take to repair. Aside from the machinery buried deeply inside its body, nearly ninety percent of Theta's operating systems were off-line.
"Hey, Nick!" Someone yelled. From the condescending tone, German accent, and female source of the voice, it could only be the third most annoying thing in the universe. The second was the sound of fingernails scraping on a chalkboard, and the first has been erased from all time and space. "Did you see how MY Eva defeated that angel? I told you I didn't need the hero and wondergirl to beat it!" Asuka continued for some time about her own personal greatness. Nick considered the virtues of slamming his face into the nearest bulkhead for a while, at least until unconsciousness set in, then thought about slamming Asuka's face into a bulkhead to shut her up, then decided to ignore her.
At some point, hours later, Asuka had finally finished with her speech on her awesomeness and powerfulness. Nick was still there, almost ready to write a report on Theta's damages. All he had left to do was to check how long it would take to regenerate the biological components.
Asuka watched Nick suddenly stop moving.
"Did you fall asleep or something, Idiot?" She walked over to him and saw he was reading something from a screen. Asuka read over his shoulder.
[Regeneration Time: ERROR]
[ERROR 491: Biological systems inactive]
Nick looked up at her.
"It's... dead."
"The games have been called off, obviously." Misato said, looking at each of the two Eva pilots in the small cafeteria to gauge their reactions. The small eatery was just off to the side of the mecha bay. Rei and Shinji didn't look sad, or really anything. Just tired of fighting. Quite tired, indeed. Misato had been hoping the games would be a nice break for them, but it turned out otherwise. "We will return to Japan tomorrow morning. Get some sleep."
"Dead?" Asuka asked, not quite understanding.
"Biologically, anyway. Mechanically, it's as good as can be expected for something that just got the crap beaten out of it." Nick replied. "I think I can get it running after a bit, though."
"How long is a bit?"
"Call it a few weeks."
"That's pretty quick."
"Well, there are a number of benefits to being in charge." Nick smiled, and Asuka could tell that he wasn't going to be getting into any more detail than that. "I'll be returning to the American branch of PEACE to oversee the completion of Evangelion Units Three and Four. I just know they'd screw something up without me to keep them in line."
"Another two Eva units? Where will they be deployed?"
"Unit Three will be transferred to your branch of NERV. Unit Four is just a prototype for a new type of power source. It'll just be a test bed for it's entire operating life."
"And the pilots?"
"I'm not in charge of that. If you see him, ask Kaji. I think he'd be quite surprised you know any of this."
To be continued.
