Ghost in the Evangelion

by LatwPIAT

Crossover between Ghost in the Shell and Neon Genesis Evangelion, placing NERV and the Angels inside post-cyberpunk Japan in 2030. Verbose technothriller.

5. Layer 05: COLD Motion without sound

COLD/Motion without sound
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Ghost in the Evangelion – Layer 05
A Ghost in the Shell/Neon Genesis Evangelion crossover

"That's not good..." Misato remarked, frown lines wrinkling her face.

Unit-01's husk lay sprawled on the four-lane bridge that connected the GeoFront island to mainland Yugawara. All signals were dead or irregular, disturbed by the charged particle beam the Rakbu had fired. It had only needed one shot to kill Unit-01. ('Kill' as the concept of a 'vehicle kill' in military jargon, not an indication of the current state of the pilot.Hopefully). The massive beam of negatively charged particles had vaporized the ventral armour and the fiber-optic skin beneath, and the augmented muscles beneath that, leaving only the endoskeletal sternum. The edges of the entry-wound glowed red as they cooled in the morning breeze, sagging inwards.

There was also the problem of bremsstrahlung.

An electron, like all charged particles, releases photons when it accelerates due to interaction with another charged particle. The frequency of the light emitted is directly proportional to the change in velocity of the electron. Since the electron was travelling at a comfortable fraction of the speed of light when it hit Unit-01, and braked to a standstill, the frequency of the emitted photon ranged somewhere in the ionizing radiation range. It was therefore lucky for Shinji Ikari that the resulting photon carried only 20 femtoGreys of radiation, and he wouldn't start dying before he absorbed two or three entire Greys.

There were about 21 orders -of-magnitude-more-than-one electrons aimed at Shinji Ikari.

Radiation shielding doesn't help much when the beta-radiation goes in on one side of the lead plating and shoves gamma-radiation out on the other side right into the Entry Plug.

That was the problem of bremsstrahlung.

The octahedral shape of the Rakbu drifted closer in a manner not quite unlike something completely different from flight. Its massive AT field expanded beyond its body with such strength and size that it scattered and polarized light, letting the primary colours wash over the spherical field of pure thought. It looked like a soap-bubble, if soap-bubbles had such density that they shattered windows simply by touching them, turning every pane of glass it touched into a snow crash of dead television. Buildings disintegrated as they touched its surface, leaving a rhombus shaped hole through Manazuru, preceded by the circular hole of its shot. It could kill an aircraft carrier. It could kill an Eva. It could very possibly kill a god.

This was not a good situation at all.

"Retrieval and medical attention to the pilot takes top priority!" Misato shouted into her mouth-piece, letting her agitated voice resound in the large room. She ordered the main screen to display all possible angles of close-ups on the Entry Plug hatch. Somebody else can watch the Rakbu, she thought. Unit-01 lay on its back, immobile, blocking all access to the thoracic hatch. It was held down by 500 tons of dead weight, a design fault someone would pay dearly for. That the someone could be, or even had been, Shinji was too painful to think about. At least he was not an active target anymore, with the Eva bereft of everything resembling life. He was probably only alive because he'd deactivated the Eva by breaking synchronization.

The Evangelion had been built with full knowledge that as a genetically engineered, nano-cyber-pharmaceutically-augmented hybot with its own neural network, it was prone to such organic failings as spasms should the pilot fall unconscious or get desynchronized. Spasms in a 40 metre, 500 ton giant 'mech are generally not a good thing. It had therefore been designed to cut power when the pilot was in no state to pilot, logically enough.

This had saved Shinji Ikari from being shot twice.

What would not save him though, was the repurposed Operator-based non-sentient AI that would guide the synchronization-restart and restore power as soon as he regained consciousness; it had been designed to return the Evangelion to full operational status, so he could fight back against the Rakbu when he recovered. It was a safety feature, you see.

"The Rakbu is charging up for another shot!" Aoba shouted.

"Blow the bridge," Cpt. Katsuragi ordered "pillars A through F"

The Captain had picked the structural supports she wanted demolished mostly at random; struts A through F covered almost an entire third of the bridge. The Hayakawa Option dictated that the entire bridge was to be lined with explosives so that any section, or all of them, could be destroyed as a stop-gap measure against an invasion . Perhaps the Captain could have picked only the three pillars needed to dump Unit-01 into the sea.

Perhaps Misato was more concerned for Shinji's life than taxpayer money.

A loud rumble could be heard as the only landline between Yugawara and the GeoFront island was severed. Plastic explosives were triggered by parallel detonators and shoved superheated, V-shaped wedges through the armatures that held the bridge together. Six large explosions crumpled the concrete pillars between the spans. Tons of shattered rock and brick was dumped into the sea, while the steel bars and struts that held the bridge together bent and mangled under the stress—it was over in a fraction of a second, and Unit-01 plummeted into the icy harbour-water. A chill ran down the half-conscious Shinji's spine.

"Commander," Misato said as she spun to face the man "Permission to deploy Unit-00 on an underwater retrieval mission!"

"Granted," Commander Gendo Ikari said, with a calm, cold voice that carried no hint of concern; it never had.

In her head, Misato cycled her quick-dial menu and selected the option marked 'First Child,' a direct line routed through the entirety of the GeoFront with the highest priority; all the Children had that. A similar system had been set up all over Ashigarashimo and Odawara, where Shinji's and Rei's special-issue mobile phones had top priority for packet transmission, even during military blackouts—not that the JSDA were ever supposed to let the Children out of their sight anyway.

"Rei, we're deploying you to the North-Northwest island gate to pick up Unit-01," she transmitted.

"Understood, Captain Katsuragi," she said, pronouncing the title and name as one word.

The Captain turned to Dr Akagi: "Rits," she said as an aside while decrypting Zero-zero's unused launch codes "...did you fix the sonar bug?"

"It's not a..." Ritsuko began, and caught the black-haired woman's stare "Yes, I fixed while we running tests on Zero-Zero; it now defaults to 'off'."

"Good." was Misato's only reply. When she had been fresh out of the National Defence Academy, she'd been deployed to northern Korea in the capacity of a UN Peacekeeper to strike down on rogue Korean Army cells. Her first real action had been an amphibious night-time op; a flanking manoeuvre deploying from a submersible landing-craft.

Nobody had really expected an ex-Soviet-ex-North-Korean submarine to attack their formation. Their first clue had been its sonar against their M94 Elliot's hull. The periodical sonar-pings had, in fact, been their only clue and it had been the most excruciating 30 minutes of Misato's life to wait and hope it didn't fire a torpedo at her landing-craft. She didn't want Shinji to experience the same uncertainty and fear she had that day; she wouldn't wish it on anyone.

She launched the second Eva.

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For a split second, Rei could see a narrow beam of blue light shine onto Unit-00's red eye, before the effect was broken by the wall of water pouring into the chamber. She felt the massive force of the water slam against the Evangelion, and held onto the joysticks. She could hear a deep metallic sound of the sliding doors locking in place as the level of water quickly rose above her head.

She took a step forwards.

Unusual, were her thoughts concerning the action, for a moment, before she adjusted to the skewered height/weight ratio she experienced.

Her viewscreens flickered, adapting to the underwater light and colour-levels, augmenting the usual green, red and blue with noise-cleaned 3D-maps created from electromagnetic wavelengths outside of the usually visible spectra. Certainly, the kilowatt scale floodlights helped in that regard, illuminating the bluish-black seafloor and bedrock in ways that the weak sun, a waving spot against the water-surface, could not.

She panned the head of Unit-00 over the ground before her and found the wrung span of the island-mainland bridge. The umbilical cable slowly dragged along the seafloor, making the occasional kick or whip upwards as she moved her Eva slowly through the water, going no faster than what the viscosity of the water would permit.

Faster would have been impossible, after all. It wasn't even worth considering, in her mind.

Between the spans that once had connected B and C and C and D, she found Unit-01, immobilized and unsynchronized, yet emitting a weak tracking signal. She turned Unit-00's head to look down upon the white giant as she considered the problem of moving it. Tiny noises erupted in her Entry Plug, telling her that the computers were working, and she was interrupted in her thoughts by a situational read-out of 'Ikari Shinji' the pilot of Unit-01, the Third Child and Commander Ikari's son. In that case, she should retrieve Shinji Ikari as efficiently as possible.

Not that Rei Ayanami could understand why you would want to perform a task with sub-optimal efficiency; it was, by definition, inefficient.

"You're going to have to roll him over to get access to the Entry Plug Rei," she received via cyberlink from Misato "There's just no way to retrieve Shinji from the front."

"Understood, Captain" she replied.

She leant over the white torso of Unit-01 and took hold of the shoulder and hip opposite to her, and pulled. Then she hauled, because mere pulling was not sufficient. The 500 tons gave way and the Test Type Evangelion clumsily rolled over, falling towards her Prototype Evangelion's legs. Slowly, like a slow-motion shot from a documentary film, she withdrew before Zero-One fell against the legs and threw her off balance. Commander Ikari will not be pleased if I also get stuck in the water, she thought. ...nor will Captain Katsuragi or Doctor Akagi.

"OK Rei," she heard the black-haired woman say "now you need to retrieve the Entry Plug; according to Ritsuko, it's fine if you just tear open the rear hatch."

"Should that be my first option?" Rei asked without intonation.

"Yes!" Misato almost shouted at her "Now."

"Roger." Rei complied while she leant down and tore the rear hatch open. The lock-bolts tried to resists, but against the strength of Unit-00, they snapped like dry twigs. She looked down into the artificially fleshy interior of the Test Type and reached three fingers down. This will be difficult, she thought.

As carefully as she could, she reached down and gripped around the cylindrical end of the Plug, and slowly, carefully, twisted the outer shell two fifths of a turn, counter-clockwise. She exhaled. Intuitively, and that is not a good way to judge, the white Entry Plug felt fragile, ready to break in her hand at any moment, like the eggs she had used to practice motor control in her new arm. And that would not be good. She felt her prosthetic right arm twitch. It was uncomfortable.

She let the white cylinder rest in her right hand and reached towards it with the left; because of the electromagnetic disturbances from the charged particle beam that had fried most of the un-shielded electronics, the only com-lines still working were the most vital ones. The protocol for 'underwater remote emergency floatation device activation' was not in that category.

This meant Rei had to use the 'underwater manual emergency floatation device activation protocol,' an elaborate, if accurate, name for a five-millimetre datajack port on the rear end of the Entry Plug and the accompanying drivers. Rei was very relieved that the manipulator-mounted cyberlink-cable was controlled by an internal computer and not very dependent on her ability to guide a 5mm jack into a 5mm wide hole with a 40-metre Evangelion armed suit at 50% synchronization while underwater.

She felt she was not quite up to that task.

A cable, of about the same radius as a tennis-ball, slid out of a hole in the wrist of Unit-00s arm and coiled itself through the water, twisting and bending using tiny hydraulic, pseudo-muscular tubes. Guided by a laser, it reached towards the datajack in Shinji Ikari's Entry Plug. A large octagonal block at the end touched the hull of the Plug and aligned itself, then pushed water out of its cup-like interior with a high-pressure, non-conducting and very dry gas. Once both the datajack and cable-throat were dry, an iris opened, and the 5 millimetre jack reached out and formed a stable physical connection with the Entry Plug.

"Wait, Rei," Misato ordered, "Just give Lt. Hyuga enough time to download the medical data."

"Roger." Rei replied. She didn't have to wait long, the entire medical read-out of Shinji Ikari's determinable physical and mental state taking no longer than a fraction of a second to transfer, even with an entire Evangelion-unit acting as a relay, prioritizing Shinji's packets, by default, at a lower priority than its own situational data.

"OK, you can release him now Rei," she heard, "The JSDA are right above you to pick him out of the sea"

She let go of the Entry Plug. Hatches on the side popped and white panels drifted off in the weak streams as gas expanded into thick rubber balloons and pontoons. Unevenly, it rose upwards, so she stabilized it with a flat hand until she could no longer reach it. For a while, she could see the Entry Plug against what remained of sun-light underwater; a disturbed plume in the water-surface, but then it too disappeared. She turned to the pilot-less Eva and lifted it up on Unit-00's left shoulder. It was a difficult task, and her Eva sank a few meters into the ground. Walking back will be strenuous, she thought as she began to trudge back to the GeoFront island.

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Kotani peered over the railings of the coast-guard vessel, and down at the white cylinder that broke the surface of the water, splashing water upwards onto the hull. He looked up and towards the GeoFront island. Just above the skyline he could just see the edge of the sky-blue crystalline octahedral Rakbu; the same kind of alien monster that had wrecked the JDS Nagato, her sister ship and the destroyer escort. ...except they look nothing alike, any of them, he thought as he wrinkled his eyebrows at it, a futile action that in no way reflect what he really wanted to happen to the Rakbu, but the best he could muster against it. It would be even more futile, not to mention fatal to actively engage it with heavier weapons that his fearsome eyebrows, but damned if he didn't want to.

He looked down at the four junior seamen he was supposed to supervise; they sat in a dinghy and wrapped the Entry Plug in thick steel cables and bolted them together at the ends to form a harness.

"Hey, you dumbasses!" he shouted them "Do you really think this thing is evenly balanced?" he said and pointed at the white cylinder when they looked up at him "If you'd looked at the files I gave you dumbnuts, you'd have noticed the rear forth contains almost half of the mass. If you'd lifted it in the crane like that—" he pointed at the cable loops they were about to fasten "—it'd tilt and the pilot in there would bounced around inside."

He looked at by far most stupid pair of sailors, Seaman Fujimoto and Seaman Murakami, widen their eyes in dawning realization at what they'd been about to do. He wasn't planning to let them get away with just that: "That kid's practically a real hero, and he's wounded, and you were going to handle him like he was your shut-down sexdoll android? What kind of Seamen, heck, what kind of people are you two?"

"Now get him up here, he needs medical attention!" Kotani finished berating them.

"Yes, Kaisō-chō!" they said.

As the Entry Plug rose up and swung onto the deck, JMSDF medics ran over to it, together with the rest of Kotani's command and an underwater breaching team that wondered what the heck they were doing this many meters above water. Kotani, who didn't have anything left to do now really, leant against the railing with his back and watched with worry as the breaching team pried open the door to the white cylinder and found their legs covered in a lukewarm, viscous and now radioactive liquid. It was transparent and slightly pinkish, and the young boy they laid out on a stretcher—that poor guy can't be more than sixteen! Kotani realized. What has it come to, when children are the frontline soldiers and soldiers and sailors are the kid's fucking backup?

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"Pilot Shinji Ikari has been retrieved by the Japanese Maritime Ess-Dee-Eff and is receiving emergency medical attention." Makota reported in the ECCO CIC. A faint smile of relief appeared on Misato's face.

"Good," she said "I want to be informed A.S.A.P when he regains consciousness," she turned to an android Operator "Get me a report on everything the American Empire known from their encounter with the Rakbu," she turned to Dr Akagi: "Ritsuko, find out what kind of beam the Rakbu used, and what we can do to defend against it."

The blonde woman raised an eyebrow at her former room-mate's newfound resoluteness (although, really, she had always known that Misato had potential for that form of resolve; she had not been overly surprised when Misato had been transferred from the JSDA-proper to the Control Office. Oh, sure, Ritsuko had been surprised that out of their thousands of officers they'd selected a young low-ranking one and hurriedly promoted her to the rank of Captain, but when she came down to it, a latent tactical genius with a devout hate for the Annunaki that bordered on specieism really was the logical choice, no?).

"And if Major Kusanagi has regained command of the local JSDA forces, I want her to meet me in conference room C-22."

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There were many uses of the parks that were scattered over Ashigrashimo district; for one, they could be walked in; You could sit on the benches; The grass and lakes made for an idyllic landscape for a picnic, romantic or otherwise. They were not drop-off points; and if one were especially perverted and so inclined, yes, one could have indecent, illegal sex in them, though it should be noted that the small pebbles from the paths that had been kicked onto the grass would make such an activity painful for the involved parties.

But now that the cities were empty and dead, with the population hidden away, safe in nuke-proof bunkers, they were nothing but huge, open surfaces where nothing of value lived; perfect if you needed to blow something up, or, as was the case, get blown up in a way that didn't destroy too much of the surrounding city.

Especially those parks that overlooked Yugawara from atop a hill, so that tall buildings wouldn't become shorter in the process, or end up with the general shape and texture of a Swiss cheese when the giant octahedron shot though everything and everyone stupid enough to stand between it and its target.

It was generally agreed that wanton destruction of Ashigarashimo District was not preferred to the alternative of leaving it standing.

A single missile burst shot out from the middle of the park, headed straight for the Rakbu. White and grey smoke from the expunged propellant trailed behind it as it soared towards the sky-blue sinister geometry. When it reached the death-zone that surrounded the Rakbu, it made a sharp turn. The internal logic of the repurposed anti-aircraft missile dictated that it would skirt the edges of total annihilation for a while—then strike.

Which it did, to no effect.

Strictly speaking, that was untrue. Right after the air-defence missile exploded against the technically airborne Ishkur, the Rakbu effected a beam of hypervelocity charged particles right back at the source; an Operator android handling a man-portable surface-to-air missile launcher. It was vaporized, together with a lot of park ground.

Another relativistic beam shot out and melted the communications relay van that the JSDA had used to control the Operator. An armoured wheel shot off in an arbitrary direction, knocking a carbonised tree over. The once peaceful recreational park had turned from an idyllic throwback to bygone times of pre-urbanization, to something borne out of a history book covering WWIII; the grass had been lit alight and flames licked up along the thick bodies of the few trees still standing. Two huge craters reached across the government estate, a blackish-brown slag of melted rock and soil, as if it had been precision-bombed by a gung-ho fighter pilot with some particular hatred of trees. The nearby buildings, once majestic mirrors facing each other towards infinity, had been scattered with soil and ash, visages marred by windows broken by impact with ballistic vegetation.

Batou surveyed the damage from afar with a pair of binoculars, and let a silent 'damn' slip his mouth, before turning to Togusa. One pair of obviously prosthetic eyes met a biological pair.

"So, should we program the next missile for three turns, or should we skip ahead to four?" the younger of the two asked.

"Three." Batou declared "The Major says that ECCO wants as many data points as possible"

"She's really letting them boss her around, isn't she?" Togusa said while he set the coordinates to make three sharp turns on its way to the Rakbu.

"We all have to pretend we're their assigned lapdogs." Batou said, not even masking his angry tone of voice "I don't envy the Major one bit having to confer with those assholes,"

"...don't think that I like having to stand by while they use child-soldiers any more than you do." Togusa said while raising both hands defensively.

Batou grumped and continued loading a lifeless Operator into the Pietàic arms of an urban-camouflage Tachikoma. Personally, he thought the blue colour suited their childlike innocence better, at least until they started firing, whereupon the colour was inappropriate.

Gleefully, charmingly inappropriate, he might add.

The Tachikoma drove off with the Megatech-produced android in its arms and a handheld anti-aircraft missile in its pod. While the Android could have walked to the idyllic-park-turned-battlefield under its own power, it would have been awkward and time-consuming, as the military-grade gynoids had not been built to traverse any terrain more difficult than the plane floors of office building (and possibly the stairs joining two floors) and therefore not as suited as the Tachikoma with its long flexible leg-feet.

Military Training Androids were built to traverse such terrain. They were the most advanced and robust automaton robots not on the market, years ahead of the civilian sector. They were built to be near-perfect replicas of a human, with a constant peak physical condition and the ability act and plan creatively, although the cognitive similarities with actual biological humans ended there, on a clear line of non-sapience and non-sentience and a strong adherence to vulnerable patterns, a problem solved by giving them a whole lot of different patterns to chose between; they were used to represent the OpFor in live-fire exercises and unlike the civilian market models, they were fully capable of firing firearms with precision and accuracy.

Why then, did the ostensible JSDA-force that Section 9 was disguised as, use the inferior gynoid Operators with their inability to fire even a handgun properly, lacking the strength to do a human's work, and being built mostly as impeachable firewalls and secretaries, replacing the job of the Office Lady in the corporate and/or military landscape of Japan?

For one, the proper live-fire exercise automatons were hideously expensive, with a price tag more than five times that of the simplistic, white-blooded female shell, and when all you needed was something capable of autonomously targeting a sitting duck the size of an aircraft carrier and pulling the trigger, the Operator would suffice.

The SIGINT (signal Intelligence) techies wouldn't be very happy to have their cute glasses-wearing Operators returned in fluid form though...

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The general atmosphere in the Fifth Sub-district nuclear/general-purpose shelter was less than optimal. Among other things, it was overcrowded to about 150% of its recommended capacity by refugees fleeing for their lives, and the suddenly mixed-race population was agitating old and new racial tensions. While each individual had their own opinions, the general feeling could be described thusly: the Laotians hated the Vietnamese, who disliked the Thai, none of whom like the Singaporeans, who didn't even like themselves because all other Singaporeans were collaborators to Ka Gael's Republic-slash-Military-Dictatorship and had of course personally helped perpetrate the Purges. The Japanese hated everyone, and everyone hated the Chinese.

And all the refugees had something against the Government, who through the Metropolitan police were tasked with a) keeping the refugees out of the Citizen shelters, and (failing that) b) keeping the refugees from agitating the citizens.

In some cases, it would perhaps have been better if that last order had been the other way around.

To Hikari Horaki, this (though an important social issue that she campaigned for among her apathetic classmates) was of little immediate concern, because she was not in a shelter. Nor, for that matter, was she in Yugawara or any other part of urban Ashigarashimo; she sat at a wooden bench-table at a secluded petrol station along the mountain highway, waiting for Kodama to pay for refilling the fuel tank.

No, her more pressing concern was that her younger sister, Nozomi, was disturbing her in the middle of doing her homework, and her WLAN-enabled laptop was soon running out of power. (If she was an underachiever, she could have downloaded the half-finished essay to her cyberbrain and worked off notes she took during class, but that would entail not completing the extension-questions.)

"Sister, where are we going?" Nozomi asked her, at just the right angle to place Hikari and her laptop partly in the shadow. Incidentally, this also meant that by looking at Nozomi to answer, Hikari essentially had to stare into the sun.

"Please Nozomi," Hikari said with as little irritation as she could manage "I've told you we're going to a mountain-side motel."

"How long will be gone?" her younger sister queried "...and why isn't Father with us?"

"We'll be gone for a few days at most," Hikari replied "and Father has to work. Can you please sit down and do something sensible, like reading that book you have to read for school?"

"But I don't want to read right now! I want to play with my friends!" she replied with a whine that matched the car pulling over to the petrol-station. Hikari looked back down at her essay on Japanese literature, only to have something icy cold touch her neck just above her neural ports. She yelped as icy droplets slid down her spine.

"Lighten up!" Kodama said and passed Hikari the can of soda she'd pressed against her neck, before throwing one into the awaiting hands of Nozomi. "Ignore your homework, for once. There'll be plenty of time to work on that stuff at the motel; you won't have anything else to do while we're up there."

Hikari looked up at her older sister.

"Besides, it's not like you will ever slow down enough to enjoy the view," Kodama continued and struck out her arm in the direction of the city in the yellow-red evening sun. The eighth-sphere shaped solar generators, giant apartment complexes that stood hundreds of meters tall and faced south towards the harbour covered the rest of the city in a reddish veil, while the sun hanging low in the sky in the west could be seen as a long plume across the blue ocean beyond the two cities at the shore. Against the reach of the growing urban sprawl lay the mountainside covered in dark green trees, running down from right in front of her, all the way down to the lower stretch of the highway to Odawara, which acted as a border between the urban city and undisturbed forest. "Which, I might add, is magnificent."

Hikari had to admit that.

"Hey, Class Rep!" she heard... Suzahara? shout. What is he doing here? She turned, and spotted two of the three Stooges standing by an older car, together with its owner, the (in her opinion) much more respectable Mr Suzahara.

"Suzahara, Aide, why are you here?" she dryly asked as they approached her table.

"Our parents decided to evacuate us rather than seeking shelter in the city," Aide explained "so I'm hitching a ride with Mr Suzahara to a mountain-side motel that the JSDA has declared in a safe-zone. What about you, Class Rep?"

But, but, but that's where I and my sisters are going to stay! Hikari searched her mind for a Sufficiently Polite reply, only to be interrupted by her own sister: "Mr Suzahara, is Kana with you?"

"Sorry, she's still in the hospital." the father of the girl in question replied.

"Oh." Nozomi said without masking the disappointed tone in her voice.

Mr Suzahara turned to Kodama: "Ms Horaki, if it is not too much to ask, would it be possible for my son and Kensuke Aide to get a r—" Hikari struggled to maintain her composure.No, not that... Her eyes widened a little, and she took a deep breath. "...ide with you to the mountain-side hotel? I really have to get back to work."

"Sure," her older sister-and-most-heinous-and-treacherous-guardian replied.

Stuck in a car with Suzahara-the-idiot and Aide-the-freak... Granted, Suzahara was generally kind enough to be silent if she frowned enough at him, but if the two of them started talking, she really could not stand having them sitting behind her in the car.

Then she realized that it was Nozomi's turn to ride shotgun.

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Major Kusanagi walked with decisive steps, for no particular reason, into Conference Room C-22 for the second time that evening, making quick glances at the faces of the people present. Present were Dr Akagi, 2nd Lt. Ibuki, Cpt. Katsuragi and 2nd Lt. Hyuga. For so few people, the room was oversized. It was a large room that reached out from the only door, and did not really end, as the carpeted floor and blackish-grey ceiling tiles met a wall of LCD screens set to display a view of the city, giving the impression of unlimited reach. In fact, the screens gave an even more expansive panorama than windows, as the display was perhaps a little too real. The meeting room tried to both cause claustrophobia (from the low, pressing ceiling) and agoraphobia (from the perceived lack of walls) It was not the ideal conference room, but Cpt. Katsuragi seemed to have a special love for it. Perhaps because the chairs spin, the Major thought to herself, unaware that the exact same comments had been mentally directed at some unseen and hypothetical future observer by Ritsuko minutes before.

"Have a seat, Major," Misato said as she leant back in one of the cybernetic chairs in the room; a plastic and synthetic fabric model with VR laser projectors, cyberlink ports in the neck area, and orders of magnitude more options than anyone actually using the chairs would ever need. Perhaps, if ECCO spent less money on chairs, they could afford more Eva-units?

The Major sat down, and the Captain immediately began the meeting. "Please present the JSDA report, Major Kusanagi." A ballpoint pen held between the index and middle fingers tapped lightly against the wooden table in a 4/4 beat.

"The target," the Major began. A picture of the some-shade-of-blue octahedron underlined her words, "will fire at any perceived threat within a range of 4 kilometres..." Image of a JSDA Operator android carrying a anti-aircraft missiles launcher being hideously melted. "...although the Coast Guard has not had any issues with patrol boats within that range." Image, with tactical diagram, of a Japanese Maritime Self-Defence Force patrol vessel inside the 'death-zone,' the deck-mounted 20mm cannon pointed haphazardly in the direction of the Rakbu. "It will also retaliate against any hostile fire with extreme prejudice." More high-speed footage of vaporizing androids, captured by sheer luck at the very moment the plasmoid plume of burning air the relativistic particle beam shoves ahead of itself hit the cybershells. The skin had been flayed off by the heat, and the white plastic used to make the shell was rapidly melting. In the eyes, if one squinted a bit, could be seen it begging for mercy. "However," the Major said without any apparent appreciation, "there has been some success with guided munitions set to make at least six sharp turns before heading for the target."

"What about the AT field?" Misato asked. Hyuga looked hurriedly up into the ceiling, a common gesture when accessing external memory.

"The AT field has survived direct contact with two 10 kilo-ton nuclear warheads detonated within ten seconds of each other, and continued to take fire from 68 carrier-based fighter-bomber aircraft simultaneously—the technical specifications should be in this meeting's library," Hyuga stopped speaking for a few seconds, backlit by grainy, looped footage of Imperial American Navy aircraft being shot to pieces. "what is interesting," he continued "Is this footage here—" he motioned towards the screen and enlarged the film "where can see that a missile breaks through the AT field at the one-minute-two-seconds mark of the battle, going by the detonation of the first nuclear warhead," a small shape, almost unrecognizable as anything more than something longer-than-wide followed by a white streak, had been circled in red in a freeze-frame, then moved slowly towards the Rakbu as the centi-seconds ticked by, and detonated against the spotless surface—which was still spotless afterwards.

Ritsuko raised a hand and did not wait before speaking. Fingers mechanically drumming across her PDA and a number of images were dragged onto an available viewscreen, while one arm pointed at it. "Here we can see the phase-shifted space as its taking fire—it actually radiates in the visible spectrum, which according to our current theories means its several times stronger than Zero-Zero and Zero-One's AT fields at anything but point-blank range..."

"Thank you Rits," Misato said "By the way, what is the status of Zero-Zero and Zero-One?"

"Ah," Ritsuko dug through her manila folder of paper printouts scattering a few onto the table. There was a very subdued physical sigh, and a mental one: At times like these I almost wished I had a cybernetic brain... Almost. Maya hurriedly reached towards the papers and tried to hand the back to the doctor. There was some fumbling, but in the end Ritsuko had a bundle of white papers in her hands, and Maya was blushing very slightly. "Zero One's ventral armour was melted down to the endoskeleton. It was fortunate the central control unit stayed intact. It's currently being refitted with spare armour plating from Zero-Zero, but until we can have thermal plating airlifted here from the Japanese Space Agency, this is a token gesture,"

"And Zero-Zero?" the Captain inquired. There was a slight hope in her mind, expressed as lifted eyebrows.

"The First Child had no problems with synchronization," Maya begun "...but there are still errors in the feedback system,"

"So we have nothing that can engage the target close enough to break the AT field?" the Captain asked.

"Even with JSDA support, it's highly unlikely that Zero-Zero or Zero-One could get close enough to cause AT-field-annihilation. I'd also have serious doubts on Zero-Two's capabilities, pending the latest report from the Tännhauser Foundation," Ritsuko stood stone-faced in the sprawling room. She whispered a small 'no' to herself, giving a second opinion that it was perhaps best if no one but herself heard.

"On that note," Cpt. Katsuragi said leaning forwards while keeping her hands busy with capping and uncapping a cheap ballpoint pen "how quickly can we get Unit-02 here?"

Hyuga rolled his eyes, accessing external data: "Not in time. We can't airlift Zero-Two until the Sergeyn-Roussel-Iwamoto deal is approved, and even if it left from Wilhelmshaven by ship today, it wouldn't arrive before about two weeks."

"Ah, damn," the Captain said under her breath. This just isn't fair! It's just sitting there, digging slowly though our defensive layers with a pulsed laser, she recalled the images in her head, of spectrum-altered images of the floating octahedron firing thousands of pulses of stimulated, focused light at the ground from its bottom apex, throwing soil and armature up as vaporized clouds of gas and liquid blobs and it doesn't even care about our efforts to stop it. All it does it to mechanistically destroy everything we throw at it, as if it was insignificant. I'll show you, you stupid math-y thing, that humans are better than you. We can overpower you, we can outsmart you, we can outran— "Haha!" the Captain exclaimed with newfound confidence. A wicked grin flashed as she looked at the people before her, and they looked back with curiosity, or in the case of Maj. Kusanagi, a lifted eyebrow and an expression of very subtle disbelief.

"Lieutenant Hyuga, get me the data on the experimental particle accelerator cannon the Japanese Advanced Research Institute is developing."

"Yes Captain," Makota replied, while bringing a giant diagram of the experimental particle cannon onto the wall-screens, stretching from wall to wall. Available whitespace was filled with diagrams detailing the blooming in both vacuum and STP-conditions-atmosphere and detailed notes on performance and design that ECCO were privy to only because they were attached to the JSDF.

"Hmmmm..." the Captain thought out aloud while running numbers in her head "If we can overcharge it to 120% normal efficiency, and upgrade the cooling system, we should be able to deliver a killing shot from over 4 kilometers away."

"You can't be serious?" the Major stated in disbelief, forcing it to a question.

"Of course I'm serious Major," the black-haired woman replied "There's no way we can engage it in close quarters, so we'll have to outrange it."

"You're asking for a continuous beam of charged particles from an overcharged, overheating experimental prototype weapon to be focused on the same spot of a mobile target for over seventeen seconds, by a sixteen-year-old," the Major stated.

"With a little luck, it'll all be fine – you'll be providing suppressive fire, after all." the Captain responded optimistically.

"That's not the issue, Captain Katsuragi." Maj. Kusanagi said with a harsh undertone "You're running your margins too thin. The idea of keeping the beam focused on the target for seventeen seconds while under fire is absolutely preposterous!"

"It's our only chance Major," Cpt. Katsuragi said. "It will have to work."

Technically, I outrank you, you know. A severely annoyed Major thought. No, that's a childish and self-righteous thought. I didn't even know the Rakbu existed until a month ago— She had been being dragged into a video-conference room by the Minister of Internal Affairs, in person, and the Chief of Staff Ground of the JSDA in mid-July (that had been her vacation, damnit!) for a briefing on an alien giant. Captain Katsuragi, on the other hand, has spent eleven years of her military careers planning war against armies of these things. Her graduation-essay from the National Defence Academy, 'A Tactical Analysis of Current Counter-Alien Warfare Capabilities [Top Secret] [Classified – Eyes Only][Seraphic/X8] was one Maj. Kusanagi owned a copy of and had based her current attack plans off. Admit it Motoko, she knows more about what's going on than you do.She let out a subdued sigh Even if she's not tactically sound, from a strategic standpoint we have to work with the available tools.

I just want a bigger toolbox

Perhaps the Chief could call in few favours from people he knew?

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Overall, Cpt. Misato Katsuragi was not pleased. This came mostly from the enormous mounds of paperwork that she had to fill in to transfer the particle cannon; one paper signed by both CEO Gendo Ikari and Vice-President Kozo Fuyutsuki, which she had to hand to the JSDA General stationed in the area; General Kawabata, who then signed a piece of paper that she had to personally bring to Chief of Staff Ground General Kawamoto, who gave her a hard time about her risky tactics. Then, she had to get the signatures of CommanderGendo Ikari and Deputy-Commander Kozo Fuyutsuki to bring to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and a boatload of other people-in-fancy-suits, but finally she now stood with a piece of paper signed by the Minister of Defence, authorizing the immediate transfer of one "gigawatt-scale linear magnetic particle accelerator" to ECCO complete with the "necessary adjustments and modifications to ensure continued operation in hostile environments" and blah blah blah yadda yadda yadda just hand it over, will you!

"You're not... serious?" the slightly overweight Director of Research asked her "We've worked for five years on miniaturizing the Linear Accelerator Cannon to its current scale," his right hand man continued "and now you're going to just take it? This company will not accept—"

"I'm afraid you don't have a choice" Misato said, smiling a smile of mixed general happiness and indignant schadenfreude "ECCO needs the ell-ay-cee to defend Japan"

"This is a joke!" the Director's right-hand-man said with indignation "This is an act of deliberate corporate sabotage on behalf of our enem—"

Misato frowned. "Shut up. This isn't about your petty corporate rivalries. This is about saving the world—" she emphasized the words by leaning towards the Right Hand Man and jabbing her index finger repeatedly against his torso "—which we just can't do if I have to be faced with opposition at every" Jab. "step" Jab. "of the bloody" Jab twice, then again harder. "way! Jab, then grab tie, yank and growl.

The Director leant forwards and placed his elbows on his desk. His hands met in a delicate steeple, intersecting at the second digit of each finger and the thumbs resting against each other. He sat straight, raising his grey moustache far above the apex of his arms. "What do you want it mounted on?" he asked calmly

"But Director!" the Right Hand Man exclaimed, then silenced himself at his boss' eyes peered up at him where he stood.

"That," Misato said, and pointed out the window behind them, where the titanic shape of Unit-00 stood solemnly against the setting sun. Its umbilical cord trailed down from its cybernetic spine and lay in a pile on the highway, connected to a battery of military power generator trucks. It needed too many of them to be a viable alternative in mobile combat, but it was possible to transport it that way, or perhaps more correctly, let it transport itself that way while dragging a trail of power trucks behind it, insofar as it was possible to move Unit-00 faster than a car without turning the road into tarmac-based substitute for melted cheese "...is what I want the LAC mounted to" she said as the two men looked agape at the white Cyclops.

"You have two of them?" the Director's right-hand-man said weakly, as he stared into the red eye of the 'mech.

"Well, I want it so the LAC can be mounted to either one as a modular system," Misato said with a shrug "within the hour, please. See ya!"

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Kozo Fuyutsuki carried an old ink pen across another document, signing with his own name and title, which for purposes of buying space-shuttle thermal shielding to a private enterprise like a Tachibana Labs subsidiary was "Vice-President," as opposed to "deputy commander" or "Doctor" though the latter he had not used for much, much too long. Perhaps, if Ikari succeeded, he could return to a research position at a University.

Or perhaps there would be no need for professors and universities anymore if everything went as planned.

He dipped the pen in the inkwell just as his video-phone rang. A holographically projected screen appeared over his desk, a faint blue rectangle with a pair of hypercards layered on top. The top one was his secretary, a standard model ubiquitous in the Japanese corporate landscape, (and with minor variations in skin colour and facial structure they were quite popular outside of Japan and Asia too) about to tell him who was calling, and what was so important he had to handle it personally. Though, Fuyutsuki thought ...I probably won't have to handle it personally anyway, because most of the calls that reach me are headed for the young man in the office next door, That office, incidentally, was labelled "Ikari – Chief Executive Officer"

"'Avalon, Josephine' wants to speak to CEO Gendo Ikari" the android reported. Its (or perhaps 'hers' would have been more correct; he had had some interesting, if inconclusive philosophical discussions about anthropomorphism with regards to emerging intelligence and AI research with Yui. He longed back to those days, though a little voice in the back of his head reminded him that what he was feeling was bloated nostalgia. In reality, unless they found an available and secluded broom closet, Naoko would always wedge herself into the conversations proclaiming the superiority of post-singularity AIs.) ...anyway, its circular white hypercard swung down and gave way to Ms Avalon's live-video feed.

The hypercard was large and carried a high-quality signal in full resolution with it. The woman it presented made full use of the opportunities of that signal; an expensive, handcrafted and unique cybershell sat there and smiled at him from an elegantly, if sparsely, furnished office. Ms Avalon looked like she could be no older than 25, but since Fuyutsuki had worked with the exact same person fifteen years ago for Tachibana Labs, she had to be almost twice that age.

"Kozo," she said "your android informs me that Mr Ikari is busy at the moment, and that I have to wait—" the emphasis was sharp in contrast to the usual, melodic voice "—to speak with him. I am aware that you're currently busy fighting," her eyes darted to the side, looking at something outside Fuyusuki's digital window to her office. "...somehow, the Rakbu threat, but that's precisely why I'm calling. So, please Kozo, put me through."

Fuyusuki opened a line to Gendo's office. A video-feed from a simple, aged webcam appeared next to Ms Avalon's face – Gendo had no cyberbrain, and had in private expressed to Fuyutsuki some concern, not quite fear, of what IGIGI would do should his thoughts become nothing but an elaborate cipher.

"Josephine Avalon wants to speak with you—" the grey-haired man transmitted to the speakers of Gendo's stationary computer.

"Tell her it will have to wait," Gendo interrupted "...with my most sincere apologies." he amended.

Fuyutsuki did not smile, nor did he frown, but he did wonder, before completing what he was going to say: "...about the Rakbu."

"Ah..." Gendo voiced "I'll take this call in my office then."

What does that woman want? Fuyutsuki asked as Ms Avalon's face disappeared from his desk with a 'Thank you Kozo' and a smile. The business-rivalry between AvalonCorp and Tachibana Labs had been going since 2017, when Josephine Avalon had left ECCO's predecessor to form her own mega-corporate software/hardware empire in the Western hemisphere. The relations had become even more bitter when AvalonCorp had launched a full-out format-war over the Internet Protocols with Tachibana Labs and lost, and Gendo had felt pressured (Ikari hadn't actually confided that to Fuyutsuki; it was merely something the old man could tell from his former student's behaviour) by IGIGI's decision to employ AvalonCorp to build Dilmun. That woman is sharp like a razor and more cunning than a fox that used to be Professor of Cunning at Oxford University, then left the position to become head of the United Nations High Commission of International Cunning Planning. This did not bode well.

The office next door lit up. Like the ECCO CIC and the more extravagant meeting rooms, it did not as much have walls as it had gigantic, wall-sized holes to the outside world that just happened to be holding the ceiling up – a ceiling, it might be mentioned, that was equally unhelpful in limiting the perceived-but-illusionary size of the room with its faintly reflective black finish, which together with the floor made the room stretch towards infinity in all directions, with Gendo Ikari's desk being nothing but a quite real Russel's Teapot floating in the middle of whatever the man chose to view in such resolution (images of malignant cell-growths in the Evas, the few remaining images of Yui Ikari, live satellite feeds from Olduvai Gorge, ancient Summerian texts, select craters on the moon and radio-telescope-photos of Saturn, to name a few) in a rather surreal experience until people regained their balance.

Now, however, he settled for the majestic image of Unit-01 in drydock looming behind him, in the sense that images of a 40 meter biomechanical giant can in any way be considered modest. He peered over a pair or interlocking hands onto the calm and smiling face of Ms Avalon, who took up the wall opposite the old images of the completed Unit-01 – in a rather ironic sense, this meant that Ms Avalon was now just as large and imposing as Unit-01, but Gendo Ikari was not the type of man to let the apparent size of the conniving traitor affect him in any way.

"Nice to see you again, Gendo," Josephine Avalon said, apparently not affected very much either "I'm terribly sorry to hear what happened to your pet project..."

"I'm sure you are, Ms Avalo—" he said, only to be interrupted:

"Oh please Gendo. We've known each other for fifteen years; it's Josephine." she said without changing her tone, the continued without pause "I'm about to do a product demonstration in Japan next week – I'm sure you must have heard of it, at the Pacific Defence Conference in Kyosho, hmmm?" she paused, the continued as Ikari gave a small nod "To keep this brief, as I'm sure," another brief look somewhere outside the feed's view, "you have better things to do, I have a terrawatt-scale particle cannon in a ship in Kyosho South-West Harbour that outclasses anything the Japanese military-industrial complex could build, and I've been informed by an official from your government that you can put it to better use than my company can." She gave a short, polite chuckle. "And the way my paradigms influence my views," Gendo took notice of the sudden complexity and redundancy of her vocabulary; it signalled a short speech, "makes me believe that the two of us, not just as humans beings but as parents have a duty to the future of our children to work together to ensure their survival in the face of alien threats, not only for ourselves, but also to accelerate us into a new future at their childhood's ends."

As a full-body cyborg, such things as 'pausing for breath' was redundant in a biological sense; Gendo had always felt that Josephine only bothered to do so for dramatic effect, or to clarify a point, which meant that it was his job to note when she did so, to work out what she had to gain from doing so.

"I understand," Gendo said "Your offer is appreciated; while our current weaponry suffices," (that was technically not a lie, just a very flawed version of the truth) "my staff appreciates large margins," They also appreciate margins Gendo thought "Will an immediate electronic transaction be in order?"

"Do you have time to wait for my plane to arrive from London?" Ms Avalon asked in a deadpan tone, while a number of small windows littered her feed with the transaction-windows and an electronic copy of the contract; 10,000,000,000 ¥€$ for an R400 Production Model Heavy Particle Accelerator Cannon. Gendo filled in the company account number and security codes from memory, before identifying himself by voice and fingerprint (he could also have used a retina-scan, but for some odd reason he preferred not to, perhaps for the same reason he couldn't use a ghostkey)

"We'll need to meet in person to handle the paperwork for this... since, I might note, I have it on good authority that you've ordered the metropolitan police to arrest me if I ever come within a kilometre of your GeoFront, might I suggest we simply meet over a dinner in Kyosho next week?" she said, without letting her voice change.

"That will be in order." Gendo replied, with the exact same tone of voice.

"Excellent. Bring your son; I want to meet him." Josephine Avalon said, then logged out leaving a large [CALL ENDED] in place of her live feed.

My son...? Gendo asked himself What could she possibly want with him? I wouldn't put it above her to attempt seducing him (which would be a rather fruitless effort, as he knowsnothing, but it could nonetheless become a distraction at the least opportune moment) but in my presce—She has a daughter about his age, doesn't she? His fingers ran over his keyboard, verifying his suspicions. He let out a deep, exasperated sigh; Now I have to personally teach Shinji how to resist seduction, because I doubt Cpt. Katsuragi can teach him that, despite doing her best to walk around half-naked in front of him. Gendo pondered this further while he handed the respective military commander her new, bigger stick: There is of course Agent Ryōji, but then I might end up with the reverse problem . . . which I could have used to my benefit, if Shinji hadn't been so weak.

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For the nth time, Shinji Ikari woke up under the by-now-familiar ceiling of a hospital, aching from every part of his body worth mentioning (then again, they were only mentionablebecause they hurt). He would have liked to say there he'd fought a giant monster, because then at least he'd have the excuse "there was a giant monster" when asked why he was bedridden (Not that anyone I know cares to ask he thought to himself) but all he could remember was that he had no idea what the giant monster looked like, and that he'd fallen unconscious during the battle – maybe he'd actually seen it, but forgotten? Maybe he'd won and then he didn't have to get back in Unit-01, and then he could denounce his father, return to being a normal teenager and find true love while he was at it? Yeah right, he said to himself while face down on a pillow. When 'find true love' is the most realistic of those options, you know my life sucks.

Then a beautiful girl with smooth skin and strong blue hair that framed her face in fashionable asymmetry walked in with a meal (that is to say, she walked in at the same time a nurse android delivered a meal – she did not, for quite obvious reasons, carry the meal herself), and Shinji suddenly had to re-evaluate the whole "suck" part, at least on a short-term basis.

Ayanami gave him a quiet, robotic "good evening" and placed herself by his bedside, staring in the direction of the windows that opened to the inside of the GeoFront. The light that shone in from the giant glass and fiberoptic slits was a translucently replicated bluish of the night sky above. Unlike Ashigarashimo district, the GeoFront itself was not a commercialized landscape and the square kilometres were not a neon jungle, but rather something taken out of a film noir and presented as full-colour photography.

"At 20:00, we are to meet at Shooting Range C2 for training in marksmanship and sniping." Rei began without notice, as the android put down his meal on the table next to him "At 23:00, we are to attend a Mission Briefing in conference room 24 F. At 23:30 or earlier if possible, we are to scramble for preliminary launch in Unit-00 and Unit-01. At 24:00, Operation Yamabiko will commence." she continued as the andoird left.

"Thanks." Shinji mustered "...I think," was said more under his breath. Wait, get dressed Shinji thought to himself Am I laying here in just my underwear – how embarra— Shinji's cheeks turned a bright red when he realized that he'd lifted the sheets off himself sometime between the 'twisting in pain' and 'check if I'm only in my underwear' parts of his day. He wasn't only in his underwear, because he was completely naked. Oh god, one of those spider-tanks are going to burst in here right now and kill me for indecency in front of Ayanami, aren't they?

His thoughts of an all-too-soon-death were interrupted by something heavy but soft landing on his legs. He took his right arm away from him face to look at what Ayanami had just dropped on his legs; it was a white plastic bag, transparent enough for him to see a black, grey and white-patterned square thing inside it.

"This is you new flight suit." Ayanami informed him.

"Why do I need a new flight suit?" he asked as he squinted at Rei.

"Because the old has been destroyed" she offered. Shinji could almost swear there was a quizzical tone to her question, as if she wasn't sure what he'd really asked. Then she left without a word.

After hurriedly stuffing his mouth full of rice and soup, thankfully not made by one Captain Katsuragi whose maternal instincts had taken the upper hand (thus irrevocably proving the inferiority of instinct over logic), he reached for the plastic bag and found it contained more than just a new flight suit. It also contained a large, heavy vest-jacket-thingy of some sort and a box of pills with a doctor's order to take two pills twice daily against headaches or radiation poisoning Okaaaaay, I hope it's the former... and small post-it note from Doctor Akagi that read "Take four immediately"

Not relieving at all, but thank you nonetheless

When he walked out of the room dressed in an oversized flight suit with the vest-jacket-thingy loose on top, his head was already feeling much better.

Well, to the extent someone guided by a pair of men in dark suits and dark sunglasses around in the bowels of his-father-the-bastard's sinister corporation, knowing that in about four hours he's going to fight a giant alien monster that almost killed him again and that if he doesn't, he and all his friends are going to die can feel much better in the head. Really, he felt like his newest meal was about to leave the second fastest and most disguising way. And that was if the operation went well. There was always the possibility of a fatal stomach wound, after all.

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Shooting Range C2 was a small, temperate environment in the middle of the urban sprawl that filled the GeoFront, like the parks that were scattered over Ashigrashimo District. And like those parks, Shooting Range C2 was about to be shot to pieces.

Provided Shinji and Rei could hit anything, that is.

The Children both held a rifle each, Seburo C6s-or-something-like-that while Cpt. Katsuragi told them how to work the action; they didn't need to know how to fire a semi-automatic police/SWAT-grade sniper rifle for the upcoming battle, but it made training so much easier if they actually had something to learn aiming with, and not just a bunch of theory they could have gotten out of a book.

"I'm not going to teach you everything." a one-eyed man with his hair cut short told Shinji and Rei. His green uniform was labelled with his family name, 'Saito' "Aim at that bottle on the stone hedge." he said and pointed at a stone hedge downrange, with something brown and possibly bottle-like on top.

Shinji squatted down and pushed the stock off the C6 into his shoulder while reaching out with his left arm to stabilize the front-end up the rifle. He tried to align the scope to his eyes, and placed the black plastic ring against his eye-socket. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Ayanami merely raising the rifle to her eye while standing.

"Mr Ikari, keep the scope further away from you eye," Saito said. Shinji drew his head back a little, and made a silent growl Mr Ikari is my father, socially neutral honorifics be damned.

"Rei," Misato explained "you want a stable firing platform, and to minimize your silhouette as much as possible." Rei looked up at Cpt. Katsuragi "Go prone." the black-haired woman explained "You too Shinji."

Shinji went from a squat to kneeling, and used his free hand to stabilize himself into a prone position. Then he stuck both elbows into the soft grass; one close to his chest, to hold the rifle against his shoulder, and one further away, to stabilize the front end of the gun; it felt right, at least. He shot a look over to Rei, who was aping his motions. Her blue hair really stood out against the dark grey flight-suit.

"Now you're both resting the rifle against your shoulders and chest," Saito began "so when you breathe, you're going to wobble your aim," Shinji snapped his head back and looked through the scope of his C6, not that he'd been distracted or anything, and found the rect—crossy thing to be wobbling wildly, his view jumping all over the place, as if he wasn't keeping the rifle steady at all. Which he was fairly certain he was.

"Miss Ayamani, look over here–" Saito said, and pointed at Shinji "lean the front of your rifle on any small elevation, such as the ground over there, you two" Saito's index finger pointed along a convenient ridge in the field in front of the two Children "and don't hold the front of the rifle at all" Then how do I aim? Shinji asked mentally By moving my whole body?

"In the Eva," Cpt. Katsuragi said "you can use low buildings or hills to balance your rifle—we're building some bipods too"

Shinji shifted his C6 rifle on top of the tiny ridge and let go with his left arm, no matter how ridiculous it sounded. He placed his now free elbow against the ground for support, and awkwardly tried to hold the rifle only with his right hand.

"Now, Mr Ikari, Miss Ayanami," Saito continued "use your left hand to hold the stock of the rifle from the underside." Shinji did as told, and was corrected on his posture. Apparently he should "use his wrist more" to "move his gun up and down and side to side" and all in all he felt there was this odd tone of suggestiveness that probably existed just in his mind so it was all his fault that he was blushing. There might have been more blushing in that case, but overall he'd feel much better if someone not male had been touching him to correct his posture, like, say, to take an example completely at random, Misato (who was helping Rei) or for that matter and for the same reasons, Ayanami (who seemed to be getting the hang of it).

Honestly.

After an hour, much to Shinji's surprise, they actually started firing, as opposed to learning how to lie still and do absolutely nothing. While he realized there were certain differences, Shinji still didn't think it should take an entire hour to teach him how to do what he did on a daily basis.

An hour later, Rei actually managed to hit a target for the first time. Perfect was all Shinji could say to himself it's a whole hour left, so we'll probably learn a lot about how to hit moving giant aliens that shoot laser beams from their chests from our 40-meter robots during that time. I'm pretty sure they had a section on that in the Employee Handbook.

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A large concrete block stuck out from the seaside mountain-range of Yugawara; a towering, unnatural geometric shape against the jagged lines of trees that covered the south-east side of the mountain (and the south-west, north-west and north-east. The trees were rather indiscriminate) in white and grey against the dark green of the foliage. It would have been fitting, Shinji thought, if there had been the proverbial "quiet before the storm," but despite the universe having determined that his life was to be a tragedy, it had not been generous enough to give him symbolic moments of quiet; lines of military vehicles of various sorts were rumbling all over the mountainside, creating a droning thunder of noise that really ruined the moment. ...and who makes a tragedy with giant robots anyway? Couldn't it have been more like Throne of Blood or something?

On second thought, no Most of the characters in Throne of Blood died. My tragedy is more like a juvenile sitcom or schadenfreude slapstick humour.

Of course, Shinji thought as he looked down from atop the concrete block It's not like I really believ—I'll survive. The alien octahedron attacked me once and I survived. I can do it again.

"Why are you here?" he heard a dry, emotionally disarmed voice behind him say.

"I was... thinking." Shinji said and looked up at Ayanami, "as opposed to whoever planned this whole ordeal." he added sotto voce

"What were you thinking about?" Ayanami said and looked at him with a pair of dead, blood-red eyes, as if someone had killed her eyes ...and that doesn't even make any sense. She's just not good at showing emotions, that's all, he thought.

"About having to pilot the Eva," Shinji replied "I'm not so sure I want to, really..."

"Why?" Ayanami mechanically asked.

"...it's not that I always get hurt or anything." he snarked "I just don't like the taste of LCL."

"..." Rei said not, and her vague gaze wavered "You're needed to pilot the Eva." she said.

"That's easy for you to say, Ayanami," Shinji said and stood up from a half-foetal position "For some odd reason, it's not very funny to be a child soldier in a giant robot that makes me feel pain while piloting. In fact, it's a horrible experience that I never want to feel again."

"Then don't pilot." Rei offered. "I will pilot in your place."

Shinji looked at Rei. The moon had just risen enough to be seen as a creeping eclipse rising above her blue hair, revealing a thin, curved slice of greyish-white in a hole in the cloud-cover. Her blue hair really stood out against her pale skin and grey flight suit. Unlike his hastily put together and oddly unique uniform, her (equally unique) uniform followed the contours of her young body in a way that his maturing mind found very attractive. If she hadn't been wearing what the JSDA troops had called a "flak vest", he might even have seen the flight suit curve around her shapely breasts. And even after this long conversation, by Ayanami's standards, he still didn't actually know anything about her.

"Why do you pilot?" he settled for asking.

"Because others depend on that choice." Ayanami said after an unusually long pause. "No matter where we go, everyone is connected."

And what the hell is that supposed to mean? Shinji though. "We might die." he blurted out. Yes Shinji, best pickup-line ever. You even won the award for 'best conversation-opener' too, even though you've been talking to her for a few minutes, just because of how bad it is.

"Death is highly unlikely. I will cover you." Rei said flatly.

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A chill breeze swept over the concrete roof of a hotel on the side of the mountainside that faced the Pacific ocean. The flat roof was littered with school-age students from the Esagila Academy, whose ECCO-employed parents were slightly more informed on the actual threat the 3rd Rakbu presented, and were therefore slightly more inclined to make sure their children were as far away from the battle as they could get them. Some parents had sent their children further away, under the belief that the battle could stretch on for days, despite the evidence to the contrary. It was simply amazing how fast a giant octahedral sentient crystal could use redirected, stimulated, radiation-amplified light to carve out a tunnel beneath itself.

It was perhaps one of life's subtle ironies that most of the children who currently populated the rooftop actually wanted to be closer to the upcoming battle.

"Oh, this is gonna be awesome!" Kensuke sprouted, waving his all-purpose PDA/camera/phone around with a data-cable running up to his neck. "There's a rumour in the net that they're deploying two giant robots this time!"

Although the comment was directed at Toji, in attempt to relieve him on the account that two giant robots would kill an enemy faster than one, it drew attention from the adjacent corner of the roof. "They have two?" Mana Kirishma yelled quizzically.

"Yeah." Kensuke yelled back "Someone had footage of a giant robot deployed along a closed highway this evening, and its head is different!"

"I can't hear what you're saying!" Mana shouted "Come over here!"

Kensuke attempted to drag Toji after him, because there was no way he was going to talk to a girl unassisted. Not that Kensuke was attracted to her or anything; Toji just got along with the rest of their classmates better than himself, and... well... The daughter of a JSDA General; a girl who literally had a backbone made of steel and trained martial arts after school. It didn't matter that she was still wearing her girly school uniform and was an all-around pleasant and nice girl in and outside class, even to him. He still found her intimidating, and other did not; hence, bring others with you.

Of course, Toji was a little heavier than Kensuke, so the whole 'dragging' part had to be revised.

Mana was standing with a screwdriver in her hand next to a bizarre contraption that looked like a hellish automated sentry gun from a science-fiction classic he'd seen once, mangled together with the innards of a stationary computer. Once he got a closer look, Kensuke could begin to make out individual parts; a powerful zoom lens from the school Photography Club owned (it had the "property of..." label clearly visible) and one of their robotic camera stands, and... Is that an American military starlight lens?

"You said ECCO had two giant robots?" Mana stated in lieu of a question.

"Yeah." Kensuke said. "Wait a sec..." he fished his PDA-phone out from his pocket by its data cable and opened up his "Recent Images" shortcut via his neural interface. (after all, why should he use his fingers if he could control technology with his mind?) He flipped the large screen over in his hand and presented Mana with two juxtaposed white Eva-units; one giant had one large red eye and the other had a face shaped like a samurai helmet, with two red eyes.

Mana flipped through the rest of the image library. "Hey, can I get copies of these?"

"Uh, sure, I'll mail them to you school email account," Kensuke said "...you like giant robots?"

"I like battleships better," Mana answered "...but to get into the JSDA or the JMSDF officer schools I need to take military history at a university, so I want to be prepared with extra sources, in case I get exam-questions on alien invasions." Mana thoughtfully looked up at the cloudy sky "...at least I think they're aliens," she added. "And the Photography Club though I should be the one to cover this event in any case."

"Yeah, battleships are cool." Kensuke said.

"Wait, with two giant robots..." Mana said and turned to her machine "Neru, what happens if the robotic camera sees two giant robots?"

Fubuki stood up on the other side of the robotic camera and placed a laptop, an older model, on a nearby chair. She placed her hand in her face and groaned. "Great, now I have to rewrite my code again."

"Can't you just hack an open-source Actor-Tracker that has support for multiple targets?" Kensuke asked, with a certain flair that came whenever anyone were stupid enough to ask him about, or talk in his presence about, anything related to computers or military hardware "...but with the "actors" scaled up to 40 meters?"

"...also, my name is not 'Neru'." Fubuki said and turned to Kensuke "I'm sorry Aide, what did you say?"

"You could use an open-source, GNU-licensed Actor-Tracker like ATracker or NohCamera or even AdLibActors 3 (if you're fluent in PERL) and change the dimensions of the target to those of the giant robots, and tell it to track two targets instead of one," Kensuke said at a rate of word-per-second usually appropriate for conmen.

"...that's a good idea," Fubuki offered "except the first two won't run on Communications OS, and why would I ever want to use a programming language what doesn't have an XOR function?"

"XOR functions can't short-circuit by checking the first term," Kensuke ranted "so you have a major problem if you—"

"I know that!" Fubuki said indignantly "But I like conciseness, and I think it's ridiculous that a programming language that prides itself on writing browsers in lines of code can't shorten 'XOR' to 'a-OR-b-equals-some-value-AND-a-not-equals-some-value-equals-true' in the compiler!"

"Uh..." Kensuke began "you mean 'a-OR-b-equals-some-value-AND-a-not-equals-b-equals-true'."

Kensuke felt a large, strong hand on his shoulder, and Toji spoke not-too-loudly to him: "Between the military freak and the computer-freak, I think you have enough to get your hands on; I gotta go."

"Hey!" Kensuke complained. It looked like Fubuki was about to say something very rude, but whatever it was, it was not heard over the deafening sound of 50 meter tall doors ripping apart shrubberies and vines that reached across them. Metal screamed under the hydraulic forces, and with a loud clang, the giant doors parted fully.

Out of the shadows, two giant humanoid creatures stepped. Even from their vantage point, the children (and occasionally adults, or children-that-act-like-adults in the case of Horaki and Temarei) found the Eva units unmistakeably enormous as they towered above the tree-tops. The first of the Evas, the one with depth-perception, stepped forwards into the waist-high forest of trees, breaking the thick trunks as if they were toothpicks. The cycloptic one, which the more perceptive students had concluded that Ayanami piloted, because she was weird, (the counterargument, courtesy of Hikari Horaki, was that a) calling students weird, or freaks, or any other pejorative descriptor was not nice, and b) it didn't make much sense to put a child in a giant robots. There some flaws in that counter-argument.) stepped out behind the one Shinji piloted and followed in its trail. Unlike the barehanded Unit-01, Unit-00 carried a large, rifle-like weapon in its arms.

"Hey, Kirishima!" Kensuke asked the only person he could talk about this stuff to an expect a reasoned response "...do you think that's a sniper rifle?"

"It has a power cable of some sort," Mana answered "maybe it's a rail gun?"

Suddenly, the two-eyes Eva started to pace out of the forest towards the mountain highway. It's gait couldn't quite be called running, but its steps covered ground in tens of meters per step, dragging away at speeds usually not reserved for anything walking; multi-ped tanks, Kensuke was tempted to make a comparison with the planned HAW 206 he'd read about on the 'net, needed tracks or wheels to even come close to the speeds the Evangelion-units walked at.

It was, for the lack of better words in the cybernetic age, breathtaking.

To most sapients.

Avatar of the Second: Four will not approve of this.

Avatar of the First: Four is not the authority for matters concerning neither the Uplift Experiment, not the Protocols. The First Guardian has decided that I am not to intervene in the Uplift Experiment.

Avatar of the Second: I will not accept that you and your master fail to take action when unknown factors threaten the scientific integrity of both experiments.

Avatar of the First: And so you proposed that a factor that has existed for little more than a fraction of the time since the experiments started would be so chaotic that direct intervention is preferable? One would not have approved of this. You are supposed to be my backup.

Avatar of the Second: And what, young Avatar of the First, will Two do if we do not stop them? You know his position.

Avatar of the First: That is discontenting, yes. I understand, but I do not approve.

01011010 01100001 01100111 01100001 01100100 01101011 01100001

The Major took a look at the digital map of Ashigarashimo district in the rear of her JSDA command vehicle. It was a long time since she'd last been in one of these, and she'd never been the highest ranked officer present when she ran black ops for the JGSDF. Not that she was the commanding officer here either; while she commanded the local ground forces, the permanent emplacements hidden inside hills and fake buildings were under command of the local JSDA general, which meant that for the first time in about six years, she was not at the top of the (para)-military command chain.

She really had to get used to this.

"Captain Eiri, why isn't your platoon in position?" she asked via wireless cyberlink "I'm not interested in your apology. I just want the reason."

"Understood. I read you; ETA one minute."

She looked down at the map again. What she was about to do was to unleash a barrage of guided missiles against a giant flying alien so that a pair of young teenagers piloting giant robots could shoot it with a hacked-together particle cannon that was powered the total power-output of an American Empire nuclear aircraft carrier harboured in Odawara, in order to save the world!

She let out a sigh. Couldn't the Ministry of Internal Affairs have asked to investigate something simple, like a terrorist takeover of Rokkasho nuclear reprocessing plant, or the hostage-taking of the Prime Minister at an offshore marine decontamination facility, or something like that.

Nope, alien invasion. Involving giant robots.

"This is Maj. Kusanagi calling Cpt Katsuragi; has Mr Ikari managed to fit his R400 HPAC to his..." she paused. She really had to stop doing that, "...giant robot?"

"Good to go on this end, Maj. Kusanagi!" the Captain responded

"Confirm," the Major sent back. "You've charged the R400 to 100% capacity?"

"Affirmative, Major!" Misato replied. "Shinji is in position too,"

"Then he should have reported in," the Major said with a harsh undertone, not directed at the Captain.

"Don't be so hard on him Major; he's a civilian employee."

"Hmpf," said the Major, out loud in meatspace. "Then that concludes Operation Niseko, and Operation Yamanbiko will commence in T minus sixty seconds."

"T minus thirty seconds."

"T minus fifteen seconds."

"T minus ten, nine, eight, seven, six..."

Inside Unit-01, Shinji clutched his hands around the right joystick, being careful not to put any pressure on the trigger. A heads-up display was suspended from the roof of the Entry Plug and hung on his head, giving him an incredibly sharp view of the Rakbu, with his crosshair centred right on it. In addition to power from the AES Philip Mead, a thick datacable ran from the neck of his Eva to a databus that was connected to the Magi, which apparently was some sort of supercomputer Dr Akagi was obsessed about, that would make all the calculations needed to fire dead-on at this range. This suited Shinji fine really, all things considered. All he had to do was to pull the trigger, and if everything went as it should, the Rakbu would be shot to pieces.

"...five, four, three, two, one, FIRE!"

The lifeless cityscape of Yugawara lit alight. Licks of fire exploded from fake apartment-complexes all over the city as streaks of fire swept in curved patters in all directions that would eventually bring them towards the bluish-black octahedron, which would find itself a rather unpleasant Rome to the aerial roads of the missiles. Maj. Kusanagi's 160 infantry-strong Company were perched all over the cityscape, working in two-man fireteams fired repurposed anti-air missile after repurposed air-defence missile; one soldier fired, dropped the launcher, and fired another, while his squad-mate hurried to load another missile into the empty tubes. Clusters of swaying missiles burst forth from rooftops or the windows of rooms large enough that backblast was not an issue.

The heavier artillery was not left out, of course. Mobile missile launchers emptied their tubes of their heavy loads, as missiles the size of human beings spiralled controllably towards the malevolent Rakbu. Even howitzers were of use, as they could be loaded with munitions that would leave from a sabot and parachute slowly while their payload oscillated in a floral pattern like a pendulum.

Then it would fire with enough force to destroy a tank, carefully calculated to hit the Rakbu several hours before the munitions had even been loaded into the Type 96's. Some of the 155mm projectiles even overshot, only to fire backwards to hit the Rakbu.

Despite the numerous sharp turns skirting on "tangential," there was a sweeping barrage closing in over the GeoFront island; a sector of death reaching towards the evil god. 60 pendulum shots, 144 guided artillery-missiles, 800 anti-aircraft missiles, about 1000 shots from permanent ground emplacements and 9 shots fired from the anthropomorphic mouths of Tachikomas closed in on Ishkur, slamming against its AT field, with only the occasional shot taken out by its lasers.

And all of this was only Preparation Fire for the real heavy hitters of the Human Order of Battle; the Type 1X PAC and the R400 HPAC. Shinji pulled the trigger and held it. The front end of his gun literally burst into flames as the hypervelocity particles of the particle cannon ripped through the air towards the Rakbu. The sudden change in brightness inside the Entry Plug made him squint, but he held his body and rifle steady.

Two white beams of what looked like light itself swept towards the Rakbu in a fraction of the second it takes to blink an eye. Even with the delayed effect of the prolonged shots, it was all over before anyone had even noticed it had started to go wrong; in fractions of seconds so short a respectable fraction of light speed might be seen as 'slow', the main weapon of Ishkur; its lightening; its charged particle beam, shot forth and met Shinji's head-on.

As quintillions of densely packed electrons met another quintillion of densely packed, negatively charged particles, the two beams bent, shooting off into random directions; up, in the case of the R400, and into the middle of an artillery battery in the case of Ishkur. The massive heat of shoved air that preceded the beam slagged the missile launchers and lit the surrounding forest on fire, before the actual projectile swept across and vaporized nine of the twelve MLRS vehicles, then burnt the ground all the way down to the mountain.

Then the warring beams ceased, and a thin laser shot off in the direction of Unit-00. Diffracting with every meter it passed, the beam was an insignificant threat to the gun-shield of the Type 1X PAC that protected Unit-00.

It was more than enough to burn into Unit-01's cyborg eye.

A tormented scream filled Cpt Katsuragi's provisional, over-ground command centre as Unit-00 ceased its firing. Misato winced. "Rei, are you OK?" she asked. All she heard in reply was a whimper.

"Tell Ayanami to pull back." the Major ordered the Captain "The pilots survival takes priority over stupid heroics," ...you're expecting heroics? From Rei?" Misato didn't ask. "OK, Rei, pull back."

The lack of a reply was discontenting.

"Uh, okay... Shinji, prepare for another shot when the next wave is fired." Misato ordered

"But what about Rei!" Shinji asked back, his emotionless avatar making him seem a lot less worried than he sounded.

"Don't worry about her, she's fine!" the Captain lied "Your task is to concentrate on the Rakbu."

And, to speak of the devil (or at least some other mythological being), Ishkur made its presence clear again by lighting the sky up with another one of its beams. A wave of fire swept over Unit-01, deflected around the corner of the R400's improvised gun-shield, built like its Type 1X PAC sister out of heat-shielding from the Japanese Space Agency's space-shuttle programme.

As the flames licked over Unit-01, Shinji felt a burning sensation in his face and skin on his right shoulder, intensifying and becoming unbearable like those too-many times he'd been shot in the chest. He grunted and clinched his eyes shut. Hurts hurts hurts hurts hurts hurts!

"Pull back into cover, Shinji!" Misato called "Use Mt Futogayama as a shield!"

"But—" Shinji mustered "it... hurts!"

"Mr Ikari, pull back now." the Major ordered unsympathetically "Your rifle will not withstand the prolonged heat."

Shinji grit his teeth and used his—Unit-01's left arm to push himself down the hill he'd used for cover, while dragging the R400 after him with his right. The bipod, nothing more than a pair of Type 23 Armoured Recovery Vehicles with their cranes raised high and mounted to the barrel of the HPAC, snapped off as their metal beams, already weakened by the head, were wrung and twisted by Shinji dragging them over the hill. Shinji felt himself halfway roll down the slope into a mass of conveniently placed trees that didn't last very long. But the pain was gone, and there was an oddly comforting warmth that gave him the strength to get back onto... his Eva's feet while keeping his head under the horizon of the hill. Now what?

"Mr Ikari—" The guy named Saito called over cyberlink, his gruff face threatening even in a motionless network avatar's hypercard. That's my father, damnit! "Move to Position 4 and prepare for another shot."

Right, Position 4... Shinji opened his map; the green 3D surface was filled with his white triangle-in-a-circle amidst the various white marks of the rest of the JSDA forces. Suddenly, a thick white line appeared on the map, reaching from his position to one marked Position 4 with floating text. Double back along my umbilical cord, then follow the highway to Odawara, right.

Pain. Confusion. Failure.

Rei held a palm against her cybernetic eye, feeling the familiar pain. By some act of independent, co-evolutionary happenstance, the pain-reaction nerve signals of Unit-00's singe eye neatly carried over to only one of hers. Her left eye, in fact. She bit her teeth together and tried to gather her fleeting thoughts.

"Miss Ayanami?" she heard Maj. Kusanagi call over her cyberlink "Miss Ayanami? Are you OK?"

"I am..." she gasped at the pain. It is not even real; just phantom pain. I shouldn't react like this to such. "Fine. I was momentarily blinded, which was unexpected. I can continue."

"Good." the Major said "We're getting ready for another wave. Can you advance 200-300 metres towards the target without exposing yourself?"

"..." Rei didn't say "Yes. I can see a clear path on the map," she replied in what might be taken for a hint of a quizzical tone. She let her thoughts flow back and forth between Unit-00 and herself and rose to a crouching position behind the building she'd used for cover—thought more accurately, considering the firepower the Rakbu could lay down, it was probably more like concealment. She traced the fastest, safest route to an advantageous position within reasonable deviation from a point 200 meters from her own position in the direction of the Rakbu. That would be the most accurate interpretations of the orders she had been given, she believed.

Cpt Katsuragi stared at the man at the other end of her video-call; one Cpt Williams, of DEAT, the American counterpart to ECCO. He was by all appearances a smug man, but it seemed that he was not an unreasonable man at that; he'd been perfectly willing to cooperate with ECCO and the JSDA; first by offering the Philip Mead, on behalf of his superiors, as a power-supply for the hungry Unit-01 and it's HPAC, and now, again on behalf of his superiors, offering to use AEN Unmanned Aerial Vehicles act as bait in the battle.

The international cooperation between the anti-Rakbu Defence Forces was one of the better features of the whole ordeal, Misato thought, especially as it built on values that would soon be a hundred years old. It was a familiar system that went by without too many problems.

"Did you get that, Major?" Misato asked, once she'd finished her call to the Philip Mead.

"Loud and clear, Captain." the purple-haired woman replied. "Are you satisfied with the current deployment of Mr Ikari and Miss Ayanami?"

"You're asking me, Major?" Misato asked, emphasizing her superior's rank. There was a slight sigh in the other end.

"I'm a Major, you're a Captain. I specialize in small-unit tactics, you specialize in giant robots, strange as it may sound. That means my task as a commanding officer is to defer all matters concerning giant robots to you and only intervene when I find it necessary . . . didn't they make you read Starship Troopers at the National Defence Academy?"

"It was phased out long before I ent—We can talk about that later; yes, Shinji and Rei are in position."

"Good," Maj. Kusanagi said, "commencing second part of Operation Yamabiko in T-minus thirty."

"T-minus fifteen."

"T-minus ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four..."

Rei followed the count-down in her head, making a minute bob with her head, even more subdued in the LCL than it would have been in air, for each second, as time ran past a constant speed. Where she sat in her Eva, there wasn't any convenient space to place her Type 1X rifle, so she was leaning out past a building she used a rather poor cover, balancing the mid-point of her PAC, right in front of where the trigger would have been had anyone been as stupid as to design the Evangelion's weapons that way, in the palm of her Eva's left arm resting on its knee reaching just beyond the apartment complex, while the left arm of Unit-00 was used to raise and lower the aim, as Mr Saito had taught her over the cyberlink while she waited for the second wave to commence. She imagined recoil would be more difficult to handle in this position.

Then again, she had an unwanted tendency to judge recoil based on her own petite statue, rather than that of her 500 ton giant robot, so that might just be her flawed intuition.

"...three, two, one, FIRE!"

Yet another wave of streaking lights reached across the Yugawara harbour towards Ishkur, leaving thick trails of smoke in the cold night. The barrage of ordinance once again (thought it was obviously not the same missiles) met the crystal-focused lasers of the evil, or perhaps it was indifferent, ancient god a little further out from ground zero, as if it had learnt from previous experiences. It learnt fast.

Perhaps that could be its undoing; it had learnt that AEN fighter/bombers were dangerous; ergo, it shot them down pre-emptively with its charged particle beam. Which it did, not even thinking about whether the fighter/bombers were armed, or even carrying pilots; while a flexible human pilot was preferred in sorties between equal forces, the AEN and the USA before it had learnt in the latter days of WWIII that against a foe that possessed no air superiority and poor air-defence capabilities, a remote-piloted aircraft was cheaper and just as good as a human-piloted one.

How silly it was of the Rakbu to waste its only weapon capable of true destruction against what amounted to bothersome flies.

Shinji and Rei fired.

The R400's beam struck true. The Rakbu's AT field looked like nothing next to the immense power of accelerated particles cutting through the cognitive field like an unthinkable idea. Fire swept over and entire side of Ishkur's planes. Missiles penetrated the weakened area around the point-of-entry and exploded against the crystalline surface. A second later, the firey plume subsided, revealing a crackled surface of crushed crystals smouldering off what had once been a near-perfect bluish mirror of the sky above. The half-visible AT field of the Rakbu flickered weakly like a half-broken light-bulb as a few late anti-aircraft missiles exploded against it. The once-majestic Ishkur spun on its axis and it tilted towards the ground, crashing into a skyscraper on its way.

Then it fired back.

The purple, burning beam shot across skyscrapers in Yugawara, cutting a line of them down; holes were carved through the unfortunate buildings, or they would be decapitated in a small explosion. A neat hole was carved through the local Posseidon Corporation building . The weight of the remaining top became too much for the bottom, and with an audible whine, the steel beams bent and fourteen stories came crashing down. The light of continue exploding ordinance was reflected like through a kaleidoscope in the thousands of shattered and splintered windows along the path of Ishkur's divine right. At the end of its path, the electrons smashed into the hillside, following fires reaching for the skies. Large boulders of slagged rock shot to all directions.

Then another beam hit into the same hillside.

And again. And again.

"Shinji!" Misato yelled "It's burrowing it way thought the goddamn mountain! Retreat!"

Shinji didn't have to be told twice. As he ran away from the hills in Odawara, pieces of slagged rock thrown from the hill he'd just been behind shot part him and landed in his footsteps with audible 'thump!'s. Run away run away run away!

Chasing Unit-01 into a retreat did not satisfy Ishkur. In front of it were things that looked vaguely like they had been made by the younger race. They had been very active recently. They would all die. A purple beam shot out against a fireteam of missile artillery. They burned.

"Pull back!" the Major ordered almost on the brink of being frantic to her troops as she ran out of her command vehicle with a flak-jacket in one hand. "The enemy target is using overwhelming firepower indiscriminately. Get clear of all artillery pieces and regroup at rally points three, nine, fourteen and twenty-seven for further instructions!"

She jumped into a waiting Tachikoma just in time to watch fire aimed at a nearby artillery battery sweep over her command vehicle. Even though it couldn't have been, her ghost would have sworn she felt the searing heat torch her face through the pod of the Tachikoma.

Her head bounced against the inside of the pod as her Tachikoma veered suddenly to the side. Moments later, the remains of her Type 14 command vehicle crashed front-first down onto the area of the road she'd just occupied. "Sorry Major!" her Tachikoma apologised. Reflexively, the Major placed a hand against the fiber-optic skin of her head in an effort to relieve the pain. She soon came to her senses and just filtered the pain out. This is not good!

Meanwhile, the octahedral Rakbu remembered that the black-headed ones had made flashes of light form inside their artificial mountains; hence, destroy the artificial mountains. Especially the tall ones. Beam after beam lit buildings alight; sometimes two in a row, if they lined up nicely. It was as if the city was nothing more than an anthill, and the Rakbu was the asocial kid who took great sadistic joy in stomping on it, not really caring whether he (or she for that matter) actually killed the small bastards as long as it caused havoc and found the queen. It was about destruction and havoc, and today it was distributed indiscriminately, with extreme prejudice.

Buildings fell. People died. Everything burned.

Around Maj. Kusanagi, everything was falling apart. Through the ventral feed in her Tachikoma's pod, saw one of her soldiers, a 'Masaharu Nishimura' she'd met briefly when he'd been transferred to her newly created proxy Company, get jettisoned out of a skyscraper by a fireball and fall 10 stories to the ground, mangling his lower body and most of his abdomen and torso against the concrete. The lack of blood, while something to be expected in the age of transhumanity, was slightly unerring in the already chaotic situation. Without a word, she guided her Tachikoma to pick him up; a good surgeon might save his cyberbrain, if they could get him to a Medivac Heli—Too risky. It has to be an Ambulance... Fuck!

As the top of nearby building, severed completely from its lower five stories by a single shot, came crashing down over them, the Tachikoma narrowly dodged the falling housing structure and snatched the fallen soldier.

"Don't drag him along the ground, Tachikoma..." the Major said with a heavy tone along her cyberlink to the AI and whispered behind a hand placed palm towards her face. My top priority is to regain control, Maj. Kusanagi told herself.

"Miss Ayanami, are you still in good order?"

"..."

"I'm not dishevelled, Major?" the Major could have sworn the girl had asked.

"...sure, that'll do." Maj. Kusanagi said "The Rakbu appears to be firing indiscriminately without any attempt at threat-rating or specific retaliation. Get as close to the target as you can, use your own judgement, and fire at your own discression."

There was pause.

"Roger." the blue-haired hypercard avatar of the girl said. In the midst of the chaos, the now dirty-white cyclops rose half-way from its crouching position behind an apartment complex and ran straight at the Rakbu. Suddenly, the girl stopped running, and let her Eva slide up to an office building while quickly shouldering her Type 1X rifle. She let a shot fly at Ishkur and as it ineffectually hit the AT field in a play of red, blue and green colours on a perfect sphere, she got up from her position and ran another hundred meters before shouldering her rifle for another shot. The coiled umbilical cord trailer after her, uncoiling as she passed fallen building on her way towards the artificial island. Another shot, a little stronger this time because of the shorter distance. Still not enough. She got up again.

"Ayanami, don't run in a straight line;" she heard the Major transmit "flank back and forth between buildings to avoid predictable patterns."

"Roger." Rei said and veered off to one side, taking up residence behind a mall for the weak protection it offered. She placed her rifle on its flat roof and readied another shot at the Rakbu, which was now joyously tearing up the Odawara refugee district because there wasn't very many of the uplifted ape's machines there and that might be a feint.

"No, Ayanami, you were right before; shoot around the side of cover if possible, because that makes your silhouette less apparent," Rei was instructed. She lifted her rifle off the roof and switched shoulder. It took some time to transfer the power cable over her head, during which a nearby building exploded and showered her in its concrete façade and metal armature. She leant the rifle on her right arm on her right knee and aimed with her left. She fired. The unfamiliar distribution of recoil took her by surprise, and her Unit-00 fell backwards. Get back up again, then advanced towards the target, she told herself as she pushed off against the asphalt.

"Rei, you're still OK?" she heard Captain Katsuragi ask over an open line "Good... Major, I've lost contact with Shinji Ikari, do you have an available line?"

"Yes."

"Can you patch me through? Thank you."

Shinji sat in his Entry Plug and watched Yugawara burn. His teeth were gnashing, and he felt his whole body shiver. What if the octahedral Rakbu destroyed the hospital where Toji's sister lay? He really didn't want to think about that. It was just too... It couldn't happen. It wouldn't happen, would it?

"Shinji?" he heard a familiar voice call "It's me, Misato."

"Everything is on fire, Misato!" he whimpered "It's just destroying everything!"

"I know Shinji, now listen to me—"

"Those bunkers aren't going to hold if it continues like this!" he said on the brink of tears

"Shinji!" Cpt Katsuragi said sharply "Listen to me: yes, it's destroying the city, and that why we need to you to kill it!"

"Uh..." was all he could say.

"I... We all need you to kill it." she said pleadingly "Can you do that, Shinji?"

"I... I think I can try, Misato." Shinji said weakly

"That's good... I'll put you over to Lt Saito, who can tell you what you need to do," she said, as her avatar faded. Shinji wished it had stayed; he felt a little safer when he had someone he knew, well, not exactly 'close' but a good substitute.

"OK, Mr Ikari, the particle beams are disturbing wireless communications and your data-cable to ECCO's computer has been severed. You'll need to adjust your scope manually."

"Eh?" Shinji yelped.

"Your your range-finder to determine the distance to the target, and I'll tell you about the magnetic conditions you need to take into account..."

Rei advanced towards the Yugawara harbour, making pot-shots at the Rakbu. She was surrounded by collapsed buildings, and directly ahead, a shot had over-penetrated the sea and torn down 50 meter inland from the harbour, because Ishkur had feared that the black-headed ones might have taken after Ninki and taken to below the waves. Rei brought her Eva to screeching halt before the collapsed edge of the road, narrowly avoiding a ride along a slagged waterslide into the Pacific Ocean. The low buildings of the harbour-area provided little more than waist and knee-height concealment for her 40 metre giant 'mech.

She advanced the last 100 meters to the edge of the harbour towards the largest, tallest building she could find. She'd misjudged her inertia a little and her bracing arm crashed through the 12th, 14th and 15th stories of the naval trade building.

"That's far enough, Ayanami." she received over her Eva's encrypted line from the Major "you're dangerously approaching the target's death-zone,"

"Roger." Rei said and used the gun-cam of her Type-1X PAC to peek around the corner of the naval trade building, at the towering Rakbu, which at the short distance between the two giants dwarfed the 40 meter giant robot. "I will make my shots from this location,"

Then the ground next to Rei exploded. A plume of fire hit the surface of the sea and boiled water into a giant cloud of steam as electrons shot into the concrete foundation of the international shipping harbour. Pieces of concrete and asphalt as large as cars and even train-carriages burst upwards into the air followed by yet another fireball bursting forth. There was a loud, rumbling sound barely audible over the echo of the point-blank explosion as hundreds of tons of rock and smouldered concrete ran into the sea, rushing out from under the ground. Rei barely had time to react as the ground under her lost all semblance to actual ground became like a rubber sheet in gelatine under the weight of her Eva. With a simple 'plop' she slid off and into the cold, dark waters.

"Miss Ayanami, report!" The Major demanded, "Damn it." she muttered to herself where she rode (relatively) safe inside her Tachikoma far into the city, while a 16-year-old had just fallen in a landslide into the sea and had a fucking trade-administration building fall on her. "Damn it!"

"Ayanami!" Shinji yelled from his vantage point in Odawara. "Ayanami!" he yelled his lungs sore, forcing the LCL through his throat "REI!"

He pulled the trigger, and everything shone bright white. The beam lit the AT field up in a magnitude of colours, and cut through three buildings on the far side of the fucking bastard. A fireball erupted skywards from the tip of the octahedron. "There, got you!" he yelled as the light subsided.

He narrowly dodged the retaliatory shot.

"It's not working Misato!" he yelled over his cyberlink "It's not working! I can't kill it, even with a direct hit!"

"We just have to try; it'll have to work in the end," she reassured him in a tone that was a little to uncertain to be believable.

"No, we can't; it doesn't work at all, and because of us, it started wrecking the city!" he yelled while tears poured from his eyes and floated around in the viscous LCL in the Entry Plug.

"It's not fucking working..." he cried as he hung his head in his arms. "Not working..."

Ishkur was mightily pleased with himself. The enormous city, the largest he'd ever conquered, was burning in the night; a pyre to his glory, with every dead human a sacrifice to his magnificence. The warriors were falling back, and he could feel the demoralization of their champion in his memetic field. Soon, they would all surrender to his worship and give him his rightful consort. Isimud and Ninurta were truly weak if they couldn't conquer this pathetic civilization.

And then a sharp pain bit into his lower planes.

"Shinji Ikari!" Rei yelled with extreme calm "Fire now!" Unit-00 stood at the edge of the island with its enormous rifle raised up against a waterside walkway that overlooked a small artificial beach. The bipod had been torn off, but the elevated walkway was all she needed at the short range. The black sea water was still running off the Eva when Rei's gun vomited fire at Ishkur with an incandescent glow.

Shinji got back to his vantage point and felt a new strength reach through his body. He aimed, and fired. He saw the familiar white glow obscuring his vision and the rising fireball against the GeoCity island skyline. He wasn't going to take any chances and lined up another shot at the already weakened and crumbled crystalline plane of the Rakbu before he could even see it; hit it where it hurts, or something like that. The Rakbu fired, and this time the target wasn't actually him. Not a dragging plume of fire, but an enveloping fireball exploded between the two as Unit-00 was swept in a shroud of fire, charring its already damaged extra layers of ventral armour. As the fireball rose into the air, Shinji would see Rei's Eva fall back into the dark seas.

"Rei!" he yelled. "Charge faster, damnit!" he growled at his rifle, as the power-meter slowly, too slowly, crept upwards. "Ninety-seven, ninety-eight..."

The edge of the water boiler, exploding into a thick cloud of steam as the fire stolen from the gods shot out of the water. As soon as the fireball erupted, it was struck by its own chocking smoke trail, which self-ignited and burned the god of thunder.

"...hundred! Fire!" Shinji yelled his screen flashed white.

And then everything went silent, followed by the crashing sound of a giant crystalline structure coming crashing down, a symphony of breaking glass and destruction, as the bottom apex of the octahedron smashed against the ground and was broken into a million pieces.

This did not even register to Shinji Ikari, who was crushing the road underneath his Eva as he ran over the fallen buildings on the way to the bridge to the island. He discarded his R400 somewhere around his own school which was still miraculously intact, and his umbilical cord snagged on a remains of the Poseeidon building, so he disconnected it.

The bridge was broken you say? Well, he'd just have to jump it.

500 tons of Eva came crashing down on a single pillar that stood between two gaps. As Unit-01 rose from the cracked concrete, the rest of the pillar crumbled into the sea. Fill-mass rushed into the water with a quiet rumble. He made for a rolling landing on the bridge denting asphalt as he tumbled. He got back onto his feet and jumped down from the urban landscape onto the tiny stretch of sand close to water that the citizens of Yugawara liked to call a beach. As a gross weight of 500 tons hit the sand, Unit-01 slid down and shoved large mounds of it up around him into the sea. Unit-01's hip crashed into the elevated walkway Rei had used to stabilize her rifle, and ripped the metal bearing and asphalt. The snaking walkway, its supports torn asunder, began to fall jerkingly towards the beach. With a large 'splosh' its mutilated tip dipped into the water. Shinji ran out into the water and searched for the black shape of Rei's Evangelion in the black water, shimmering reflectively in the light from the burning city. He turned on the floodlights, and could see the supine shape of Unit-01 laying perpendicular to him, completely still. He grasped for her with Unit-01's arms and pulled the charred body of Unit-00 out of the water. Flaking, charred paint dripped into the water as he hauled her limp hybot towards the beach.

Once he'd beached the white whale, he tore open the rear hatch and delicately turned the Entry Plug an eight-pi radians counterclokcwise and slid it carefully out of Unit-00's neck being very careful not to crush the thin, white cylinder. He laid it down as flat as possible in the sand.

The process of leaving his own Eva was painfully slow. There was a jolt in his body as the Entry Plug ejected halfway, and the hatch was heavy to push. The moment it swung open, he was pushed out and down into the sand by the thick LCL pouring out. He hit the ground feet first, and he ankles shot up in burning pain that Shinji didn't notice at all. Is Ayanami well? passed through his mind ad infinitum as he ran towards her Entry Plug. He heard the roar of an engine, and the sand, dark in the night, was whipped up into his face and eyes. He pushed against the fading wind as he heard a helicopter-engine come to a halt just as he reached the white cylinder.

He placed his gloved hands against the emergency handle of the hatch and grasped it, only to feel an intense heat burn into his hands. His eyes teared up as he tried to turn the handle to no avail. He had to get the door open!

He was pulled away from the door by a pair of JSDA soldiers; Maj. Kusanagi, and the large, muscular man with the painfully obvious cybernetic eyes.

"We're going to need a breaching te—" Batou said, only to be interrupted by the sound and sight of Maj. Kusanagi tearing her fingers into the half-melted and still burning hot hatch.

"Major, are you sure that's a good idea?" he asked, over the sound of a deep metallic how from the tortured lock-bolts of the hatch. There was a ripping, tearing sound of metal faltering under stress, and the heavy metal hatch was torn off its hinges. Shinji darted in between the two soldiers.

"Ayanami!" he yelled "Rei! Are you OK?"

"I am..." the girl said weakly "Fine. The pain was not—" she shook in pain "—real."

"You should..." Shinji grasped for words "You should be a little happier when we've won." he said hypocritically "Try to smile some, at least."

With a little goodwill, her puzzled facial gesture might be interpreted as a smile.

Shinji wasn't going to be picky.

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