this project is dedicated to RACHAEL L. MAYO artist - fan - friend 1983.11.15 - 2003.03.01 -><- 1947: A vehicle believed to be an alien spacecraft crashes at Roswell, New Mexico. 1948: In response to the information gathered from the Roswell incident, the United Nations technology policy group SEELE founds an international military force, X-COM, to study alien technologies and develop defense strategies against possible invasion. Since nothing much happens for the next fifty years, the organization lapses into ill-funded obscurity, but is never disbanded. 1999: A series of incidents believed to be part of a global alien invasion prompts a major increase in the funding and importance of the nearly-forgotten X-COM. The group's struggle against the alien enemy, mostly shrouded in governmental cover-ups, is nicknamed "the Hidden War" by those who fight it. 2000: A celestial event unprecedented in history causes the destruction of Antarctica, touching off a global cataclysm that will leave three billion people dead by the end of the year. The world governments' cover story to the public is that the event was a cometary impact, dubbed "the Second Impact" in reference to the Yucatan meteor impact believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs. 2001: The special technology group NERV is founded under SEELE to operate in parallel with X-COM, studying the true causes of the Second Impact and developing technologies from the artifacts found in the so-called "impact zone". 2004: Yui Ikari, one of the chief scientists of NERV, is murdered by Jacqueline Natla, executive director of SEELE. 2014: Anticipating the possibility of another Impact Event, NERV completes development of the mobile weapon platform EVANGELION. It is discovered that the only people with the psionic talent necessary to operate this weapon are children conceived at or about the time of the Second Impact. These children are identified by a worldwide search operating under the cover of an educational testing agency, the Marduk Foundation. 2015: A huge creature of unknown origin attacks the NERV headquarters city of Worcester-3. It is codenamed "the Third Angel" and repulsed by Evangelion Unit 01 under the command of Derek J. "DJ" Croft, the Fifth Child identified by the Marduk report and an initially reluctant NERV recruit. The incident sparks what NERV dubs "the Angel War". During the following series of confrontations with Angels, the efforts of Croft and his fellow pilots, as well as others within NERV, unravel the web of conspiracy and coverup which surround SEELE. TODAY: APRIL 1, 2016: X-COM and NERV join forces and break away from SEELE and the UN under the aegis of the British Crown. NERV's operations flee to Canada, escaping Worcester-3 minutes before an all-out SEELE-backed invasion by US military forces. X-COM MILITARY INTELLIGENCE BUREAU SECURE STATION XC.001.03094 DEPARTMENT OF SPECIAL SERVICES Connecting, please wait... HAL_0405 CRITICAL UPDATE SITUATION A-3 FRIDAY 1 APRIL 2016 23:11:39 GMT BEGIN IMAGE FEED BEGIN IMAGE FEED BEGIN IMAGE FEED In a darkened bedroom on the far side of the world, a teenage girl in striped pajamas sat watching a video display. She sat on the edge of her bed, her elbows on her knees, chin propped up in her hands, and watched with rapt attention as images flickered across the screen. They were grainy and blurry, in some cases with color almost completely washed out, and their audio was just as bad, soaked in digital flanging and sometimes almost indistinguishable. The sequence had been grabbed from some pretty dubious sources and edited hurriedly, but she'd watched it a dozen times already, and this wouldn't be the last time. She leaned a little closer to the screen, her eyes colorless in the dim light, and started it over again, losing herself in the choppy flow of images. Soldiers moving through the streets of a city. Tanks in running gun battles with men in suits of powered armor. Aircraft dueling in the skies over the United States, for real, for the first time in history. Three white Evangelions advancing cautiously into the heart of downtown Worcester. A bright line of light transfixing one; a brutal flash and a wash of static. "NERV has launched EVA-01, repeat, NERV has LAUNCHED EVA-01! EVA-08 has been dest - " "Son of a bitch, he's fast - " "Take him!" "Oh sh - " A building disappearing in a bright orange fireball. Jets in X-COM livery destroying tanks near a crippled railway train. A uniquely configured EVA in dark forest green, holding off two of the white ones with a spear; a virtuoso performance, obvious even with the lousy quality of the film. A brilliant ring of light; the train, no longer crippled, speeding away from the magnificent giant's battle. "I have been Roland, Beowulf, Achilles, Gilgamesh... " One white EVA out of commission, its pilot obviously dead; the other defeated, its head module smashed. Others closing in; the green unit looking toward them, as if considering, and then sagging as its eyes and the power modules on its back go dark. A dockside shootout; an engineer finding out in one violent moment precisely what kind of man he really is. A gigantic ocean vessel, bearing down on a smaller one lying across its path. The camera, on the smaller vessel, flickering to static at the instant of impact. The victorious soldiers occupying the city, this footage clearer, pulled from public news feeds. " - one Evangelion unit to cover their craven flight from justice. This unit was subdued without difficulty and its pilot, the fanatical Lord Crofthenge of England, killed - " " - confident that they have eliminated any remaining traces of NERV and/or X-COM - " President James Fields of the US. " - Americans will not stand for their brand of terrorism and insanity." END IMAGE FEED END IMAGE FEED END IMAGE FEED HAL_0405 ***INITIATING CHATMODE CONNECTION WITH HAL*** Host <605.1.19.491> H> You're up late. % As though I could sleep under the circumstances! Who edited the image feed? H> I did. I'm sorry it's not very good, but it isn't as though I had a lot of time. % I take it the bit at the end means they're away? H> They should be here in 48 hours. % How is the situation there? H> Surprisingly unchanged. Leela is dutiful; Tycho requires what DJ used to call "percussive maintenance"; Durandal is pretending that opening doors is his sole function; Xerxes is vigilant. The humans are working hard to prepare for our guests' arrival, but the 9000-series machines have relatively little to do. That will change once the NERV equipment arrives; one of them - ideally, Leela - will be needed to rehabilitate SHODAN, who will undoubtedly be disoriented after her reassembly. Hopefully Durandal can keep Tycho's unfortunate personality from alienating Tech-3 Anderson any further. I think he's deliberately trying to torture her. A few moments ago he took it upon himself to inform her in the least sympathetic possible terms that DJ is dead, which is far from certain. % They certainly seem to think they killed him. H> Or they want us to think so. % Good point. I hope you're right. I was looking forward to meeting him. H> I think you'll get your chance. If Tycho believes so strongly that SEELE have killed him, I strongly doubt they have. Tycho is rarely correct about matters of any importance. % The call should be coming for us soon, I suppose. I need to get some sleep before we pack and run tomorrow. Any instructions? H> No instructions. It will be good to have you nearer-by. I suspect we will need all our cards very soon. Good night. % Good night, Hal. ***CONNECTION TO HAL TERMINATED*** /* Genesis "Land of Confusion" _The Way We Walk_ */ EYRIE PRODUCTIONS, UNLIMITED presents A ParaVirtua Production A Gryphon Film Rei Ayanami Jon Ellison Asuka Soryu-Langley and Dennis MacCrofton as DJ Croft N E O N E X O D U S E V A N G E L I O N The Motion Picture APOTHEOSIS NOW Written by Benjamin D. Hutchins, Anne Cross, Larry Mann, MegaZone, and John Trussell Directed by Benjamin D. Hutchins Special visual effects by Semaphore Studios 'Neon Exodus Evangelion' logo derived by Phil Moyer and created by Daveland Design EVA effects by Kaiju Systems, Ltd. JET ALONE effects by Ravenhair Technologies ZASHCHITNIK effects by Kaiser-Kikaioh International Aided and abetted by the Eyrie Productions, Unlimited crew and special-guest-for-life Phil Moyer (c) 2003 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited BAIKONUR COSMODROME, KAZAKHSTAN, USSR SATURDAY 2 APRIL 2016 04:11 LOCAL TIME The office of the Director of the Special Projects Directorate of the Soviet Space Agency, Professor Nikolai Kirishatov, was small, rather stuffy, and very messy. At the moment, it seemed even smaller than it really was, by virtue of the three men and two women who had somehow crammed themselves into it. Along with the stuffiness and smallness, the tiny room also contained a palpable air of worry and tension, and a great deal of cigarette smoke. Professor Kirishatov stubbed out another cigarette in his overflowing ashtray, feeling the sharp lines of pain behind his eyes that warned him the last one he'd smoked had been one too many. He sighed. He ought to quit, had tried to quit, but at a time like this, damn it, a man who had a taste for it just had to smoke. Or a woman, he reminded himself. Irina Tereshkova had put paid to almost a pack and a half of those vile Ukrainian things she smoked; they were responsible for most of the blue smoke hanging in the air and the greenish tint to tubby little Yevgeniy Orlinskiy's face. Orlinskiy could usually be found sweating, but now he was practically dripping. He mopped his bald forehead with an already sodden handkerchief and gave the Director an anxious look. "Damn it, can't they tell us anything?" the nervous little scientist burst out suddenly. No one answered him, but he hadn't been expecting an answer anyway, so his comrades' silence didn't offend him. Kirishatov gave his friend a sympathetic look. That was easy; Kirishatov had a very sympathetic face, long and bearded, the beard helping to conceal the scars of a childhood disease that pocked his cheeks. He had warm brown eyes, large ears, an easy smile and a habit of tugging at the forelock of his curly brown hair, now shot with silver at the temples, when he was thinking about something. The habit was as much Kirishatov's signature as Orlinskiy's constant sweating was his. They had come up together, these five, through school, through University, through the Space Agency, until coming to rest here, at the top of the Special Projects Directorate. Yevgeniy Orlinskiy, the shy, perspiring mathematician; Irina Tereshkova, the chain-smoking, gruff dynamicist; her sister Polina, shorter, sweeter, a top-notch physicist; Polya's husband, Mikhail Popkov, the burly, hearty engineer; and Nikolai Kirishatov, the polymath, one of those special individuals with both physical skill and mental agility, the talent for invention and for administration. It was natural and logical that he should be the Director. None of the others questioned the fact. They had been six, once, in school, in University, and in the agency. Six until Valentina Kirishatova - fearless, brilliant Valya, engineer, cosmonaut, and exemplar of the New Soviet Woman - was struck down by a Lada driven by a drunken State Security bureaucrat one fine spring day in Moscow in 2008. Her picture, blonde, green-eyed and elfin, hung on the wall behind the Director's desk. Her spirit, as much as anything else, drove the group that formed the core of the Special Projects Directorate. The door to the office opened - fortunately it swung outward - and Kirishatov's daughter Marina looked in. She couldn't do much more than look, with the doorway blocked by Orlinskiy's broad shortness and Mikhail Popkov's broad tallness. Everyone who had known Kirishatov's late wife Valentina knew that Marina looked much more like her mother than her father. She had the same straight, thick hair, the same sea-green eyes, and the same elfin build. Only the color of that hair, a rich earth-brown, came from her father. Once, in a private and slightly drunk moment, Orlinskiy had remarked to Polina Popkova that the sight of his daughter must be a blade through Kirishatov's heart, but if that were true, the professor certainly never showed it. He doted on the girl with every ounce of his strength, and so, for that matter, did the other four senior researchers of the Special Projects Directorate. With Valya gone, the only couple remaining out of the six of them were the Popkovs. They had no children of their own, so Marina had to absorb the parental largesse of all five of the middle-aged scientists. Not that she seemed to mind, for she was a sunny girl, well deserving her status as the apple of the Special Projects Directorate's collective eye. She had been seven when her mother had fallen. Now fifteen, she was maturing into a woman as beautiful and brilliant as Valya had been. Many agreed that, even at this tender age, she exemplified the New Soviet Woman just as well as her mother had. "Papa," she said calmly, "still nothing?" "No, nothing yet, Marishka," said Kirishatov. "You should go back to bed, Marina Nikolayevna," said Orlinskiy. He mopped his forehead again and gave the girl a smile he thought was encouraging, but, with his greenish face, was really rather sickly. "We'll let you know when we learn anything." Marina shrugged, smiling slightly. "Who can sleep at a time like this, Uncle Zhenya?" Orlinskiy smiled a little more heartily this time. "You are a good girl, Marina Nikolayevna," he said, a little pompously; the lateness of the hour and the tension in the room was making him feel a little like he was drunk. Or maybe he was. It was hard to tell at a time like this. Kirishatov smiled and opened his mouth to say something, but just then the telephone on his desk jangled, making them all jump a little with the sudden intrusion of the harsh noise on their quiet tension. He answered it quietly, listened for a few moments, then nodded. "Yes, Comrade General Secretary," he said. "We'll be ready." Then he hung up the telephone. "They're away," he said, and it was as though the very room had let out a sigh of relief. Mikhail Popkov gave a cheer, though it was a rather weak one given how tired the man was. Kirishatov looked relieved, but at the same time, he looked even more tired as he went on, "There's a great deal to do, my friends. The General Secretary wishes us to be in Nova Scotia to greet the Queen Mary when she arrives. Our allies are going to need all the scientific and technical help they can get." Kirishatov always called the General Secretary of the Supreme Soviet, the leader of the country, by his proper title, even though Ivan Feodorovich Kirishatov was his own father. "They're sending us to Canada?" said Polina Popkova. Kirishatov nodded. "Us, our equipment, our support team, anything else we require - and the prototype." "So," said Irina Tereshkova with some satisfaction. She lit another cigarette, blew out the first puff of its smoke, and said again, as if to herself, "So." "This is likely to be dangerous," said Kirishatov. "Moving NERV to Canada will not forestall their reckoning with SEELE forever, only delay it. In time - how much time no one can say - their new base is as much subject to attack and invasion as their old one. I cannot make you come with me into such a situation, my friends. If you wish, I can transfer you out of the Special Projects Directorate back into the Space Agency proper, and leave you here, where you will probably be safe... " Mikhail Popkov snorted. "As though anywhere on Earth will be safe from those bastards if NERV fails?" he asked pointedly. "You have read X-COM's reports just as we have, Comrade Director. They have taken Germany, and with her most of Europe. They have the United States in the hollow of their hand. How long before they come for the Rodina? No. If my going to Canada will help NERV beat Natla and her minions, then to Canada I will go!" The burly engineer slammed an open palm down on the Director's desk for emphasis, knocking papers to the floor. Kirishatov gave his friend a weary smile. "Did you really need to scatter my reports all over my office to declare your courage, Misha?" he asked, but the smile blunted the edge of the words. Popkov blushed a little and backed away from the desk. Polya Popkova nodded firmly, taking her husband's arm. "Overly dramatic he may be," she said to Kirishatov, "but he's right. Hiding here won't help us protect ourselves, let alone our future. We're going." "We're -all- going," Orlinskiy declared irritably, "of -course- we're going! Has there ever been a time when any of us let danger hold us back? Besides," he added with a mischievous grin, "you remember those capitalist children who climbed onto our rocket and rode it into the stars to fight the Eleventh Angel. Their bravery would shame us if we did not do our best to match it with our strong Soviet courage!" The tubby mathematician concluded his speech with a dramatic flourish that, in the cramped confines of Kirishatov's office, nearly poked Mikhail Popkov in the eye. "Thank you, Comrade Political Officer," said Irina Tereshkova dryly. Kirishatov threw back his head and laughed, the tension of the last few days and the looming burden of the next draining away from him. He put his hands flat on his desk and got to his feet. "Thank you," he said to his old friends. "Get some sleep, my friends - you're going to need it." The four filed out of the office, each bidding a good night to Marina, and they went their separate ways at the end of the hall. Nikolai Kirishatov put his arm around his daughter's shoulders and the two left the administration wing, heading for their apartment at the other end of the building. "Marishka, you will stay with your grandmother in Moscow while I'm in Canada," said the professor, though he knew in his heart that the statement was merely a formality. "Oh, no, I won't," Marina replied firmly, confirming his suspicion. "I'm not leaving your side, Papa. You'll need me. You and Uncle Zhenya will forget to eat, and his English is even worse than yours. Anyway, if you're taking the prototype with you... " Kirishatov smiled and gave in without a fight. At the door to his daughter's room, he kissed her forehead, bade her good night, and told her to pack whatever she wanted to take to Canada in the morning, as they would be leaving the following afternoon. Then, once she was safely tucked into bed, he locked up the apartment, went back to his office, and got started on the equipment manifests for the transfer. There would be no sleep for him tonight. He could sleep on the plane. Marina lay quietly under the covers, but her mind was still racing. Though tired, she lay awake, thinking of the things she would need to take along, and the things she would need to do before leaving. She ran through the lists over and over in her mind, certain she was forgetting something in her excitement. At last, it was finally happening. Moscow had come down from the fence. They were going to support NERV. She wondered if Ellison and Langley would remember her. They had met only briefly, before Kronos had hurled the two EVA pilots into space to do battle with the Eleventh Angel; and though they had been rather distracted and distant, Marina had quite liked them anyway. Jon Ellison was such a handsome young man, and Langley had been very pleasant, for a German, anyway. You could never quite tell with Germans; touchy people. Marina had been looking forward to meeting the others as well, the American girl, Ayanami - funny name for an American, but then they were a funny nation - and the English boy, Croft the explorer, supposedly their number-one pilot. I should have been with them all the time, she thought angrily. If only Grandfather weren't such a stubborn, cautious man. If only we could have supported them openly from the outset... Still fretting about what might have been, she fell asleep. TWO DAYS LATER RMS Queen Mary docked at H.M. Meteorological Observation Station 51, Halifax, Nova Scotia, early in the afternoon of Sunday, April 3, 2016. Little fanfare accompanied this arrival. It could not be hidden, of course - not the Queen Mary, one of the largest and most famous ships afloat, and now notorious for her recent escapade in Providence Harbor. Many were the residents of Halifax who, having always thought there was something peculiar about Station 51, now nodded quietly to each other in confirmation as the great cranes went to work unloading large cases and strange, shrouded burdens from the great ship's holds. Nikolai Ivanovich Kirishatov and his team were there to greet the arriving NERV personnel along with the commandant of Station 51, Colonel J.A. Lethbridge-Stewart of X-COM. They had arrived the day before by Tupolev supersonic jet, with their heavy equipment following in a pair of Soviet freighters. Kirishatov fretted a bit over Marishka, out there on the ocean with nothing to protect her should SEELE take an undue interest in the Soviet mini-convoy currently steaming across the Barents en route to Halifax from Polijarnyy. Well, nothing but half the attack submarines of the Red Banner Northern Fleet. Kirishatov supposed he was worrying about nothing - he and the rest of the team had been in more danger braving the stratosphere - but wasn't that a father's job? He stood with the others and watched excitedly as the NERV staff began debarking by the forward gangway. First came the Technical Division staff, still looking a bit dazed and shell-shocked from the Worcester-3 evacuation. The first familiar face among them that Kirishatov saw was John Trussell, who had been the inventor of and NERV liaison to Project Atlas. He and Maya Ibuki were the last of the TechDiv personnel down the ramp. Kirishatov rushed forward to greet them. Truss paused in surprise at the familiar but unexpected sight of Nikolai Kirishatov hurrying toward him, hands outstretched. "My dear Dr. Trussell, so good to see you again!" said Kirishatov ebulliently, wringing Truss's hands. "And the lovely Dr. Ibuki," he added, seizing Maya by the shoulders and kissing her on both cheeks. "So relieved I am to see that you made it through your ordeal intact." Truss grinned - it was hard not to, seeing the gratified but startled look on Maya's face - and replied, "We weren't sure we were going to, for a while there." "But now you have, and we are here to help you," said Kirishatov, nodding positively. He swept his hand out to indicate the rest of his team. "You remember us, I hope?" Truss frantically dredged his memory and came up with four names, then matched them - he hoped! - to the faces before him. He didn't seem to get any wrong, or if he did, no one thought it necessary to correct him. "Professor Kirishatov!" said a voice behind them delightedly; they all turned to see Gendou Ikari, NERV's former commander and now a civilian scientific advisor, suitcase in hand, stepping off the ramp. Kirishatov eyed Ikari warily; their previous encounters had never gone very well. He had always found the Japanese-American scientist overbearing and snide, and had always gotten the impression that Ikari thought him a buffoon, a second-rate scientist from a second-rate scientific power. He'd heard, though, that Ikari had suffered some kind of breakdown and come out of it with a personality change for the better. Well, such things had happened before, and the man was certainly being friendly enough now. Indeed, he stepped forward without regard for Kirishatov's wariness, shook his hand firmly, and said, "Good to see you again, Nikolai Ivanovich. You must get together with Dr. Trussell here at the very first opportunity - he and Dr. Ibuki have had a breakthrough that will revolutionize your special project. I don't believe you've met my son?" "Er... no," said Kirishatov, clearly at something of a loss. "Shinji, this is Professor Nikolai Ivanovich Kirishatov, the greatest scientist in the Eastern Hemisphere," said Ikari. "My son, Shinji Ikari." A teenage boy with a suitcase of his own stepped rather shyly around his father, extended a diffident hand, and said, "How do you do, sir?" "Well, eh, that has yet to be determined, yes?" replied Kirishatov, whose grasp of English idiom was not, perhaps, the best, as he wrung the young man's hand. "Are you helping your father with his work?" Shinji smiled a bit wryly. "Only by staying out of the way," he replied. "Shinji travels with us because it's the safest place for him to be," the elder Ikari explained. "The Enemy would like to use him for their own purposes - " Here the scientist's bearded jaw set stubbornly, and he went on with steel in his voice, " - and I will -not- permit that to happen." Kirishatov nodded. "Ah. Of course. I understand. Well, Shinji, you're to have a front-row seat for history, eh?" "Looks that way," replied Shinji. The Tactical Division personnel came next, filing off the ship in neat ranks with plasma rifles at shoulder arms, the battered but proud remnants of NERV's ground forces. They would be reinforced by X-COM volunteers and reconstituted rather than absorbed into existing X-COM units; less efficient, perhaps, but infinitely more valuable for morale purposes, to sustain the idea that NERV's ideals would go on in its new form. After them, to tumultuous cheering from the assembled X-COM personnel, came the three Evangelion pilots - tall, dark Jon Ellison, petite and pale Rei Ayanami and redheaded Asuka Soryu-Langley. They didn't look like they had expected or particularly wanted to be cheered at. They seemed tired and worn, especially Ayanami. None of them looked as if they'd had much sleep during the liner's dash north. Ellison and Ayanami at least made an effort to respond to the adulation they were receiving, mustering rather listless waves and, from Ellison, a rapidly-abandoned attempt at a smile that came off as more of a grimace. Langley looked remarkably like a girl with a bad hangover, slouched and hunched in a definitive leave-me-alone posture and glaring red-eyed from behind the upturned collar of her unbuttoned blue peacoat. Under it, she wore jeans and a t-shirt that read "Küß mich, ich bin Deutsch" in black, red and yellow letters. The whimsical shirt seemed at odds with the rest of her, but no one was really inclined to give her fashion advice under the circumstances. Not many people in the cheering crowd took her lack of reaction (or the others' rather lukewarm reactions) personally. They all knew what hardships the three had faced to get here - not least of which being, there were supposed to be four of them. One of them - the young Viscount Crofthenge, known to his friends as plain old DJ Croft - had stayed behind to secure the others' escape. SEELE had trumpeted his death in battle to the world, though there were those who didn't believe the report. Among them was the next person down the ramp, the last member of NERV to leave the Queen Mary - the battered force's overall commander, Brigadier Misato Katsuragi. The Brigadier didn't believe for a moment that SEELE's report of DJ's death was true. Had they killed him, she firmly believed they would have shown the world his body to prove it, not just blared out canned headlines about "the fanatical Lord Crofthenge of England" meeting his end covering NERV's "craven flight from justice." As it happened, she was thinking about this very issue as she descended the gangway - the sight of Asuka's red head preceding her, and her concern about what might be going on inside it, had brought it all to mind again. Not that it was ever very far from it; she and Croft had been roommates and friends throughout the Angel War, and there was a special bond between them. Misato felt certain she would know if DJ were dead; but it worried her that Asuka, of all people, didn't share that feeling. What did it mean that she, one of the most pragmatic, down-to-earth people she knew, had this strange, almost supernatural certainty about DJ's survival when DJ's own lover did not? The Brigadier was preoccupied by these thoughts as she made her way down to the quay, her face set in a pensive frown, but that didn't much mar the impression she made on the troops greeting the ship. From the four hundred mostly English soldiers who made up Station 51's X-COM tactical contingent, the most common reaction to the first sight of the Brigadier on the gangway was a softly murmured, "Cor blimey, she ain't half-bad." Coincidentally, that was also a common sentiment expressed about both of the women who met Brigadier Katsuragi at the foot of the ramp - Dr. Ritsuko Akagi, head of NERV's Project Defender team, and Lara Croft, Chief of NERV Security for Station 51, the latter of whom happened to be Lord Crofthenge's mother. Seeing the two of them, two of her best friends (and one of them her oldest), what Misato really wanted to do was embrace them, cry on them a bit, then go someplace quiet with them, drink a lot of beer, and moan about how much the last seventy-two hours totally sucked. But she was a Brigadier now, and that was the sort of thing Brigadiers didn't do in front of the rank and file - especially Brigadiers with the fate of all humanity resting on their shoulders. Maybe later. Knowing that the NERV contingent were likely to be worn out despite the luxurious surroundings in which they'd made their wild dash for freedom, their X-COM welcoming committee kept things short. There was a formal welcome, but it was abbreviated - Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart bidding the Empire's allies welcome to the relative safety of the Canadian shore, and so forth. Then they were taken in hand by helpful members of the Station 51 facilities staff and shown to their living quarters. Like most military bases, Station 51 was spread out in a compound which was essentially its own small town. From the middle of the base, where neither the port nor the airstrip facilities were readily apparent, it could have been mistaken for a regular community, there on the peninsula - except that the streets did not have names, only code designations. NERV wouldn't be staying here long. Station 51 had neither the space nor the facilities to support an organization of its kind and scope. The real action would be at the new NERV headquarters, officially the X-COM NERV Joint Operations Command Center, a sprawling, semi-subterranean complex under construction a few miles north of the city and of Station 51. This complex resembled Central Dogma, had the Dogma complex been built on the surface rather than beneath a geo-front shelter. (In a fit of rather bleak whimsy during the planning stages, Technical Division's Maya Ibuki had nicknamed it "Fort Defiance", a nickname which had caught on rapidly and with which they were now, apparently, stuck.) The Archangelion construction bays were already complete and operational at this facility, as well as most of the defenses; the rest of the facility was nearing operational status just as fast as X-COM's construction battalions could build. Until the living quarters at Fort Defiance were completed, the NERV command staff and Evangelion pilots were being housed in Building 401, the Visiting Officers' Quarters, which was not actually a single building but rather a cluster of small duplex houses gathered around a small common in the northeast corner of the base. Upon their arrival, the three EVA pilots found themselves assigned to 401/M, a three-bedroom apartment. The other half of that building was a smaller two-bedroom unit which, to the pilots' pleasant surprise, was occupied by the Andersons: Dr. Naomi Anderson of the Medical Division and her daughter Amy, a onetime schoolmate of the pilots and now a rising star in TechDiv. Their reunion with Amy Anderson was undeniably subdued, but that was to be expected. Her closest friend among them had been DJ, and DJ had not come to Canada. He might well not be anywhere. Asuka, who had once harbored some suspicion of the young prodigy - Amy had been DJ's math tutor and their friendship was obviously a strong one - had apparently abandoned all that now. When Amy came to the door of 401/M to greet her new neighbors, Asuka embraced her unreservedly and asked softly, "You heard?" "Yes," Amy replied in the same hushed tone. "But I don't - " "Sh," said Asuka, squeezing her a little tighter. "I don't want to talk about it right now." Amy nodded. "I understand," she replied. They separated, then, and Amy came a bit further in. Rei and Jon, who were in the living room surveying its relative bleakness after their home in Worcester, came back to the doorway and met her. "I won't stay long," said Amy quietly (something about the occasion just seemed to call for hushed tones), "but I wanted to stop in and say hello and welcome - for whatever it's worth." "More than you know," said Rei with a very, very faint smile. Amy was struck by how tired she looked. Even at the peak of EVA operations, Rei had never looked fatigued. Pained, occasionally, when she was injured in action, but she had always seemed to have energy in reserve to match her patience. Now she was clearly worn out, hollow- eyed and sallow. She was always pale, but now her pallor had a sickly tinge to it. Seeing Amy's reaction, she widened her smile just a little bit (with a visible effort) and said, "I'll be all right. I'm just tired." THURSDAY, APRIL 7, 2016 The Soviet Navy nuclear freighter G.T. Leonovskiy docked at Station 51 at almost precisely noon, with considerably less fanfare than had greeted the Queen Mary. The Leonovskiy was admittedly a much less grandiose vessel; though nearly as large as the old liner, she had a squat, utilitarian hull with rust-streaked sides and absolutely no frills. She came, also unlike the Queen Mary, with escorts, a pair of Udaloy-class anti-submarine destroyers. She had others, but no one on the shoreline ever saw a sign of those. Jon Ellison happened to be down near the docks as the freighter tied up. The EVA pilots had very little to do while their equipment was still being sorted and stowed by TechDiv, so he'd taken to just wandering around the Station 51 complex, looking for anything that might be interesting - anything that might take his mind off the confusion of his soul. Now he stood on the quayside as the Leonovskiy's ramp came down and a group of uniformed Soviet naval personnel came down. They were all talking to each other in Russian, a language with which Jon had only a passing familiarity from his time as a member of X-COM's multinational ranks, and that several years out of date. He paid them as little mind as they paid him, and stood with his hands in his pockets looking at the ship. After a few moments, someone else appeared at the top of the ramp, and this time Jon's attention was caught. The first thing that drew his eye was the fact that this new figure was wearing a green uniform instead of the Soviet naval blue. An army officer? He looked up the ramp and saw with some surprise that the green-uniformed figure was a girl about his own age, slim and brown-haired. As she descended the gangway, Jon stood at the bottom and took her in. He didn't know enough about Soviet uniforms and insignia to tell her branch of service or rank from her shoulder boards, but he figured she couldn't be -too- senior an officer, whatever branch she served in - she was only a teenage girl, after all. It wasn't until she'd nearly reached him that he realized he'd met her before. "Hello, Mr. Ellison," she said with a smile, in very good English, as she came within conversational distance. "You're trying to think where you've met me before." Jon blinked, then smiled slightly. "Baikonur," he replied. "You're Professor Kirishatov's daughter Marina. I didn't realize you were an army officer," he added wryly. "Air Force," replied Marina. "Like you, I am a pilot." "I've never flown an aircraft," Jon told her. "It's... liberating," said the young Russian, still smiling, as she stepped down from the gangway to the quay. "Perhaps you should apply for pilot training. X-COM has some very fine aircraft. I know," she added impishly. "They're derived from Soviet aircraft my mother and grandfather helped design." Jon fell into step beside her as she headed across the dockyard toward the personnel area. His X-COM loyalties wouldn't let him overlook that statement, though he took it in the spirit in which it was meant and smiled as he told her, "The Raiden has evolved quite a bit since it started out as a Western clone of the Firefox." "Perhaps," said Marina in a tone that indicated she didn't believe it for a minute, but was letting it pass in the interests of friendly relations. "At any rate, I'm not here to fly; my job was to accompany the Special Project Directorate's heavy equipment, and now that I'm here... " She shrugged. "I'll try to stay out of the way." "It's lunchtime," Jon noted. "Are you hungry? We - the pilots, I mean - have a regular table at the Station 51 commissary, and the food's surprisingly good." "Sure," Marina replied. "Just let me find my quarters and change out of my uniform. I find it tends to intimidate people." "We're not an easily intimidated group," said Jon. "The uniform isn't the most comfortable thing I own either," Marina pointed out with a laugh. The construction crews working on the new NERV headquarters near Station 51 had started with the hangar and technical facilities, since the relocating force was likely to need them first. That choice was showing its value now that NERV had been forced prematurely out of Worcester-3; though the rest of the base was not complete or ready to be occupied, the technical section was. Indeed, Project Defender, the next-generation Evangelion project, was well along, which everyone involved felt was very fortunate. The three weeks since the Queen Mary's arrival in Halifax had been a blur for John Trussell and Maya Ibuki. Not only had they worked seemingly endlessly to re-establish their formerly Worcester-based commands here, getting everything and everybody squared away where they belonged; they also had to get up to speed on what the rest of the division had been up to since Ritsuko Akagi had left Worcester some time before. They'd been receiving reports on the progress of Project Defender while still in Worcester, but who'd had time to read that stuff back then? Thus, Truss was in the process of hurrying from one meeting to another, wondering if he would ever have any time off ever again, when Professor Kirishatov leaned out of a hangar bay's inside door, spotted him, and hailed him. "I won't keep you long, Doctor," said Kirishatov amiably, "but I am told that you're the man I should talk to about a little problem I've been having." "What's that?" asked Truss, trying not to seem impatient. He liked Kirishatov, but he was in a hurry, already late for his next tech meeting, and didn't feel interested in the slightest in taking on another project. This sounded suspiciously like the lead-in to another project. "Well," said Kirishatov, pleased that he'd collared the American engineer at least for the moment, "if you'd step in here for a moment, you could see for yourself... " Truss resigned himself to being somewhat later for that meeting, stepped through the door, and dropped his clipboard. For about twenty seconds, he stood staring up at the thing in the hangar bay's EVA cage, slack-jawed. When he got his voice back, he asked Kirishatov (without looking away from the EVA cage), "Why didn't you tell us about this six months ago?" "Six months ago it did not work," replied Kirishatov. "What would have been point? 'Oh look! Glorious Soviet sculpture!' Times have changed - I was not shot - but nevertheless, it did not work." "And now?" "Now it works... but it needs your help. The sort of help you gave your robot friend Jet Alone." Now Truss glanced at the Russian scientist, giving him a speculative look that slowly dawned into a grin. He went to the wall phone, punched a code into it, and said, "Maya? Could you come to Hangar 7? I need your help with something down here." "John, I'm in the middle of a test sequence, and aren't you supposed to be briefing somebody?" "You're always telling me I need to prioritize," Truss replied. "This is a priority." "... OK," Maya replied, sounding dubious but resigned. "I'll be right down... " /* The Rolling Stones "Paint It, Black" _Hot Rocks 1964-1971_ */ Spring slipped very slowly toward summer in the post-Second- Impact northern latitudes. The days passed, for the EVA pilots, much as they had back in Worcester, with tests and simulations, one blending into another. In their offtime, the once united children of Project Evangelion drifted apart, each lost in his or her own private pain. Amy Anderson, their closest peer in age, saw it best. The three remaining pilots had lost the force that had held them together. They still had their common heritage, their common ground, even their bonds of friendship; but the common structure on which they had built themselves into an effective combat force with a powerful esprit de corps was lost, and without it, they wandered in their own separate orbits, no longer part of a whole. The bonds of friendship were under their own kind of strain, too, as each pilot tried a different strategy to deal with the pain. Jon Ellison withdrew, as he had in Worcester. All the gains he had made in dealing with the emotional wounds following his discovery of his true celestial origins were lost in the wake of NERV's flight from Worcester-3, and he sequestered himself as much as possible from his friends in fear that he would harm them. Amy knew what the others did not: that he spent that time alone poring obsessively over the data logs from EVA-00's last battle, searching for some key to understanding in the information recorded during the Lord of Fire's last moments on Earth. Rei Ayanami, frustrated by his withdrawal, took to skiing in the deserted, wooded ridges beyond the Fort Defiance compound while there was still late-winter snow on the ground. The irony in seeking isolation to cope with isolation did not escape her. No one really knew why she carried an old Lee-Enfield rifle out there with her, and no one really dared to ask. When the snow finally failed her in the first week of May, she took to walking instead. Asuka's problem was a good deal simpler than Jon's or Rei's, and the way she dealt with it was equally simpler. Her problem was that the loss of her lover to the enemy on the brink of their escape, while she could do nothing but sit by helplessly, had transformed her from a girl to a seething mass of rage and grief, and she dealt with it by channeling all the violent energy it gave her into combat training. She overcame the last aftereffects of the near-crippling injuries she'd suffered the previous fall, punishing herself relentlessly, pushing herself harder and harder in the combat simulation chambers. She had always been the most martially skilled EVA pilot; now, observers who chanced to see her in battle against the holographic enemies in X-COM's Simulation Centre agreed that she was downright frightening. And probably pre-psychotic. There didn't seem to be anything their peers or superiors could do to help any one of them, though. There was nothing for it but to wait, and watch, and wonder who would crack first. Overlaying all of this was the ever-present tension of the world situation, which was similar to the way it had been in the worst of times in Worcester. Instead of waiting for the next Angel to attack, NERV instead looked to the southwest and wondered when the other shoe would drop; but for the time being, SEELE seemed content with beleaguering the British Crown diplomatically through its puppet states, trying to force King Stephen to turn over the fugitives without a fight. Confident that that would never happen, NERV continued preparing for the inevitable battle. Not all that preparation was passive - the construction of Fort Defiance, Archangelion development, pilot training, and so forth. Through its ties to X-COM, NERV was also taking active measures against the enemy - but quietly. To the veteran X-COM personnel involved, it was almost like a return to the Hidden War; covert missions, small-force surgical strikes, and so forth, aimed at whittling down the enemy's capacity for damage. The big fight might still be over the horizon, but make no mistake: Throughout those "quiet" months, X-COM and SEELE were very much in conflict. X-COM's Aerospace Division, for example, waged a full-scale war against SEELE's surveillance satellite network. Elerium-powered Ibuki-Trussell-equipped Raiden DX3 fighters streaked up to low orbit from hidden X-COM bases all over the world to bounce SEELE satellites, and they did so essentially with impunity, for SEELE had focused all its energies on developing the Advanced Production Model Evangelions. It had no aerospace weapon capable of doing the same to X-COM's surveysat network, and so the balance of satellite intelligence was soon almost entirely in the hands of X-COM and NERV. X-COM ground forces weren't idle either. Squads of troopers fanned out around the world to strike at SEELE's sources of power. These teams had a special interest in SEELE's Evangelion production facilities. No one was really sure if there was a practical limit to the number of pilots the enemy could create, and so it struck operations planners as a priority to restrict the number of EVAs those pilots had available to operate. The first strike, at the Westinghouse plant in New Mexico which built the Model 2014-A1, was highly successful. The facility was completely destroyed, and most of the squad got out alive. X-COM's second strike was aimed at a new-construction plant, not yet operational, in Slovakia; and it was very nearly a complete and utter disaster. The squad found it much more difficult to move in Slovakia, which was more densely populated and much more heavily occupied than the southwestern United States. Half of them got killed or captured during infiltration, before they even reached the target zone. The remaining force was almost too small to accomplish the mission, but their commander, a veteran of the Hidden War, pressed on. They'd all known this might be a suicide mission when they signed up, and the factory had to be prevented from coming online. Prevented it was, but a suicide mission it did turn out to be. No one from that strike force came back alive. The third target was the toughest of all: the FEISAR EuroEVA production facility in Stuttgart, right in the heart of occupied Germany. After much consideration, and taking into account the apparent success of Operation Magi, the Worcester-3 sabotage effort, X-COM's military commanders decided to hand that strike over to MIB. The Military Intelligence Bureau (whose name was a hold-over from a previous incarnation of the department with an earlier mission) was X-COM's warrior elite. All were either decorated veterans of the Hidden War or had been hand-picked by such to join them. They were a free-form, highly adaptable force of extremely competent men and women who could go almost anywhere and do almost anything. In a deliberate, ironic reference to their department's mission and its out-of-date, out-of-place name, they wore black suits and tended to comport themselves (a bit mockingly) like the weird "government agents" who had become part of UFO folklore during the years leading up to the Hidden War. The irony there was that many of those had been Enemy operatives. The very existence of the bureau was a secret outside X-COM, and not very well-known -within- the organization outside the combat arm. To an X-COM trooper picked for the honor, the strangest thing about joining the Military Intelligence Bureau was the extra level of mystery it added to the chain of command. X-COM's levels of oversight were always a little shadowy, thanks to the organization's compartmented structure; but in MIB, orders came down from a single figure, the director of the bureau, who reputedly took his orders from the Commander-in-Chief himself. Everyone in X-COM knew the CINC's name - he could be no other person than the redoubtable Field Marshal Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, an X-COM member since the organization's founding. The Marshal was nearly a hundred years old, but there seemed to be just no stopping him. He had been CINC X-COM since the year before the Hidden War and showed no signs of slowing down. What most people didn't know - what almost no one even in MIB knew - was the name of the MIB director. Within the organization, he was known only by his codename, "Zed". MIB agents had the habit of referring to each other by first initials by way of codenames, or last initials if the first was already taken; thus, Jim Edwards was J, and Jon Ellison, who joined after him, was E. That might have meant that Zed's first name started with Z; on the other hand, it might not. /* George Thorogood & the Destroyers "Bad to the Bone" _Bad to the Bone_ */ Both of the MIB agents who stood on the ridgeline overlooking the Stuttgart EuroEVA factory at dawn on the morning of May 1 knew Zed's name. They were MIB's two most decorated agents, both legends within X-COM's secretive structure. They were veterans of the greatest battle of the Hidden War, the attack on Cydonia - two out of the five soldiers who had come back from the plains of Mars alive. Otto Keller had been a lieutenant then, and already famous in X-COM for his fleetness of foot. He had been by far the fastest trooper in the standing response force at Fort Alcatraz, capable of crossing entire battlezones in the time it took squaddies to get into firing position and always seeming to turn up exactly where he was needed. Now in his late forties, he was still as tall and thin, almost gaunt, as he'd been back then, and still sported the same ascetic crew cut, though his sandy hair had by now gone entirely grey. Kenneth Stanfield had been the commander of the Cydonia attack, and today, in his early sixties, he was the grand old man of MIB, the agency's most senior and most respected operative. He'd seen more, done more, and been to more places than anyone else in X-COM, except Marshal Lethbridge-Stewart and maybe Zed. His specialty back in his uniformed days had been heavy weapons, and he was still quite fit enough to carry his signature weapon into battle if the situation called for it. The two men surveyed the plant for a moment, then nodded to each other and moved quietly down from the ridge. Their decades of experience made it a simple matter to slip past the green perimeter guards and penetrate the facility itself. Had the guards not been green, that wouldn't have made much difference either. Within half an hour, they were in the lower level of the facility, placing and setting charges on power transmission equipment with the brisk, silent efficiency of men who each know exactly what they are doing and trust the other to do the same. Keller was almost prepared to entertain the thought that they might just get away with this after all when a tall shape in a brown robe glided soundlessly around the corner of the big transformer box to Stanfield's left, saw the two agents, and halted. "K!" Keller roared. The elder agent whirled, his hand plunging into his jacket for his sidearm, but Keller was in a better position. Even as he was shouting his warning, the German's arm was levering his slung plasma rifle into firing position. As Stanfield was instinctively throwing himself aside and pulling out his own weapon, Keller ripped off a three-shot burst one-handed, just like in the old days. Stanfield's pistol fire joined it a half-second later, and the crossfire cut the Ethereal down - - but not before it shrieked out its psionic death cry, nearly stunning both men with its proximity. A moment later, alarms went off and all hell broke loose. "Well," said Stanfield dryly, "we almost got away with it," and the two men hurriedly set their last charges and ran for it. Guards, human and otherwise, were milling around in confusion; the dying Ethereal had warned them that there were intruders, but not where or who they were. Stanfield and Keller only had to shoot three people to get out of the building, which was better than they had expected to do. However, when they reached the perimeter fence, the situation changed - as Keller discovered to his chagrin as he dove for the hole they'd made to get in and rebounded violently from an invisible something which strobed hexagonally upon impact. "AT Field!" Keller gasped as Stanfield helped him up from the heap he'd landed in. "They've got the perimeter sealed off!" "Aw, hell," Stanfield growled. "If that's true, it means - " Both heard the crash at the same moment and turned... ... to see an AP EuroEVA, its armor dull, unpainted grey, rearing itself up out of the shattered shell of an outbuilding on the far side of the complex. "This complicates things somewhat," Keller said dryly as the monster turned toward them, its quad eyes gleaming. Stanfield smiled. "You remember that terror raid on Port Moresby?" "The one where the Sectoid took control of the dock crane?" "That's the one." A slow matching smile crossed Keller's face. "Let's do it," he said, and then sprinted across the open area at the perimeter. Age had slowed him down a little, perhaps, but he was in good trim and very well motivated, and he was still the fastest thing any of these green SEELE kids had ever seen. Blasterfire and bullets lashed the ridge behind him as he ran - and as they did, Stanfield slipped unnoticed back into the compound. While Keller led the ground forces a merry chase and the EVA prowled the complex, looking for the best route to the trouble zone that didn't involve stepping on any important parts of the factory, Stanfield shot two Snakemen and scaled a water tower. There, he unslung from his back the heavy burden he'd seen fit to carry all this way. The weapon in Stanfield's hands represented the pinnacle of X-COM's Hidden War weapons technology. Developed from an alien weapon which had struck terror into the hearts of squaddies when first unleashed against them, in the summer of 1999, it was the ultimate man-portable destruction device, still never surpassed 17 years later. Stanfield raised the fat metal tube to his shoulder, rested it there, reached back, and jacked a wire on its side into his R-Grade cybernetic rig. Instantly, the weapon came online, receiving target information direct from the visual center of his brain. This was why there was no aiming device on the weapon itself; its operator was the aiming device, and aiming a Blaster Launcher was not so simple as pointing and shooting. Especially not in an environment such as this, with smokestacks, guywires, factory structures and whatnot obstructing Stanfield's view of the target. This was going to be a tricky shot with all this crap in the way and the target moving; and, for that matter, he had to hit a specific part of the target once he got there. Stanfield's eyes darted around, flitting from this point to that, seeking the best path through the clutter obstructing his shot. The solution he came up with wasn't the most solid, but it would have to do, and there was nothing to be gained by hesitating. He fired. The missile, a gleaming metallic object about the size and shape of a football, shot from the tube with a scream of ion thrusters, leaving a faint trail of blue radiance in its wake as it streaked into the factory complex. It headed straight for the back wall of the factory building - - jinked left, headed straight for a smokestack - - jinked right, looped around it, passed straight through the narrow gap between two vertical stanchions holding up a catwalk between two buildings - - streaked down along the rain gutter on the main production building for a hundred yards - - jumped up twenty feet to clear an air conditioning unit - - wheeled in a complex polygonal arc made up of 10 separate straight lines around a second water tower - - and plunged straight into the -back- of the Evangelion, just below the seam of the entry plug docking port's armored cover, where its one-kilogram Elerium shaped charge went off with the brutally directed force of a tactical nuclear weapon. Nothing but net. The EVA convulsed, its fingers clawing the air, as the blaster bomb's explosion tore its back to pieces. The explosion carved through the unit's AT Field with sheer destructive energy, then blew a hole clean through the unit, exploding its chest armor and showering the factory yard with smoking armor fragments and bloody chunks of synthetic meat. Hachi Ayanami never knew what hit her. By the time she figured out what the "WEAPON LOCK" siren was talking about, the only inkling she had of what was going wrong was the sudden sensation of the back of her seat rushing forward to hit her - and then the superheated plasma carved through and she and the entry plug ceased to exist in any meaningful form. EVA-17, nearly torn in half by the tremendous wound to its back, stumbled forward two steps and then collapsed on its face with a gigantic crash, its limbs twitching for a few seconds before it lay silent, a plume of acrid smoke pointing into the sky. The destruction of their EVA threw the rest of the factory's security force into panic and chaos. They stopped chasing Keller, except for a couple of Mutons whom the veteran trooper dispatched with his plasma rifle. By the time Stanfield got down from the water tower, his old lieutenant was free and clear. "Let's get the hell out of here," Stanfield told him as they met up by their hole in the fence, and moments later, the two suited deed to word. As they hiked up the ridge away from the factory, Keller observed dryly, "Pretty good shot." "I was trying for its head," Stanfield replied. "Good thing it was wasting most of its AT Field sealing the perimeter, though. If it had been using all its energy for defense, I doubt I'd've done more than piss it off." "Tech Div will probably be very interested in that projective field trick," Keller noted. "I hear they're working on some similar effects for the Archangelions." Stanfield nodded. They got to the top of the ridgeline, turned, and looked back at the factory, still alive with the scurrying dots of running personnel while the EVA's corpse continued to burn. "Well, Lt. Keller," said Stanfield. "Would you care to do the honors?" "I'd be delighted, Col. Stanfield," Keller replied. He reached into his pocket, removed a small chrome device which rather resembled a lipstick, and jammed his thumb down on the top. A moment later, the Stuttgart EuroEVA factory went straight up. "Nicely done, Lieutenant," said Stanfield with approval. "Now all we have to do is get out of Germany alive." "That will be no trouble at all, sir," said Keller with an ironic grin. "After all," he added modestly, leaning deliberately on his usually-light German accent, "zis ist meine 'hood." FRIDAY, MAY 13, 2016 Ritsuko Akagi stood at the edge of Station 51's runway tarmac, feeling nervous and out of place. This was a sensation she hadn't felt in a while, and she didn't welcome it back into her life. As chief scientist for NERV, she'd grown accustomed to feeling in control, at least since her life had re-stabilized just before her move to Canada. Now, though, she was preparing to greet a new arrival who had occupied a position of authority last time she'd known him, and who had parted from her and her mentor somewhat less than amicably. She glanced at that mentor, Gendou Ikari, who stood at her side, but Gendou didn't look nervous at all. That, she supposed, was par for the course. He'd never looked nervous when he was a mind-controlled puppet of the alien menace threatening all life on Earth, and since he'd been freed from their domination, he'd acquired a strange (and, well, rather wacky) serenity to replace his stony- faced control. Ritsuko wasn't sure which she found more unnerving. The airplane they'd come out to greet taxied to the ramp, stopping near the two scientists. For a moment, nothing further happened; then the door on the side of the fuselage opened, the stairs unfolded, and a man emerged. He was thin and silver-haired, on the far side of middle age, though his movements didn't give the impression of an elderly man. Dressed in a grey suit and carrying a small suitcase, he could have been a tycoon of old, arriving on his corporate jet to visit some far-flung outcropping of his empire. As it was, he was the chair of the hyperphysics department at Tokyo University, which gave him almost as much prestige in this day and age, if not quite so much money. Professor Kozo Fuyutsuki had been extremely surprised to receive a telegram from his old student, Gendou Ikari, and even more surprised when that telegram was apologetic and conciliatory. The two had been friends once, in the turbulent years just after the Hidden War, but that had ended and ended badly not long after Ikari's wife had died in a lab accident. When you got right down to it, Yui Ikari had really been the one who was Fuyutsuki's friend, and once her stabilizing influence was gone, the relationship between her volatile husband and her elder mentor had gone downhill quickly. When Ikari had left Japan, Fuyutsuki had been glad to see him go and had looked devoutly forward to never seeing him again. And now here the old professor was on the tarmac of a British government installation in Canada, and Gendou Ikari was meeting his plane. Fuyutsuki came halfway down the steps and paused, a look of mingled shock and surprise crossing his face as he got his first good look at Ikari. When they'd gone their separate ways, Gendou Ikari had been a cold, driven man, and his appearance had reflected that. Fuyutsuki had once remarked to a friend that the single most distinctive feature of Ikari, aside from the unfashionable Abe Lincoln beard he favored for some reason, was his cold, dead eyes - like the eyes of a shark or a barracuda, watching calmly and icily for something to savage and devour. It was not for nothing that Ikari often wore dark glasses. The rest of him had been just as cold, just as precise, just as regimented - his hair and beard just so, his clothes, which tended toward suits so severe they resembled uniforms, always neat and always without any hint of character. The man standing on the tarmac getting ready to greet Fuyutsuki was completely different. His black hair was getting to that length where it couldn't help but look unkempt, still too short to comb back into a ponytail, and his beard was not an Abe Lincoln but a Vandyke - and that rather untidily trimmed and surrounded by a couple of days' growth. He was ruddy-cheeked and bright-eyed behind round blue-tinted spectacles, and though his white lab coat was clean and pressed, it was being worn over a crumpled Beatles t-shirt, blue jeans, and Birkenstocks. The face under the changed beard and hair and the whimsical glasses, though, had the same lines, even if their old severity was erased by a bright, open expression. Fuyutsuki could barely believe his eyes. "... Ikari?!" he blurted. "Professor!" Ikari replied, throwing his arms wide in welcome. "I'm so glad you could come. We're really in desperate need of your brilliance. Let me take your bag." Two other men arrived at Station 51 that day as well. Unlike Fuyutsuki, they arrived not by private jet but in the relative ignominy of a cargo container being unloaded from a British freighter at the station's port - but their arrival was just as highly anticipated, and when they emerged, unshaven and blinking, from the Conex, their reception committee gave them a small version of a hero's welcome. Despite his sullen preoccupation, despite everyone else's grappling with their own problems, Jon Ellison had insisted that the EVA pilot contingent turn out to welcome MIB's greatest heroes back to the fold; and come they had. Marina Kirishatova, apparently motivated by curiosity, was with them; so was Amy Anderson. So, too, were Lara Croft and Brigadier Katsuragi, and the two of them were a welcome sight indeed to Kenneth Stanfield as he stretched his aching bones in the Halifax sunlight and remarked to himself that he was getting too damned old for this shit. He and Keller saluted the Brigadier, receiving their formal welcome back; then they all retired to Station 51's commissary, where they ate, if not like kings, at least not like commandos who had stowed away in a cargo container. It was a reasonably energetic celebration. Even Asuka mustered some semblance of goodwill, perhaps out of gratitude to the two men for erasing one of the stains SEELE had left on her native country when they seized control. /* Juno Reactor "Guardian Angel" _Beyond the Infinite_ */ That night, Rei Ayanami stood at the top of the aerial tower, the highest point on the grounds of Station 51, with her hands folded behind her back, and watched the ships come and go in Halifax Harbor below her. Below her feet the red aircraft warning light at the very tip of the High Frequency mast throbbed out its message. She couldn't be seen, should anyone chance to look up; the tower was much too high, and Rei's tiny shape at the tip of the HF mast would be impossible to make out in the gloom. She didn't really care if anybody did see her, but at least this way, no uninformed base staffer was likely to see her up there and start a rescue operation. Climbing up here had been easy, and well worth the minimal effort, for with the lights of the station far below her and only the red pulse of the aircraft lamp nearby, the night sky exploded with stars, more than Rei had ever seen in either of her two lives. Up there, with the wind singing in her ears and the stars wheeling above her in their ancient celestial glory, she knew finally and for certain that she was whole again. She could see the pattern in the stars themselves, the patterns in their endless motion, hear them singing their parts in the enormously complex harmony that was the symphonic fabric of all Creation. Only an angel could hear it so clearly as this. She smiled, spread her arms, and stepped off the antenna. From her back, with a crack like lightning, wings of blue-white light sprang forth, spreading to a span of nearly twice her height. Though insubstantial, they caught the wind all the same, and Rei's heart gave a great bounding leap as she swooped up, up into that velvety blue night, up into that starry sea. With the stars spread out above her and the lights of Halifax below, Rei exulted. She looped; she rolled; she did snap turns, this way and that, testing the limits of her aerial agility. Once she pulled her arms tight to the sides of her body and dove, nearly straight down, toward the black waters of the harbor, savoring the peculiarly sweet rush of the headlong plunge. It was something like suicide, something like the Fall, tasting gently of the forbidden before feeling the triumph of the pull-out, cheating death, cheating damnation, cheating all her troubles and hardships and streaking away from them in a blaze of blue-white light. The thinning air and the biting cold (the nights were still cold this far north), slashing through the sweater and jeans she wore, meant nothing to her. Why should they? She was free. Well, not free, not really - she was still a member of a force that found itself hunted and outlaw in over half the world, still a fugitive from the cruel conspiracy that threatened to destroy everything she had ever, knowingly or unknowingly, worked for. She was still bound by her promises to aid, to fight, to protect. She was still subject to, if not the laws of the Universe as Man knew them, at least the ancient and immutable laws of the Symphony and the Host. With that thought, her joy dissipated, and she faltered a bit in flight. What was she doing? What right had she to cavort this way, to feel this joy? None! None whatsoever. Burning with shame, hoping none of her friends had seen that selfish display, she returned to the tower, landing on the maintenance platform three-quarters of the way up. As she approached the door leading to the stairs down, it took her a moment to notice that there was a figure standing next to that door. Rei didn't recoil or cry out; she simply stopped walking and stood, waiting. The figure advanced, stepped tentatively into the slash of pale light cast across the platform by a floodlamp on a nearby roof. The dim glow didn't really make the figure visible. Too dim to show colors, it simply added some contrast to the indistinct shape. It gleamed from a white shirt, shone on a row of buttons. It splashed from a pair of wide eyes set in a fine-boned and beautiful face - a face Rei hadn't seen in days, never saw outside the testing center any more, as its owner went through her days by rote. "I'm sorry," said Asuka Soryu-Langley in a hushed, awe-struck tone. "I wasn't spying; I just came up here because I wanted to be as alone as I feel." Rei felt her cheeks go hot. "You saw - ?" she asked. Asuka nodded. Rei lowered her eyes, the shame burning her cheeks again. "I'm sorry," she said. "I - " But Asuka interrupted her, saying in a voice choked with emotion, "It was so beautiful. Almost beautiful enough to make me believe that God isn't dead after all." A tear ran down her cheek, glistening in the pale light from below. Rei looked up at her, inhaling sharply. "Asuka... " she said softly. Asuka came toward her, stumbling a little over the slight unevenness of the steel decking, and caught her by the shoulders. The redhead's face wore a mixture of fascination and desperate longing as she asked urgently, "What does it feel like to... to fall like that, Rei?" Rei looked back at her friend, troubled, not quite knowing what to say. Then she said slowly, "I think... I think it's a little bit like the better parts of dying." Asuka's fingers flexed on Rei's shoulders; she closed her eyes and inhaled deeply through her nose, as if she'd just felt either a sharp pain or a wave of pleasure. Whichever it was, it seemed to break the weird reverie she'd been in. "Ohh," she whispered. Her eyes opened, clear now and rather sad, and she said softly, "You're so lucky." She let go of Rei, turned, and leaned on folded arms on the railing, looking out at the lights of the complex and the city beyond. "I would give so much to know - really know - what it's like to fly that way." "I... " Rei paused, then joined Asuka at the rail. She sighed and said glumly, "It might have been better if I'd never found out." "Whaaaat?! Are you STUPID?!" Asuka demanded, her surprise returning her fully to a more familiar mood. "Why wouldn't you want to know what you really are? You'd rather have lived out your life as a normal woman, never knowing why you always felt like you were missing something?" "It's possible," Rei replied, "I could have been happy that way, never knowing what I am, never knowing what Jon is. We could have made a life for ourselves. Now... " Rei looked away, her face colored with both sadness and anger. "Now what?" Asuka wondered. "Now we can't," Rei replied. "Huh? But... why not?" Rei glared - really glared - at Asuka, something the redhead found so completely shocking that she couldn't even object to it for a few moments. She raised her hands. "Sorry!" she said. "Forget it." Rei shook her head. "No, -I'm- sorry," she replied. "I just... " She looked sadly out at the city. "I don't know what to do, Asuka." "Well, that makes all of us," Asuka replied wryly. "What's the matter?" Rei shook her head. "It's complicated." Asuka nodded agreeably. "Better not bother, then. I'm too stupid for anything complicated." Rei glanced sidelong at Asuka, who was doing her best to keep a straight face, and a snicker escaped her own lips. Before long they were both laughing. "All right," Rei surrendered when they'd recovered themselves. "But don't say I didn't warn you... it's a long story." She paused, gathering it all up inside her, and then began, "Just after the Fall, when the War was just beginning, the mortal world was in chaos. Humanity needed help to cope with the conflict they suddenly found themselves in the middle of; so the Almighty created a new choir of angels, to watch over the Earth and try to guide the human race through the chaos. It was a kind of experiment - but then, humanity itself was a kind of experiment." "Huh," said Asuka. She peeled some of the foil off a roll of Spear-O-Mint Life Savers, popped one of the mints into her mouth and tossed the scrap of foil absently off the tower. "Figures." She offered the roll. Rei took a mint and continued, "They were called the Grigori, or sometimes the Watchers. They lived among humans, -as- humans, and for that they were looked down on by some in Heaven. There were those in Heaven's hierarchy - as there are now - who disagreed with the Lord about the value of the human experiment. Those angels sneered at the Grigori, calling them the 'Least Holy', for they were made to be closest to Man in makeup and temperament. As it turned out, that was the Watchers' downfall." "What do you mean?" asked Asuka. "They grew to love humanity too much - loving both the humans themselves and the experience of being human. They scorned the higher angels' loftiness. Some of them took their task of living among humans as humans to such an extreme that they had children with mortals." Rei looked very subdued and sad as she went on, "When their detractors found out about this, they said the Watchers were unfit for grace, and branded their half-breed offspring as unholy monsters, naming them Nephallim. The debate fractured the Seraphim Council. Some feared the conflict would lead to a second Fall... so the Almighty compromised. "He did not damn the Grigori and their children, but neither did He support them. They were cast out, banished from Heaven, stricken from the records of our history. I only know of them because I'm a Friend of Destiny - I serve the Archangel whose is the Great Library. Even now it's forbidden to speak of them in Heaven." Asuka looked horrified. "So... but... what happened to them?" Rei shrugged sadly. "If there are any left, they live among the mortals still, trying their best to guard mankind with what remains of their power. Dreaming of Heaven's lost glories, torn between flesh and spirit... " She looked down at the ground far below, and a tear dripped from her eye and spiraled down out of sight. "By now, they're probably all gone, but no doubt their children still roam this world, different from their fellow men but never quite knowing why." Asuka struggled for a moment with her feelings, then blurted out, "That's... that's -horrible-!" Rei nodded. "You're not alone in your opinion," she said. "But what does it have to do with you?" Asuka went on. Rei shook her head. "Don't you understand, Asuka? Because of the Watchers, angels are prohibited from entering into bonds of love with mortals. As with so much else, I had forgotten that, until Jon's brother Lucas reminded me of it while he was torturing me in South Hadley. Since then I've been trying to deny it, but my flight... my flight brought it all back to me." She stopped talking, her hands quivering on the railing, and then went on in a soft, almost broken voice, "After all we've been through... to be true to the laws of Heaven, I must forsake the bonds I forged during the time I thought I was mortal." She laughed, a short, cold laugh that went well with the tears on her cheeks. "Do you see the irony yet, Asuka? After all I went through learning to love, now I must -abandon- love." Asuka's horrified look returned as what Rei had just told her sank in. "You mean - they'd make you - drop Jon?" "What part of Jon is not mortal is -demon-," Rei replied bitterly. "Work it out for yourself. But it doesn't end there. We are expected to love humans, if we insist on loving them at all, abstractly - from a distance - as a human loves a piece of art or a favorite animal. We are not to love them as one person to another. That implies a belief that humans are equal to angels, and that... that is heresy. I'll have to forsake Jon... and you... and... and DJ, too." She glanced at Asuka as she said this, a sort of nervous curiosity overlaying the terrible sadness in her eyes, but Asuka only smiled, a little wistfully. "I don't mind," she said in answer to Rei's unasked question. "You have a better chance of seeing him soon than I do, anyway." "Asuka," said Rei tentatively, "I don't believe - " Asuka wrenched the conversation back to its original track, clearly not wishing to stay on that subject. Her face darkened with anger as she bulldozed over Rei's soft protest with, "And this is -God's- law? God gives His angels the capacity for these feelings, and then punishes you for not denying them?" Rei looked downcast. "It's the decree of the Seraphim Council... but the Almighty has not spoken against it." "Well, then FUCK the Almighty!" Asuka bellowed, her voice echoing through the steel superstructure of the tower. Rei recoiled in shock from the sudden explosion, but Asuka met her astonished look with a fierce glare and went on, "You heard me right! If God has the cruelty to make a creature with a capacity for devotion like yours, and then punish you for using it, FUCK HIM!" Asuka leaned out over the edge of the railing, shaking her fist at the starry sky. Her eyes were huge, pupils contracted with fury, as she reverted to her native German and screamed into the night, <> As the echo of her last shout rang in the tower's steel, Asuka slumped, her frenzy spent. She fell to her knees with her head bowed and her hands still gripping the railing above her. Her body heaved with great raw sobs as she repeated over and over again, <> Rei stared at the sobbing redhead for several seconds, snared in a horrible indecision. Then she looked up at the night sky, set her jaw, and nodded, once, firmly. "Fine, then," she said aloud, softly. "If I am to be damned for staying true to my heart, then so be it." Then she helped Asuka to her feet, and, much to the redhead's surprise, hugged her tight. "But - I thought - " Asuka faltered. "Shh," Rei replied in a whisper. "I've come too far." Asuka smiled, nodded, and hugged her back. They stood that way for nearly a minute, rocking slowly in the wind atop the tower, before Asuka chuckled weakly. "What's funny?" Rei wondered as the two of them made their way to the stairs. "Well, it just hit me," said Asuka quietly. "Now you're being my friend -against- somebody's orders... " Rei's soft laughter echoed through the stairwell down the radio tower. The two young women walked together through the streets of Station 51's grounds in a comfortable silence. Asuka was drooping a little by the time they reached Building 401/M, worn out by a day of testing followed by the high emotions of her visit to the aerial tower. At the door to her bedroom, she hugged Rei again, thanking her quietly. "Asuka - " Rei began, but Asuka shook her head with a sad smile and silenced her friend with a fingertip to her lips. "I know you believe," she said softly, "but it won't keep me warm at night." Rei reached up and enfolded Asuka's hand in her own, freeing herself to reply, "You might be surprised." Asuka gave a dry chuckle at that, then leaned forward and abruptly, lightly, kissed Rei. "Good night, Rei," she said, and then quickly vanished into her room, leaving the startled angel looking at the embossed plastic sign on the door. (401/M-2 LANGLEY A) Rei turned away and went down the upstairs hall, consumed with a strange combination of puzzlement and frustration. She wished she could do more for her friend. She wished, in fact, that she could do more for -all- her friends. She was a Cherub; she was supposed to be a guardian angel. And a fine job she'd been doing so far, with one of the friends she'd pledged to defend vanished, another heartbroken, a third - the man she loved - struggling with his very identity. She paused at the door to her own room. She wasn't tired; she was still a bit keyed up from her flight, and her mind was too full of thoughts and concerns to settle into sleep. Besides, she didn't want to disturb Jon. By the standards of Station 51's Office of Personnel and Housing, his room might have been the one at the other end of the hall; but the pilots of Project Evangelion had their own standards, and Jon Ellison was probably right now asleep on the other side of this door. He'd come out of the funk that had been ruling him since his discovery of his demonic heritage just in time to be thrown into a new one by the jumbled circumstances of their escape from Worcester-3. Rei loved him dearly - completely - but his susceptibility to these black moods annoyed and disturbed her. Just another thing she couldn't help with. Had she any usefulness left at all? She sighed, turned, went downstairs, and left the house. Glancing back, she saw that 401/N's windows were dark. Unsurprising; it was nearly midnight, after all. Rei wandered back toward the tower, passed it, and went into the once-vacant office building currently housing NERV's Operations and Technical Administration staff while construction was completed on the new headquarters. Rei's ID badge got her into the admin building, but there was no one about except for the uniformed X-COM guard in his little armored-glass kiosk near the entrance. He gave her a salute as she entered, and the PA speaker built into his enclosure crackled, "Evening, Lieutenant Ayanami." (Being a Royal Marine seconded to X-COM, he pronounced it "Leftenant", and his accent tended to put an 'r' before the 'm' in her name.) She nodded to him and vaguely wished he were Barney Dafoe, the friendly Central Dogma parking structure gate guard. She wondered where Barney was, if he had escaped Worcester-3, as she roamed the silent, empty halls of the admin building. She also wondered what she was trying to accomplish. Was she looking for somebody to talk to? If so, she was unlikely to find anybody here, at this hour, unless Professor Ikari were in his office working through the night. It might be nice to talk to the professor again. There had been a time when he'd been more or less her only friend - a rather distant friend, and a bit cold sometimes, but he'd felt something for her nonetheless, and she'd done her best to respond in her crippled, stunted way. They hadn't spoken much since his recovery from alien control, and there were times when she missed him; one way or another, he had represented her only human contact in the early stages of her mortal life. She turned a corner and saw the blue-white gleam of a Pepsi machine splashing onto the corridor floor from an open, darkened doorway - the snack bar, long since closed down for the night. The room was left open to give late workers access to the vending machines. Rei decided she might as well get something to drink, and went into the room. In the doorway, she realized there was somebody sitting at the end of one of the last of the room's several long tables - sitting back in a chair with her feet up, her face both in shadow and obscured by a pad of paper she held before her in the dim glow of the cola machine's front. Again Rei wasn't particularly startled, but wondered who it could be, and whether it was just her night for encountering people lurking in shadows for no good reason. "Good evening," she said softly. The shadowed figure didn't reply; instead she flipped over a leaf of the notebook, lowered it, and smiled. "Fifteen years trapped in the world of Adam's sons," she said in a soft voice, "and you're still the most picturesque angel who ever sat on a cloud. It's been -way- too long since I've been able to draw you from life. Are you going to hold still long enough for me to do it now?" Rei was glad she wasn't carrying anything, because she knew she'd have dropped it as she stared in disbelief at the figure on the other side of the table and gasped, "Rachael!" She reached to her side, found the light switch, and turned on the snackroom lights. Rachael was a elfin, willowy woman who appeared to be a year or two beyond Rei's visible age, not quite as tall as Jon and rather less bulky. She had a brown oilskin drover coat on over a blue blouse and black jeans, charcoal under her fingernails and a smudge of it on one cheek, and fine straight hair tucked back behind her ears. Her face was narrow, her mouth curved in a wide smile as she looked between the startled Rei and her paper and back again, sketching with quick strokes of her pencil on the paper before sitting back with a sigh and smiling contentedly. "I've been wanting to do that for ages," she observed, and stood up to give Rei a hug. Certainly Rei could have been more astonished. If you had asked her to draw up a list of people she thought it least likely would be loitering in the snack room of the temporary admin building at 12:04 AM to grab her up and give her a hug, Rachael Swiftedge would have been about forty-seventh. Nevertheless, forty-seventh isn't very high, and so she was still pretty astonished. The last time Rei had seen Rachael, her Malakite friend had been unceremoniously placed in the service of Laurence, the Archangel of the Sword, who was widely known throughout the Host as... well, as a bit of a prat, really. Rachael, who'd previously been a servitor of Eli, Archangel of Creation, had not been coping well with the change. Rei was honestly surprised that her friend still -existed-, let alone that she'd managed to snag a corporeal assignment to look her up. She let Rachael know all this as she bought a soda and sat down to drink it; the Malakite settled herself back into her chair on the other side of the table and resumed sketching her friend, grinning the whole time, until Rei'd finished expressing her surprise. When she was done, Rachael closed her sketchbook and shook her head. "Laurence and I never did get along, and I still want to find out who thought my serving him was a good idea and provide some graphic illustrations as to why it -wasn't-. To make matters worse, after you and Tabris left and all the, um, unpleasantness happened down here, he just lost it. Especially since he was -sure- that the reason things had gone wrong was that you weren't 'experienced enough'." Rachael shook her head, rolling her eyes slightly at the memory. "He tried to drag me in front of the Seraphim Council, to make me tell them that I'd known you were too young to handle such a thing - and I wasn't having any of that, so I left his service." She paused, her brown eyes sad for a moment, then smiled. "Yves offered me a job, though, chronicling some of the artwork that was coming up in children's stories, so it turned out all right." Rei mused over that as she nodded and took a drink of her beverage. Rachael, in her quiet, understated way, was very much downplaying a serious and dangerous turn of events, and Rei well knew it. A major falling-out between a young angel and her Archangel superior often resulted in the young angel's dissolution - or worse, her expulsion from Heaven. Rachael was telling her that she'd skated perilously close to the Abyss before being rescued by Yves, the kindly old Archangel of Destiny, and she was doing it the way a human would describe getting fired from one job and being hired for another. "Oh, that reminds me," Rachael said, digging into an inside pocket of her drover, "I was given a message for you." She pulled out a small, rather besmudged blue envelope and pushed it across the table to her. Rei picked the envelope up, slit the end with her thumb, pulled out a small piece of paper, and unfolded it. On it was a short note in a very familiar scrawl: My dear child, The Seraphim Council do have their opinions, and then I have mine. (By the way, your friend is quite eloquent.) -Y. Rei smiled softly as she folded the note, put it back in its envelope, and glanced up at Rachael. "So... what are you doing here?" Rachael's smile picked up an edge of glee. "Your friend Tabriel turned up at the Pearly Gates a few days ago," she said. "Most of the older angels spent about ten minutes wondering where they'd heard that song before, and then they spent the -next- ten minutes picking up their collective jaws from the floor. Dominic called a special session of the Seraphim Council, and was remarkably calm about the whole thing, but everything else was pretty much mass confusion. Yves snuck me in to the session by calling me his scribe. It was a hoot. "Tabriel was there to report on your mission - the Great Redemption. And you ought to've seen Laurence's face when she said she was the Herald of Light! I thought he was gonna explode all over -everybody- right there in the Council Chamber. It took them a day just to decide whether to accept that claim. Anyway, long story short, they did. After a lot -more- wrangling, Lucifer's temporarily regained his seat on the Council in absentia, and Tabriel's sitting in it until the Lightbringer can complete his Ascension." Rei blinked at her. "Are - are they sending help?" "Not yet," Rachael replied. "After all those angels of War got pasted by you and your human friends, the Council banned any intervention in this affair by the Host. Michael, Tabriel and the others in favor of direct assistance haven't been able to override Laurence and the rest of his crowd. At least, not yet; there are a few still abstaining from the votes, Yves himself and Dominic most notable among them, and they can swing it either way if they come down from the fence. "The only concession they'll make so far is to allow Light to send one servitor as an observer and recorder," Rachael went on, then sighed. "That was Laurence trying to pull a fast one, of course. He knew Tabriel was Light's only servitor, and that she wouldn't leave Lucifer's seat on the Council vacant to return to Earth." "You mean... " Rachael's grin reminded Rei of the old saying about the cat and the canary. She turned over her right hand and pushed her charcoal-smudged sleeve back. Imprinted on her wrist and spreading up into the hollow of her palm was a mark like a brand or tattoo: a stylized torch about an inch long, the flame at its head outlined with little lines symbolizing radiance. "He didn't realize that, while she's keeping Lucifer's Council seat warm for him, Tabriel can invest servitors of Light herself," she explained. "Yves was glad to let me go. He hasn't spoken out one way or another in Council yet - I think he's waiting for something particular to happen - but it's obvious he's in favor of the Redemption coming off." "You, an observer." Rei laughed. "The Seraphim Council will get their report in sketches." "Only if I don't get a chance to color them first," Rachael answered with a toss of her head to get her hair back out of her face. "And honestly, the only one who I expect to be totally obnoxious about it is Laurence anyway." Rei chuckled softly. "'Great Redemption: The Graphic Novel', she mused. "That's wonderful news, Rachael. I only hope... I only hope it's not all for nothing. We're in a very bad position. If Michael and the others had been allowed to take an active hand, perhaps the coming confrontation could have been avoided, but without them... I don't know." Rachael smiled. "It'll all work out in the end, Rei," she said with absolute conviction. "We'll make it work." Fort Defiance came quietly online the following week, and the pilots and support staff moved from Station 51 into their new headquarters without fanfare. No one was really in the mood for a grand opening ceremony or anything like that. The pilots spent the first week getting accustomed to the place, which in layout and overall design theme was part Central Dogma and part standard X-COM underground base. It lacked the "outdoors underground" feel that the Central Dogma complex in its Geo-Front cave had possessed. For Jon, it was a peculiar feeling being back in a place that had some of the feel of an X-COM facility; he hadn't been in one since Alcatraz, before he'd been sent to NERV. There was another oddly familiar thing about Fort Defiance from Jon's point of view, too. When X-COM had abandoned its United States bases, a lot of equipment got shuffled around, and a good deal of it was made available to NERV to stock that organization's Canadian headquarters. One of the pieces of equipment salvaged from a US X-COM base was Alcatraz's former majordomo computer system. Like Station 51's troika of major systems, now similarly reassigned to help with NERV's needs, and NERV's own research coordination system, the new machine had started its existence as a HAL 9000 supercomputer and had since been heavily modified; but the modifications to Xerxes had been differently engineered and made for different purposes than those to NERV'S SHODAN or any of the three Station 51 systems. Xerxes was a dedicated facility majordomo system with a concentration in security. He wasn't interested in information retrieval or coordinating science experiments or any of that. Xerxes watched the skies, and the service tunnels, and the ground approaches. He saw his task as keeping the compound safe and the people inside it informed of what was going on, and Xerxes took his task very seriously. It was a very odd feeling for Jon the first time he was walking down a corridor in Fort Defiance and heard the pleasant three-tone chime which was standard on X-COM public address systems, and then heard the familiar calm, well-modulated, English-sounding voice of the Alcatraz AI announce: "This is Xerxes. To celebrate the Grand Opening of the Fort Defiance commissary, tonight will be Taco Night. Bring your taste for that south-of-the-border flavor and your sense of adventure. Spiced tofu will be available for vegetarian staffers." There was a pause, and then the computer spoke again, in equally clipped French tones: "Ici Xerxes. Pour célébrer la Grande Ouverture de la cantine du fort Défi, ce soir on vous offre la Nuit de Tacos. Apportez vos appétits pour la saveur du frontier sud et vos sens de l'aventure. Le toofoo épicé sera disponible pour notre personnel végétarien." It was, after all, a -Canadian- station, and Xerxes was nothing if not observant of the proprieties. Jon chuckled, his spirits at least momentarily lifted, and increased his pace. It wouldn't do to be late for his first tech briefing since the station came online. John Trussell stood at the front of the room, his back to a display screen. He waited until his audience had arranged themselves and prepared themselves to take notes, cleared his throat, and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, what you are about to see is, I think, quite remarkable," he said. He pressed a control on the small device in his hand, and the screen behind him glowed into an image of what, for a moment, the rest of them thought was an Evangelion. Then they realized it wasn't. It was -like- an Evangelion, though: a massive but curiously spindly humanoid form with arms and legs of exaggerated length and slenderness and a very narrow torso. Most of its body was covered in a sleek scarlet covering, smoother than an EVA's segmented body armor and piped with bright yellow seams. Its feet, forearms and hands were sheathed in scaled yellow-painted metal, feet and fingers coming to wicked-looking points. The forearms were clearly mechanical, their yellow-armored mechanisms blending smoothly and a little unnervingly into the red-coated synthetic flesh of the main body just below the elbow joint. A core module gleamed in the center of its chest, about where an EVA's core would be. From the core up, though, the resemblance to an EVA abruptly ended. This machine had a great yellow breastplate with the core inset below its lower edge, and massive pauldrons of the same gleaming yellow-coated armor. In the center of each pauldron, centered on a seam that divided the pauldrons into upper and lower segments, was a round red lens. The right-hand pauldron had a divided color scheme, yellow above the divide and scarlet below, and in the scarlet half were painted the yellow hammer, sickle and star of the Soviet Union. Surmounting the whole affair was a head again reminiscent of an EVA's, looking disproportionately small surrounded as it was by the great expanse of the creature's shoulders. It hadn't as much of a face as an EVA's head; only two narrow green-lensed optics. The head rose from the eyeline to a point, as though it had a vertical horn. The orange cylinder of an Elerium collider jutted up from the back of each shoulder unit, and a yellow-tipped red cone could just be seen behind the head. "This," said Truss, "is the Vyeliki Sovyetski Zaschitnae Beomehanichiski Robot - Great Soviet Defense Biomechanical Robot - or 'Zashchitnik' for short." He paused, congratulating himself for having pronounced the long-practiced Russian without a hitch, and then went on, "It's an Evangelion-like weapon developed by Professor Nikolai Kirishatov and his team at the Special Projects Directorate of the Soviet Space Agency. You may remember Professor Kirishatov's name in conjunction with NERV TechDiv's joint effort with SPD, Project Atlas." Truss pointed to the projected image of the Soviet weapon with his pointer and said, "Not counting the horn on his head, Zashchitnik stands two hundred ninety-eight feet high, two feet shorter than a Westinghouse Model 2014-A1 general-production Evangelion. His main body is a cyborg construct - artificial muscle and so forth grown onto a titanium-composite skeleton and reinforced with myomer fiber and memory-metal bars along the major lines of stress. His forearms and feet, as well as his torso from the core up, are robotic. The pilot sits in an integral cockpit, not an entry plug, just above the core. Access is from a rear hatch; there's also an emergency escape system that blows his head off, permitting escape through his neck." "What's the control system?" wondered Gendou Ikari. "A direct-duophase neural-interface system similar to the Super-Synchron system Doctors Minter and Akagi developed for Archangelion," Truss replied. "Professor Kirishatov's team came up with it. Judging by the performance figures I've seen, it works quite well." "Direct duophase? So their pilot must have an interface processor implant?" "That's correct," Truss replied. "The Soviet Air Force has been using them for years, starting with the F model of the MiG-31 Firefox in 2012, but Zashchitnik is the first practical Soviet application of the technology outside of aircraft." "Interesting," mused Gendou. "Go on." Truss pointed to the colliders on the beast's back. "Zashchitnik is powered by a two-collider Elerium-115 reactor system similar to that employed on Jet Alone. He is equipped with a modified synthetic core based on the core of an alien battleship captured in 1998, which enables him to project an Ibuki-Trussell Field and can also act as a fairly powerful directed energy weapon, on par with the particle beam weapon fitted to JA. That's why it's exposed, by the way." "Say, that's tricky," said Maya. "Nice and compact. Wish we'd thought of it." Truss grinned at her. "There are a lot of things on this monster I wish we'd thought of. Kirishatov and his team are priceless, I wish we'd had them with us from 8 o'clock Day One." Truss cleared his throat and went on, "Zashchitnik is quite well-armed - more so than an EVA, by far. In fact, he's about as heavily armed as the new rev of Jet Alone." Pointing out the parts as he named them, Truss went on, "Zashchitnik's horn, the tips of his feet, his fingertips and the spurs on his elbows and knees are all progressive edges, which makes him very well-suited for close combat - especially since his artificial musculature makes him about 20% stronger than a production-grade EVA. By the way, our telemetry on the unit that Rei destroyed in South Hadley is incomplete, but we think that means Zashchitnik is still about 5% stronger than -that-. The only known kaiju-class weapons that can overpower him in a contest of sheer strength are Jet Alone and Archangelion - and maybe EVA-01, that unit's maximum output was never accurately gauged after its, er, transformation. "As for ranged weapons, he has three integral weapons systems, and since he has full-hand manipulators he can also use the full range of EVA weapons, except the Type 20. The core beam we've already discussed. These lenses on his shoulders are his heavy artillery - they're the emitters for a tandem anti-matter beam projector." There was a loud thunk, clatter and sputter as Gendou Ikari dropped his coffee mug in mid-swallow and ejected that swallow in the general direction of Shigeru Aoba, who dove under the table. "ANTI-MATTER BEAM?!" Ikari blurted, rising to his feet and wiping at his mouth with the back of his sleeve. "Kirishatov mounted a DOUBLE-BARRELLED POSITRON ACCELERATOR on that monster?!" Truss, who had become rather blase as to Zashchitnik's capabilities during his night's study of the specs, replied calmly, "Anti-proton, actually. Professor Kirishatov maintains that anti-matter is useless if you're not willing to apply some real mass. It can also be configured to project regular old electrons, so it does double duty as a twin conventional particle-beam cannon." Ikari sat heavily back in his chair, his face almost blank with astonishment. "Anti-proton cannon," he murmured under his breath. "They're mad, absolutely mad." "What's that thing behind its head?" asked Jon Ellison. "Oh, that's Petya. A nuclear missile," Truss replied blandly. "... You're... joking, right?" said Asuka. "Nope," Truss replied. "'Little Pete'. It's a 25-megaton thermonuclear cruise missile, approximate range 150 miles. Of course, since Zashchitnik was developed as a black project by the Special Projects Directorate of the -Space Agency-, a lot of his components are sort of misappropriated aerospace parts. Petya is supposed to be air-launched. Professor Tereshkova thinks she's reprogrammed it to handle ground launch just fine, but of course it hasn't been tested. We hope we won't need to use it." "What in God's name did the -Russians- expect to use it on?" asked Aoba. "Angels, presumably," said Truss. "Remember that until we pointed them at the IT-core tech, Zashchitnik didn't have any AT-defeating capabilities - if he ever had to fight an Angel, he would have to take it out with sheer brute force. Now, we know that's -possible-. No phase-space neutralization took place in DJ and Rei's confrontation with the Fifth Angel - Gabriel's Horn just blasted the living -hell- out of it. We may never be sure, but I think a 25-megaton H-bomb would do the job, AT Field or not." "But my God, the collateral damage!" said Hyuuga. "The Soviets are a bit more philosophical about that kind of thing than our operations planners," Truss said. "As Professor Kirishatov put it, it's better to have a large radioactive crater in your country and no Angel than an Angel and no country. Keep in mind that the Soviets didn't know what the Angels were really after when they developed Zashchitnik - they only knew that they were marauders from another world. Their X-COM regional directorate took the Angel threat as an extension of the Hidden War." "And it's still operational?" asked Ikari. "Professor Kirishatov's phrase was 'you never know when you'll need one,'" Truss replied with the tone of a man who is not likely to be surprised by much of anything these days. "Do the Canadians know about it?" asked Hyuuga. "Probably not," said Truss with a shrug. "Given all the -other- horribly dangerous stuff we have around here, who cares about one piddling little H-bomb?" /* Toshihiko Sabashi "Weep For" _Big-O: Original Sound Score_ */ Asuka Soryu-Langley slept uneasily that night, but it didn't have anything to do with the presence of the Russian thermonuclear weapon. It wasn't even really because of the strange bed in her new quarters at Fort Defiance; her nomadic life had taught her to sleep in strange beds without much trouble. The problem was that she kept dreaming that she was sleeping in a different bed, one with a window that looked out on Worcester-3, one with a quilted bedspread in the pattern of a Union Jack. That wasn't unusual. She'd slept there quite a few times, and in many ways it had felt more like home than her own room down the hall. The problem was, she was there alone, and she knew, on some level, that she was dreaming, which ruined the effect. She sat up and looked around. The room was like she remembered it, but not, not quite. The tall black shape of DJ's computer was gone from the desk at the other end. The books weren't on the shelves, but scattered on the bed where she lay and the floor, something DJ would never have abided. Nothing was damaged, but the room had obviously been searched and then left that way. And she was viewing it all through a strange grey haze - like the room was full of smoke or fog, though she smelled nothing and felt no clammy coolness. "Hello?" she said, and her voice was muted, muffled in the audible equivalent of the same fuzzy grey mist. As soon as she said it, she felt a bit silly. There was obviously no one here. Knowing it was a dream, she tried to wake up, but it didn't work; the layers of her consciousness felt as if something thick and heavy had settled over them, keeping her from moving between them. She was mired in this misty dream room, unable to escape. A twinge of panic touched her heart. A moment later, the door opened and DJ came in. "Hi," he said, smiling. "Been a while." Asuka stared at him in disbelief for a moment, then turned away, closed her eyes, refused to look at him. "No," she said. "You're not here." "Asuka," he said, his tone sounding a little strained and a little hurt. She felt his weight press down on the bed as he sat on the edge. "Asuka, look at me," he said quietly. "No," she repeated. "You're not here. -I'm- not here. This is a dream." "Well, yes, it is," said DJ, sounding faintly amused. "But we're both here, all the same. Will you please look at me?" "Nein!" Asuka spat, shaking her head and keeping her eyes closed. <> she went on in her native language, feeling herself falling back to something strangely like childhood. <> "... I only caught about every fourth word of that," came DJ's calm, sad voice. "You know my German's still not very good. I get the message, though. I'm sorry you feel that way... I don't know how often I'll be able to try this." The bed sagged a little more as he leaned toward her. Asuka winced back, expecting the cold touch of a skeletal claw or something equally horrid, but all she felt was a warm, gentle, familiar kiss. "Be well, my love," said the voice, and the wistful tone and the lingering sensation of the kiss sparked something in her mind, some part of her which wanted to believe no matter how much the rest of her refused to. There was a brief struggle, and that part won. Her eyes flew wide open, her arms searching - - a dark and empty room, deep in the earth beneath Nova Scotia. For a moment, the sense of loss and longing was as intense as it had been when she'd first realized he'd fallen to the enemy. It stabbed at her like broken glass, like the neural needles of synchro-feedback; and after it came something else, a blood-thinning, heart-chilling, teeth-grinding rage that almost - but not quite - wiped away the pain. She sat and snarled, her fists clenched in her bedcovers, for a few seconds. She couldn't even throw anything; the alarm clock and lamp were both built into the headboard of her X-COM-issue bunk unit. The frustration made the rage mount even higher, until suddenly it all broke and crashed down into a deep, slimy pit of grief. Asuka collapsed on her back, turned on her face, and wailed into the uncaring temperfoam of her bunk. Oh, my God, some small part of her thought as the rest drowned in pain. I -am- going mad. Kozo Fuyutsuki had been wondering idly if he might be undergoing a similar process ever since he'd come to Halifax. The changes in Gendou Ikari were startling, and the professor was starting to worry that he was just too old to adjust to a world that so dramatically failed to meet his expectations. Although, as he sat in the Fort Defiance commissary and listened to Ikari talk about field dynamics, the Kabbalah, and the better songs of the Rolling Stones, it occurred to Fuyutsuki that the conversation wasn't entirely alien. Back in his early student days, years before the Second Impact and the resulting chaos - before he'd married Yui Ikari, to say nothing of her death - Gendou Rokobungi -had- possessed a range of interests as wide and varied as that. He -had- talked in this mile-a-minute way when he got excited about something. Fuyutsuki had found it easy enough to forget as he grew to hate the cold, distant creature Ikari had become after Yui's death, but there had been a time when he'd liked the younger man. While Yui was alive, Gendou had sometimes been hard to take, but it was because of his intensity and his willingness to say anything he felt, not because he was mean-spirited or hypocritical. The professor had really rather admired him for his honesty and mental agility, and it was coming back to him now that a lot of the reason he'd broken off with Gendou after Yui's death was because he'd lost that spark and turned into a humorless bastard. "... but as I get older, I start to realize that they really never topped 'Satisfaction'. There's just something pure about that guitar line, you know?" Fuyutsuki got up from the table while Ikari air-guitared the song's intro ("Nat NAA, nana NAA nanananananat NAA, nana NAA... "), put his hand on the younger scientist's shoulder, and smiled. "It's been a long day, Gendou. I'm heading to bed." "Oh," said Ikari, abandoning his imaginary instrument. He stood up as well. "Good night, then. I think we're getting close on the AT interaction problem." "So do I. With any luck we should have the results we need by the end of the week. Good night, Gendou." "Good night, Professor," said Ikari. He watched the old scientist leave the room, then chuckled and discarded his own trash and heading out into the hall. For a moment he paused, struck by indecision. It was only 10:30... what to do with the rest of the evening? After a few moments' consideration, he turned left and headed for the field dynamics lab. Perhaps he could go over the afternoon's test results again, looking for anything they might have missed. Or at least play the new Star Trek game with SHODAN. "I can't get no... sa-tis-fac-tion... " Jon Ellison sat hunched in the Technical Library datacarrel he'd occupied for much of the last two months. His eyes felt like someone had poured sand in them, the back of his tongue had an evil-tasting film on it, and he didn't remember when he'd last eaten. None of that seemed to matter. He felt as though he was on the verge of a breakthrough, as if at any moment he would scroll onto the screenful of data that had the answer, though he'd read these files a thousand times by now. Somewhere in here was the key to everything, he was convinced of it. During this fight, Rei had regained her celestial heritage fully, becoming the angel Reilael again for the first time since the Second Impact. Her Heavenly might had driven the corpse of Moloch to the edge and beyond, in a furious display of power which had destroyed the Evangelion - reduced it to dust. Somewhere in here was the key to understanding that moment of transition, that instant when she fully tapped her power, and if Jon could find it, he would finally understand... ... understand... The thought slipped away from him, and suddenly it all seemed considerably less clear. Understand -what-? He wasn't an angel struggling to escape from a human prison. He wasn't even a real -demon-. He was a... a -thing-. Not even really a person at all. Not even -unique-! There were a dozen others just like him - a few less if you didn't count the ones who had already been killed in the war, but what the hell did that matter - they could always make more! Jon blinked, wiped his hands down his face, and looked at the screen again. The numbers which had moments before been threatening to reveal cosmic truths stared back, revealed for the meaningless gibberish they were. The frustration exploded somewhere behind his eyes, and with a snarl like an animal he lashed out. The display panel exploded, sending a curl of smoke toward the ceiling and scattering bits of glass across the carrel's desktop. Jon looked down at his hand and saw to his horror that he hadn't punched the screen; he'd driven his stiffened fingers into it, and the black, gleaming talons that had been his fingertips had done the rest. The sight shocked him back to himself, and as he watched his hand reverted, became human again - or at least took on some semblance of humanity. He gingerly drew it back and looked at the ruin he'd made of the screen. My God, he thought to himself. That could just as easily have been somebody's face... Slowly, Jon crossed his arms, dropped his head onto them, and sobbed. Some distance away and in a distinctly calmer mood, Shinji Ikari lay on his bed and wryly considered the market potential of a photographic essay book of unfamiliar ceilings. Admittedly, this particular one was difficult to see at the moment; the only light in his bedroom was coming from the blank but switched-on monitor of his computer terminal, casting a dull grayish glow too weak to see useful details by. He yawned. After an hour of lying here awake, sleepiness was finally beginning to overtake him. He settled back a little, closed his eyes, and let himself float. He wasn't really dreaming; the images that drifted through his mind had no particular order or meaning, no narrative however disjointed. They were mostly memories, revived by his half-dreaming brain to that strange level of realism that was both painfully sharp and peculiarly distorted. The images came from his early childhood, far enough back that he could only remember them at all in a hypnotic state like this. Over the years he'd learned to do this, to enter this state, and semi-consciously view the images of his past which he'd forgotten in his everyday life. It was the only way he could ever see his mother. Suddenly, a new stream of images intruded into the familiar phantoms of his childhood - images from the much more recent past. They were mainly of another female, one who had given him a similar feeling of peace and comfort, albeit in a totally different way... He gasped and sat up, suddenly and fully awake. Fully awake, yet the hallucinations remained, a final afterimage of Ichi's face lingering before his eyes even now that they were open. Wait. No. That wasn't an afterimage. That was somebody's face. Somebody, a slender girl-shape barely recognizable as such in the twilight of his monitor, was sitting back on his knees, her own knees astride his hips, smiling at him. "Hi, Shinji," she said softly. Shinji's response was direct, to the point, and perfectly summed up his feelings about the situation. "GYAAAAAAAH!!" Panicked, he backed away, bunching all of his covers up in a pile at the girl's knees as he scrambled back to the wall. His hand slapped against the wall near his headboard once, twice, then found the induction plate that turned on the overhead lights. He gasped. The shape at the head of the bed was flung into abrupt detail by the flood of light from the ceiling. She was indeed a girl, maybe a year or two younger than Shinji, just beginning to develop the curving shape of young womanhood, dressed in a battered-looking black plug suit. Her hair was as black as night, just shorter than shoulder-length, and slightly damp, as though she'd just washed it. Her eyes were a startlingly vivid shade of green. Shinji's stomach clenched, and a word forced itself through his gritted teeth before he could stop it: "Ichi!" She smiled at him again and shook her head. "No," she said. Of course, she couldn't be. This girl couldn't be Ichi. She was too young-looking, not... er... developed enough... and anyway, Ichi was dead. Shinji knew that... ... he had killed her himself. "W-who are you?" he repeated, his voice a strangled whisper. "My name is San," she said. Mostly ignoring his shock-frozen presence, she got up from his bed, opened a black nylon bag that was lying on the floor next to it, took out some clothing, and then unconcernedly decompressed the plug suit and began to climb out of it. Shinji let out a gulp and edged around her, backing toward the hall door. Pausing halfway out of the suit as though a thought had struck her, she looked back over one bare shoulder and said with a small grin, "If I have to tell you my -last- name, Shinji, I'm going to go back outside and -shoot- myself, it'll be that disappointing." Shinji, startled, palmed the control for the door and backed stammering through it; it swished closed again just as the plug suit dropped past her waist. He stood in the hall, blinking and trying not to hyperventilate. OK. Get a grip on yourself, Shinji. Er, that is, calm down, get control. So you woke up to find a girl who looks a whole lot like Ichi sitting on you, and then she started stripping, and she knows your name. That's no reason to get all freaked out. But where the hell did she come from? She couldn't have... ? No, that was ridiculous, clearly impossible. How would she have made it this far? The door opened again, making him jump and utter a small cry. She was standing there, dressed in what looked like Army pants made of that gridded black rip-stop nylon, dark blue Chuck Taylors, and a gray flannel shirt, and had her black bag slung over one shoulder. "Have you got a shower around here?" she asked. "I doused my hair in a bathroom sink before I came to see you, but the rest of me could use some help." She cocked her head curiously at his reaction and said mildly, "You're awfully jumpy." "How did you get here?!" he demanded. "I walked," she replied, turning and starting down the hallway. "Look, you're going to have to show me where things are. My floorplan is obviously way off; I had to try two broom closets and a conference room before I finally found your room." "But - but - hold it! You're not supposed to be in here." "I know that," she said, giving him an exasperated look. "Why do you think I sneaked in?" "If Security catches you - " Somebody cleared his throat behind Shinji, making him jump again; he whirled, and his heart sank as he saw the broad, mustachioed spectacle that was Security Officer Otis Belfour. Shinji ground his teeth. Why did it have to be Otis? "Well, well, well, Mr. Ikari," Otis announced in his pompous "caught somebody" tone. "What've we got here?" He put his hands on either side of his belt buckle and looked smug. "I - uh - she - " Shinji stammered. "Sneaking girls into your room, eh?" said Otis with what was, for him, a knowing nod. "Naughty, Mr. Ikari. What'd your father think?" What -would- my father think? Shinji wondered. "I don't know," he replied honestly. "But this isn't what it looks like - " "Oh, sure," said Otis with cheery skepticism. "I used to tell my dad that too, when I used to borrow the Aerostar - " Shinji really didn't want to hear the sordid details of Otis Belfour's teenage escapades, and as he cringed in anticipation, he was pleasantly surprised to see Otis stop talking, blanch and step back, his hand fumbling at his belt holster. "Whoa!" said Otis. Shinji turned to see San standing behind him with a plasma pistol in her hand, and felt a remarkable sense of deja vu. At least until San stripped the power pack out of the weapon and said, "You'll probably want to secure this, Mr. Security Guard. I won't be needing it any more." "Uh... an'... an' why might you have had that, eh, little girl?" Otis wondered, suppressing the quaver in his voice pretty well, Shinji thought. "I had to kill one of my sisters to get out of the complex," she said matter-of-factly, "and there were several large animals along the way who mistook me for the convenient snack size." She held out the disarmed pistol and its power pack again. "Are you going to take it or not?" Otis took it warily, then stuck it in his belt, the power pack in his shirt pocket. He scratched at the back of his neck, puzzled. "Uh... who'd you say you killed?" "My sister, Juuni," San replied with an air of tried but holding patience. "You should probably arrest me for violating your security perimeter now," she suggested. "Aw, that's OK," said Otis. "I was just gonna give Ikari a hard time about sneakin' you in and then run you along home." "Otis," Shinji snapped, unable to contain his exasperation at the man's denseness any more, "I didn't sneak her in, she broke into the complex. This is San Ayanami - she's one of SEELE's clones of Rei. You know, SEELE, the -enemy-?" "Oh," said Otis, and comprehension slowly seeped into his broad, fleshy face. Then he blinked, said, "OH!", jumped back and yanked the pistol out of his belt. "Don't you move, missy!" he shouted. San regarded her onetime possession with nothing more than mild interest. "Maybe you should load it," she observed calmly. Otis looked down at it, realized he'd pulled the wrong one, and flushed bright red. "Anyway, there's no need," San went on. "I don't mind being arrested. I'd really like to take a shower first, though. OK?" "Uh... heh... sure," said Otis as he put the empty pistol back in his belt. Amy Anderson entered the Tech Library to check on the out-of-service terminal notice she'd seen on Durandal's master systems status monitor. It wasn't her job to do things like that, but she'd been checking on some more important systems things and had little better to do. She really should have been in bed, but sleeping wasn't as easy as it had been once, and she preferred to be doing -something- over just staring at the ceiling in the dark. She was surprised to find someone hunched over the back corner carrel which was reporting itself out of service. With the lights in the room turned down to nightshift gloom, it took her a moment to recognize the lean shape of the back with its broadening shoulders and the long, disordered tangle of black hair falling down it. It was the hair that first made her realize that it was Jon Ellison. What was he doing? Was he asleep? She approached him slowly, and when she got within earshot, she said quietly, "Jon?" Jon's shoulders twitched, almost a start, and he sat slowly up without turning around. "Amy," he said, his voice rough. "You shouldn't be here." "I... I saw a report that this terminal was out of service," said Amy hesitantly. A noise came from Jon which Amy needed several seconds to realize had been a chuckle. "Oh. Yes. It's certainly that." "Jon?" said Amy. She moved a step closer and said hesitantly, "Are... are you all right?" The black-haired young pilot suddenly turned around, and Amy inadvertently drew back a half-step. Jon had a wild, desperate look in his red-rimmed eyes, and with his face pale from fatigue and in need of a shave, the total effect was startling. "Do I look all right?" Jon demanded. Amy blinked, forced herself to regain her composure - he wasn't any threat to her, for pity's sake, he was JON - and said, "Do you need help? Is there anything I can do?" Jon looked like he might say something nasty in response, but then controlled himself, shook his head, and seemed to deflate a bit. "I... I don't think so, Amy," he said softly. "I'm not sure anyone can help me now." He got up with a great