Chapter 4: Asuka
I lay on a couch bleeding my guts out. The bandages weren't helping much, and the ministrations of my would-be nurses were prodding and clumsy. I gritted my teeth and stared at the body of a BABYKA agent sprawled across the floor. The fucker was still holding the gun he'd shot me with. I guess Winthrop hadn't wanted to take any chances.
Jinnai was shouting into the phone in the hallway.
"—What?! Ignore the press, you idiot! We need those radio stations knocked off…Eh? I don't care if there are nineteen of them! Get them all!"
The wound didn't hurt as much as it probably should have. In my time, I've been decapitated, burned with acid, roasted, disemboweled, and eaten alive while my EVA was at over 100% synchronization. After a while, you learn to take the pain in stride.
Then again, I hadn't been bleeding my own blood during those times. It was nice to think that after so many dress rehearsals for it, my real death might end up comparatively painless.
"Asuka, I'm talking to you!" Jinnai snapped.
"What is it?" I rubbed my forehead, hoping the wooziness would go away.
"Where—does—Shinji—stand?"
"What? Oh…He'll join you," I said.
"How can you be sure?" he asked.
"He came into my room tonight and snuck a letter into my desk that said he was joining you and that I had nothing to do with it."
Jinnai's expression changed into a mixture of shock and disgust.
"Is he actually stupid enough to think that that would get you off the hook?" he asked.
"Yeah," I said.
Plus, it gave him a way to commit suicide and STILL be the hero, I thought.
"If his piloting skills are as pathetic as his people skills…"
"Piloting's probably the only thing not pathetic about him," I said.
Jinnai was about to reply when one of his aides interrupted him. Apparently, the head of the railway union was on the line. For a few seconds, Jinnai's gaze swung hesitantly between the phone and me. Then…
"Get her out of here. I want her in the EVA within an hour. And pick up Ikari in case she's useless."
"I'm not useless," I said.
Jinnai's face twisted into a snarl. He carefully placed his hand over the phone and pointed a finger at me. I noticed that his hand was shaking, but his voice was smooth, low, and angry.
"You're worse than useless, Sohryu. Thanks to you, we've blown our cover and have to start the coup a week early with one wounded pilot and another who's probably too depressed to synchronize. That is, if BABYKA didn't kill him already after you left him alone."
My unexpected surge of fear at this prospect made the pain much more intense. Another man interrupted us.
"Sir, they're trying to retake the Fernsehturm TV tower—"
"Then set the charges off!" Jinnai roared. "Do I have to do everything myself? And why is Sohryu still here?"
He motioned to the men around me to get moving, then took his hand off the phone to calmly reassure the railway boss that nothing was wrong. It took his attendants almost ten minutes to half-escort, half-drag me down the stairs and into the waiting car.
The drive to NERV Central was tense and painful. We drove at top speed through the empty streets, and the never-ending potholes jerked my body into the seatbelt every few seconds.
One of the drivers muttered something in Russian.
"What did you—" I began, before another dent in the road shut me up.
The man looked back, clearly terrified. I thought he was looking at me until I realized he was staring out the back window. He pointed behind us.
"Someone following," he said. His Japanese was so thickly accented that I could barely understand it.
I peered out the window.
"Someone? That's a fucking convoy! Are they part of the coup?"
He looked confused, so I tried again.
"Ours?"
"No. Pyaati ОМОН… Fifth Palitsiya…Police," he said
"Riot Unit Five?"
He nodded. His partner slammed his foot onto the accelerator.
"Shit!" I yelled, to no one in particular. "Shitshitshitshitshit—" I was suddenly pressed against the side door as the driver rapidly swerved. For a few sickening moments, we seemed dangerously close to tipping over. We didn't, but the view I got from the side window as we turned was almost as bad.
The entire street was illuminated with headlights. A column of cars was driving four-abreast thanks to the lack of traffic after dark, and I couldn't see the end of them. It would have looked impressive in the well-lit streets of pre-Impact Japan. In electricity-starved modern Berlin, it was awe-inspiring. They included everything from sports cars to minivans—uniformity was a luxury that post-Impact governments couldn't afford—but they were all painted in same ominous black.
However, there was something much, much worse.
"They've got armored cars!" I shouted. I instantly recognized the squat, ugly turrets and jutting prows that looked like salamanders' heads. I'd seen them a year ago, when they'd crushed the Hauptbahnhof railway strike with machine guns. My warning was rendered irrelevant two seconds later when one of them opened up on us with its thirty millimeter autocannon.
The driver swerved again, and his partner rolled the window down. At first, I thought he was going to jump and make a run for it, but he leaned out instead and started firing. He managed to empty two pistol clips before somebody picked him off. We barely turned in time to avoid running the back wheels over the body.
I looked over the back of the seat again to see what was happening. A bullet shattered the window a moment later, and I crunched down as far as my seatbelt permitted.
"Get down!" the driver screamed, too late.
I took the next second or two to process what I'd seen before the glass shattered. I felt an icy lurch in my stomach.
"They're splitting up! They're trying to cut us off!"
We screeched around another corner. Our pursuers were getting closer now, although the armored cars couldn't get a clear shot at us. Small arms fire was another matter; one of our rear tires exploded after a bullet buried itself in the rubber. For a moment, the car became almost uncontrollable. It zigzagged back and forth along the street as the driver tried to stop it from spinning into the sidewalk or a building.
Then blinding white light flooded through the front windshield. The driver slammed on the breaks and began fumbling with the door handle as the car skidded to a halt.
"Get out!" he yelled. I crawled out of the door, the pain temporarily dulled by the rush of adrenaline. I got maybe a meter or two before rough hands grabbed me and dragged me toward a set of wooden barricades. The asphalt tore skin off of my legs and sandaled feet.
They unceremoniously dumped me on the ground twenty or thirty feet behind the barricades, face up. I took the opportunity to get a last look at the stars, and wondered for the first time in my life why I'd always preferred to see the night's sky drowned out by city lights.
"Asuka?" a voice asked.
My mood oscillated from resignation to panic.
"Verfluchter Idiot! You let yourself get captured! What the fuck's the matter with—"
Shinji held his hands up to his chest as if he was trying to ward off punches.
"No, it's not like that! Asuka, they're on our side."
"Oh…"
"Let's hope they stay that way when the shooting stars," another voice interrupted. I turned my head to find the source of the sound and saw a long-haired man in an old NERV uniform sitting a few feet away from me. He smiled and tugged at his shirt.
"I figured if I was going to get killed, I might as well do it as a NERV officer," Aoba said.
"What do you mean 'when the shooting starts'?" I asked.
He pointed past the barricades. I noticed for the first time that the street was constricted on both sides by cross-parked cars and antitank traps, funneling any potential attackers into a narrow defile.
Convoys emerged from three different streets and converged on the narrow entry-point. The armored cars stood guard, cannons leveled, as the jumbled mass of cars tried to untangle itself enough to allow the riders to get out and take firing positions.
Aoba stood up and dusted his pants off.
"Showtime," he said.
He walked alone into the headlight-lit whiteness between the two forces with his hands behind his back. When he reached the midpoint, he stopped and stood in "at ease" position.
"He's insane," I said. "They're going to gun him down."
Even as I spoke, another man stepped into the light from the other side. He was odd-looking, with fluffy white hair and a nose that looked like it had been broken so many times that it had become flattened. I recognized him from the EVA planning meetings: Raymond Gordon, the commander of Riot Unit 5. He looked furious. Then again, he always looked that way.
"What the fuck is this?" he shouted at Aoba. "You and your men'd better clear out of NERV Central immediately and hand over the occupants of that car or I'll—"
Aoba held a piece of paper under the commander's nose. For a second, Gordon looked as if he was going to strike Aoba, but he thought better of it and snatched the paper instead.
"What the…?"
"Orders from the Secretary-General," Aoba explained. "Your unit should return to barracks and await further orders. There's some sort of political disturbance, and I'm supposed to keep NERV Central under quarantine until the crisis is over." He stood aside and subtly motioned to something behind us. Even with the glaring searchlights obscuring them, I could see the outlines of machine gun emplacements and anti-tank positions.
"What do you mean by 'disturbance'?" Gordon demanded.
"I don't think it's wise to speculate at this point, except to note that there might be something going on in the inner circle. But you didn't hear that from me," Aoba said.
Gordon seemed to weigh this carefully, biting his lip and looking Aoba up and down. Every few seconds, his eyes drifted to the heavy weapon emplacements.
"You can check with your MAGI access port if you don't believe me," Aoba said.
"That won't be necessary," Gordon replied. "Fucking politicians screwed up again."
Aoba grinned and nodded.
"We're staying here until we figure what's going on. There's no way we're returning to barracks under these circumstances."
Aoba's smile evaporated.
"Chief Gordon, I doubt that the Secretary-General would—"
"I'll explain it to Winthrop when I see him next. This meeting is finished," Gordon said. "Benny! Try to get the Executive Guards on the radio!"
Aoba swung around and started walking back quickly. As he passed us, he didn't even break stride as he seized our hands and started dragging us past the gun emplacements. I clung on to Shinji's shoulder to steady myself. Within seconds, we worked out one of our unspoken agreements: he wouldn't ask me if I needed help, and I wouldn't call attention to the fact that I was receiving it.
"Hurry up!" Aoba said. "This quiet isn't going to last for long."
"Asuka?" Shinji asked.
Please, PLEASE don't ask me what I think you're going to, I silently pleaded.
"What…what made you change…I mean…Asuka, why did you join the coup?"
Scheiße
I groped for an easy answer and found one.
"I need to avenge my mother. Even you should understand that."
It sounded absurd when I put it like that, like some kind of Icelandic blood feud. Yet either because he sensed that I didn't want to talk about it or for some reason of his own, Shinji just smiled at me.
"I understand."
Gunfire erupted behind us.
"Sometimes I hate being right," Aoba muttered. "Hurry up!"
"Carry me," I said.
Shinji stopped walking and stared at me as if I'd announced I was the Queen of England.
"Just how petty do you think I am?" I shouted. "There's a difference between pride and a death wish. CARRY ME!"
Fortunately, he'd gotten a lot stronger in the four years since Third Impact. That, plus some help from Aoba and a German soldier whose name I never asked, allowed us to move pretty quickly.
I heard the police autocannons firing in the distance, booming in three-round bursts. Every few moments, they would be interrupted with an explosion, and the chorus would seem a little feebler.
"At least the RPGs are working," Aoba said.
He ran his ID card through the front door's reader. Nothing happened. A muffled mechanical voice spoke over Aoba's radio. He didn't seem to notice at first, and continued trying to snick the card through. The voice became louder, shriller and more insistent.
"Someone's on your radio," I said.
He swore and turned up the volume.
"What is it?"
"Second Executive Guards Regiment has just penetrated NERV Central," the voice said.
Aoba's face fell.
"Where's the First Regiment?"
"A train full of 'em derailed near Schönefeld. The rest'll arrive by road in a couple minutes."
"Open the door!" I screamed.
I suddenly realized that the autocannons weren't the only weapons going silent. Our own machine guns were firing less frequently as well—which could be a good sign or a very, very bad one.
The latch finally clicked open. We ran inside. After the chaos in the courtyard, the quiet was almost a relief—just the sound of heavy breathing and the clank of shoes running across a metal floor. Then Aoba's radio crackled again.
"Exec Guards three hundred meters to your right."
Aoba changed direction. I could feel Shinji and the other man carrying me beginning to tire. Shots rang out ahead of us, distressingly close.
"Turn left!" the voice ordered.
We did. Shinji was definitely slowing down now.
"Drop me," I said.
Nobody responded.
"Give me a fucking gun and drop me!"
When they still didn't say anything, I started struggling. If I was going to die, I refused to go out as a cripple who dragged her protectors with her. Shinji tightened his grip, which only made me struggle harder. He would let go eventually, before the Executive Guards got him.
But what if he didn't?
I was only able to dwell on that uncomfortable thought for a moment. Then I noticed that the Guards already had arrived.
"They're--" the voice began
"In the tunnel ahead of us," Aoba finished. "I see them."
The German soldier drew his weapon. A series of shots rang out, almost deafening in the narrow hallway. When I recovered from the pain in my ringing ears, the first thing I noticed was the young soldier's shredded body.
Aoba was no fool. He had already tossed his weapon aside. Shinji was unarmed and exhausted. And I…
… I was lying a few inches away from the dead soldier's pistol.
Dodge this, Arschloch…
At that point, several things happened. I reached for the pistol. Aoba threw himself on the floor, dragging Shinji along with him. The Guards opened fire.
All of this had been expected. What was unexpected was the stream of bakelite that flooded over the soldiers from nozzles in the ceiling. Within seconds, the sound of gunfire had been replaced with muffled screams and gargles as the bakelite began to congeal over mouths and noses. Where there had once been an open corridor, there was now a solid pink wall.
"Gotta love the MAGI's security system," Aoba said. He and Shinji hoisted me up again, and after another minute's sprinting we made it to the armored doors of the command center. It took another minute for the people inside to disengage the locks, but the area was now sealed behind several feet of bakelite and I wasn't particularly worried. I should have been.
Even before the doors shut again, Aoba leaped into action. He rounded on a harassed-looking young man sitting in the commander's seat.
"Deng, what's going on? What's the Executive Guard doing here? Only the Secretary-General and the Vice-Secretary have the authority to order them in. I thought we had both of them"
The other man licked his lips, trying to avoid Aoba's eyes.
"That's not technically true, sir. Winthrop's in our custody, but the Vice-Secretary…ah…"
"Spit it out!" Aoba said.
"He subverted the detail sent to capture him and escaped."
Aoba slammed his fist on the desk, then took a deep breath and ran his fingers through his hair.
"What about the police?" he asked. "Their communications system was supposed to be down."
"Riot Unit 5 has its own frequency, sir."
"Then see what the MAGI can do to shut it down," Aoba replied through gritted teeth.
"Yes, sir."
He turned to us again, as if seeing us for the first time. He unzipped the bag on his shoulder and tossed us a couple bundles of clothing.
"You two: get into your plugsuits. Now."
"No privacy?" I asked.
His only response was to roll his eyes. After a moment's consideration, I realized that it was a stupid complaint.
"Sir, Colonel Jinnai's on the line," a man called from the bridge.
As I dressed, I looked at the screen in the middle of the room. It was enormous, at least twenty feet across, with a black-and-white diagram of Berlin at its center. Dozens of smaller windows were arranged around the central diagram, each a live video feed. Small colored arrows connected each window with some point the map, which presumably indicated where the action was taking place.
Aoba's conversation with Jinnai was becoming heated.
"Sir, we need to evacuate the Reichstag immediately and concentrate our troops in—what?—I know people associate the place with government authority. It doesn't matter. We can't hold onto a symbolic target like that…"
I looked at the map again, trying to figure out what was going on. One image in particular caught my eye: a couple fire teams huddled around a school bus in the middle of a concrete road. It looked like they were about to be overrun. The camera panned out, and I saw that it wasn't a road at all. They were guarding a bus parked in the middle of the airport's runway, obstructing plane traffic. And that meant that the MAGI's attempts to shut down air traffic electronically had failed.
"Shinji, I think the airport's getting—"
I stopped when I saw that Shinji was staring at me, his eyes saucer-sized. Pervert, the irrational part of my mind screamed. But no…he was staring at my bullet wound.
"That's…really bad, Asuka."
"It's nothing."
"You need to get that taken care of," he said.
"I said it's nothing. I…You just want an excuse to look at me naked, dontcha?"
It was feeble, and we both knew it. Shinji smiled anyway. A subtle change was beginning to come over him. I'd seen it before, many times, and always before a battle. He was calmer when he was like this, more confident and forceful. (And, incidentally, a cocky jerk). During the war with the Angels, we had each chosen our own peculiar ways of dealing with the stress of combat. He lived his life as a neurotic little boy and only assumed his battle persona when the fighting was about to begin. I wore mine all the time. Neither approach, I reflected, was very healthy.
Too late to cry over spilt milk, Asuka.
"No reserves!" Aoba screamed into the receiver. "It's now or never! What the fuck do you think we'll do with reserves if the main line goes down? And what kind of idiot tries to micromanage a coup from a single home base? Do you have any idea how much easier it would be for the government to attack a single target like that?"
The conversation never finished. An explosion went off in the hallway behind the armored doors, followed seconds later by something that sounded like splintered glass rebounding along the metal walls. Aoba slammed the phone down and turned to a short-haired techie.
"I thought you told me that RPGs couldn't penetrate the bakelite!"
"I…I can't understand it, sir," she stammered. "I don't know what—"
"Recoilless rifles!" another voice yelled. "They're firing plastic explosives!"
"What?!"
"It sticks to the bakelite before exploding. The blast vibrates the whole thing until it shivers into pieces. It's used for antitank rounds--"
"Thank you, Lieutenant Rodney. I get the picture," Aoba said. "Asuka, Shinji: We don't have much time. The main line to the EVA cages is blocked off. You're going to have to crawl through the ventilation system."
"Crawl?" I said.
"I can carry you," Shinji offered.
I forced myself to stand straight up and clicked the button on my plugsuit.
"That won't be necessary."
The three hundred meter crawl to the EVA cages was torture, though I did my best to conceal it from Shinji. After the first twenty meters, I decided that the ducts' pine green paint was the most revolting color in existence. The irregular thumping of our hands and knees on the aluminum floor was just as maddening. My chest and shoulder muscles burned from pain and lack of blood, and they nearly gave out on a couple occasions.
I wondered momentarily what sort of idiotic architect would build four foot wide air ducts. Whoever he was, he must have worked on Tokyo-3's system as well.
"This brings back memories, doesn't it?" Shinji said. He'd probably meant it to cheer me up, but his forced, sing-song tone made me want to reach back and hit him. Even the echo of his voice gave me a headache.
"Ich werde euch töten, wenn man sich—"
"Sorry, Asuka. What was that?"
"Look at my ass like you did last time and I'll kill you," I said.
"Oh."
"Weren't you supposed to be his girlfriend or something?" a third voice called from behind us. "What's with you two? Bad breakup or something?"
"Shut up!" we both yelled simultaneously.
When we finally emerged into the light again, I collapsed onto the floor and gasped for breath. The hiatus lasted a grand total of twenty-two seconds (I counted). Then they picked me up and carried me to face my new EVA.
It looked the same as toothy, bulbous-headed monstrosities that had torn me to pieces during Third Impact. Exhausted as I was, I shuddered. Years ago, I had taunted Shinji with my own secret fear: that the entry plug felt like a return to the womb. Now I would be curled up in the womb of one of the machines that killed my mother.
"Wait a minute," I said. "Where are the other EVAs?"
The man I'd spoken to turned pale.
"Other EVAs?"
"You don't know about the other EVAs?" I asked shrilly.
"I...no…"
Some of Shinji's pre-battle calm began to evaporate. His hands were now opening and closing in a regular rhythm.
"Sir, maybe you'd better ask Aoba where they are," a woman in an engineer's uniform suggested.
The man nodded and shakily raised the radio to his mouth.
"Lieutenant Aoba? Are you there? The Children say there are supposed to be two other EVAs."
When Aoba replied, we could hear shots being fired in the background.
"They moved 'em before the test. We don't know where they are. Get one of the Children into the EVA immediately."
"Yes, sir. And what if—"
"I'm busy," Aoba interrupted. "This is my last transmission."
The channel went silent.
"Get me in there," I said.
"Asuka, maybe I should try first," Shinji said. "You're not in great condition at the moment, and…"
I glared at him until he trailed off.
"You know as well as I do that the strain from EVA piloting is mostly mental," I said. "I'm going."
Shinji had always insisted that the LCL in Rei's EVA smelled like her. I hadn't participated in the compatibility experiments, and I'd always assumed that he was either lying or delusional. Probably both. The minute I entered the MP EVA, I realized that he had been telling the truth.
No pilot had imprinted on the EVA yet, but there was definitely an odor there. It was nauseatingly sweet and antiseptic, like being dunked into a tank of cheap air freshener. Every once in a while, though, I smelled an undercurrent of rotting meat.
This was not my Unit 02.
"Erst Erfullung…Anfang des Nervenanschlusses…" I intoned. The EVA warmed up. I groped through the mental static, looking for the nimble, protective mind that I'd always found in Unit 02. Remembering my last battle, I worried that I would find an uncontrollable monster instead.
The MP EVA was neither. It had the mind of an abused, brain-damaged animal too broken to fight me as I extended my control over its body.
I became conscious of a thousand tiny pains all over, along with sharper ones along my left arm and right leg. I looked for their source and noticed that my new skin was pockmarked with metal patches and motors where skin and muscle should have been. In their haste to finish the EVA on time, the designers had substituted mechanical parts for some of the biological ones. These would be the vulnerable points that I would have to protect with my AT field.
If you can still form one, a voice in my head taunted.
I turned on the intercom.
"What's this battery pack on my back? And don't you dare tell me that this EVA doesn't have an S-2 organ," I said.
"Don't worry," a voice on the other end said. "It's an old EVA battery we refitted to power the positron cannon."
"What happens when the battery runs out?"
"The battery draws power directly from the Evangelion."
"What?!" I yelled. "So it's going to suck the power out during combat?"
"It's limited to very small amounts at any particular time. There's a safety feature to make sure of that."
"What about hand-to-hand weapons?" I asked.
"There's a replica Lance on the surface. It isn't finished, so it can't assume its pronged form when you throw it."
"So essentially it's a really big double-bladed swordstaff?"
"Yes."
"Wundervoll. You get all that, Shinji?"
"Yes," he said over the intercom.
"Good. It's your job to give me advice when I'm out there. Now that Misato's gone, you're probably more experienced with EVAs than anybody else alive."
"Other than you, of course" he added. I could hear the smile in his voice.
"Naturally," I said.
"But since when does the Great Asuka Langley Sohryu need advice?"
"Don't push your luck, Dummkopf."
I barked the final commands and waited for the EVA to start. Everything went smoothly—I could feel the muscles waking up as they accepted my control. The movements were sluggish, but then again, I hadn't piloted for a long time. It would probably take a minute or two to recapture the dexterity I'd enjoyed as a girl.
"You can do this, Asuka," I muttered to myself.
"Synch ratio climbing," a voice called out. "Seven percent. Nine percent. Eleven percent. Fifteen percent. Sixteen…No, wait. Holding at fifteen percent."
"What?!"
"I'm sorry, Asuka. It's stuck at fifteen percent."
"But it'll barely be able to move!" I said.
No! Please, no, I pleaded. Not again! Not now!
I thought of the warrior girl who chopped her way through nine MP EVAs as NERV and the rest of the world crumbled around her. The girl who had finally managed to channel the years of pressure and loveless isolation into a single perfect performance. Her opponents had been invincible, but she'd still left them with enough injuries to fill an emergency ward.
Right now, I hated that girl with every fiber of my being.
I jerked the control sticks in and out uselessly. When the EVA didn't respond, I tried to impose myself by force of will. The EVA didn't have the spirit to fight back, but it didn't need to. It responded to my mental prods and kicks with resigned apathy. At last, I even begged.
The EVA remained almost immobile. I was useless again.
"Asuka, concentrate harder!" someone said.
"I can't!" I moaned. "I'm trying as hard as I can!"
I expected what was coming next. That foreknowledge didn't make it any less painful.
"Get Shinji in there."
Of course. That would make the humiliation complete, wouldn't it? Damaged goods at nineteen, four years out of a prime that had barely lasted beyond my fifteenth birthday—and now replaced by the same pathetic kid who'd…
"No. Keep her in there," Shinji said.
"This isn't the time for pity, Third!" I snapped.
"It's not pity," he said. "Neither of us has synched in four years. I don't think I'll do any better."
My desperation quickly boiled into rage.
"You're not even going to try? You're willing to turn yourself over to BABYKA and you're too cowardly to crawl into a fucking entry plug?"
The other end of the line was silent for a moment. Shinji hadn't realized that I'd seen him creeping into my room, let alone that I'd read the note.
"I'm not giving up, Asuka. I think I figured out another way to raise the synch ratio."
I started running through possibilities in my mind, trying to figure out what he was getting at. I searched for something—anything—that would allow me to pilot the EVA. Nothing came to mind. But what if…
Of course!
It wasn't what I'd hoped for. On the other hand, it was better than dying in a firefight or a BABYKA torture chamber. I took a deep breath, relaxed my shoulders, and pushed my few remaining dreams of glory aside.
"Come aboard, copilot Ikari."
A barrage of artillery shells hit me in the face as soon as I surfaced. I threw my hands up as a shield, but they moved slowly, like running in a dream. The armor held up well. On the other hand, I doubted that the improvised mechanical bits would be able to sustain a direct hit.
Shinji had been right on both counts. Using two pilots doubled our effectiveness, but his synch ratio was just as pathetic as mine. We were about to fight Winthrop's army without the benefit of an AT field and a synch score below thirty percent. Judging from the sound of chopper blades, Winthrop's air force was arriving as well.
"Let's see how well you bastards can fight without a power cord to target," I said.
I reached for the swordstaff and took a few more tank shells to the face in the process. Aside from clouding my vision, they didn't pose any danger. The tanks of the First Executive Guards were entrenched on a green, rolling hillside in front of us. Fifty smoothbore guns poked out from a fifty hastily-dug hills, each designed to obscure everything but the top of the turret. To a conventional force, it would have been impenetrable. To an EVA, it was a termite mound waiting to be kicked over.
"Shinji, just remember to back up my movements. When you feel me moving an arm or—AAAGH!"
Both of us screamed. Even with the low synch ratio, something had managed to hurt my—our—leg, badly. Unlike my mother, this EVA passed as much of its pain to the pilot as it could. I looked down and saw a smoking hole in my thigh where one of the metal patches had been.
Another shell slammed into my arm. I started moving toward the mass of enemy troops. They tried to scatter, but even in slow-motion, my EVA's stride length made it too fast to avoid. When I reached them, I started crushing tanks and IFV's with my feet. It felt like stepping on empty soda cans.
Compared to my duel before Third Impact, the battle was a farce. Even so, I felt a surge of predatory joy that I hadn't experienced in years. I grinned at Shinji. He didn't return the smile. His expression was a mixture of fear and nausea, and he seemed to be struggling to keep his concentration.
I'd never felt guilty about killing the JSDF troops in Tokyo-3, and I didn't feel guilty about repeating the performance now. Winthrop's Guard Regiment had enough blood on its hands to ease even the most sensitive conscience. Even if it hadn't, its soldiers still knew the risks when they signed up. They'd signed the same agreement I'd made with NERV when I was four years old.
I didn't feel sorry for anything…Except, in that brief moment, for making Shinji help me kill them. Unfortunately, I'm not the right person to turn to if you're looking for comfort.
"Buck up, Third. You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."
And the First Guard Regiment was definitely broken. Its armored vehicles and artillery were crumpled wrecks. Any footsoldiers who hadn't been crushed in their APCs were cowering in the woods. I glanced over the hill at the Second Regiment and realized that my work was probably done. After watching the fate of their brothers-in-arms, they'd decided to pull back. I considered whether I should take a swipe at them before they got away. Ultimately, I decided against it. The risks to Shinji's psyche were too high, and without his help I couldn't continue piloting.
Another bolt of pain shot through my leg. I scanned the area for the source of the attack.
"Attack helicopters at four o'clock," Shinji said.
They were too far away to hit with the swordstaff, and I was too sluggish aim properly anyway. A third missile burned into my leg in the same spot the last two had hit. My knee started to buckle. In a moment, I would be crippled.
Shinji reacted before I did. I felt him reach for the positron gun, and I supported the movement. Not for the last time, I thanked the war gods for our synchronization training five years back.
I fired. A blue neon ball the size of a minivan collided with the helicopter and blasted it to pieces. The other choppers veered away from the cloud of smoke, but by that time I'd fired again. Another direct hit. Another rain of shrapnel.
Shinji tapped me on the shoulder.
"I don't think we have many shots left, Asuka."
"We won't need them," I replied.
I turned two more helicopters into fireballs. The rest took the hint and turned away from the battle. I watched them retreat eastward, toward the rising sun. Silhouetted against the dawn, they looked for all the world like a flock of hummingbirds.
Then I saw another silhouette: a hunched, gangly giant with drooping shoulders and arms that dangled at its sides like thick ropes. My stomach knotted and the LCL in my mouth turned to ice.
"How…?" I managed to get out.
"Jinnai said something about the Dummy Plug system when he captured us."
"I thought he was bluffing!" I said.
I took stock of our situation. We were barely above minimum functional synch ratio. We had to cooperate to pilot, whereas our opponent had the benefit of a single mind. Our EVA's leg was nearly crippled. We couldn't form an AT field. Worst of all, the enemy EVA was carrying a swordstaff of its own.
Shinji's voice interrupted my thoughts.
"There's another one!"
He was right. It was distant, but another monstrous shape was moving toward us from the west. If we were going to stand any chance at all, we would have to attack the first one while it was still moving through Berlin. With luck, its brother wouldn't arrive until we'd disabled it.
Or, more likely, until after we'd been killed.
I urged my EVA into a sprint. It just stood there, frozen.
"What the…?"
Shinji glared at me with a look of determination I'd only ever seen on his viewscreen during combat. He'd never looked at me that way face-to-face.
"Asuka, we're not going to fight in Berlin."
"Are you crazy?!" I screamed.
"No, I'm not. There are civilians in there."
"This is war, you idiot!"
"I'm not going to make a choice that gets innocent people killed," he replied.
"What do you think is going to get more people killed, Dummkopf: Fighting in Berlin, or twenty more years of Winthrop?"
"At least that'll be on Winthrop's conscience rather than mine," he said.
If not for the LCL's decelerating effects, I would have belted him in the jaw.
"You know what, Shinji? I don't have time for this shit. I'm not Misato, and I'm not going to stand here and comfort you like a fucking eight year old. You know what's riding on this. You're the one who stopped me from killing myself, remember? I'm here on your dime, Arschloch. You wanna let me die again? Great. Be my guest. If not, take your foot off the fucking brakes!"
Life seeped back into the Evangelion's legs. I broke into a run as soon as I could feel my feet.
"We'll probably die anyway," he said.
I swung the swordstaff over my head and laughed.
"Today's a good day to die, Shinji."
"Maybe you're right," he said.
I swung my weapon at the Dummy Plug's EVA without breaking stride. He took the blow on the end of his own swordstaff and tried to thrust over my guard. I pivoted, dug my heels into the ground, and deflected the thrust over my head. My feet dug deep furrows into the ground as I tried to force my thirteen-hundred-ton body to decelerate.
The Dummy Plug's EVA watched me carefully, waiting for me to make the first move so it could counterattack. With his twin arriving in less than a minute, I didn't have much of a choice. I rotated my right side forward as if I was going to strike his left cheek, then lunged for the inside of his left leg.
The feint worked, but my reflexes were shot. My opponent skipped away just in time, and I barely scrambled back into position before he counterattacked. He swung for the right side of my head, but the attack was amateurish. His grip was poorly balanced. Both hands held the swordstaff at its center as if it was a baseball bat. I held my weapon vertically and swept it across my right side, catching the blow on the swordstaff's midsection. It would take him a second to recover position. He'd lost momentum, and right now his weapon was nothing more than a heavy impediment.
I lunged and opened up the right side of his face.
The EVA—or its commanding dummy plug; I could never be sure which—screamed in pain. It—or he—recovered quickly, though. Within seconds, he swept his swordstaff downward at my legs. I blocked it with the lower half of my weapon, but I wasn't able to anchor the blade into the ground. The swordstaff's tip slid beneath my guard and sliced my foot. The Dummy Plug opened his EVA's misshapen mouth and grinned at me.
I didn't have many lunges left before my foot gave out. It was now or never, especially since our second opponent would be there any minute. I feinted for the right leg and then threw myself forward, rotating my hips and body to the left. As the right side of my swordstaff approached his head, I prayed that he wouldn't block it in time.
He didn't. Instead, he calmly jumped away and stood just out of reach. He could see the other EVA a few thousand meters away, and he wasn't going to give me the chance to land a killing blow before help arrived.
"We can't catch up with him in time," Shinji groaned.
"Shut up!"
Living most of your life in an LCL aquarium has a lot of drawbacks. One of them is that you never learn just how far a staff weapon can reach.
I slid my hands to the base of the swordstaff and swung it in an arc at his left cheek. This time, he didn't react quickly enough. My blade sliced through the middle of his head, unleashing a geyser of blood. I wondered irrelevantly whether EVAs were pressurized.
As I'd expected, cutting off the EVA's head hadn't killed the Dummy Plug. It had blinded him, though. He took two steps and crashed into a building. As he flailed around in the rubble, I carefully sliced his arms and legs off.
"Asuka, look out!" Shinji yelled.
I wheeled around a little too quickly and heard a crack in my right knee. After taking abuse from tank shells, missiles, and dozens of lunges, the joint was beginning to tear at the socket. The entire leg stiffened from waves of pain. There wasn't much time now, and I tried to restore flexibility by forcing it to bend. That was a mistake. The remaining tendons snapped, and I toppled to the ground in agony. Even then, I had the presence of mind to grab the positron rifle.
"You idiot!" I screamed. "Look what you made me…"
Shinji's eyes were riveted on the approaching giant. I followed his gaze to see what was going on. As soon as I did, I slammed my fist on the intercom button.
"He's got a fully operational lance!"
"Shoot him!" came the reply.
I did. At that range, it was impossible to miss. Unfortunately, it was still too far to neutralize his AT field.
As soon as the shot glanced off, the EVA broke into a run. He held the lance like an Olympic javelin thrower, with the same graceful precision I'd seen from Ayanami when she'd skewered the fifteenth Angel. I got the feeling that the Dummy Plug would share her uncanny accuracy. I could do nothing but passively wait to die.
Shinji hit the intercom button.
"Remove the safety on the positron cannon!" he shouted.
"But…"
"If I'm wrong, we're dead anyway. Remove it!"
A light went off in my head.
"Are you insane?" the voice asked.
I slammed my hand down on the second com line.
"The S-2 engine produces infinite energy, remember?" I said. "Infinite energy."
The Dummy Plug's EVA was almost close enough to throw its lance.
"Disengaging now," the voice said over the intercom.
I felt the remaining strength seep out of my EVA's muscles, leaving behind a burning sensation that felt like I'd finished a marathon and couldn't breathe. My head swam and my vision began darkening. The EVA was so close now….
I fired.
My vision snapped back to normal, just in time to be blinded by the muzzle flash. Instead of an energy ball, the positron cannon fired a solid stream of light as thick as my EVA's arm. It punched through the AT field as if it wasn't there and left a giant charred hole where the core had been. The other EVA sagged in mid-stride and toppled head over heels. It rolled forward, carried by its remaining momentum until it careened into a hillside. Shinji said afterward that it was like watching a butterfly die in mid-flight.
It took another hour for the rest of Winthrop's army to surrender. We spent that hour looking ridiculous, hopping on one leg from hotspot to hotspot to convince the holdouts to give up. A few refused. Fortunately for Shinji's peace of mind, our conventional forces took care of most of them.
We arrived at our retrieval point at eight AM. It seemed absurdly early after spending the bulk of the last 24 hours screaming at each other or locked in combat.
"I'm gonna sleep for a month," I groaned.
"I'll be too jittery to sleep," Shinji replied. He sat a foot away from me hunched over his thighs, hugging his knees to his stomach. It wasn't from exhaustion. Shinji had already begun to retreat from his 'hero' persona, and his body language reflected the change.
I felt a sharp pain in my side from the bullet wound. With my synchronization gone and adrenaline depleted, I knew that it would only get worse.
I switched off the communication system.
"Shinji?"
"Yes?"
"Thank you."
I was relieved when he didn't ask me to clarify exactly what I was thanking him for. I wasn't sure I knew myself.
"You're welcome," he said simply.
A long pause followed. A small vortex of LCL formed around Shinji's nostrils, which meant he was taking a deeper breath than usual.
"Asuka?"
"What?"
"Do you…I mean, I wondered if you felt…"
"You want to know if I love you," I finished.
"Y…yes."
I sighed. This wasn't going to be easy, but the truth seldom is. Snapping at him to shut up would only prolong the discomfort for both of us.
"No."
He huddled together even more tightly, if that was possible.
"Shinji, I was a lonely little girl when you met me. I didn't have any family worth mentioning, and the closest thing to friends I'd had in Germany were my tutors. When I met you, another EVA pilot…you were the only peer I had."
He didn't respond. In fact, he didn't move at all. He just stared blindly at the control panel.
"I realized that you were attracted to me—even with my limited people skills, it was easy to notice. You paid attention to me when I flirted with you…"
And when I bullied you, I thought.
"…so that's what I did to get your attention."
Shinji was totally silent. I'd expected that reaction. Since Third Impact, I'd rehearsed this speech in my mind a thousand times, always imagining that it would be thrown in his face during an argument. Life's little ironies…
Finally, Shinji spoke again.
"I see. I…won't ask again. I'm sorry, Asuka."
Now came the truly humiliating part. The part I hadn't rehearsed for the last four years.
"I'm not finished," I said.
A look of confusion spread across his face.
"Shinji, you're all I've got left. There's nobody left alive who I can relate to."
The look of confusion changed to…recognition? Empathy?
"So there you have it, Shinji. You win by default."
If you still want me, I added silently. I stared at the floor and waited for him to throw my rejection back at me. My bluntness would make it easy for him. I'd offered him a relationship without love because I couldn't do any better. Just a little physical attraction and the ghost of old friendship. Sex, too, if he wanted it.
I doubted that it would be enough. Shinji had never been interested in sex for its own sake; it had always been a means to an end—to feel unconditionally nurtured and loved. I'd just refused to do either, and demanded that he give me both.
On the other hand, I'd underestimated Shinji's own desperation.
"It's better than nothing," he said at last.
I nodded. I suddenly remembered my rebuke to Misato during Third Impact: You're just two depressed grown-ups licking each other's wounds.
We didn't say anything for a very long time. At last, Shinji uncharacteristically restarted the conversation.
"Asuka, I worry sometimes."
I snorted.
"That's a surprise," I said.
He looked at me seriously.
"When Instrumentality took our souls apart and put us back together again…"
He paused, waiting for me to veto a discussion about Third Impact.
"Go on," I said.
"How do we know that we're still the same people?" he said. "I mean, what if our current consciousness only started to exist after we reassembled?"
"I think I'd remember something like that," I said.
"But that's just it…if we were created during Instrumentality, we would have received all of the old Shinji's and Asuka's memories. We could spend the rest of our lives arguing about things that neither of us ever did."
The image of two people fighting over poisoned memories that weren't their own frightened me. What if the fifteen year old girl I resented so deeply wasn't even me?
"But like you said, we wouldn't remember it," I replied. "There's no way of knowing for sure. It's useless thinking about things like that."
"I suppose you're right."
Outside, I could hear the recovery teams moving the hydraulic plug extractor into position.
"We'll talk about this later," I said. "I have to take care of something when I get back."
"Okay." He stretched out a little and sank back into his seat. He looked burned out, but his brow was soft and relaxed. It may not have been the closure he was looking for, but at the moment it was probably enough. At least, I hoped so.
"Wanna kiss?" I asked wearily.
"I guess so."
That evening, I was ushered into a small, darkened room somewhere in NERV Central's basement. Like most of NERV's facilities after Third Impact, it hadn't been cleaned in years. The only light came from a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling on the far side of the room. Under it sat a tired, bruised man tied to a chair. One of his cheekbones was broken. By the look of him, I guessed his ribs and legs weren't in good shape either. Little clouds formed in the freezing air from his ragged breaths.
The floor squished as I walked toward the chair. I looked down and noticed that a wet green film had formed over what had once been white tile. I felt spider webs brush across my face twice before I reached light.
This was a room where secrets were kept.
"Glad you could join us, Miss Sohryu."
I nearly jumped when I heard the voice. Theatrical as always, Jinnai had been waiting in the shadows for my arrival. He stepped into the light, holding a gun in his hand.
"Ladies' privilege," he said.
I stared at it for a moment, unsure of what to do.
"Hurry up, Sohryu. I can't afford to keep a counterrevolutionary figurehead around much longer."
I willed myself to take the gun. The man in the chair looked up at me, only mildly surprised.
"You, Asuka? I knew Shinji might be a problem, but you?"
"You should know why," I said.
Winthrop pretended to ponder this for a moment.
"Because I kicked you out of my bed and gave you to Jinnai?"
My hand clenched so quickly that I almost shot myself. Bile filled my throat.
"I was never interested in you," I said. "Either of you. What I did was for my own protection"
"And I only slept with you to keep you loyal," he replied. "Fat lot of good itdid me. In any event, didn't Hans Whatever-his-name-was dump you before I picked you up?"
"You gave him a promotion to stop seeing me, you son of a bitch!" I spat.
"That was probably for the best." He grinned at me through a bleeding mouth. For a moment, I was impressed and unnerved at the same time that he still had the guts to mock me with half the bones in his body broken. I shivered, and not just from the lack of heating.
"How's that?" I asked.
"Sluts like you are a liability for a career soldier."
I brought the pistol butt down on his broken cheekbone. He cried out, but not as loudly as I'd expected him to.
"Try that again," he said. "You've got nothing on Jinnai's people."
"You killed my mother!" I screamed.
For the first time, he looked confused. I smiled grimly.
"You didn't think I knew about that, did you, Wichser?" I said.
"No, I figured as much," he said. "It's just…That's it?"
I didn't think I'd heard the last part correctly.
"Excuse me?"
"You expect me to believe you'd risk your life for a woman who died when you were four years old? Whose only contact with you in the last fifteen years was three minutes in a giant robot? You're joking, right?"
He tried to laugh, but his bruised lungs rebelled against the attempt and he ended up gasping in pain instead.
"No, Asuka…I think you were doing it for somebody else." He seemed lost in thought for a moment. "Jinnai, maybe? No, perhaps not. Some other guy you've been whoring around with recently that I don't know about?"
I ground my teeth and flicked the safety off.
"I'd tell you to ask my mother when you see her, but I don't think you'll run into her where you're going," I said.
He looked me in the eyes and smirked.
"I really doubt that," he said.
I fired until the magazine was empty and his brains were lying somewhere in the darkened half of the room. As usual, he'd gotten the last word.
"You certainly took your sweet time," Jinnai grumbled.
I thrust the gun into his hands.
"Shinji doesn't hear about any of this. Any of it. Understand?"
Jinnai nodded.
"It would be counterproductive to tell him anyway," he said.
I staggered out of the room and waited for my stretcher bearers to carry me back up the stairs. The elevator hadn't worked in years.