Chapter 34: Resolution and Execution

Chapter 34:
Resolution and Execution

 

THICK, BILLOWING SMOKE rose from the smoldering earth of the battle-ravaged arctic island of Novaya Zemlya.

A window to another place stood open. Seven Angel Carriers had arrived from the other side. One group dominated the sky, white wings thundering, while a second group landed on the ground.

Two Victors—or Torwächters, as the Europeans called them—had opened the gate. The first Victor carried Shinji’s stolen heart, and had been gravely injured by the Euro and Russian forces and the Euro Eva, Heurtebise. But the Eva had also taken a deep wound.

When the gateway opened, several units on the front line went radio silent.

A tepid, sweetly scented wind blew out from the other side.

Soldiers who’d properly protected themselves with CBRN gear sent panicked reports as they watched their less-prepared comrades transform into pillars of salt—some of whom dutifully radioed in their own disintegration during their last seconds of life.

Heurtebise’s control airplane closed off all external air intakes. From the comms station, a radio operator said, “Kommandobrücke to all mirror trucks, check that your personal equipment is airtight, pressurize your cabins, and switch to interior air recirculation!”

Despite being badly shaken by these events—or perhaps because they were shaken—the operators carried out their duties by the book, and they disseminated the instructions that had been prepared for this eventuality.

Good, Lieutenant Colonel Clausewitz thought as he watched his crew.

“Hikari,” Clausewitz said into his headset, “you’d better arm yourself with Dora while you have a moment.” He paused. “Hikari?”

A message came in from the joint forces headquarters by way of the Sixth Army command center. They’d lost contact with three artillery units near the Torwächters. The joint commanders wanted to know if Heurtebise could buy any time for rescue efforts to be staged.

Clausewitz plucked the headset from his assistant, who, to his credit, remained resolute despite the chaos.

Speaking into the microphone, the lieutenant colonel minced no words. “Sorry, sir. Everyone in those units has been turned into a pillar of salt.”

Several members of the observation team had also ceased transmitting vital signs.

The team had been installing sensors across the battlefield when the shooting started, and they’d taken refuge under the closest shelter. A nearby sensor was now reporting the presence of sodium chloride, equal to the mass of several human bodies. A saw-toothed line on the graph captured the moment of their deaths.

Clausewitz could apologize to the dead later.

He tossed the headset back to his assistant. “Something’s wrong with Hikari.”

“Is she not responding? I’m not seeing any abnormal readings—or at least, not any more than you’d expect from those injuries. The regeneration is proceeding well, and—”

Before his assistant could finish, Clausewitz adjusted the microphone on his own headset and spoke loudly and slowly.

“Ritter! Schaft! Hikari! Get Dora! The eighty-centimeter armor-piercing cannon! We can’t bring it to you—the cannon weighs 550 tons, and we don’t have anything that can move it on this terrain!”

This time, Hikari replied, but her voice was trembling. <<Y-yes, commander. Heurtebise…acknowledged. I’ll go… I’ll go get Dora.>>

“What’s wrong, Hikari?”

A pause. She was considering whether to answer.

<<The second Torwächter… The one who came to open the gate. It’s… She’s my friend. And the Eva beneath that plate is Heurtebise’s sister.>>

“Are you telling me that’s Asuka Langley and the first production model Evangelion, Eva-02?!”

An operator from central command came on the line. <<The outer territory observation UAV squadron is launching.>>

At timed intervals, small scouting drones began taking off from just beyond the outer ring of the battlefield. They were light gray and resembled miniature fighter planes.

“Are you sure it’s her, Hikari?” Clausewitz asked.

<<I…>> she began weakly. But then her voice rose into a loud, tearful cry. <<I wouldn’t mistake her anywhere!>>

Startled by the noise, the staff at the nearby stations looked up in surprise.

 

Acting in parallel with the main combat operations, the plan was to fly the squadron of scout drones into the open window to determine the location on the other side. The gateway had previously shown glimpses of a glasswork cubic structure—the Ark. These reports had been corroborated by spies on the ground in the Hakone Caldera. Now that Armaros had moved the Ark from North Africa’s Atlas Mountains, the Europeans hoped to learn its new location.

By this time, Nerv Japan had passed word on to the Europeans that the Ark didn’t offer salvation, but rather was a high-density repository for the information of all life, so that the Instrumentality Project could be more quickly rebooted after each failed attempt. But the European military had been searching for the Ark in the Mount Ararat region because of the area’s connections to religious stories, and they weren’t convinced that what Nerv Japan had found was, in fact, the same Ark they sought.

Europe’s religious constituencies contained a great many people who looked to the Ark for salvation.

But even if Nerv Japan was right, Armaros had specifically moved the Ark to keep its location hidden from humanity. Whatever else Armaros was, he was the enemy, and the Ark was important to him. All the more reason to seek it out.

No one knew how many more lives would be lost on the battlefield this day.

Because of this, humanity needed to start focusing on the next step.

 

The ground forces launched an attack to draw the enemies’ attention away from the scout drones. The Angel Carriers had spread out, with their backs to the gateway, and the swarm of bullets struck their A.T. Field-like power shields and disintegrated.

Over the radio, Hikari muttered, <<It’s all so strange. Heurtebise isn’t asking me to rescue Asuka. Asuka is acting of her own free will. She’s not being compelled.>>

“Hikari,” Clausewitz repeated, “get Dora. And stay at range. We need you to figure out which Angel larvae those carriers are hiding!”

Hikari usually had no trouble focusing on her tasks, but now that the dummy plug had taken greater control, her consciousness was melding into the Eva. She was gaining new, extraordinary senses, and she was beginning to act in previously inconceivable ways.

“You need to keep your head in the fight, or you’ll get yourself killed. There’s too many of them!”

“Understood,” she said, but she was clearly more concerned about Asuka/Eva turning out to be the Torwächter who’d opened the gateway than she was about the seven approaching Angel Carriers.

 

The attacks of Heurtebise and the Russian naval railguns had fatally injured the first Torwächter, reducing it to a torso, a head, and one arm—the same arm that had been swinging the spindle-shaped weapon. The giant had turned into a grotesque statue, propped up only by the black plate that grew out of its back, no longer contributing to the battle except as a raggedy scarecrow, while Super Eva’s heart raged out of control. But the second Torwächter—Asuka/Eva—had come over and calmed the heart. Rather than self-destruct, the broken Torwächter had begun rapidly reconstructing its missing limbs.

A volley of guided munitions sailed toward the wounded Torwächter, but Asuka/Eva neutralized them with her A.T. Field. Though partially concealed by explosive flashes and billows of smoke, the Torwächter’s recovery seemed to progress differently from the way Evas or even Angel Carriers regenerated. The giant’s black armor was reassembling, as if guided by unseen hands, but only the Torwächter’s external layer was being reconstructed, not the body underneath.

In the control plane, the observers from the science teams turned to each other in confusion. “Where’s the Torwächter’s Q.R. Signum?” one asked.

Previously, the Torwächters had arrived, opened a gateway, and then quickly departed. The location of their Q.R. Signum scale—or scales—remained unknown. The working assumption was that the black-and-red scale must have been hidden somewhere internally. But now, a gatekeeper’s body had been shredded apart in plain sight, and there was no sign of a Q.R. Signum inside.

The resident theoretical physicists’ minds raced. Supposing the Torwächters don’t possess any Q.R. Signum scales at all, what does that mean?

Rather than being merely linked to Armaros, are the Torwächters his shadows?

The ground rumbled.

The Angel Carriers on land planted their feet firmly, and the ones hovering in the air descended to a few meters above the ground. In time with the Torwächter’s heartbeat, they began slamming the butts of their staves on the ground.

Each strike shook the earth. Even amid the explosions and gunfire, the rhythmic rumble announced the heartbeat—and their presence—far and wide.

 

So far, the battle had been a messy free-for-all. The ten giants seemed to move with no apparent order, and the soldiers fired their cannons and missile launchers at will. But when the seven carriers began striking the earth in unison, the armies from each nation could sense something bad was coming, and their chaotic barrage temporarily subsided.

The armies shifted from offense to defense while new orders filtered down from their commanders.

During the lull, the joint command officers took a moment to assign each Angel Carrier a number from one to seven. Any allied forces with electronic sensors and line of sight—from fire control teams stationed around the edge of the battlefield, to warships, to Heurtebise’s control plane—shared their information with the rest of the military, and each carrier, along with its number, appeared in real time on the strategic map.

The fundamental strategy employed when eradicating Angel-class enemies—whether they appeared alone or in groups—was to focus as much firepower as possible on one target at a time. In practice simulations, this seemed to be the best approach. However, in a real battle, with this many targets, while the military evaluated the effectiveness of a given attack, the other carriers might already be striking back. To allow for better response time, the attacking forces were split into groups that would attack in a predetermined order. When assigned a target, the groups would focus on that target, regardless of what the enemy was doing, while groups without a target would be free to defend themselves against whatever was attacking them.

“If you identify an Angel Carrier carrying Zeruel in its cocoon, take that carrier out,” Clausewitz ordered, “even if you’re under attack from the other carriers.”

The Angel Zeruel was capable of firing long-range attacks in quick succession. The human forces relied on striking their enemies from superior range, so an Angel that followed the same tactic posed the greatest threat. As long as the military didn’t need to defend a specific point, they could fight the other Angels on the run.