Second Impact was mostly so devastating because of its immediate impacts, by way of tsunamis, seismic shocks, and sea level rises, and human responses to them, such as the refugee and resource wars, but it had also had serious documented long-term effects. One was that Antarctica was still largely devoid of life, being flooded with poisonous levels of Adamite LCL. Another was that Earth's orbit had significantly shifted; the equator had tilted and Earth's orbit had become elliptical and moved closer to the sun, with a shorter year of slightly over 364 days. Because most of the Antarctic ice had been vaporised, not only was the sea level higher, but the world had become much more humid. This had upset ecosystems the world over, exacerbating food and especially water crises.
Japan had become a land of eternal summer, which had confused its seasonal plants and wildlife for years. More recently, though, its trees had resumed their traditional rhythm of blossoming. After the barren post-Impact years, hanami had taken on an extra-special meaning, especially for the older generation, showing that not even a global cataclysm could stop life on Earth for long.
"I don't know about this," Shinji said nervously, picking at his yukata. "I look stupid."
"You look adorable," said Misato, who had been looking for an excuse to play dress-up with her charges again ever since the seventh Angel.
"Couldn't I just stick with Western formal? Tie and suit?"
"It's a tradition, Shinji. She'll be expecting a yukata."
Asuka strolled into the doorway, sipping from a juice box. "She'll be expecting you to not be wearing pink, idiot. We're not even going to the gay pride march."
"It's a flower festival," said Misato.
"You say tomayto, I say togayto."
"I can't believe you've lived here for a year and you still don't appreciate Japanese culture."
"And I can't believe how much you appreciate Oktoberfest when you've never even seen Germany."
Misato, who happened to have a Yebisu in hand, set it down and scowled. "For your information, Shinji is going, and if you want to sit around here all night moping, that's your problem."
"Are you stupid?" Asuka asked Shinji. "It takes more than a few minutes for a girl to get dressed for something like that. I don't even have clothes, and don't ask me to wear hers."
"Yeah, you'd need a way bigger push-up for that," said Misato, still sore about the beer crack.
Asuka glared. "And a belt."
Seeing things beginning to deteriorate yet again, Shinji spoke up. "Um, Asuka? I kind of said I'd go with Ayanami."
There was a gentle pop, as Asuka's juice box burst in her fist and spattered across the floor. Shinji made to fetch the mop, but Asuka didn't move aside to let him pass, and one look at her face told him that she wasn't taking it any better than he'd feared.
"What."
"She asked –" said Misato.
"Shut up."
"It was, um, right after the last battle," Shinji said. Asuka, her expression now quite terrifying, began stalking toward him, like a hunting tiger; he circled around her to keep away, and his speech accelerated. "She came and asked me and, um, she wanted to so I said yes."
"You promised you would spend tonight with ME."
"What? N-no I didn't! When did I do that?"
She affected a high-pitched girly tone. "Oh Asuka-chan, no I'm not going to that stupid old festival! I'm so sorry, Horaki-sama, maybe next year!"
"I didn't –" It had never occurred to him that she would interpret that as a promise, although he'd had a gut feeling that she'd go off at him for one reason or another. "It wasn't like that! And I did promise Ayanami. I mean, you could come too, we could all –"
She slapped him, putting her hips into it; the sheer venom knocked him off his feet. "Idiot. If I wanted the Honours Student's cast-offs, you'd be the very last thing I took." She turned and swept out, then went into her room and slammed the door.
Misato gave Shinji an apologetic look and a hand up. He shook for a moment, then threw his SDAT at his futon. It bounced off and scuffed the wall.
"I don't get her," he hissed. "We spend every night together, we barely ever go out or do anything, we just watch TV, she doesn't even let me spend time with Kaworu, and the one time, the one time I decide to do something I want, and which someone else wants, she hits me for it. What does she expect me to do?"
Misato, who could have given an accurate answer, just shook her head. Then she picked up her beer and took a sip.
"And do I have to wear pink?!"
"It's all I have in your size!"
…
Rei and Chitose helped one another adjust their kimonos. Given their egregious fashion senses, the results were middling. Once they had done the best they could, Chitose fetched her phone.
"Kaworu? I know I should have asked earlier, but are you going to the festival?"
Kaworu, who was himself dressed up in elegant black velvet, blinked, seeing a brief mental image of Tokyo-3 reduced to a smoking crater. "If you wanted a date, you really should have asked in advance."
She chuckled. "Not a date, I just want to know whether you'll be there or not. I want to see what it's like. I mean, I suppose that a date might be nice, and I guess that'll be an option for next year, and I should like to because dating sounds interesting – there was one boy from school who had some strong opinions about it – but right now I just want to see what the festival is like."
"I'm sorry, but I have bad news."
"Oh." She put a pout into her voice. "But Kaworu, you know how much I like this sort of thing. Couldn't I owe you a favour? We should do more favours for each other."
He'd actually thought they agreed that he appreciated events like this much more than she did. She'd tried to get into culture to have something more to talk about with him, but it hadn't really stuck. "I meant, I have a prior arrangement."
"You … what. Kaworu. Who's with you?" Her voice slowed and deepened.
"What exactly is your relation to her, anyway?" Hikari asked Kaworu, remembering what he'd said about Chitose being permanently surrounded by crises.
He mouthed 'not now' to her. "Schätzchen, I like her, and I like spending time with her. It doesn't change anything about us, but I have my own life, just like you do."
Hikari frowned.
"You didn't answer my question, Kaworu."
"Yes, because I don't want you to get mad at her."
"I don't get mad."
"The last time you got mad, you hit an Angel in the face with a human thighbone."
Hikari opened her mouth, but caught herself. There was no way she hadn't misheard that.
"I wasn't mad. That was perfectly rational. It was the best weapon I had to hand."
"Missing the point, Schatz."
"You fought her too. Unarmed."
"Yes, other than my Angelic powers. I'd asked Seele to disable the CCTV so I could use them without being seen. I didn't run in with no protection whatsoever and then get the tar beaten out of me."
"You're exaggerating."
He chose not to respond to this. "The second-last time you got mad, you literally destroyed a mountain."
"Are you talking metaphorically?" Hikari asked. Kaworu mouthed 'don't let her hear your voice'; Hikari couldn't lip-read, but got the gist.
"I still wasn't mad. I was upset because that Angel had just torn you in half and you were bleeding to death."
"Thank you again for that, by the way, but the third-last time you got upset, you destroyed another mountain, this time without using an Eva, and this one containing rather a lot of people."
"I'd been stuck there for seven years. I had pent-up frustration."
"My point is that yes, you don't often get violent, but when you do, the results tend to be drastic."
"Fine," Chitose said. "Fine. You can have the damn festival."
"Schatz, please don't –"
She hung up.
Hikari gave him a look. "If it's not too rude to ask … why are you friends with someone like her? She seems to cause a lot of trouble."
"She was my first friend," he said. "After Berlin, when Asuka left, she was the only person my age I knew. And she really isn't a bad person. Besides, she's been under a lot of stress since she arrived in Tokyo-3, and especially since Asuka quit. She tries not to show it, but I'm worried about her."
Hikari wasn't happy that he was so concerned about another girl, but she had to smile anyway. Times like this reminded her why she liked him so much. He really wasn't just a pretty face.
…
Rei gave Chitose a look.
Chitose set her jaw. "Well, festival or no festival, I'm going to experience something new tonight," she said, and they set out.
Shinji was waiting for them downstairs; when he saw them, he waved, and Misato, who had dropped him off, drove away.
"Ayanami, Mogami," he said, then, directed toward the former, "You look really pretty."
This was true. When Rei had gone shopping, she'd had no idea what to get, but an assistant had helpfully recommended a deep blue kimono that went well with her hair. It wasn't perfect, it wasn't even great by the standards of girls who put hours into their appearances, but her natural beauty plus the fact that for once she wasn't wearing her uniform made it look quite magical on her. Like her plugsuit, it showed off the lines of her body, and that she was remarkably well-developed for a girl her age; unlike that and her school uniform, it gave her an air of sophistication and culture, and made her look a few years older.
She normally cut her own hair, but had never put much effort into working out how to make it look nice, so it was usually ragged. For tonight, she had – after much soul-searching – asked her roommate to even it out for her. Chitose, who had briefly experimented with a few hairstyles before deciding to just leave hers unbound, managed a serviceable pixie cut, and even offered to dye it; Rei declined this.
Chitose, for her part, was still splotchy with bruises from the last Angel. As usual, she had ignored the assistant and picked out a kimono that she liked the look of without consideration for how it would look while she was wearing it; the yellow clashed with her eyes and made the unbruised parts of her body look washed-out. Like most tall, skinny girls, she'd had the choice between horribly loose and obscenely short; she had gone for short, and made up the difference with zettai ryoiki stockings. Luckily, she hadn't thought to try makeup.
Still, at some point her pubescent gawkiness had begun maturing into long-limbed elegance. Even with her injuries, she moved gracefully. Her eyes sparkled as she drank in every sight, and she'd finally learnt how to cut out her split ends properly, so her hair was long and flawless.
"Thank you!" she beamed, misinterpreting his meaning. "So do you!"
Shinji frowned. She kept calling him pretty, but never handsome.
"I didn't know you were out of the hospital yet. Misato said that that last Angel …"
"It looked worse than it was."
"She said that it punched you. Angels can destroy battleships by punching them."
"This one wasn't so strong. My ribs are taped, but other than that I was pretty much fine after they tweezed the glass out and gave me some therapeutic massages to help with the bruises. But what about you, what happened to your cheek?" she asked; it was still pink.
"Nothing."
"Did Asuka lose her temper because you're taking Rei?"
"No," he said stubbornly.
"Really? Then why did she slap you?"
"Can we please just drop it and go?"
Chitose shrugged and turned. Over her shoulder, she said, "I'm not actually going to the festival. Promise you'll tell me about it after!" and flounced off down the road.
"Then where is she going, dressed up like that?" Shinji asked Rei, who said nothing. "I guess she's just like that. Shall we go?"
She nodded, and they set off. They didn't hold hands or speak, but still it felt peaceful, in a way that it never did with Asuka, not even before the fifteenth Angel, when her moods starting growing ever more unpredictable. There were crowds in the street, for once; the city had shut down most public transport for the night and put up blocks against cars to allow pedestrians freer access.
Neither of them had ever had much appreciation for just how many people lived in Tokyo-3. Piloting Eva to save the city and the world had always been an abstraction; a thing that gave Shinji worth, or that the Commander ordered. Here, it was emphasised that even in these few square kilometres, there were something like a million people, every one of whom owed their lives to the four Evas.
Neither of them really liked that. They preferred simplicity, and the quiet of their own existence.
The trees, though, were nice. They lined long boulevards west of the central business district; most of the time they were wilted, barely surviving, but after a cool stretch, they had finally blossomed, and now the desolate rows of brown turned to pink of new flowers. White fairy lights were draped across the trees, giving it an eerie radiance.
People had set up stalls along the lane; mostly sweetmeat vendors sending tantalising aromas wafting through the streets, but also handicrafts, clothes, paintings, street games, and assorted bits and pieces. Some sold what they claimed were parts of vanquished Angels, although the pilots couldn't identify which Angel could have dropped the nacreous shell nor the vial of black ichor, and they rather doubted Section Two would allow such a breach of quarantine. Musicians played a mix of traditional, Western classical, and modern pop music.
After a while, the anonymity of a crowd set in, and the pilots relaxed. It wasn't as though they would meet anyone they knew in such a large crowd.
"Shinji!" said Hikari, walking up with Kaworu in tow. "Ayanami! I didn't know you two were an item. Wow, how long?"
"Er," said Shinji. "We just … how did you find us?"
"Are you serious? Ayanami's the only person on Earth whose hair is naturally blue. We spotted you a mile way."
"Oh. Right."
He scanned her outfit. It was also pink, a lighter tone than his, with a lilac pattern, and very well tailored. She'd put her usual pigtails into a short French braid, which made her look older and more mature in the same way Rei's outfit did. Together with Kaworu, who could look stylish wearing a garbage bag, the overall effect was very classy.
"Is Asuka okay with this?" she asked, of him being with Rei. "If you hurt her …"
"I wouldn't say that that was what happened," said Kaworu; by now, Shinji's cheek was close to its normal colour, but Kaworu had good eyes.
"And, um, congratulations," Shinji said. "I didn't know you were going out either."
Hikari blushed prettily. Shinji mentally reclassified her from 'classy' to 'cute'.
"We started while you were at a synch test," said Kaworu. Ritsuko had largely given up scheduling them for him, since he'd kept his ratio at 90 flat for months, having decided that any higher would entail too much risk of sympathetic injury for too little gain in effectiveness. He was more cautious ever since the seventeenth Angel. "She asked me by IM while I was recuperating. Would you mind not telling Chitose?"
"Um, okay. Why not?"
Kaworu looked pointedly at Shinji's sore cheek.
Shinji got the hint. "Right. So, uh. I didn't realise you were so close."
Kaworu glanced at Hikari. "We've shared a lot. We find each other interesting."
"Well, you are a pilot, and everything else," said Hikari. "Do they …" Kaworu gave a nigh-imperceptible shake of his head. "I mean, should we stick together for a bit? You know, like a double date?"
"Er," said Shinji. He glanced to Rei, who said nothing. "Okay?"
The four of them made their way through the crowds, stopping to buy fairy floss, and to listen to the last third of a rendition of Tchaikovsky's piano trio in A minor, which Shinji had once tried to play with Kaworu and Asuka but which had been well beyond them. They dawdled by a karaoke stand which Kaworu wanted to visit, but the other three swiftly vetoed this, before Hikari asked to try goldfish scooping.
…
Asuka lay on a chair, her eyes not really focused. She'd supposedly been watching TV for the past hour, but she couldn't have said what had been on. She occasionally changed the channel randomly, more to give her hand something to do than because she expected it would change anything.
"So that's it, then," she said aloud. "I've lost."
She got up, went to the fridge, cracked open one of Misato's Yebisus, and took a pull. Then she made a face and poured it down the sink, and went back to not watching TV.
More or less involuntarily, she went over the tally again. Over the past few weeks, a backup pilot had not merely broken but utterly crushed her synch rate record, seemingly as an afterthought, as though she could have done it any time she'd wanted, and hadn't only to spare Asuka's feelings. A few minutes later, she'd lost her ability to pilot altogether. She hadn't received any love letters from the boys at school since then; she wouldn't have reciprocated, obviously, but it was impossible not to wonder why they had all at once stopped being attracted to her. And tonight, the one boy who she had thought she could count on had decided he'd rather have a walking mannequin than her. Even her boozehound guardian had run off with the man she used to have a crush on, until she'd realised he was just as self-absorbed as any other adult.
Being the best pilot had been a central part of her self-identity; it had been how she'd proved to the world that she existed as a person, that she wasn't just some worthless pile of bones and flesh. Losing that had hurt, but she'd had enough scraps left to keep herself together. She was the smartest, the prettiest, and everyone loved her. Except, not really. Her grades in school were still lacklustre; she'd never put in the effort to understand kanji. The boys had forgotten about her. Even her faithful Shinji. Even Hikari was too busy mooning over Smarmy to worry about her best friend. Without any of that, she wasn't sure who she was.
"What's even the point?" she asked the TV.
…
"Shinji," Hikari asked quietly, when they were close enough to speak without either of their dates hearing. "I was wondering what things are like between you pilots."
He thought. "Haven't you asked Kaworu or Asuka already?"
She shrugged. Neither of them was impartial enough for the question she had in mind.
"Well. I like Kaworu. We've kept up our duets, you know; do you play anything?" Hikari shook her head. "He's really good. He's been trying to teach me a piece called Quatre Mains."
"Have you seen any of his paintings?" she asked. She deftly scooped another goldfish. She was the most experienced, having been scooping for years.
"He paints?"
"Yes. He's very good, although he doesn't think so. He used to throw his canvases out when he was finished; I made him keep them, or give them to me. I have quite a few by now."
"Huh," said Shinji, surprised to learn about this side of Kaworu that he'd never hinted at before. He tried to snatch a fish, and his poi broke. He looked over at the subject of their conversation. Kaworu had never tried scooping before, but he was naturally graceful enough to be almost as good as Hikari. Rei was watching from a few paces back; he said something to her, to which she didn't reply.
"How about him and the other pilots? He doesn't talk about them much."
"I don't think he gets along very well with the girls. I never see him with any of them."
"None of them?" she pressed.
"Rei isn't paying much attention to him," Shinji pointed out; she was looking at him instead. He flashed her a smile; she blushed, which made him blush in turn.
"Aside from her?"
"Well … we're physically together during synch tests, obviously. Asuka doesn't like him. He calls Chitose a lot, and I know they go out some nights, but he's never asked her along with us. I … I think he feels awkward around her?"
Hikari wondered whether that was because they didn't get on as well as they pretended to, or because they got on even better. "Do you know where they go? Like, to date things, or …?"
Shinji shrugged. "I wouldn't know. But he's here with you right now, isn't he? She didn't even come to the festival."
Suddenly, Hikari felt a lot better. "Yeah. Thanks, Shinji."
They finished up, waved Kaworu and Rei back over, and walked toward a mask stall.
"Hey! Shinji!"
They turned and saw Toji approaching, a girl with a toothy smile under his arm.
"Hey, everyone. These are most of the Eva pilots, and the Class Rep. This is my girlfriend, Yuki."
"You have a girlfriend?" Shinji asked, surprised. "Does everyone?"
"We've been keeping it quiet," Toji said. "Do me a favour and don't tell anyone? Even Kensuke? Especially Kensuke?"
"You must be Ikari Shinji," said Yuki. "Grey hair is Nagisa Kaworu, blue is Ayanami Rei."
"And Horaki," Toji added. "Just be glad there's no red."
"You must have talked about us a lot," Shinji said to Toji.
"Not really," said Yuki. "Well, I mean, yeah, a bit, obviously, but you're the guys who pilot the robots that fight the things that keep trying to destroy the city. You're kind of famous."
"We are?"
"You didn't realise?" said Hikari. "How could you not be famous, with all that?"
"Right?" said Yuki. "I'd've thought you'd get random girls walking up and trying to swap undies for autographs all the time." Hikari turned pink.
"Maybe we would if ever we actually managed to stop the city being destroyed," said Kaworu, who had actually had that happen once, shortly after the fourteenth.
Shinji opened his mouth to protest, except that on second thoughts the previous four Angels had all at least damaged it, and the last had stopped blowing it up not because they defeated it but because it managed to bypass their security.
"You can't talk about it, can you?" Yuki asked. "Toji-chan said so. But there's still a lot of bootleg footage of the battles, you know, shopkeepers with CCTV that they upload to YouTube, that sort of thing. We were just watching the laser dick one a few nights ago; he told me what happened inside the robot. That was pretty hardcore."
"Er, thanks," said Shinji, who had tried to repress that particular nugget of trauma.
"Huh? Shinji?" came a familiar voice.
"Oh, crap," said Toji, shifting the arm he had around Yuki to her forearm so they could run. "Sorry we've gotta –"
At that moment, Kensuke pushed his way through the crowd and stopped short.
"Oh," he said. "Toji. And Yuki."
Hikari opened her mouth, then promptly shut it again.
"I guess this explains a lot."
"Wait," said Toji. "It's not what it looks like."
"It looks like you've been going out with the girl I liked for, what, six months, behind my back."
"Okay … yes, but it's not like that."
Yuki sighed and touched Toji's arm, couple-code for 'let me handle this'. "Kensuke, you're sweet, but we had no chemistry. We were never going to work out."
"Didn't keep you off my best friend, though."
"Hey, you don't get to tell me who I can date," she said, hackles rising. "I like him, he likes me. If you don't like it, tough. And don't you dare take it out on him, either. Your hurt feelings about not marrying the first girl you asked out don't mean you get to tell him who he can date, either."
"Hey, will you keep it down?" said a middle-aged man passing them. "Some of us are trying to enjoy the hanami."
Kensuke rolled his eyes and turned. "Whatever," he said over his shoulder, before pushing his way through the crowd.
He didn't care where he went, only that he was too angry to enjoy anything or want to be near anyone. In spite of his interests, he was too gentle to vent by kicking anything or even shouting. He made it down to where the fifth Angel had fallen; the area was central and had been repaired, except for one little fenced-off patch which the city council had kept as a memorial, with cracked concrete and slivers of broken glass. It matched his mood well.
"That had to suck," said a man, who came and sat next to him.
Kensuke glanced at him long enough to not recognise him, and went back to staring at the memorial, not saying anything and hoping the man would take the hint and leave.
"So, let me guess. You thought it would be worth at least checking out the hanami, see what we old people were so excited about, because it hasn't happened in your lifetime. What do you think?"
"It's stupid."
The man nodded. "Yeah, I never liked it either. Plants aren't really my thing."
"What are you doing here, then?"
"Eh. It's not about that. It's about going to a party, any excuse. Life sucks, but you have to make the best of it."
Kensuke said nothing.
"Not that that helps you at all. You have to have time to get angry and hate both of them before you can get over it. No point even thinking about that part of it yet."
"Why are you still talking to me?"
"I guess you remind me of myself, when I was your age. You're Aida Kensuke, right?"
"You know me?" Kensuke asked, interested in spite of himself.
"A bit. I'm a coworker of some of your classmates, if you know what I mean. I read your file. I liked a lot of the same things you do. Still do. And I sucked at talking to people. I was scrawny, couldn't play sports, the biggest otaku in school. Eventually I graduated and got a job where I … well, where I know some of your classmates pretty well. Being a teenager sucks, and there's not really anything you can do about it. But it's not forever."
"This isn't about being a teenager. This is about my best friend lying to me."
"One thing your file didn't say was why you two were friends. You don't seem to have much in common. Other than Shinji."
"It was like … you know when the teacher tells you to get into pairs? And you're the one left over?"
The man chuckled. "Thanks a lot. I spent the last fifteen years repressing that."
"We were left over. And he's not – he wasn't a bad guy. Not perfect, you know, but who is?"
"No-one I've ever met."
"They weren't even wrong, you know? She wasn't anything like me. The one time we did go out was boring. We would have broken up anyway. I mean, you can't date someone unless you like them at least a little bit, can you?"
"Sure. I mean, you can't hold out for a soul mate, either. They say that there's even odds your soul mate died in Second Impact. And I've only ever known one woman into the military," he added wistfully. "But you'll meet someone you have fun with, eventually. Maybe go for someone who likes other technology? It's good to date people who show you new things."
"Tsh. I thought I did. Then it turned out she was already engaged. At our age. To this other guy I know, too. Can you believe it?"
"I wish I couldn't. The good women are all already taken. There's this one girl I've liked for years, and she's just started going out with this guy she knew from college, a real scumbag. I never had a chance. You know, it's probably a good thing we left early. I hate seeing couples together at nights like this. Right?"
"They aren't there together," said Kensuke. "I know her boyfriend, and he was with a bunch of other people." He thought back to the scene: other than Toji and Yuki, there had been Kaworu, Shinji, Rei, and Hikari. He tried to work out how those four met. Maybe the pilots had all gone together, and Asuka and Chitose had run off somewhere, and then they'd run into Hikari?
"Oh. Guys' night out. I guess she's with some girlfriends, then?"
Kensuke shrugged irritably. "Maybe? How should I know?"
"Well, didn't you say you liked her?"
"But she's engaged."
"Yeah, but you can still hang out, can't you? You said you had fun together. And if the other guy isn't with her now, he can't be all that possessive."
"Yeah, but," said Kensuke.
"But, you were thinking of her as a girlfriend, so once that fell through, you stopped thinking about her at all?"
"… I was angry that she didn't tell me earlier," he said, defensive.
"I'm not criticising. It's your choice. And I probably would have done the same for mine, if I didn't have to see her every day at work. It's just that I do like her, and I know I'd be less happy if I never saw her again, even if seeing her hurts. That's part of what it means to be human." His phone chimed. "Well. Speak of the devil. I've got to go."
"Another attack?"
"Yeah. But not on us."
…
"Don't look."
"I have to."
"Don't."
"If I don't, the world will end."
"It'll be worth it."
"Give me my phone."
"No."
"Give it to me."
"That I can do."
She snatched the phone from his hand. "Damn. Damn, damn, double-damn."
"Angel?"
"If I say yes, will you tell Seele?"
"Do you think they won't find out anyway? And you know we'll need an in with them soon."
"Urgh."
"You know, they won't miss you for fifteen minutes."
"No … mm …"
…
Makoto walked onto the bridge, which only contained Shigeru.
"Nice," said Shigeru, of Makoto's dark grey yukata.
"I didn't take time to change. Where is everyone?"
"Maya's still on psych leave. I don't know where Doctor Akagi is; the Commander went off with her to do some experiment, but they should have been back hours ago, even without the alert. The Subcommander was here, but he wandered off … somewhere. And Major Katsuragi's not here yet. We'll get everything prepped and hope one of them shows up soon."
"Right." Makoto booted up his terminal. "What's the situation?"
"You know Akagi's robot submarines, in Antarctica? I was on duty for them tonight. One detected a blue blood pattern, just before it was destroyed. I set others to investigate. One by one, they were destroyed. One of them lasted just long enough to confirm it was azure."
"The mother of the yellow Angel critters," Makoto guessed.
"I'm thinking it was probably a critter, not the Angel itself. Those probes were equipped to detect AT Fields, and didn't, just the blood type. Probably the mother is near that point, and the latest critter is guarding her and took out the subs. Its Field hasn't yet matured, so it doesn't attack the Angel; just before it does, it'll head here."
"They're close to indestructible now, with all that armour," said Makoto, and queried Magi. "It says here that, going by past patterns, the next one should attack soon. We have maybe a few days before it arrives. What do we do?"
"Knowing the Major, I'm guessing we'll attack first," said Shigeru, leafing through UN military schematics. "The obvious thing would be a diving raid, like with the eighth, but off a ship. There's only one ship with the power infrastructure for an Eva that could make it there within a few hours. Asuka's old friend, the Over the Rainbow. They had it running recon for the critters, that's where we got forewarning from the last, remember?"
"We can't requisition it without Misato's orders," Makoto said. He tried to call her, but her phone rang without an answer. "She's not picking up. Do you think she's alright? This isn't like her."
"Tell Section Two. I'm going to try to figure out if we can deploy any pilots."
There was a long list of regulations, which had come from the Commander's office and which seemed entirely arbitrary to Shigeru, about how Evas could be used. Unit-00 wasn't allowed out of the Geofront; perhaps that was fair enough, as it was only a prototype, and wasn't fully compatible with third-generation infrastructure. Ever since the seventeenth Angel, Unit-01 wasn't allowed off Honshu; Fuyutsuki had said something vague about protecting critical assets, presumably meaning that it would be embarrassing if they lost their strongest Eva at the bottom of the ocean due to an equipment malfunction. That left the two production models. With Asuka unable/unwilling to pilot, that meant Kaworu or Chitose.
In his debriefing after the eighteenth Angel, Kaworu insisted that he heard an alarm and headed out to the cages; the Angel ambushed him en route and dropped the ceiling over him, miraculously not crushing him. When Chitose was interviewed, she pointed out that she was still banned from piloting, so she'd gone looking for Kaworu, and it had thrown her through a door. There was mysteriously no CCTV footage, but it had been obvious to an irritated Misato that both were telling half-truths, not least because they happened to be the only people who'd run into the Angel and survived. Still, Kaworu wasn't blacklisted, and Chitose was. Shigeru made the call.
Kaworu answered on the fourth ring. "Hello? I see. Yes, I'll – one moment, please." He checked his screen: a text had just arrived from a contact whose name was written '?'.
[You must not pilot Eva.]
"I'm afraid it's impossible," he said aloud. "I can't pilot now; I wouldn't be able to synchronise."
"What? But you had a test barely a week ago, and you got a synch rate of 90% again."
"Even so."
"Just come in, will you?"
"What was that about?" Makoto asked, putting his own phone down.
"The Fourth says he can't pilot."
"Did he say why?"
"Something about synchronisation, but he didn't go into details."
Makoto thought. "We still don't know how he can set his rate to 90 and leave it there. Maybe whatever he does to synch won't work right now?"
"What else are we going to do?"
"Ask for a spare."
They considered this, then, wordlessly, played a round of paper-scissors-rock. Shigeru lost, made a face, and tried a second call. Makoto set about prepping Unit-03.
Kaworu arrived a few minutes later, suited up, and made his way to Unit-03. Fuyutsuki showed up again, giving no explanation of where he'd been, and took command. Kaworu climbed into the plug and waited while they powered up the mecha.
"Eva is active," Shigeru reported.
"With a synchronisation score of zero point zero percent," Makoto read out.
"Is that possible?" Shigeru wondered. "I heard that even if you stick some random guy off the street in a plug, they could still get a few percent, just not enough to clear the absolute borderline."
"Are you even trying?" Fuyutsuki asked Kaworu, irritated.
"As hard as I can," Kaworu said blandly.
Fuyutsuki harrumphed. He could see where this was going. With Kaworu bowing out, that left them with exactly one option. He had a fairly good idea of what the outcome of the battle would be. Still, he wasn't the sort to leave any stone unturned. "Eject, and try in Unit-02."
"Sir?" Makoto said, surprised. "He's never been synchronised with any other Eva before."
"The Commander's standing orders are to defeat the Angels at all costs, and not to allow the Fifth Child to pilot," Fuyutsuki said. "We have no choice."
Kaworu climbed into Unit-02's plug. It smelt sterile, dead. Asuka hadn't been in it for three weeks. It screwed into Eva's back, and there was a burst of neural static.
"Oh," he murmured. He glanced at the cockpit microphone, and static obscured his words from Central Dogma. "Pleased to meet you, Kyoko. At home, I think. She's afraid of you. A mutual friend says she said you tried to murder her when you were still human." He listened for a while. "Aaah. That explains a lot. Yes. I promise I'll tell her, the next time I see her. Yes." He dropped the white noise. "How am I doing?" he asked Central Dogma.
"Zero," said Misato, appearing in his HUD.
"Major Katsuragi," Kaworu said. "I was wondering where you were."
Kaji was behind Misato, looking smug. "She dropped her phone behind the fridge," he said.
"You were at 50% earlier," Shigeru said with annoyance.
"It can't be helped," Kaworu said.
Chitose's face appeared in his HUD. "I suppose that means I'm up."
Her hair was unkempt, her limp was more pronounced than earlier that night, and she'd had grass stains on her kimono. She had arrived with Misato and Kaji and been decidedly vague about what she'd been doing all night.
"I suppose so," Kaworu said gravely. "memento mori, Schatz."
"… Thanks," she said, a little grudgingly, as though he'd wished her luck.
Fuyutsuki, who was the only other person present who knew any Latin, blinked.
Misato frowned, two facets of her personality at war. Kaworu wouldn't pilot. Chitose was dangerous and sometimes a liability. Misato's mission was to destroy the Angels. Her threat estimate of Chitose had steadily ratcheted upward ever since they met, and hadn't actually plateaued. If she was good at one thing, it was destruction. The Commander wouldn't like it. She had to destroy the Angels.
"Is whatever's affecting Kaworu going to affect you too?" Misato asked.
"No. Shall I prove it?"
"You might as well, although you won't be launching from here either way. Go ahead."
Chitose entered the cages and climbed into Unit-03. Kaworu nodded to himself. His work here was done. He ejected and set off for the showers.
"94.9%," Makoto reported.
Misato set her eyebrows. She'd known all along that Kaworu was holding back, given he could set his synch rate as high as he liked. Ever since the seventeenth Angel, she'd realised that Chitose had been, too. She'd wanted to stay under the radar and had deliberately kept her synch rate low, except when she needed a little more power. At this point, though, her cover was well and truly blown. The only question was whether she could raise it past two hundred at will, or if that could only happen when she was completely enraged.
"Fine," Misato said. "Mogami, you're piloting for this mission. Search and destroy. We've found the twelfth Angel."
…
Evas were at the upper limit of what was possible to fit onto an aircraft for long flights; the engineering details had only been worked out between when Asuka and Unit-03 had arrived. Short-distance deployments, such as to the beach at Sagami Bay, were handled by rocket-assisted aircraft, but it would be prohibitive to carry enough fuel for more than a few tens of kilometres. Instead, to support a five thousand ton robot required JATO and ramjets to cruise at several times the speed of sound. There was no way to hope to land something moving that fast on a carrier's relatively short runway, so Unit-03 had to be jettisoned into the ocean and recovered. The dropship could barely take off at all, so all the accoutrements had to be removed and carried by a second plane: its prog knives, a waterproofed needle gun, the plug, its cable and other power paraphernalia, the D-type equipment, whose cooling subsystem they had repurposed as heating, additional armour plates that would double as ballast, and of course the pilot.
"Why is he here?" Chitose asked Misato, of Kaji, during the flight down.
"That's a good question," said Misato. She had had to come in person in case this Angel turned out to have long-range jamming abilities, to browbeat any intransigent navy men, and to watch Kaji.
"I'm here because Seele wants me to keep an eye on both of you," Kaji said, looking out a window.
"I see," Chitose said, slowly, connecting him with Kaworu's veiled warning.
"I'm still not going to do anything to you," he said. "You fought an Angel bare-handed, and you're still alive. I'm not completely stupid."
"I hope not," she said, although this was untrue: it would mean that, rather than have to worry about an obvious threat, she'd have to worry about one that was completely invisible and would likely blindside her at the worst possible moment.
When the girl was out of earshot to go to the bathroom (a process complicated by the one-piece plugsuit), Kaji continued talking to Misato, in a low tone barely audible over the plane's jets and the howl of hypersonic wind. "Seele, however, is planning to make a move here."
"It's about time," she said. "I'm sick of waiting. What is it?"
"On the bright side, there's not going to be a whole lot more waiting. I think things are about to start moving very quickly. If things go right, I might be able to get us all out alive."
"So might I, if you tell me what's going to happen."
Kaji shook his head. "You need to focus on killing the Angel. But I'm going to need you to trust me. I know, I know. But soon, I'm going to give you an order, and I won't have time to explain it. You'll have to obey it exactly."
She said nothing.
The water around Antarctica was still stained red; there was a gradient between it and the rest of the blue ocean, showing how far it could seep before it decomposed into its chemical constituents. Civilians believed it was from some sort of salt pigment from the meteorite that supposedly caused Second Impact. For years, Nerv had thought it was LCL leaked from Adam, but that didn't make sense any more, since Adam was a dormant embryo ten thousand kilometres away. In truth, it was the twelfth Angel's secretions, turning the hostile saltwater environment into an Adamite LCL bath that allowed it and its children to thrive, while they matured and prepared to seek out the Seeds. It was more of a murky brown than red or orange now, during the permanent winter twilight; the sun wouldn't rise so far south for months.
Unit-03 threw a colossal splash when it impacted the surface of the ocean. Hazmat-suited soldiers aboard the Over the Rainbow hurried to shoot grapples around it and bring it aboard the carrier, while the support craft slowed and landed more elegantly.
Chitose shivered while the men worked at preparing Eva for sortie. Even inside the heated cabin, even with her thermal plugsuit, she could feel the bitter cold on her face. Misato donned one of the heavily insulated NBC suits to direct the prep; in five minutes, Eva was ready. Chitose donned a pressurised helmet, a hose connecting it to an oxygen pack on her back, and set out for the entry plug. Inside, she removed the helmet and inhaled the purified Lilithian LCL. The burst of neural static signalled synchronisation; she attached the power cable, pulled on the extra armour and D-type equipment, and sealed it, then pressed the button on her wrist so that her suit would balloon up and her body would properly mimic Eva's.
"I remember the footage of when Asuka used this suit against the eighth Angel," she said, twisting around to get a feel for how much clumsier she would be. "But we're not going to try to capture this one."
"There's no point," said Misato, from the carrier's bridge. Kaji stood beside her. Admiral Kuznetsov glared at them both from across the room; he'd never forgiven Nerv for making him look a fool with the sixth and fifteenth Angels. "There are only two Angels left after this one, and we know enough about them by now." Or only one more, accounting for the ten point fifth. "The data wouldn't be worth the risk to both of us. Besides, it's already full-grown; we couldn't contain it anyway."
Chitose nodded, put her knives into the suit's holsters (they had been heavily reinforced after Asuka lost her knife in Mt Asama), and picked up the gun.
"How does the Eva feel?"
"It's fine," said Chitose, tracing along where the seventeenth Angel's teeth had bitten it almost in two. The repair work was seamless. "No damage that I can feel, and the flight over hasn't torn anything. The scuba's annoying, but I'll manage. Are we ready?"
"When you are," said Misato.
Chitose dropped off the carrier. It was so cold that even salt water would have frozen solid, but apparently not Adamite LCL. The heating wasn't for the pilot, whose plug was well-insulated; Eva itself couldn't operate so far below freezing.
"I hope we can stay for a while," she said. "I love astronomy; I've always wanted to see the auroras, and it's best during the winter night. It's a shame it's a new moon; I'd like to see how the full moon looks from down here. But even this is pretty in its own way, you know? Endless seas of orange-red …"
"They say it's the blood of those who died," said Kuznetsov, hoping to unsettle her.
"It isn't," Chitose said, with the air of a tour guide describing a local wine-making process. "It's the blood of one who is about to die. moritura nos salutat," she added, even though no-one else present knew any Latin, because she still had Kaworu's warning on her mind.
Kuznetsov put his hand over the radio. "What is wrong with her?"
"How long do you have?" Kaji asked.
"We've been wondering that for months," Misato agreed, and reactivated the radio. "Mogami. The submarines were destroyed in a rough circle about our position. Once you hit bottom, begin a spiral search pattern."
"Couldn't I just go straight toward the AT Field?"
"You can tell where it is?"
"Eva projects its own, right? So it can feel the interference patterns whenever there's another nearby, like how if you hold a magnet you can feel where a second magnet is by the force it exerts on yours. With a decent synch rate, pilots can piggyback on Eva's senses. Are we not supposed to be able to?"
"Mogami," Misato said. The girl was exhausting. "Where is the target?"
"It's hard to tell the distance; I can't see down here, so I don't really have any depth perception, and I don't have a reference for this Field. The direction is down and, ah, west of here. Call it eighty degrees west of north? Shall I swim toward it, or wait until I hit the seabed and walk?"
"Walk," said Misato. "The spawns have those paddle-like feet; I'm guessing they're better swimmers than you are."
"Got it."
"Depth at one kilometre," reported a ship science officer.
"Nothing on sonar?"
"Not yet."
"How deep is the floor here?" Chitose asked.
"Can the sonar pick up the bottom?" Misato asked the officer.
"Yes. It's rocky down there. Between fourteen and sixteen hundred metres."
"It feels like it's about forty-five degrees downward," Chitose said. "So, half a klick horizontally?"
There came a ping. The officer spoke up. "Large object detected inbound to Eva. Belay that, multiple large objects."
Chitose slung her gun over her back and drew a prog knife in either hand: the gun only had eight rounds and couldn't be reloaded underwater.
"Mogami, try to disengage ASAP," Misato ordered. "The primary target is whatever's making them. Destroy it, and the others will supposedly die by themselves. Besides, it'll take too long, and without AT Fields they can't hurt you anyway."
"Roger." Chitose holstered one knife. "How many is multiple?"
"At least two," said the officer.
"Really."
"They're too close together. I can't make them out. Not more than five, probably three or four? They're closing."
Chitose turned on her headlight; it couldn't penetrate far through the thick LCL, but she could make out the approaching silhouettes.
Misato had been right: the spawns were fast underwater. Three of them swarmed Unit-03, and bounced off its AT Field.
"This must be how the Angels feel," Chitose said. "Being battered by things that can't do anything at all to me. I don't think I'm going to be able to disengage: they're faster than me. Which is also how the Angels must feel."
"So do what they do, and deal enough damage to one to scare the rest off."
"If they don't have AT Fields yet, I don't think they know how to be afraid." The mini-Angels kept attacking, without effect. "Do I even need to care? They can't do anything."
"Yes, because the Angel proper will bring down your AT Field, leaving you vulnerable."
Chitose nodded, and seized one of the Angels. She threw off its mates again with her Field, spun it round, found a patch of yellow on a hind leg without any armour studs, and stabbed into it. It thrashed at her; she dug her suit's clamps into the cut and pulled it open, like someone who cut open plastic wrapping to get purchase for tearing it off. The leg split apart.
"That's enough," Misato said.
"I haven't done enough damage to scare it off yet," Chitose said, like a schoolgirl telling her mother she couldn't go to a family picnic because she had homework.
"My God," said Kuznetsov, watching her methodically tear the leg apart.
One of the other spawns had got around behind her. Flailing against her AT Field, its claw went wide and sliced through one of her coolant pipes. Chitose gave an annoyed cluck and threw the injured Angel away, a moment before hitting the ocean bottom.
An alarm sounded. "The damaged pipe isn't working at all," said a tech. "The pressure's there, but no flow … I think it's frozen solid. That's 60/40 antifreeze in there!"
Chitose holstered her knife and drew her needle gun. One by one, she flipped her assailants under her and shot their feet, pinning them to the ocean floor. She turned back toward the Angel.
"Can you melt it with the power cable?" Misato asked.
"No, the hardware's not set up for that. And we can't modify it while it's down there."
"Sonar's picking up a large rock formation dead ahead of you, it's … oh. Wow."
Veiled by the orange-red ocean, the Angel slowly came into sight. Larger than even the thirteenth, it was like a massive bivalve, with two halves pointing upward, high enough to look like a rock shelf on sonar. The shell was decorated with a pattern with ten orbs, joined by ornate branches, like some impossible tree. Chitose approached slowly.
"Her sons grew like pearls inside her," she murmured, running her hand along its shell. It was room temperature to the touch, and seemed to hum gently. "She is weak; she depended on them to achieve Instrumentality."
"Mogami," said Misato. "What are you talking about?"
"I'm not much of a poet. My brain just doesn't work that way. But I still think there's something poetic about her. We're sort of the same, her and me. We're both alone, really, no matter what we want, even if we surround ourselves with others, and …"
"It's an Angel, Mogami. Don't … anthropomorphise it. Destroy it."
"… we both want to live. I'm honestly sorry." And with that, she drove her knife into the Angel.
The blade snapped off at the hilt. She was left holding a broken piece of metal, feeling foolish.
"So it's too tough to cut into," Misato said. "If it's like a mollusc, there's probably a hinge of soft tissue at the base. The core is probably inside."
"Second coolant pipe blocked!" reported a tech. "The ice is spreading inside!"
"Not an issue. The suit will protect her for long enough. Mogami, proceed."
"Incoming large object," said the sonar tech. "One of the spawns is loose."
"Deal with the primary target. Once it's down, they'll be defenceless."
Chitose crouched in the bulky suit, trying to get under the Angel, but if there was a hinge, she couldn't see it. She thrust her remaining knife in and jiggled it around, without effect.
The spawn swum up behind her. A moment before it rammed her, she felt the Angel dedicate its entire AT Field to neutralising hers.
"Oh," she murmured, in the moment before the spawn tore into her back.
The girl tried to wrestle the monster off, but the D-type equipment was too cumbersome. The spawn aimed directly for her entry plug; she thrashed hard, and it missed and instead carved gouges into her back, thighs, and waist. She gasped in pain and hit a button; explosives blew the diving suit's seals open, and it broke apart.
Several things happened very quickly. Her suit automatically deflated to its normal skin-tight conformation; Unit-03's four eyes were crushed under a hundred and fifty atmospheres of pressure; the spawn seized her in a bearhug; and she got a proper grip on her knife, stabbed it into a weak point under the spawn's right shoulder, then tore it open and fired her shoulder spike cannons, ripping it apart. She flipped around and kicked it away.
"Makoto?" Misato asked.
"The damage looks bad but not critical from here," replied Makoto, who was monitoring Eva and Chitose's vitals from Central Dogma with Shigeru, "but without the D-type, Magi estimates two minutes before Eva locks up. If the power cable comes loose, she'll be stranded down there."
"Then keep going," Misato ruled. She turned to one of the naval officers. "Be ready to winch her back in on my mark."
"Unh," said Chitose, her eyes scrunched shut, panting with pain. She half-paddled, half-climbed one-handed up the Angel's outer shell. Purple ichor leaked out of her wounds into the ruddy sea.
"The second spawn is loose and inbound," said the sonar operator.
"Mogami, we have no visuals any more. Do you still have the gun?"
She dropped back down, patted the ground in search of it, found it still attached to the diving gear, tucked it under her knife arm, and resumed climbing the Angel. The second spawn barrelled into her from behind; blind, she flailed at it, and managed to kick it down, propelling herself upward. It jumped back at her and stabbed a paw into her abdomen, tearing out what would have looked like intestines to anyone watching; she stabbed wildly at it until she found a gap in its armour, then shoved the entire knife in, pulled the wound flaps shut over it, and kicked it away. The spawn thrashed itself apart around the sonic weapon.
"Armour badly compromised," Makoto said. "Eva's taken critical internal damage. And you have about a minute before it locks up from the cold. Magi recommends you withdraw, repair, and try again later."
"No," Chitose whispered, her voice shaking with pain, holding her Eva's stomach closed. "Even stronger next time. Now."
"Third spawn inbound," said the sonar tech.
"Hurry," said Misato.
Chitose made it to the top of the Angel. She felt around, forced her fingertips into the gap between the Angel's two shells, and pulled. The shell gave a little, slowly, and she got her feet into the gap. With a sob, she wrenched the shell open; she couldn't see, but inside was the red core like a pearl, and, beside it, a half-formed foetus that would one day become another spawn. She drew her gun, aimed directly downward, and emptied her magazine. She scored three direct hits, on the foetus. It burst apart.
"Blue pattern unchanged," Makoto reported. "You missed the core. Major, you have to pull her out! Thirty seconds!"
"No," said Misato. "We can finish this now."
The cold had made Eva clumsier; Chitose's fine motor control was gone, she had to rely on gross movements. She dropped into the Angel and kicked off downward. The third spawn reached her at the same moment she touched the core; it drove its claws into Unit-03's back, tearing the muscles around the shoulder blade. She mule-kicked at it, crying, twisting around so it couldn't get a good angle to target the plug, and bashed the Angel's core again and again with her elbows, as the spawn tore through her armour and pulled out Eva's internal organs, one by one, and then ripped an arm out of its socket, and then a leg.
"That's done it," Makoto said, speaking quickly. "Its core is destabilising, it's going to blow in eight seconds."
"Eva won't survive the explosion," Shigeru said.
"Mogami!" Misato cried. "Raise your Field or get out of there!"
Kaji seized Misato's shoulder and whispered in her ear. "Now. Eject her plug."
Misato blinked. For an underwater mission, they had used a buoyant plug; it achieved buoyancy by having barely enough armour to survive the water pressure, and the spawn could get her with a spite swipe. Besides, Unit-03 would be doomed without a pilot to raise an AT Field.
"Trust me," he said.
She sent the ejection command.
The next thing Chitose knew was violent desynchronisation and G-forces, as the plug's ejection rockets kicked in. "Wha – what's going –"
The spawn followed her plug as it shot out of the dying Eva, and whipped its claws around it. A moment later, the Angel's core cracked, and it, the spawn, and Eva turned into crosses of orange light.
"Chitose!" Misato shouted into the mike, forgetting herself, before Kaji took her wrist and pulled her away. The carrier rumbled with the shockwave; bits of machinery shrieked in protest and broke apart.
"We need an evac plane ready ASAP," he told Kuznetsov, flashing his UN ID, which gave him a truly ridiculous amount of authority over anyone who wasn't in Seele's top ranks. "Make it a Snapdragon. We'll give advice on clean-up remotely; stand by for orders."
Kuznetsov gave them a sour look as they left the bridge. As soon as they were out of eyeshot, Misato pulled her gun on Kaji.
"Seele didn't need Unit-03 to exist after this battle," Kaji whispered, very quickly and clearly. "They planted a bomb on the flight over. There were two other agents here with remotes; they set it off when the Angel went. They want her dead at all costs."
"That's insane. What about the last two Angels?"
"Can we please stop pretending that the virus one never happened? One Angel, and if she dies, they'll have complete control of it. They don't need this carrier to exist any more, either, so hurry up and get to the plane!"
The Snapdragon AWACS craft rolled out to the flight deck at the same time that the entry plug bobbed to the surface, crumpled, scratched, leaking, but intact. Misato, back in her HAZMAT suit, threw a lifesaver with a rope over, while Kaji climbed into the cockpit and skimmed the pre-flight checklist. Chitose, her helmet back on and suit re-pressurised, opened the plug, deflated her suit again, and staggered over to the lifesaver; Misato and two seamen pulled her up.
"Ow," said Chitose, her voice trembling. "What happened?"
Misato wrapped an arm around her, pulled her along to the plane, and helped her in. Sailors were thick on the deck, repairing machinery damaged by the exploding Angel; no-one paid the Nerv team much attention. Kaji pressed buttons, and the cockpit closed over.
"Unh?" Chitose asked.
Two other aircraft lifted off the carrier. Kaji's eyes widened.
"Buckle up," he said. "Hurry."
The plane was large, but had few seats; Misato sat Chitose in the copilot's seat and belted her in, then assumed the brace position at the back of the cabin. Kaji hit the engines; they were pressed backward by the G-force as he shot to the end of the runway and into the sky.
Chitose took off her helmet; her face was pale and drawn from pain and exhaustion, her eyes bloodshot from sympathetic irritation, her cheeks wet with tears. "What happened? Why did I eject? Did you do a remote override? Is that it for Unit-03?"
"In a minute," said Kaji, concentrating on flying, "because, yes, and oh my absolutely yes. Now quiet down and let me think. We have until we make it to Tokyo-3 Airport to work out how to stop Seele from killing all of us and Nerv."
Chitose blinked. She turned to Misato, meaning to ask whether they could trust him at all, but was interrupted by the Over the Rainbow blowing up.
It looked like an ammo dump accident, at first. A plume of flame and shrapnel rose up out of its centre; men, planes, and assorted equipment flew off into the water in pieces. The fore and aft halves tilted and began sinking. Moments later, more explosions went off. Fuel sprayed everywhere and caught fire; the support ships backed off and watched helplessly as the proud carrier went down with all hands.
The women watched as it sank. Then the voice of the man with the yellow hologram crackled over the radio.
"Agent Kaji. Can you confirm the death of the rebel?"
"Major Katsuragi's with me," Kaji said. "And the Fifth Child is deceased, repeat, confirmed deceased. She was on the Over the Rainbow when it went up. Over."
"Ah. What a tragic waste. Report to Tokyo-3."
"Yes, sir. Over and out." Kaji rested his head on one hand, still paying attention to the plane. "Scratch that. We have until they realise you're alive before they blow us out of the sky, or until we land, and the entire UN army will be waiting for us."