Chapter 11: Recovery Team, Above Mainland Southeast Asia

Chapter 11:
Recovery Team,
Above Mainland Southeast Asia

 

“ASUKA!” Misato shouted. An analog-modulated laser beam hurled her voice toward the red giant. “Don’t go that way! Go right—the side you hold your chopsticks!”

With visible reluctance, Crimson A1 altered her course.

The giant was attempting to take the shortest possible route home without any regard for national boundaries. Each time she was about to cross into some country’s sovereign airspace without clearance, Misato had to grab the microphone and redirect her.

Tokyo-3 remained radio silent. As the giant cargo plane was crossing over Southeast Asia, they received a transmission, marked urgent, from the group that had flown ahead.

It was an aerial photograph of what at first seemed to be an island off the coast of a large landmass.

“Where was this taken?” Misato asked.

A murmur arose as multiple people simultaneously came to the same realization.

“Wait a minute,” Toji said. “Where’s Odawara and Numazu?”

The two cities had been on the boundary between mainland Japan and the mountainous Izu Peninsula directly to the south of Hakone. But now the lower-lying cities were underwater, and the peninsula had become an island stranded at sea.

A sudden uproar filled the CIC.

“Quiet!” Misato hissed as she listened to the rest of the transmission on her headset. “They’re saying the entire boundary between the tectonic plates has sunk.”

From the crowd, one crewman shouted, “But that’s…”

Impossible, Misato finished in her head.

Earthquakes were common in the region. The Izu Peninsula rode atop the Philippine Sea Plate, and the eastern half of Japan’s main island, Honshu, rode atop the North American Plate. The two plates would scrape against each other, with the most stress located just north of Tokyo-3.

But a mere earthquake didn’t cause this kind of damage. The tectonic plates shifted atop a far thicker mantle. For both plates to sink, as if the ground had been pulled out from underneath them, wasn’t normally conceivable.

“In other words,” Toji said, stunned, “the foundation got pulled out. Is that what this means? Is the ground under our home being taken from us?”

Deep inside the planet, the Earth’s mass had been disappearing. This was the direct cause of its constriction, and Toji had witnessed the cataclysmic effects as he flew over Central Eurasia for this mission.

Scientists had first confirmed the loss of material by beaming particles from an accelerator underground. Various scientific facilities had since been reequipped with seismographs to continuously monitor the situation on a global scale.

But of all the losses to date, this was the closest to home.

“What about Tokyo-3?” Toji asked.

Another closer image arrived. An island poked out from the newly formed waterway between Honshu and the former Izu Peninsula.

Toji gasped. “Is that…Mount Hakone?!”

On the northern part of the depression inside the island stood a cluster of white buildings laid out in an orderly, geometric pattern.

It was Tokyo-3 and Nerv Japan HQ.

The staff inside the CIC looked at the aerial photograph with frozen expressions. They didn’t know whether to be elated that the city survived or horrified at the destruction around it.

The inside of the caldera looked just as Toji, Misato, and the others remembered it, but their surroundings had sunk hundreds of meters. Fortunately, the caldera’s previously high elevation had kept it safe.

As best could be seen from the high-altitude photograph, the city hadn’t suffered major damage. But there was no question that the area had been shaken badly.

As much as the crew wished they could run straight back to their home, they were still far away. And even when they arrived, what help could they possibly offer?

Nervous murmurs arose from the typically stoic crew.

“The earthquake shrank Lake Ashi,” Misato commented.

“Ah, not exactly,” Toji replied with a hint of embarrassment. “Six did that when she drained the water.”

Piloting Eva-00 Type-F, little Rei Six had confronted Sandalphon’s larva when the Angel infiltrated the old Geofront. She’d fired the Field Piercer—a.k.a. the Angel’s Backbone—up through the lake’s bed and flooded the underground domain.

Misato hadn’t yet heard. This had occurred while she was with Rei Quatre.

“Just…what the hell were you all doing while I was gone?”

Her exasperated tone brought a sense of normalcy back to the CIC, and the crew looked a little less panicked and pale.

“Even at its lowest point, the crater still stands seven hundred meters above sea level,” Toji reassured, to himself as much as everyone around him. “It’s gonna take more than a little drop to finish us.”

Our families are there, Toji thought, and they’re going to be all right.

More than eighty percent of the structures inside the caldera had been built to be earthquake-resistant, including Tokyo-3’s residential districts—although the original intent was to withstand attacks from the city’s many uninvited guests. Tokyo-3 and Nerv HQ also possessed an independent power grid—a lesson learned from the siege they’d faced three years ago.

Additional reports brought word that the airports in Suruga Bay and Sagami Bay had been destroyed, either by land collapse or tsunami, and were completely unusable. The advance group was in the process of choosing a new landing site.

This group included the other oversized cargo plane, which held the JSSDF’s giant mecha, the Akashima.

The Akashima’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Kasuga, made contact with the base at Hamamatsu and was informed that at the tsunami’s peak, the surge waters had submerged the grounds. But a shelter in a rise near the runway was still functioning. The landing strip could be recovered.

After flying halfway across the world, the metal birds turned their wings toward their new destination.