Chapter 52: The Deputy Commander’s Return

Chapter 52:
The Deputy Commander’s Return

 

THE JSSDF C-11 giant-sized transport plane landed at Mount Daikan Airport shortly after dawn.

The rear cargo ramp lowered, and the maser howitzers rolled out, along with Toji on a stretcher. His pale arm rested beside him. A medical team came to meet him, but of all the primary staff, only Shinji and Trois had joined them on the runway. The pair had come partly out of boredom but mostly because they didn’t know where else to be.

“Hey!” Toji shouted to them over the noise of the jet engine. “You left together, and you came back together! I hear a bunch of other stuff happened along the way, but all’s well that ends well, am I right?”

Hearing Toji’s voice, Shinji finally felt at ease. I’m back, he thought. Of course, he’d been back for hours now, but this was the first time he’d felt at home.

Toji immediately noticed Trois’ new hair color—the light blue in the front fading to a deeper blue in the middle and then black in the back.

“Ayahachi?” Toji said. “Trois? What’s with the hair? Getting a start on your rebellious phase, eh? Have you gone punk rock on us?”

Toji called out to a JSSDF soldier who’d just stepped off the cargo ramp. “Could you wait a second?”

“No, you see, with Trois, it’s more of a back in black phase,” Shinji attempted to quip.

But Toji ignored this. “Sorry, Shinji, but could you carry that canister?”

Shinji took a waist-high metal canister from the camouflaged soldier. It was heavy.

“What is this?” Shinji asked. “All those gauges and lights make it look like some kind of bomb.”

“It’s no bomb, you idiot. That’s my leg!”

“What?!” Shinji’s grip slipped, and one end of the canister clanged against the tarmac.

For a second, the artificial circulatory system’s indicator light turned red, but then it flashed green again.

“You idiot! Be careful with that!”

“S-sorry.”

Trois knelt and lifted up the end of the canister.

Toji raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“What?” Shinji asked.

“So, you two are getting pretty close, huh?”

“It’s not like that.”

“Look,” Toji said. “Whatever it is or isn’t like is fine with me. Are you at least able to say whatever you want to say now?”

“Totally…” Trois said softly.

Shinji dropped the canister again. This time, the circulatory system had to reboot.

 

Misato was yelling. “What the hell am I supposed to do about a measurement error if I’m only learning about it now?!”

Entering the command center’s middle deck, Shinji and Toji flinched reflexively, while Trois looked up to the top deck, where Misato’s angry shouts streamed down.

Toji had insisted on getting out of the stretcher. What he really wanted was to walk on his own, but the post-op medicine’s effects on his artificial leg weren’t clear. For now, Trois was pushing him in a wheelchair. Shinji followed after them, carrying the metal canister. He’d been stopped by security three times, and now he held the heavy tube balanced over one shoulder.

Aoba noticed the trio standing near the elevator. He swiveled his chair to face them, covertly stuck up two fingers in a devil’s horns gesture, and mouthed the words pissed off.

Toji nodded, glanced at the three-tiered display screen, and announced, “Suzuhara Toji, reporting in from the Euro-Russian operation. Requesting dissolution of my assignment and reinstitution of my duties as Acting Deputy Commander.”

Tension crackled in the air, and all eyes turned toward the three teenagers. Shinji flinched. C’mon man, what are you doing? Now everyone’s looking at us.

Misato was looking down at them, too. “Request granted,” she said. “Welcome back. How are your injuries?”

“They won’t interfere with my duties. As soon as the medicine wears off, I’ll be able to walk. I think my new arm is going to need more rehab than the last one. It was only being exercised with electrical stimulation.”

“Any signs of the Angel Bardiel?”

“The pattern measurements show zeroes all the way to the sixth decimal point—as far as the techs could get with noise filtering. But in the field hospital, the doctors were all over me. They kept me under constant surveillance. Everything was normal except that the post-surgery healing process went unusually fast.” Then, without hesitation, he stated the inconvenient truth. “There’s still a risk that the Angel will come out again if my whole body is put back together.”

Toji had lost his left arm and leg in the fight against Bardiel three years ago. New limbs had been grown from his cell cultures, so he didn’t need cybernetic limbs. But during the reattachment procedure, the Angel Bardiel had begun to remanifest inside Toji’s body. The surgery was called off.

When he’d lost his cybernetic arm at Novaya Zemlya, the battlefield surgeons had replaced it with the pale, emaciated arm that had been grown for him years prior. Why had they attempted the surgery this time? Did the Nerv Germany staff at Novaya Zemlya have proof that the arm by itself would be all right? No, Toji knew there was no such proof. They just wanted to see what happened. If nothing else, it was a chance to observe the manifestation of an Angel. But the result was stable.

Someone had probably put them up to it. Most likely, Kensuke had urged Nerv Germany to perform the surgery under the guise of returning the limbs to their owner. But if the leg in the case on Shinji’s shoulder was ever reattached…

“That case Shinji-kun is carrying,” Misato said. “That must be the leg. I’m going to launch an investigation and find out how those limbs ever left our facility. But Toji, it’s too dangerous to keep you and that leg in the same location. I know you just got it back, but can you trust us to keep it for you again?”

Toji smiled broadly. “Of course.”

Misato’s eyebrows rose almost imperceptibly. Oh? she thought. When did he become so resilient?

Fuyutsuki had joined her on the top deck. As he looked down at Toji, the corners of his mouth turned upward, as if he was witnessing something peculiar.

Toji turned to Hyuga. “Get Dr. Noguchi from Tsukuba on the line.”

He turned back to Misato and hooked his thumb over his shoulder at the measurement errors on the main display.

“You were talking about making corrections to the sensors around the Chronostatic Sphere? Let’s get a sample reading from each sensor and put some real numbers behind this. We can work backward from the past data and find the answer.”

How would we do that? Misato was about to say, but Hyuga spoke first.

“Acting Deputy Commander Suzuhara, I have Dr. Noguchi from the Tsukuba University of Technology on Line Three, with Level Two security.”

“It would take us weeks to recalibrate our accelerator,” Toji said, “so we just have to ask for help.”

Ayanami pushed Toji’s wheelchair to a nearby station, and he reached for the telephone receiver.

“Dr. Noguchi, good morning! Sorry to bug you so early in the day. I need you to fire one burst of measurement particles from your accelerator toward the ground under Hakone. Do you think you could do that for us?”

The professor said something, to which Toji replied, “Oh. Uh-huh. Yeah, we can do something about that. Yes. Okay, thank you so much. Three o’clock. Thanks again. Talk to you later.” He softly set the phone back in the cradle. “All right. All crews currently inspecting the sensors should stop their work and prepare to take another reading. I want the sensors within the sarcophagus dome ready by 1430.”

As soon as he finished, the technicians at their stations began transmitting his orders to the various departments.

“Shinji says that the quantum flux inclination sensors do a good job of predicting when something is going to come out from extradimensional space,” Toji explained. “We’ve got five arrays positioned along the rim. Let’s give them a test run and see if we pick anything up.”

Misato, who’d been left out of this so far, thought for a moment and then said, “That’s a good idea. We should do our best to reduce the background noise when the test particles arrive. We’ll shut down all non-essential power transmission to the city for fifteen minutes before and after. That’s a total of thirty minutes. Send word to the city government.”

“What are you standing there for, Shinji?” Toji said. “You’re heading out, too. You’ve got an hour to get to Tsukuba!”

Shinji had never seen a pigeon hit by a peashooter, but his expression probably resembled one.

“Huh? Wait, what? Why?”

“They don’t have enough power to run the accelerator right now, so you’re going to be a human power plant. Make sure Super Eva goes out with a phase-differential electric generator.”

Shinji hadn’t thought that Super Eva would be deployed so quickly again—not with the cloud of suspicion hanging over him. And from the look on Misato’s face, the commander would never have allowed it, either. Toji looked back and forth between them, as if to ask, Is that all right?

On the top deck, Misato scowled and closed her eyes. But then she opened them again, nodded, and chuckled wryly. “On your way, then.”

As Shinji was walking out, Aoba said, “The generator doesn’t put out steady power. It comes in waves. Grab the highest-capacity constant voltage regulator you can find in Cage One.”

“Understood.”

Shinji took off running. He’d been feeling out of sync with the faster pace of everyone here, but now his perception of time sped up to match those around him.

His nervous energy had a direction. Events once again took to motion, like blood circulating through a body.

 

“I overstepped,” Toji said. From his wheelchair on the middle deck, he bowed his head deeply to Misato. “I’m sorry.”

She’d been planning to say something about it, but he’d beaten her to the punch. His thoughtfulness impressed her.

“I’ll handle explaining the situation to the JSSDF, the airport, and the city,” she said. “We need to make sure they’re all fully on board, in case we need to keep the power out longer. Delays can happen.”

She stood. It was time for the grown-ups to get to work.

Her expression still looked tired, but the weariness behind it was gone.

Even though she’d technically been taken hostage by the mutant Eva, she’d abandoned her duties as commander for a significant time. She’d needed to accept Shinji back after he’d done the same or else she might have faced major criticism from those around her.

As she left the room, the others followed after her with brisk footsteps.

 

The soapy cleaning solution rinsed down Super Eva’s body. It would take more time to repair the countless scratches and dents from the Eva’s long journey, but at least all the blood had been washed off.

Shinji had been watching Super Eva’s bath from the other side of a small, blast-resistant window. He proceeded to the pilots’ standby room. The partitions from his medical inspection had been taken down, and a wide, curtain-like cleaning laser slowly swept the room, searing the air and stimulating the antimicrobial effects of the photocatalytic walls.

Shinji opened the door of his plugsuit’s bioseal locker. Behind him, Rei Trois—who’d been following him like a shadow—began to strip off her clothes.

“Whoa, whoa!” said a flustered Shinji.

Trois paused.

“I got this one,” he said. “S-so if you could just rewind all that…”

“Rewind?”

To everyone who didn’t listen to his father’s digital audio tape player, that wasn’t a word that held any meaning.

“This time,” Shinji said, “I can go alone.”

When Super Eva was adrift with no heart and the Q.R. Signum as his power source, Trois had managed the flow of Armaros’ energy. But now, Shinji could receive energy from his faraway heart.

“But…”

Trois looked faintly displeased. Or…concerned?

<<This is Suzuhara from the command center. Trois, are you there?>> Toji’s voice blared from a speaker in the ceiling. <<We’re going over plans for taking Eva-0.0 off ice. Come up here. We could use your input.>>

 

Super Eva’s external armor hadn’t been fully inspected for structural fatigue. The Eva’s internals had repaired themselves during the battle. But his new arm—the one regrown from the Zeruel’s tissues—would need to be thoroughly inspected at some point. The cage crew had been given just enough time to replace the restraint armor around the Eva’s abdomen, where the spear had passed through, and to switch out the sword-sheath shoulder pylons for the standard-spec pylons.

Super Eva’s visor lifted. Something clanged into his back. Though the Eva no longer needed an external power source, he still possessed an umbilical cable plug in case of emergency. The noise must have been the work crew installing the phase contrast electricity generator into his socket. The module stuck out from his back like a bird’s tail feathers.

“My systems are seeing the phase generator,” Shinji said. “Power transmission test…check. The output is… Well, I won’t know until I deploy the A.T. Field.”

<<Good to see you again, Shinji-kun,>> Maya said. <<Don’t forget your weapons.>>

“What? This isn’t a combat mission. Are you sure I should go out armed?”

Fuyutsuki answered from the command center. <<Technically speaking, that would go against our treaty with Japan, but the time for minding that sort of thing is long gone. You never know when and where the enemy will appear. Or if the enemy might be human.>>

“That’s terrible…”

<<You may not like it, but you must defeat any hostile and come back in one piece. Otherwise, we’re all in trouble.>>

Maya stood in the control booth directly in front of Super Eva’s eyes. She looked small as she brought the microphone close to her mouth. <<You won’t be able to take the Powered 8. When Super Eva repairs his body, the tissue growth breaks any unused electrical circuits. That means no weapons with high-power draw until we rebuild the connections.>>

Super Eva took the prog knife and the KEG-46R Yamato Rebuild, a stand-alone cannon with high-explosive ammunition. The barrel had once belonged to a warship. In the Eva’s hands, the weapon was more like a pistol.

The knife draws power from my palm, so I think it should be all right…probably. And what’s that strange weapon on the wall?

“Maya-san,” he asked, “is that a bow? A boomerang?”

<<Well, you could throw it and hit something. But no, it’s a guided weapon? Energy-based? It’s called Azumaterasu.>>

“Are you asking me or telling me?”

First Neyarl, then Kesara and Basara… Where was she coming up with these names?

<<You saw the glass egg at the bottom of Lake Ashi, right? We found this down there with it. I’ve been trying to get it fixed up again. If I’m right, it’s a weapon that works like Neyarl.>>

“That would be amazing.”

The Neyarl guided cannon had drawn undiscovered particles from the higher dimensions through Shinji’s heart. Maya thought the particles were monopoles. When the cannon fired, the barrel couldn’t withstand the energy, and it was blown apart. But the particles had struck one Torwächter and disintegrated it.

<<In an Eva’s hands, the weapon would be held like an oversized bow. Crimson A1—Asuka—was abducted just before we were going to test it. These…things…came out of the ground—like tree roots, or whips—and wrapped around her.>>

That sounded familiar to Shinji. I think I saw something like that recently…

“Those whips… Did they look like bundles of flat strips twisted tightly together? Like black film? Or tape, maybe?”

<<How did you know that?>>

He recalled when he’d been his heart, flying through the transdimensional corridors in a Torwächter.

As he’d passed through the dark tube, the walls had split apart like strips of film and gathered into a helix behind him, which was then sucked into the plate in his back.

“I’ll tell you about it when I get back,” he said.

Did the Victor abduct her? Er, Torwächter, I guess we’re calling them now. Did my heart summon her from the Torwächter’s chest?

A warning alarm sounded, indicating that Eva-01’s flotation field was active. With Super Eva ready to depart, the thick, shielded ceiling opened, and warm, early-morning sunlight streamed into the cage.