DC Evangelion

Chapter 10: Derailed Plans

"Uh oh."

Upon hearing those fatal words, Shigeru Aoba glanced over his shoulder to look at the other work station. His co-worker Makoto Hyuga who had uttered those words, was busy staring at one of his tactical readouts in worry.

"Something wrong?" he asked casually, curious but far too busy with his own work.

"I think we might have a bit of a problem," Hyuga said slowly.

"And just what sort of problem might that be Lieutenant?" a new voice asked, cutting into the conversation. Shigeru fought the urge to yelp and jump through the ceiling. Hyuga jerked in surprise too, indicating that he hadn't noticed the arrival of Air Marshal Luo Zhang either.

Zhang gave both men a slight smile. Neither of them felt the least urge to return it.

Shigeru should have known. The man seemed to immediately home in on situations. It was uncanny. It was also damn disturbing. Many suspected that Zhang had the entire Geo-Front wired. Or was in league with the Devil.

"Uh ... it's about the special mag-lev passenger car. The one carrying the new Pilot Candidate?" Hyuga asked, sweating as he was trying to work up the nerve to tell his superior officer the bad news.

In olden times, the bearer of bad news might be put to death but Hyuga Makoto was pretty sure that the Articles of War did not allow for a superior officer to execute his subordinates. At least not for informing him of bad news. Fairly sure. Almost sure. But he had no real desire to test it … or Zhang for that matter.

"I am aware of the passenger car," Zhang said patiently. "What about it?"

"We uh ..." Hyuga glanced longingly towards Aoba, hoping for moral support and found his long haired ex-friend hunched over his console and frantically tapping away, clearly doing his best to ignore the entire conversation. Traitor, Hyuga thought darkly. He shifted his gaze back at his screen, as though willing for the information to suddenly change. It didn't. "That last missile attack damaged the electric power grid and knocked several sections of the grid completely out. Which includes a portion of the magnetic rail line. We kinda sorta lost all contact with the passenger car," he finished the last sentence in a rush.

Marshal Zhang didn't even blink. Almost lizard-like, he continued to stare evenly at Hyuga. "I see," Zhang remarked in a gentle, soft tone of voice.

For a brief, very brief moment, Hyuga entertained the hope that Zhang was sympathetic to his plight.

The brief but pleasant hallucination was brutally crushed under the hard heel of reality as Zhang raised an eyebrow and with a thin smile said, "I suggest you find it… quickly."

Somehow Hyuga had a disturbing feeling that Zhang wouldn't dream of violating the Articles of War. And that was because death was way too nice. The look that Zhang was giving him said, "Kill you? Don't be ridiculous. Killing you would be too quick. Too final. Not … creative enough."

Hyuga began perspiring and tugged at his suddenly too tight collar.

"Are you fucking KIDDING me!" General Hiro Matsuda bellowed, then visibly checked his instinctive response to curse some more. Instead he glared at the holographic image of Marshal Zhang, who was impassively and silently gazing back at him.

"You LOST him?" Matsuda demanded through clenched teeth.

"We are at the moment, unaware of the Pilot Candidate's exact location," Zhang admitted.

Ivanov snorted from another holographic screen, "We lost him," he translated.

Zhang's shoulder twitched in a minimalist shrug. "More or less," he replied in agreement.

Mostly less, Matsuda thought wryly as he fought the urge to giggle hysterically. This was definitely NOT his day. Hell, it was not his CENTURY actually, as he remembered that the turn of the Millennium hadn't been all that great either what with losing half of the human population.

He turned and punched a comm key. A new holographic screen popped up. "Wake up Rei," he ordered.

The image of Kozo Fuyusuki frowned. "Her physical condition hasn't improved greatly," he warned.

"I know," Matsuda agreed, "but she's not dead yet. And we need her."

Fuyusuki looked confused, "But EXO-Frame 00 is still in the middle of a regeneration cycle in cryo-statis. We can't release it for another week at least. Even if we did take it out now, it certainly wouldn't be operational."

Matsuda knew it to be true. When one of the solar batteries had accidentally ruptured, it caused massive trauma to the cranial nerves of the Zero (as many of JSA had taken to calling the prototype). And not so incidentally severely injuring their only pilot as well. As bad luck would have it, Rei had been in the middle of exiting the Zero's Control Sphere when the accident occurred and had been totally exposed and unprotected to the explosion.

"I know," Matsuda said with a choppy nod. "That's why we're going to use EXO-Frame 01."

Fuyusuki's eyes widened fractionally then narrowed.

EXO-Frame 01 was theoretically the most powerful of all of the fighting machines built by the JSA.

Theoretically being the key operative word there.

They had never been able to actually activate the bloody thing. Rei had attempted numerous times to trigger the slumbering giant but had failed each and every single time.

Fuyusuki opened his mouth. Probably to remind him of all of the problems with 01. Instead, he shut his mouth into a tight slit and nodded. The holo screen blanked.

Matsuda glanced at the other two screens showing his subordinates. "Ivanov, contact the JSSDF. Tell them we need to delay Pale Horseman. Buy us some time," he ordered and then refocused on Zhang and slowly raised a single finger to point directly at him, "Find Pilot Ikari. Send cars, scramble airplanes, retask spy satellites, dispatch MPs, recruit bloodhounds, use smoke signals, I don't care! Find that kid! NOW!"

Both holo screens blinked off. Matsuda cursed and pinched the bridge of his nose as he clenched his eyes shut feeling the onset on a migraine. No one could possibly be having as bad a day as him.

Major Hikaru Goro cursed. He was having a bad day and it was only getting worse. He drew his eyes away from the HUD that showed the falling smoking wreckage of another aerodyne.

His tac officer Lieutenant Sora Kurosawa barked, "Load another salvo of Dragon's Teeth!" and a split second later, "Fire!" she cried into her pick-up mike. Instantly the circling aerodynes let fly another wave of missiles. Goro watched as the missiles detonated in mid-flight, unleashing the thermoplastic filaments that rapidly expanded into a mass of triangularly shaped darts. The monomolecular edged knives flayed Sachiel who ignored them, his body immediately regenerating itself as he raised an arm again.

"Evasive!" Goro called out, executing a snap roll as a brilliant beam of energy blasted forth from the forearm of the massive XT. It cut through empty air as the various aerodynes spun themselves out of the path of the beam. Goro nodded approvingly. No casualties this time. They were getting better at this. They were getting a feel for this thing's reactions and reflexes. Unfortunately the XT was getting a feel for theirs too.

"Shit!" Sora swore, "This is getting real old!"

Goro smirked, "I thought you said that you were always ready to blow stuff up."

"Yeah but when I do, it usually has the decency to stay down," Sora retorted. "This stupid thing either ignores it or gets right back up!" she protested.

Goro grunted. She was right. This wasn't working. The XT was just bleeding them of men and aircraft. They weren't even hurting it.

He heard some muttering on one of the comm channels and scowled in annoyance. Depressing a key he barked, "Either speak up or shut up," he ordered.

"Sorry sir," he heard as the unseen voice cleared their throat, "but me and my tac officer were discussing something. We got an idea. We think we could boost the output of the plasma lasers enough to hurt that thing."

Goro inclined his head, "Well?"

"We override the software controls and max out the plasma burst emitters, we can ramp up the power levels and get off a couple of shots of nearly four, maybe five times regular power."

Goro glanced over his shoulder to see if Sora was getting this. Sora's eyebrow was twitching. She spoke up, "Yeah, and those software controls are there for a reason you know, not the least of which being not to blow ourselves up or blowout the entire prefire chambers."

"Yessir, but we were looking over the engineering specs and tolerances of the prefire chambers and the engineers built them with a good safety margin in mind. They can contain an overloading plasma emitter without a breech. And the software controls are just there to keep the plasma emitters from overloading anyways."

"Uh huh," Goro said unable to keep a skeptical tone out of his voice. "And that safety margin isn't anything to fiddle around with. Which you and your tac officer weren't doing on your free time were you." Goro said in a tone of voice that was more of statement than a question.

"Uh…"

Goro continued in a dry tone of voice, "Otherwise, I'd be forced to speculate that there may be some connection to that report I received a week ago, detailing how a bunch of burst emitters worth a couple of million dollars each needed replacing when the maintenance crew swore up and down that they were good for at least another year of service."

"Yes sir, extreme speculation, sir. This was a radical, on the spur of the moment sort of idea which we would never even dream of trying out on our own," the unseen pilot said hastily in a tone of voice that was as pure as the driven snow.

"I thought so," Goro said dryly. He cut the connection momentarily to glance over his shoulder at Sora, "I feel like a conservative old man in charge of a group of insane, young, reckless hotheads," he said, knowing that most of these kids were only seven or eight years younger than himself. "What do you think?" he asked gravely.

Sora drummed her fingers thoughtfully, "It is creative," she admitted slowly. She reached over and tapped a few computer keys and waited as the computer digested it and thought about it for a moment before reluctantly displaying the results.

Sora looked up and tapped the display screen, "And according to these numbers, the prefire chambers can hold and the computers say it IS possible to rewrite the software," she said before slowly shaking her head, "But the plasma emitters can't possibly take that sort of output. Not for long anyways. We probably can get off two or three shots before they overload and burn out completely. And once they're fried, we can't use 'em anymore."

Goro nodded, "But if we don't use 'em, we might as well not even have them to begin with," he pointed out. He sighed knowing his decision was made for him already. Then he frowned deeply. "This is those two chuckleheads Kenichi and Sanada's idea right?" he asked Sora.

Sora sniggered and nodded.

Great. Goro thought rolling his eyes. Just my luck. I'm relying on Dumb and Dumber. The title of the later seemed to fluctuate between the two.

"Thought so. If we live through this, I'm going to give those two a piece of my mind for fooling around with those plasma emitters," Goro growled as he shook his head, "We're lucky those two twits didn't blow themselves up AND the rest of the base too. Including us."

His head hurt. A lot.

In fact, his entire skull was throbbing.

Shinji Ikari cracked opened his eyes and examined the ceiling of the train compartment. By God, even his eyeballs hurt!

He closed his eyes and lay still for several moments, willing the pain to ebb. He reached up with a hand and massaged his temple. He wondered if he was suffering from a concussion or something. He had hit his head pretty damn hard. He wasn't sure if he had blacked out for a moment.

He shook his head and winced as it felt like someone had just jabbed an icepick into his frontal lobe. Mentally noting not to do that again, Shinji struggled to recall what had happened. He had seen things. Heard things. For a few seconds there, it was almost as if he was somewhere else.

"…engaging neural connection, preliminary neural interface complete…"

"…solar batteries are fully charged…"

"…testing solar tap relays…"

"…start nerve synchrographic…"

A jumble of voices, all speaking things that he didn't understand. For a moment, it felt as though his entire body was tingling, like every single muscle in his body had gone to sleep all at once. His arms and legs were there, he could feel them but it was like they belonged to a stranger or something. There was a jolt and then slowly the prickling feeling on his skin faded away. He opened his eyes again and saw her.

She was about his age. Strangely enough, she was dressed in some strange white outfit and was covered in bandages that were wrapped around portions of her body including part of her face. One single cyclopean blood red eye stared at him, the other one was hidden by her dressings.

She stretched out her hand towards him. Pleadingly. Almost desperately. Instinctively, Shinji reached out his hand as well. They could almost touch, their hands almost making contact when her form began to waver. It became hazy and translucent. And then she vanished.

Shinji blinked and lowered his hand.

Whoa. That was some hallucination.

He pondered the entire incident. He couldn't be sure but he thought that he read somewhere that hallucinations were fragments of your subconscious mind at work. His mind sure seemed to favor highly symbolic imagery. He wondered what it all meant though. Must be Freudian, Shinji mused.

Within a hi-tech chamber, there was high-pitched whine as the enormous robot raised its head fractionally and its eyes began to glow with an internal light.

"…nerve synchro at threshold levels…" BRAINIAC reported, monitoring the complex series of neural impulses.

Suddenly the overhead lights switched to an ominous blood red and began to flash stridently in sequence as a high-pitched siren began blaring at a frequency that causes their eardrums to vibrate.

"Spike!" Maya Ibuki shouted white faced.

"Shit!" Ritsuko Akagi cursed, slamming her fist on the control console and then resolved not to do that again, rubbing her throbbing hand.

"Neural synchrographs are spiking! We're losing synchronicity!" Maya reported, her eyes flickering over her frantically scrolling screens.

Ritsuko Akagi stared as the fluctuating graphs of neural activity that had been in the process of merging, fluctuated and began to divide again.

The high-pitched whine sputtered and died as the robot's eyes dimmed and it's head lowered back to it's original position.

Ritsuko shook her head and pressed a control key. Instantly, a holo screen appeared in midair, projecting the image of a gasping teenage girl leaning over, the bangs of her dark black hair hanging over her face. "Rei? Are you alright?" Ritsuko asked.

The girl wordlessly nodded. "Just give me a moment," she whispered. After a moment of breathing heavily, she looked up shakily, "Try it again," she said, wiping a sheen of sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand.

Ritsuko pursed her lips as her eyes flicked to a secondary screen that was displaying and updating Rei's neurological scans. The process of a failed neural interface resulted in a lot of feedback on the pilot. Her cranial impulses were fluctuating and discharging wildly. "We need to reset the system." Ritsuko lied. The interface equipment was perfectly fine. They could immediately restart at any time but Ritsuko wanted to give Rei a bit of recovery time.

Rei nodded jerkily and leaned back in her interface harness. "Very well. I'll wait," she responded while she closed her unbandaged eye. Ritsuko depressed the key and the holo screen blanked. Both she and her assistant Maya exchanged looks. It wasn't working. It never worked. Not with Rei. She couldn't understand it. Theoretically, Rei should be able to interface with any EXO-Frame.

But it was almost as if EXO-Frame 01 had a mind of it's own.

And that mind didn't WANT Rei.

"Doctor," Maya trailed off as Ritsuko gave her a look. Ritsuko softened it with a faint smile. "Reset the system. Reload the neural profile and let's try it again. Who knows? We may get lucky," she said, the last part a bit more cheerfully.

Maya Ibuki brightened and nodded. She immediately turned and began tapping keys, beginning her work.

Ritsuko Akagi folded her hands together and bit her lip nervously. We could use some right about now, she thought grimly as she examined the various screens that were scrolling bits of data almost too fast for a normal human to read and interpret.

But her attention was not on them.

Slowly her gaze was drawn to the dense armorplast viewport and upwards to the gigantic titan that silently towered above all of them.

Why? she wondered. Why not Rei? What was it about her that made this EXO-Frame refuse a mental link? Ritsuko just couldn't understand it. And quite possibly the entire human race was depending on her to puzzle this out.