Chapter 16: The Commander’s Return

Chapter 16:
The Commander’s Return

 

THE BASE OF THE IZU PENINSULA had sunk some four hundred meters and was now swallowed by the sea.

The Hakone Caldera, with Nerv Japan cradled inside, became an island stranded in the middle of this newly formed strait. When the great sinking happened, the ground turned fifteen degrees counter-clockwise, and anything aligned to the cardinal directions became skewed. Miraculously, the ground within the caldera sank straight down rather than tilting to one side or the other.

After two agonizing days in Hamamatsu trying to secure a VTOL, Misato and the others had finally arrived home. Elated to see that Maya was all right, Misato remarked, “At least the ground didn’t tip over. That was some good luck.”

“Good luck?” Maya shook her head. “You must be joking. The ground within the caldera titled point four degrees to the east. That’s a huge deal! I’ve been working this whole time to re-level the particle accelerator’s framework. Do you want to ask me how many doors won’t open because they’re misaligned?”

“Take care of what you can,” Misato said with a placating smile. “I’ll straighten out the supply situation.”

After the initial jolt, the sinking had been smooth. There had still been many injuries, and the dead numbered in the double digits, but the greatest difficulty Nerv Japan faced was the loss of the roadways and railways.

Hakone had no airports, and of course no seaport. The most pressing concern was securing new supply routes for the immense volume of materials needed to rebuild.

 

Hyuga came rushing into the command center, wearing a hard hat and a cheerful smile. “Welcome back!”

Fuyutsuki was the next to arrive on the middle deck. “You’re back.”

Misato bowed her head. “Deputy Commander Fuyutsuki. Thank you for stepping in.” She turned to Hyuga. “I’m glad you’re all right, too. So, can you tell me what that thing in the lake is?”

“Ah. I take it you’ve seen it, then.”

A massive, egg-like object peeked out from the lowered waters of Lake Ashi. The object was semi-transparent, like colored glass, with one solitary hole in its surface. The hole had been plugged up by a rush of debris and silt when the lake had partially drained. Hastily erected scaffolding around it indicated that a survey had at least been attempted.

“We don’t have a clue,” Hyuga said. “Except… The outer diameter is exactly the same size as the Chronostatic Sphere in the old Geofront.” He looked to Maya.

“This is just conjecture,” she continued where Hyuga had left off, “but if Armaros was telling the truth, and this world is repeating itself for the purposes of the Instrumentality Project, then that object might be the remnants of the vessel that carried Lilith from the past world into our own. In other words, it might be Lilith’s previous Chronostatic Sphere.”

“So the sphere,” Misato said, “has a shell? Like an egg?”

“We don’t know. We don’t even know if that thing is a physical object or a stabilized distortion in space.”

“Before we began Tokyo-3’s construction,” Fuyutsuki added, “we performed underground—and underwater—imaging of the surrounding area, including down to the bottom of the lake. But whatever that thing is, it didn’t show up on any of our scans back then.”

“The object is tough,” Maya said. “We can’t even tell if anything we do to it makes an impact.”

“The Japanese government sent a team to relocate the object,” Fuyutsuki continued, “but when the ground sank, they weren’t sure what to do, and they withdrew to Matsushiro. They left just before you returned. Another team was looking into repurposing it as a makeshift shelter, but their work is on hold. They found a large, bow-shaped object among the silt inside, which they handed over to us as ‘repayment,’ but…”

Maya shrugged. “But we can’t make anything of it. It’s junk.”