Chapter 32: Armaros
Chapter 32:
Armaros
Armaros
A
SUKA WAS STARTLED AWAKE
by the sound of birds flapping their wings. Apparently, she’d dozed off while walking Eva-02 Allegorica. She looked around at the cockpit’s displays. She was still on the surface of the moon.
“Was I dreaming?”
The moon had continued its mystifying expansion and was now nearly 1.4 times its original diameter. The pull of the moon’s gravity had strengthened accordingly, and for reasons Asuka didn’t understand, the heated gas spewing from its subsurface had begun to form a weak atmosphere.
Due to the influence of Earth’s gravity, the moon’s heavier side had always remained pointed toward the Earth, much like the weighted bottom of a daruma doll kept the roly-poly object upright. From the moon, the Earth had remained in roughly the same part of the sky and could be used as a point of reference to locate oneself even if the moon’s topography changed. But the crust was now undergoing such a tremendous upheaval that the daruma doll might have tipped over freely. Under these conditions, Asuka couldn’t determine her exact location, but she thought she’d entered into the Sea of Fertility and was moving toward the Sea of Crises.
When the Lance of Longinus fell to the moon, the relic had landed in the Sea of Crises. That was where Armaros had pounded the moon’s surface with the lance and issued its judgment to the Earth. Asuka wanted to check the location out. She’d decided to go on foot, rather than leaping on a direct, ballistic path, because she didn’t like the idea of suddenly stumbling upon the black giant.
Asuka looked around to make sure nothing was amiss.
Wait, something is.
“I’m picking up strange vibrations in the ground.”
The vibrations were spreading out from a point behind her—from where she’d come. It wasn’t just her Allegorica’s feet picking them up, either; the seismographs on the sensor network she’d spread behind her confirmed the pattern. But the data they sent seemed wrong.
“The hypocenter is too large. What could that mean?”
These were surface-level vibrations, which Asuka had been watching for. Typically, vibrations like that would indicate something like a landslide or a mountain collapsing, and if not that, then something active on the surface—in other words, an enemy—but nothing matched this data.
“Calculate a jump trajectory,” Asuka instructed the AI. “Lock on to my sight line.”
She fixed her gaze on the near side of a mountain range called Montes Pyrenaeus, which was located along the route she’d walked. The AI began arraying the gravitons along the diamond slits in the Allegorica wings.
“Mark!” she said, and the Pegasus’s four legs added their power to the wings’ graviton floaters. She leaped off the moon’s surface and into the lunar sky.
“Ever since I came up here, nothing has gone as expected. It’s starting to get on my nerves.”
Eva-02 was about to reach the peak of its trajectory and enter free fall, when—
“What?!”
Beyond the far side of the mountain range, a new celestial object had raised its round head and climbed into the sky.
“Impossible!”
Asuka tilted her control stick, stopping her leap and calling on the Allegorica’s thrusters to bring her straight down. By dropping altitude, she put the mountains between her and what she’d seen. Using the graviton floaters, she switched to a hovering flight to approach the ridgeline.
“What was that?”
She reached the ridgeline and cautiously poked her head up.
There it was—an ascending black celestial body with a red-hot core that glowed through the cracks of its surface.
Asuka began to panic, but a sudden wave of apprehension from her Eva brought her back to herself.
Looking closer, she realized that the gigantic black sphere was rising, dome-like, from the surface of a vast plain of basalt called the Sea of Nectar. When she’d first seen the object over the mountains, she’d mistakenly thought a foreign celestial body had suddenly fallen toward the moon, but whatever the true explanation, it was equally astounding—because when she’d passed this way before, there’d been no such sphere.
These were Asuka’s observations, but they weren’t what had brought her back to her senses. A tiny speck of a black figure stood on the charred apex of the rising sphere.
“He’s here… He’s here… He’s here.”
The black giant, Armaros.
Here was the enemy who’d unwound the helix of the Lance of Longinus into a single line of light and was using that power to strangle the Earth—the entity that had urged humanity to clear the stage for the next Instrumentality Project.
Asuka zoomed in the view from her Eva’s four eyes. The image of the figure wavered through the hot gas emitted by the sphere. Eva-02 was practically trembling, withering before Armaros’ presence. Asuka could feel it, too—this was an opponent of unfathomable strength. She felt her body begin to shake, but she took deep breaths of the LCL to remain steady.
Armaros knelt on the smoldering sphere, his right hand on the burning surface, and seemed to be pulling the mass—vastly larger than the giant himself—up and out from the lunar surface.
There’s no mistaking it. Armaros really is pulling all of that up from the ground. But…
“Why am I only detecting surface vibrations?”
If that rock is being pulled up from the inside of the moon, then shouldn’t I be sensing vibrations from deep underground?
But the black and red sphere kept rising. Meanwhile, the seismic data suggested that the mass
wasn’t
coming from underground but rather sprouting directly out of the moon’s surface, magically, as if from a two-dimensional plane.
Assuming the entire body formed a sphere, Asuka tried to estimate its full size based on the visible curvature.
That’s a diameter of 220 to 240 kilometers!
“Incredible…”
A sphere with 1/14th the moon’s average diameter was coming up from the surface.
If Asuka’s calculations were right, then the size of the sphere at its widest point would reach where she was standing. The mountain range was going to collapse under her feet.
Asuka began a hasty retreat. She jumped as low as she could, but the apex of the sphere was continuing to ascend—already cresting higher than the 2,200-meter elevation of the mountains. She’d soon run out of cover.
The sphere’s widest intersection emerged from the mountain range like a gigantic 3D hologram. If Asuka’s sensors were right, the object wasn’t simply an orb of burning rock but an object of unusually high pressure and density. It was a wonder the sphere didn’t break apart under its own pressure; more confusing was the lack of change in the moon’s gravity.
“Is this an illusion?”
Whatever her doubts, she kept running. She could feel strongly the sphere’s radiating heat through the Eva’s armor. No longer worried about being spotted, she ignited the Eva’s thrusters at full power and escaped eastward.
Beyond the mountains to Asuka’s back, the sphere emerged in full. Armaros changed his stance atop the globe and placed both hands on its surface, almost as though the black giant were about to start pushing. And then—
The gravimeter’s graphic indicator swung wildly.
As if suddenly given true form and mass, the 240-kilometer-wide body of rock—large enough to be a moon in its own right—slammed into the moon’s surface. In the brief moment before the seismograph needles broke on Asuka’s sensors, they captured a snapshot of the seismic waves piercing deep beneath the moon’s crust. Just as Asuka had predicted, the mountain range named after the Pyrenees collapsed.
Oddly, the unnatural impact resulted in less airborne debris than its scale would have suggested. As the ground heaved, the rock beneath the surface melted in a radius far wider than the plane of impact. Five-kilometer tall, black-crested waves of molten rock veined with orange chased after Asuka.
For a moment, Eva-02 Allegorica was overtaken and enveloped by the fast-moving regolith, but the Eva continued to accelerate away from the silent, uniformly spreading cloud.
“None of this makes any damn sense!” Asuka fumed.
But then she remembered the hot, ripple-shaped cracks she’d seen on the moon’s surface during her initial entry.
“Don’t tell me Armaros has been doing this same thing over and over!”
The increase of the moon’s mass! The deviation of its orbit!
It didn’t appear as though the impact was going to split the moon apart, but its orbit would surely be thrown even more off-balance.
“Come on! The Earth is getting smaller and smaller, and Armaros decides to make the moon
bigger
? What’s that about?!”
As soon as she said it, Asuka realized that the two phenomena were connected.
“No,” she whispered.
When Asuka had departed the Earth, the planet was beset by frequent, powerful earthquakes, and its diameter was mysteriously shrinking. It wasn’t entirely a mystery—the Lance of Longinus was strangling the Earth from an altitude of 20,000 kilometers and elongating itself on its way to becoming a complete ring. Though the mechanism wasn’t understood, the planet’s inner material was vanishing on a tremendous scale.
But where was all that matter going?
Here.
She shook her head fiercely. If not for the LCL, a motion like that in low gravity risked spinal damage. But she couldn’t help it.
“No. No, no. I can’t believe it! It just can’t be. There isn’t—”
She was too terrified to take that thought any further. Just then, an urgent message came from her scouting satellites, and she focused her attention on the message.
The transmission contained two components—a low fuel warning for the satellites’ orbital correction propellant and a log containing a radio signal received from the other side of the moon.
“And it’s flagged as a distress signal?”
According to the AI’s analysis, it was.
“What is it?”
The message was on a loop, and half was encrypted. The emotionless appeal came across as perfunctory. Asuka figured that some nation had sent up a lunar exploration drone or something like that. But still, on this rock so far from home, the message was like hearing from a friend.
Luckily, Armaros was far behind her now and wasn’t pursuing her. Had the giant not noticed her? Or had it chosen to ignore her?
As Asuka’s leap reached its apex, all she could see was the top of the regolith cloud as it hung in the air. Everything else was hidden beyond the horizon. Nothing followed her, aside from an electromagnetic disruption and the seismic waves that crawled along the surface.
I feel defeated
.
“I’d better go.”
Asuka spurred herself onward, so as not to be tempted to look back at the celestial show behind her. Instead, she fled from Armaros without attempting a single attack.
