Bizarre Aeon
Posted: 2010-02-07 02:23am
Ahem. Here is an attempt to kick start my dead creativity by returning to some ground I have already covered. For those of you with some extra outside info, no spoiling for the others, they can work it out for themselves in due time. This of course has also led me to try and figure out a title that won't give the game all away right off the bat, although I may extra detail in later.
So without further ado, let the insanity begin.
Chapter One: The End
The world was coming to an end. The world was dying, the sky above a great pulsating bruise, the coal clouds above reflecting the fading fireballs in the sky and the raging infernos on the ground, shifting the colours through the reds, blues, and violets of contusions. A hell of incomprehensibly vast forces that swallowed up and incinerated individuals like motes of grain in firestorm.
For one young man, barely more than a boy but forced to grow up fast, the only thing keeping him from running was the faintest glimmer that what he did actually mattered. Encased in an armoured NBC suit that he doubted was providing adequate protection, simultaneously too hot about the head and torso where the armour was thickest and too cold about his limbs from where he went scrambling through the uneven snow upon the ground. Heavy, it weighed upon him with metal-ceramic armour plates and radiation absorbing materials, yet that mass was also what had kept him alive for so long.
His breath coming hard and fast, nearly choking him behind his rebreather, he managed to get to the top of the next rise of the day, throwing himself down into a drift of diseased looking snow and lying there for a moment, panting heavily from the continued exertions that burned at him even as the chill numbed his limbs. It also made sure that he would not get shot like an idiot for standing out in the open.
High above but terrifyingly close a massive fireball filled his view of the sky. His faceplate immediately went dark, but his eyes still stung with the brilliance that got through. How many warheads had initiated uncomfortably close to his position this day? How much radiation had he soaked up? Was there any point anymore to wearing his gear?
Shoving the question to the side, he squirmed through snow drift, the cheap Chinese AK clone in his hands leading the way, shoving grey, brittle brush out of the way. Shuffling about he compacted the snow and dead foliage beneath his body to increase his comfort a tiny fraction before he took out one of his two real weapons, far more powerful than the insignificant peashooter he used for shoving about debris.
Scanning his scope across the broken terrain, he spotted them by their footprints, mercifully the only thing they manifested at the moment. Great trampling footprints as of some strange and enormous animal, they possessed no correspondingly visible feet. He could see the faint ripple in the air though, visible by the debris starting to be picked up, of a powerful wind storm being kicked up.
Carefully counting the appearance of the footprints in the snow, he then checked his orientation with his map and pulled out his main weapon, the most devastating thing in his arsenal. With a single click of a button, he began.
“Alfa-Charlie-Five-Seven, this is Foxtrot-Oscar-Three-Eight-Five-Five, over,” he spoke carefully into his radio, hoping his accent and heavy breathing through his mask would not foul the message.
“Copy FO3855, this is AC57. State your target. Over,” the radio replied after a moment.
Copy AC57, I have eyes on one-two Foxtrot-Papas preparing to storm in sector Bravo-Nine-Xray-Two. I say again, one-two Foxtrot-Papas preparing to storm in sector Bravo-Nine-Xray-Two. Over,” he detailed out.
“AC57 acknowledges FO3855, 12 FPs in B9X2. Retreat to minimum safe distance of eight-five-zero metres, November inbound, November inbound. Over,” the radio crackles after a few seconds.
Swearing, the young man then clicks his radio again and says, “Copy AC57, retreating to minimum safe distance. Out.”
Squirming back through the tangled path in the brush he had made, he shoves his way out of the snow and then begins to run down the hill he had just climbed but a minute before. In the gloom of the occluded sun and the swirling of the storm, he can not know how long he has. The flash of light behind the hill he has just run from and the shudder of the ground beneath his feet that knocks him over let him know that November has arrived.
Rolling for a time down the snowy rise in an uncontrolled tumble head over heels, he eventually comes to a stop by ploughing into a particularly large drift, the snow crumbling beneath his impact to bring him to a stop. He lays there for a time, staring up at the dying sky above, vision still spinning as his inner ear tries to sort itself out.
Just staring up at the sky, he spontaneously starts to weep. He remembers the days, years ago, when the sky had been blue. He remembers the days when he could run outside without having to bundle up beneath multiple layers of protection with a gas mask on his face and a radiation badge on underneath it all. He remembers being able to drink water from a tap and not worry about how many toxins were in it. He remembers not knowing intimately the feeling of being knocked over by a near miss from the blast wave of a low yield nuclear weapon.
He remembers not having to fight in this fucking war.
They were all dead, the suicide rush of the ants against the exterminator fumigating the house. The big wigs had promised them salvation, promised them that if they could seize the home territory of the Foxtrot Papas that they could find a safe haven for humanity against the ecological ruin of the planet and the depredations above of the Mikes. But simple codes could not overcome the truth of the monstrosities they fought. They could not overcome the truth that more nuclear weapons had been initiated in the air and on the ground of this nightmarish place than anywhere else in the world, all to turn the battle into a slow and steady loss instead of an utter massacre.
The young man was about ready to try and figure out how to shoot himself in the head with his own rifle when something caught his eye high above. Flitting about, barely visible against the roiling black clouds, was a plane only visible by the twinkling of its cannons, strangely beautiful, especially as Mike craft came apart while the fighter danced in between them.
He got up shakily out of the snow and stared skyward, trying to keep up with the progress of the tiny dot across the sky in its deadly ballet. He had no idea how it could move like that, the Mike fighters normally holding the advantage in speed, manoeuvrability, firepower, and durability, but the human fighter was somehow doing it, somehow keeping just ahead of them and dealing out the punishment.
The thump of another nuclear weapon going off somewhere within a kilometre or two of his position snapped the young man out of his reverie, and made him realize where he was. No longer wanting to die, no longer content to wait for the end of his species, he moved his stiff and frozen feet through the crusty slush of bomb melted snow. He had more targets to find, more points of opportunity for the artillery to take care of. In the mountains all around him, hundreds of thousands of other men spent their lives in the struggle for the survival of the species. High above in the air every craft they could get flying and fighting fought to, if not gain air supremacy, then at least to keep their foes distracted.
He was a forward observer, well outside the bulk of the brutal ground battle, calling in targets of opportunity for bombardment by conventional or nuclear artillery. One amongst thousands like him, he sowed chaos and death in the flanks and rear of the enemy formations. Of course, he was also the last survivor of his squad and he had already been rotated through six different batteries that he reported to in the past eight hours, but he would keep fighting.
His mask now nearly completely fogged up with the moisture of his tears and hot breath, he had a hard time seeing where he was going, but he dared not remove it as the black rain started to fall from the nearby mushroom cloud. Not that it mattered much, intellectually he knew that he was probably already dead, but the insane part of him, the insane part of every human, told him that the amount of radiation he had picked up wouldn’t be that bad. He would live through this, get a smoking hot girlfriend, and then have a dozen children, just so long as he did not take off his mask.
He chuckled to himself as that irrational thought crossed through his head. He did not even want kids.
His radio then crackled to life, blaring an urgent yet mechanically dead warning, “Break-break all channels. I say again, break-break all channels. All personnel in grid Bravo-Six through Echo-Nine are to seek shelter immediately. I say again, all personnel to seek shelter. Enemy warship is inbound. I say again, enemy warship is inbound. Out.”
Eyes going wide, the young man looked up to see the sky parting before the small mountain lowering itself down through the clouds. Like some sort of colossal conch shell that had been overgrown with barnacles, the vaguely organic monstrosity was the Mike battleship, their trump card that always steamrolled humanity whenever it showed up. The mission planners had all said that they had something prepared, but everyone just thought that it was just trying to get that beast in close with the Papas and let the inhuman bastards duke it out.
Well that the fuckers who had sent them all on this suicide mission were just lying.
The hovering, impossible monstrosity opened up with its main batteries, shooting out long lines of eye-searing violet-white energy that lanced into mountains and ripped them apart with the contemptuous ease of nuclear weapons shredding wooden houses. Streams of blue lighting whip cracked across the sky, batting aside fighters and missiles inbound with frightening ease. Not even the nuclear artillery shells could make it through the screen of firepower, leaving the monstrous ship utterly untouched by the best humanity could throw at it. Worst yet from the perspective of the young man on the ground, waves of fresh fighters and ground attack craft were being disgorged by the alien warship.
This was it, this was the end. The battleship’s point defences were too good; no human delivery system could get a weapon capable of hurting it within range. Even as Papa wind control stirred up tornadoes to rip apart the beast, it just swatted away the creatures controlling the storms while the wind battered uselessly against its impervious hull. Nothing could-
The world went white, his faceplate going dark and failing against the tremendous glare. His whole body felt tingly and warm for a moment before the shock wave punched him in the chest and sent him flying into the ground. For what seemed like an eternity that wonderful, awesome, terrible light lasted, but it could have only been for a second, and when it cleared, there was only the muddy darkness of a fried and cracked faceplate.
Stripping off the now useless mask, the young man finds himself blinking away the spots in his vision as the scent of cooking plastics and ceramics reaches his nostrils. Staring down, he finds the entire front of his suit a charred, smoking ruin of crusted over material that had temporarily gone molten. Had he been wearing anything less, he would no doubt he thrashing about on the ground in agony now, his body covered in burns.
Staring up into the sky, he sees high above the battleship starting to fall, a bit removed from it where the fireball had touched directly, yet the rest of the ship still intact even if everything alive within was no doubt now dead and ash. The air was also swept clean of enemy craft, no doubt torn to pieces by the thermonuclear fury unleashed.
As the echoing crackle of the blast faded, it seemed like the whole world held its breath, just staring up in shocked awe as the battleship slowly fell from the sky, slain by whatever conjuring trick had allowed humanity to slip a strategic nuclear warhead through its defences. Even then, the majority of the monster had survived the unholy destruction unleashed upon it, clamping down on the celebration that had to beat within the hearts of every human alive that gazed up at the spectacle. Not even a direct nuclear strike could obliterate the technology of their enemies.
Stinging air washing over his face and an acrid burn in his lungs, the young man remembered that his NBC suit was also for the cocktail of acids and toxins kicked in the air by the years of volcanic eruption that had ruined the world. Slinging off his pack, he pulled out a back-up gas mask, nowhere near as good as his destroyed rebreather, but at least it would offer him some protection from having his lungs liquefy inside his body, even if his intestines were probably already well on their way in that direction anyway.
Snow flash melted in the blast had turned the hills into a muddy, soupy mess, the long dead, brittle foliage offering little resistance to the downward sagging of the terrain. Slogging through the muck, hoping the hillside would not collapse before he could find firmer terrain, he looked up once more, to find something that made him pause in near religious wonder.
High up, above the point of initiation for the warhead, the blast had shoved aside the thick clouds for just a moment to let a dirty smudge of sunlight through, the first real sunshine anyone had seen in years. Had fear, exhaustion, and despair not already sapped him, the young man would have fallen down crying, but his eyes had no tears left. Instead, he just watched until the darkness consumed the world again, leaving only the burning hell of the surface bellow the clouds.
Perhaps he had died years ago, perhaps they had all died years ago, back when the southern lands had disappeared in a flash of light. Perhaps this was hell, a punishment for a rebellious youth by forcing him to fight an eternal war against alien monsters on a planet not fit for human life. If he perished here, would he return to that night all those years ago, woken in his bed by his parents, frantically telling him to get up because the mother of all tsunamis was coming for their home? Would he relieve the years of hunger and deprivation, of scuttling about scavenging while people died all around him? Would he relive the privation of being drafted into the UN Armed Forces, the last technological army, so that he could be thrown into the fire of conflict against the tides of aliens bent on finishing the job of exterminating humanity before they all died from a collapsed ecosystem? Would he lie in some ditch here, his gear ruined and his cells cooked with radiation, to puke his guts out and die, only to start the endless cycle all over again?
Shaking his head, he decided that he must be dying from radiation poisoning. He was getting philosophical; a sure sign of neural degradation. Then again, he could just be concussed; his ears were still hurting a bit from that last nuclear initiation.
His radio a pile of slag, he tossed it aside and decides that he was going to have to make his way back to his own lines to report for reassignment. With the ground starting to freeze solid once more, if into a crumbling, unstable heap, he was only reminded a bit more of how much good his armour had actually done. His ears were starting to sting from the whining wind whipping across the exposed flesh.
Stopping, he paused to look around, as the whining sound on the wind seemed to grow louder and more insistent. Turning skyward, he found the answer to his question in the form of a great dark shape like a mythical roc descending from the sky, talons outstretched towards him. Running as quickly as he could across the broken terrain, he ends up diving to the ground as with a tremendous roar the thing passes over his head, shoving him deeper into the icy mud with a blast of hot air.
Picking his face out of the muck, the young man finds something like one of the American F-22s, a rare plane even before everything had happened, landing nearby. But whatever was out there was definitely not an F-22, seeing as how it had legs. A pair of reverse jointed mechanical legs stuck out of the bottom, jets directed towards the ground as the bizarre aircraft settled down on a flat patch of terrain, sinking half way up the first leg segment in the soft ground.
The plane looked slightly molten at first glance, its exterior having wax like ripples and flows over it along with significant directional blackening that suggested it had been in the air when the nuclear weapon that killed the battleship initiated. How it had survived and landed with its strangely complicated structure was a mystery as its avionics should have been fried, but it was clear that it would not be flying again anytime soon.
While the craft finished settling in, the young man approached it cautiously and warily, wondering if it were some sort of trick or if it were some sort of weird prototype from before the destruction of society. It certainly could not be new; the infrastructure to build something this advanced had died with the rising of the seas and the blotting out of the sun. With nearness, he noted that there appeared to be no cockpit, just a sort of forward bulge, so perhaps it was some sort of unmanned drone. This could be the fighter he had seen dancing about the sky earlier.
Approaching closer still, he could hear the ticking sound of metal cooling as the war machine settled in ways that were not entirely mechanical in nature, bits of plane reduced to slag slumping down and producing weird stress patterns. Slush pattered off the metallic skin and sizzled away, producing a low bank of lukewarm fog about the plane.
With a hiss of pressure that made the young man leap back in startled surprise and fear, a seam he had not even seen opened up about the bottom section of the forward bulge where the cockpit would have been in an F-22, a bottom panel swinging open like the jaws of some yawning serpent. From within a human shaped form tumbled out, hitting the cold ground below with a terrible thud.
Swaddled in a form concealing anti-G-suit and a face hiding helmet, the figure was quickly if rather drunkenly scrambling up to claw at the helmet, ripping it off to reveal a rather striking woman’s face that was quickly marred by the act of explosively emptying the contents of her stomach.
The young man felt his own stomach drop with the sight. He had the briefings, he knew the signs. That strategic warhead’s thermal energy went a lot further than its ionizing energy, but she must have still taken a massive amount of radiation, if not from the big one then from all of the air bursts and fallout clouds in this battle. She was probably in the ‘walking ghost’ level of exposure, where the damage was so intense it took time to notice.
Before she had even finished emptying her stomach contents, the young man was next to her, supporting her as waves of nausea washed over her. He found himself strangely attracted to her despite the hellish battlefield conditions and her doomed state. Perhaps it was the fact that she was the first human being he had seen in hours, and the first woman he had been close to, let alone touched, in weeks. Or perhaps it was a transferral of pity for knowing that she was already numbered amongst the damned.
Of course, whatever it was, he was sure that in less pressing circumstances he would have been attracted by her anyway. Of particular note was her hair, cut short enough to fit into her helmet let still as long as possible, and with a rather strange colour. Very dark, it had a strange purple lustre that suggested that it was approaching from the depths of the ultraviolet end of the spectrum rather than straight black.
Taking a few deep breaths from the chill, polluted air and breathing out little fogs of steam, the woman looked up at the young man and he was struck by the fact that she could be little older than him. Their eyes met for a moment before she broke contact and stuttered out a quiet, “T-thank you.”
Taking his hands off her shoulders like he had been burned by some force he did not understand, the young man said, “It’s not a problem ma’am.”
She sort of moved in a way that suggested she was gravitating back towards him before she seemed to withdraw and she instead asked timidly, “W-what is y-your-r name?”
Staring dumbfounded at someone so shy yet who was still entrusted with a multimillion dollar aircraft and seemed able to use it rather effectively, the young man said, “I am Forward Observer Ryoji Kaji.”
“Second Lieutenant Misato Katsuragi,” she says with a touch more conviction that before, although the well worn patterns of rote behaviour is obvious.
“Well then ma’am, we should probably get to shelter away from this plane-” Kaji begins, only for Misato to interrupt him with unusual force and conviction.
“NO! We can’t leave it!” She cried out desperately, grabbing on to his arm and looking pleadingly into his eyes.
Kaji just stared down at her for a few moments, trying to hide the wince that threatened to erupt as her grip tried to fuse his ulna and radius into a single bone, before he relented and said, “Of course ma’am, you are the superior officer here.”
He had no more optimism. He would die here, probably puking his guts out alongside this strange, insecure woman in half an hour or so. He could feel death staring him in the face, the grim reaper’s rictus grin upon him, and all he could do now was grin back. So he just moved to the leeward side of one of the legs on the strange war machine and slumped down, out of the chill, toxic wind as best he could and stripped off his mask, so that he could see the world through unfiltered eyes before he went. So he could see Misato.
His ears burning in the cold and his skin stinging from the acidic precipitation, Kaji reached into his bag and pulled out a ration pack. Ripping it open and hoping by some miracle of a nonexistent god it had been transformed into the delicacies of his childhood, but instead he just found more algal gruel. For nearly five years he had eaten the stuff, along with everyone else still alive on this damned planet. Some sort of genetically engineered crop that could be grown with the crudest of components and the barest of light and heat, it apparently had everything a person could need nutritionally, but the taste was rather lacking. In fact, it had the consistency of pond scum and the flavour of pork flavoured soy.
Looking up at Misato, he asks, “Want some while we wait?” He tacitly avoids mentioning what exactly it is he is waiting for.
A sour look coming over her face as she squats down in front of him, Misato replies, “N-no. I… I… I j-just-t d-don’t like tha-at st-stuff.”
Shrugging, Kaji replies, “Neither do I, but its all the food anyone has had for years.” He guesses she is probably embarrassed about the fact that her stomach is no doubt doing radiation somersaults and food is completely unappealing at the moment. With nothing he can do about that, he just begins to slurp down his last, runny meal.
While he eats, the wind blows and soon more thermonuclear fireworks are going off all across the battlefield, low yield tactical weapons for swatting Mike fighters out of the sky or vaporizing the obscenely tough Foxtrot Papas. Misato seems to flinch at every new fireball, but she also never takes her eyes off of Kaji as he eats, a strange expression somewhere between horrified fascination and infatuation.
Finally, unable to take anymore of the stares or slop, Kaji puts his meal down and looks back at Misato. Her hair is starting to come loose in the corrosive wind, the follicles already dead from the radiation and now being chewed away by all of the various unpleasant chemicals manufactured in the clouds by nuclear and volcanic fallout. Still…
Tossing the half eaten packet away, Kaji asks, “Misato, would you like to make out before we die of one screaming, agonizing death or another?”
The blunt question knocks Misato out of her knees hugging squat and on her ass, and she looks up in shock at Kaji. “W-wha-at?”
Shrugging and leaning back further into the metal of the plane’s leg, he says, “Well, even if we don’t get shot by Mikes, ripped apart by Papas, or made unfortunate victims of friendly fire, we have both sucked up more radiation than is survivable, so I figure even if it is fraternization, its not like it will matter in a few hours, and without your plane or my radio neither one of us can do our jobs as soldiers, so we might as well have some enjoyment before our organs attempt to crawl out of the nearest orifice. So what do you say?”
Misato just stares at him like he has grown a second head before she starts stuttering uncontrollably, unable to articulate properly. Her face also goes brilliant red with a flustered blush, and Kaji can’t help but smirk at how cute she looks like that. Finally she turns away and mutters something. Turning his ear to her, he asks, “What was that?”
Her blush deepens in the twilit hell beneath the plane, and she manages to stutter out while getting up a bit, “I-I-I-I d-d-d-don’t-t-t-t-t kn-n-n-n-ow-ow-ow-ow h-h-h-h-how-ow-ow-ow.”
Kaji bursts out laughing and says, “Don’t worry, you don’t need to,” before he reaches out and grabs onto Misato by a strap on her anti-g-suit and awkwardly hauls her into him, although the impact nearly drives the breath out of him as she is unexpectedly heavy. Always the gentleman, he fails to mention that fact and instead brings their lips together.
For the briefest moment an electric spark of something passes between them, making Kaji thinks she will push away and slap him, but then her trembling body calms. She seems to flow into him. Going with it, his tongue probes out across her lips, and he can feel a hunger awaken with her. In the few women he has been with in the past few years, he has known this need before. The need for contact with another, no matter how shallow, how crude. The need to make intimate contact with another, to feel their body heat and the smooth texture of their skin, to know that there are other living things out there and not just pale ghosts drifting in the shadows.
In a world without a sun, the only warmth was other people.
They sat there for a time, sitting in the frozen mud and driven snow beneath the strange plane while the wind howled and the thunder of nuclear warheads shook the world about them. They drank each other, revelling in the taste and smells of another human being, the sweet and the sour all together, combining into something real, something unlike the wastelands or the artificial shelters where people existed rather than lived.
Their intensely clumsy and passionately shallow kissing and groping was ended by the curious buzzing rattle that Kaji had come to associate with pure death itself. A long line of metal near the nose of the fighter disappeared, replaced by rapidly expanding globs of bright orange metal and ceramic that sprayed everywhere. Shoving Misato to the ground, he scrambled about for his gun while he tried to keep both his head and Misato’s down.
Throwing himself into a little lump of snow and hardened earth that might provide him a little protection by way of obscurity, he tried to line up on the enemy out in the swirling storm, sweat leaping to his chilled skin through raw fear alone. More invisible beams hissed through the air, their passage marked by lines of vaporized snow in the wind and lines of molten fire gouged in the soil of ground or the metal skin of the plane.
Figuring on a general direction, Kaji pulled the trigger to try and get the damn Mikes to get their… well, heads he supposed, down. Instead all he got was the trigger refusing to budge, and for a brief moment he thought his weapon had been damaged or jammed, but when he looked down at the gun he found that in his panic he had not moved the fire selector from the ‘Safe’ position. Cursing, he shoved it all the way to the full auto position and then turned about to scream at Misato to run while he distracted them, but instead he found her gone.
A keening, wailing scream kicked up over the wind and the sound of the beams trying to rip apart the area where Kaji was laying. For a few moments he tried to figure out what was going on, but eventually he decided to just take advantage of whatever was happening and he sprayed bullets in the general direction of the enemy. At least a standard bullet could damage Mikes to some extent, unlike the Foxtrot Papas that could soak up rifle rounds like spit balls.
After a few more bursts the beams stopped trying to hit Kaji’s position, even though he could still hear the sound of their activity mingled in with the storm and that strange wailing noise. Then everything returned to the way it was before, the sounds of battle fading away, replaced by the thunder of Kaji’s own pulse in his ears.
With great trepidation, Kaji rose from his prone position and crept over to the rise where he thought that the enemy fire had come from. What he found there was the windswept snow stained with fluorescent yellow fluid and bits of what could charitably be called meat strew about, with Misato standing in the centre of the carnage.
Snow whipping in his eyes and poor illumination all about, for a moment Kaji thought that he saw a sword or something like that in Misato’s left hand, but when he blinked to clear his eyes nothing was there. It must have just been a trick of the shadows. Still, how had Misato managed to do all of that?
Approaching, Kaji wanted to say something, but when Misato turned to him her face was splattered with alien blood and streaked with tears, and then she turned and began to run away, leaving Kaji with the choice to stand there dumbfounded or chase after her.
He took off in a sprint.
He caught up to Misato rather quickly, as she doubled over to puke her guts out, her exotic dark hair falling out in clumps about her face, blowing away in the wind as she heaved dark bile onto the frozen ground. Moving to comfort her, Kaji was instead blown on his ass by a sudden burst of hot wind. Looking up, expecting to see another fireball in the sky or mushroom cloud rising, he instead found some sort of VTOL craft coming in for a landing on a pillar of hot jet wash.
Thumping down, the doors opened up to reveal faceless troopers pouring out of a rear bay. They surrounded the two for a moment before they took off towards where the plane had landed. They had to be some sort of recovery team.
Then the entire aircraft shifted slightly as something that had to be close to two and a half metres tall stepped out. Some sort of enormous robot, it was squat with no visible head but numerous sensors about the torso. Most prominent of all were the large, glowing orange lenses at the centre. The metal thing stared down at the two of them before a smooth man’s voice said, “We will retrieve the prototype and repair it. Will you be ready for the final battle?”
“Y-y-yes s-sir,” Misato stuttered out.
“Good. Climb aboard,” the man said, and Misato moved to comply.
Getting up while looking dumbfounded, Kaji burst out, “Sir! With all due respect this woman is dying from extreme radiation poisoning! She is in no condition to fight.”
“We have a cure,” the man behind the steel machine replied flatly. He then asked, “And who are you?”
“Forward Observer Ryoji Kaji, sir,” Kaji said, the last bit practically a spit curse.
The machine was silent for a long moment before the operator replied, “You are rather young to be an FO, are you not?”
“They took me, and I’m the last member of my unit left alive after we got cut off, so clearly I’m not. Sir,” Kaji replied, staring defiantly at the mechanical monster towering before him, even as he felt his organs liquefying.
The wind whipped between them for several long, tense seconds before Misato interrupted and said, “Sir… sir, please don’t hurt him, h-he helped me.”
The ‘face’ of the machine turned towards Misato, and then back to Kaji before the occupant said, “Forward Observer, you are to accompany us back to base where you will receive medical treatment for radiation poisoning. You are clearly intelligent and strong willed enough to be an asset to our operation.”
Kaji was dumbstruck, but he just nodded as the robot gestured for them to board the transport. Misato and Kaji both readily got aboard, the robot following behind, tilting the suspension on the craft for a moment. It then sort of folded up into a special restraint made for it, its limbs all neatly folded away in a tight bundle, the ‘hands’ of the machine resting just below the orange optics in a bridged position.
Kaji just sat in silence, rather spooked by the whole thing and the giant robot sitting across from him. The tech being casually thrown about had no precedent that he knew about, and even if he had not been the most tuned in about the military research before the world went to hell, this sort of gear looked like the sort that would have been making the press decades ago.
Also, he was silent because he was fairly certain he could hear his DNA unravelling from all of the radiation he had soaked up, and it was making him more than a little queasy, which when added to the uneven motion of the transport made keeping what little fluid he had in his stomach an exercise in concentration.
After perhaps half an hour in the air, the transport began to go into a circling pattern, and despite not being able to see outside, Kaji knew from this that they were beginning to land. As such, when the doors opened again and they were inside some sort of building, illuminated overhead by harsh fluorescent lighting, he was not surprised. What he was surprised at though was that everything was new.
Stepping out in awe, he looked about at the clean concrete lines, the gleaming metal, and the general lack of grime. Shiny new electronic equipment was evident everywhere, and the various machines of nearly every description all looked like they still had factory-floor polish on them. Up above solid metal doors finished closing with a clang, their obvious point of ingress.
Gaping at it all as he climbed, Kaji asked accusingly, “Where did you get all of this stuff? Hundreds of millions of people barely have enough to survive, let alone build new things.”
“Advanced construction equipment, not yet revealed to the general public before Second Impact,” a female voice said from somewhere behind the transport. Rounding a corner was an attractive Japanese woman in her mid to late thirties, dressed in a lab coat and looking over a few things on a clip board while walking up to the transport.
“Is that what they’re calling the end of the world now?” Kaji asks bitterly.
“Yes,” the woman states before looking up at the robot emerging from the transport, frowning, and asking, “Did you really have to go out in person?”
“Yes. If the prototype was suffering control difficulties then an override signal would be required, and with the current EM disturbances caused by the use of tactical nuclear warheads it would have to be delivered at short range,” the robot states while the front begins to crack open and unfold like some sort of metal ribcage during open heart surgery, revealing within a rather stern looking man secured in a rather cramped cockpit. With a hiss several pressurized lines disconnected and he unfolded from the foetal position he was in so that he could lower himself out.
Taking a pair of orange glasses out of a pocket, the man then flips them open and puts them on, blinking a few times beneath the tinted lenses while the woman just glared at him. Finally, he just sighs and says, “I will avoid such behaviour in the future.”
“Good. You know how devastated Shinji would be if he lost either one of us,” the woman says. For the briefest second something flickers over the man’s face before he schools his features and nods. Mollified, the woman turns to Kaji and raises an eyebrow. She asks, “Picking up strays now?”
“Blame Lieutenant Katsuragi,” the man offers, before he adds on, “Speaking of which, both of them are suffering extensive radiation damage.”
The woman looks like she is about to say something, but glances at Kaji before she does and instead says, “Right. Dr. Akagi’s girl can run the therapy rig, I’ll have her paged.”
The man nods and gestures for two guards to come over, ordering, “Take Forward Observer Kaji to Medical Wing Charlie.”
Now feeling like total shit, his body aching as it fell apart at a cellular level around him, he lets the guards lead him through the base, his mind nearly incoherent as the massive cell and organ death now occurring throws all fluid balances out of check, leaving him feeling like he has been set on fire while suffering the accumulated hangover of every frat boy in Cancun before the world went to hell. He is practically dragged the final leg of the trip, at which point he is nearly incoherent.
There is something of a cooling sensation over his body, then a pressure at his back as he is laid down on something. Just before it all goes black, he feels an indescribable pain, like his body being torn apart from the inside, and then everything goes mercifully dark.
Eyes open to the clean, clinical lighting of fluorescent lights gleaming off the lens of a mask staring up at him, the blue eyes just behind the transparent plastic staring at him with wide-eyed curiosity. Kaji tries to recoil, but finds his limbs and body securely restrained, and worse yet, he quickly realizes that the restraints are probably to keep him from ripping out the numerous long needles driven deep into his body, piercing all the way to the bone.
“Hello,” the voice behind the mask says in an immature female tone weirdly distorted by the filter over her face.
Kaji blinks and refocuses as best he can on what is going on. It takes him a second to realize that the girl standing before him in the muted red survival outfit has to be one of the few children born after the disaster that blotted out the sun and brought the alien invasion. Rare and protected fiercely, they had grown up only knowing the hell Earth had become and were rarely seen outside their suits, used to the clothing like second skins.
Kaji had always found the thought of what the next generation was becoming more than a little unnerving, but being up close to one of the actual children was both reassuring and reinforced his initial concerns. He could see the eyes behind the mask at this range, but the fact that she did not take off her suit even when inside was deeply unsettling.
“Hello,” he managed as he turned his head away, staring up at the lights up at the ceiling, the only motion he could actually do with the restraints, needles, tubes, and sensors stuck in and on him.
“You look funny,” the little girl stated.
“I’m sick,” Kaji noted unenthusiastically.
“Is that why you’re hooked up to all those machines?” The girl asked while wandering about him.
“Yes,” Kaji states weakly. Surviving a near death encounter with radiation poisoning via unknown medical treatments has a way of sucking the enthusiasm out of a guy.
“Will they take off that growth then?” The girl asks.
“What growth?” Kaji asks, now worried. He does not need cancer now.
“The one hanging between your legs,” the little girl asks.
If he could have, Kaji would have spontaneously combusted with embarrassment. He did not need a four year old staring at his genitalia on a day like today. He starts to stammer something out when a thankfully more mature voice cries out, “Asuka! How did you get in there?”
The indistinct shape twirls about to face the accuser and exclaims, “I’m playing hide and seek!”
“Well play somewhere else! This is a hospital room and the patient doesn’t need a little girl interrupting his rest,” a young woman of perhaps Kaji’s age says as she enters the room. Wearing a lab coat, she seems to be a doctor of some sort, even if she is ridiculously young for that sort of profession. Then again, these days’ people did what they had to regardless of age or proper experience.
Shooing the little girl, apparently named Asuka, out of the room, the woman says, “Go! Go play with your friends somewhere where you won’t bother the grown ups!”
“But that idiot is too chicken to go where he’s not supposed to!” Asuka protests.
“Well then good on Shinji for not breaking the rules. Now out!” The woman says before shutting the door to the room behind the girl. Turning back to Kaji, she walks over to him, a bit of a blush on her face as she picks up something from the floor and then lays out a sort of towel on his lap.
“Sorry about that, I have a lot on my plate right now and I wasn’t watching the door as closely as I should have,” the woman says.
With his own blush subsides and the exhaustion he felt in his bones returns to him, Kaji says, “That’s all right, only my pride was hurt I suppose. Still, thank you Dr…”
“Miss Ritsuko Akagi. I haven’t earned my doctorate yet, even if I am doing the work of an MD and PhD under my mother’s tutelage,” the woman corrects.
“Ah. Well, thank you Miss Akagi,” Kaji states. He then glances about at the metal and plastic octopus colony assaulting him and asks, “Umm… what exactly are you doing to me?”
“Well, there’s the basic painkiller drip, but we have also added in a rather potent chemical cocktail of stimulants and steroids to promote healing,” Ritsuko says, pointing to a series of saline bags hooked up to him. She then points to another bag with a rather odd violet fluid in it and says, “This here is a chelating solution designed to latch on to a wide variety of toxic and radioactive compounds in the body and carry them safely out. This leads us to the pair of dialysis machines you are hooked up to that filter your blood while your kidneys are regenerated,” she points to a pair of faintly humming machines with blood filled pipes leading in and out of them. “We also directly add in replacement blood units and maintain your osmotic balance in the face of near catastrophic cell death, above and beyond the normal function of dialysis machines. Despite that, we still have seven different body cavity fluid drains in you to take out excess liquid build up.”
Finally she taps the largest and most needle laden machine and says, “And this here is what makes all of the rest of the equipment even worthwhile. This nasty contraption is keeping your body pumped full of stem cells that attach to damaged areas and replace dead cells, especially in the red marrow of your long bones. Without this machine your body would have gone into a cascade of cell death, damaged cells dragging down any surrounding healthy ones and causing massive organ failure. As it is, you currently have a fifty percent chance of survival over the next thirty days instead of one hundred percent fatality within… two days ago.” Ritsuko concludes as she checks the time.
Kaji’s eyes going wide at all of this information and he gulps. “What about that pilot… Second Lieutenant Katsuragi? She took more radiation than I did…”
“The test pilot received additional treatment even more experimental than this and is currently in a sortie against the extraterrestrials known as Mikes, by the military abbreviation,” Ritsuko states.
Kaji goggles at that, unbelieving that it could be possible.
“You have been out for approximately six days Mr. Kaji. With the loss of their battleship the Mikes are in general retreat and Lt. Katsuragi is helping to maintain air superiority. Without the distraction from the Mikes the ground campaign can concentrate on the Foxtrot Papas, and has been pushed them back to their last city, the objective of the Japanese Campaign. By tomorrow the Papas will be extinct and we will be able to claim their massive underground settlement, free from the contamination of Second Impact,” Ritsuko explains.
“Then… then…” Kaji begins, not believing his ears.
“This is the end for the Papas, and likely the end of the Mike invasion… for now. We can focus on rebuilding instead of fighting,” Ritsuko says before injecting something into one of the saline drips. “Now get some rest Mr. Kaji, if you survive the military will want to pin a bunch of medals on you.”
Once more, Kaji’s eyes fluttered shut and he went to sleep, but this time knowing that the end was in sight. Not for him, not for humanity, but for this fucking war. That was something to want to wake up to.
That and Misato.
So without further ado, let the insanity begin.
Chapter One: The End
The world was coming to an end. The world was dying, the sky above a great pulsating bruise, the coal clouds above reflecting the fading fireballs in the sky and the raging infernos on the ground, shifting the colours through the reds, blues, and violets of contusions. A hell of incomprehensibly vast forces that swallowed up and incinerated individuals like motes of grain in firestorm.
For one young man, barely more than a boy but forced to grow up fast, the only thing keeping him from running was the faintest glimmer that what he did actually mattered. Encased in an armoured NBC suit that he doubted was providing adequate protection, simultaneously too hot about the head and torso where the armour was thickest and too cold about his limbs from where he went scrambling through the uneven snow upon the ground. Heavy, it weighed upon him with metal-ceramic armour plates and radiation absorbing materials, yet that mass was also what had kept him alive for so long.
His breath coming hard and fast, nearly choking him behind his rebreather, he managed to get to the top of the next rise of the day, throwing himself down into a drift of diseased looking snow and lying there for a moment, panting heavily from the continued exertions that burned at him even as the chill numbed his limbs. It also made sure that he would not get shot like an idiot for standing out in the open.
High above but terrifyingly close a massive fireball filled his view of the sky. His faceplate immediately went dark, but his eyes still stung with the brilliance that got through. How many warheads had initiated uncomfortably close to his position this day? How much radiation had he soaked up? Was there any point anymore to wearing his gear?
Shoving the question to the side, he squirmed through snow drift, the cheap Chinese AK clone in his hands leading the way, shoving grey, brittle brush out of the way. Shuffling about he compacted the snow and dead foliage beneath his body to increase his comfort a tiny fraction before he took out one of his two real weapons, far more powerful than the insignificant peashooter he used for shoving about debris.
Scanning his scope across the broken terrain, he spotted them by their footprints, mercifully the only thing they manifested at the moment. Great trampling footprints as of some strange and enormous animal, they possessed no correspondingly visible feet. He could see the faint ripple in the air though, visible by the debris starting to be picked up, of a powerful wind storm being kicked up.
Carefully counting the appearance of the footprints in the snow, he then checked his orientation with his map and pulled out his main weapon, the most devastating thing in his arsenal. With a single click of a button, he began.
“Alfa-Charlie-Five-Seven, this is Foxtrot-Oscar-Three-Eight-Five-Five, over,” he spoke carefully into his radio, hoping his accent and heavy breathing through his mask would not foul the message.
“Copy FO3855, this is AC57. State your target. Over,” the radio replied after a moment.
Copy AC57, I have eyes on one-two Foxtrot-Papas preparing to storm in sector Bravo-Nine-Xray-Two. I say again, one-two Foxtrot-Papas preparing to storm in sector Bravo-Nine-Xray-Two. Over,” he detailed out.
“AC57 acknowledges FO3855, 12 FPs in B9X2. Retreat to minimum safe distance of eight-five-zero metres, November inbound, November inbound. Over,” the radio crackles after a few seconds.
Swearing, the young man then clicks his radio again and says, “Copy AC57, retreating to minimum safe distance. Out.”
Squirming back through the tangled path in the brush he had made, he shoves his way out of the snow and then begins to run down the hill he had just climbed but a minute before. In the gloom of the occluded sun and the swirling of the storm, he can not know how long he has. The flash of light behind the hill he has just run from and the shudder of the ground beneath his feet that knocks him over let him know that November has arrived.
Rolling for a time down the snowy rise in an uncontrolled tumble head over heels, he eventually comes to a stop by ploughing into a particularly large drift, the snow crumbling beneath his impact to bring him to a stop. He lays there for a time, staring up at the dying sky above, vision still spinning as his inner ear tries to sort itself out.
Just staring up at the sky, he spontaneously starts to weep. He remembers the days, years ago, when the sky had been blue. He remembers the days when he could run outside without having to bundle up beneath multiple layers of protection with a gas mask on his face and a radiation badge on underneath it all. He remembers being able to drink water from a tap and not worry about how many toxins were in it. He remembers not knowing intimately the feeling of being knocked over by a near miss from the blast wave of a low yield nuclear weapon.
He remembers not having to fight in this fucking war.
They were all dead, the suicide rush of the ants against the exterminator fumigating the house. The big wigs had promised them salvation, promised them that if they could seize the home territory of the Foxtrot Papas that they could find a safe haven for humanity against the ecological ruin of the planet and the depredations above of the Mikes. But simple codes could not overcome the truth of the monstrosities they fought. They could not overcome the truth that more nuclear weapons had been initiated in the air and on the ground of this nightmarish place than anywhere else in the world, all to turn the battle into a slow and steady loss instead of an utter massacre.
The young man was about ready to try and figure out how to shoot himself in the head with his own rifle when something caught his eye high above. Flitting about, barely visible against the roiling black clouds, was a plane only visible by the twinkling of its cannons, strangely beautiful, especially as Mike craft came apart while the fighter danced in between them.
He got up shakily out of the snow and stared skyward, trying to keep up with the progress of the tiny dot across the sky in its deadly ballet. He had no idea how it could move like that, the Mike fighters normally holding the advantage in speed, manoeuvrability, firepower, and durability, but the human fighter was somehow doing it, somehow keeping just ahead of them and dealing out the punishment.
The thump of another nuclear weapon going off somewhere within a kilometre or two of his position snapped the young man out of his reverie, and made him realize where he was. No longer wanting to die, no longer content to wait for the end of his species, he moved his stiff and frozen feet through the crusty slush of bomb melted snow. He had more targets to find, more points of opportunity for the artillery to take care of. In the mountains all around him, hundreds of thousands of other men spent their lives in the struggle for the survival of the species. High above in the air every craft they could get flying and fighting fought to, if not gain air supremacy, then at least to keep their foes distracted.
He was a forward observer, well outside the bulk of the brutal ground battle, calling in targets of opportunity for bombardment by conventional or nuclear artillery. One amongst thousands like him, he sowed chaos and death in the flanks and rear of the enemy formations. Of course, he was also the last survivor of his squad and he had already been rotated through six different batteries that he reported to in the past eight hours, but he would keep fighting.
His mask now nearly completely fogged up with the moisture of his tears and hot breath, he had a hard time seeing where he was going, but he dared not remove it as the black rain started to fall from the nearby mushroom cloud. Not that it mattered much, intellectually he knew that he was probably already dead, but the insane part of him, the insane part of every human, told him that the amount of radiation he had picked up wouldn’t be that bad. He would live through this, get a smoking hot girlfriend, and then have a dozen children, just so long as he did not take off his mask.
He chuckled to himself as that irrational thought crossed through his head. He did not even want kids.
His radio then crackled to life, blaring an urgent yet mechanically dead warning, “Break-break all channels. I say again, break-break all channels. All personnel in grid Bravo-Six through Echo-Nine are to seek shelter immediately. I say again, all personnel to seek shelter. Enemy warship is inbound. I say again, enemy warship is inbound. Out.”
Eyes going wide, the young man looked up to see the sky parting before the small mountain lowering itself down through the clouds. Like some sort of colossal conch shell that had been overgrown with barnacles, the vaguely organic monstrosity was the Mike battleship, their trump card that always steamrolled humanity whenever it showed up. The mission planners had all said that they had something prepared, but everyone just thought that it was just trying to get that beast in close with the Papas and let the inhuman bastards duke it out.
Well that the fuckers who had sent them all on this suicide mission were just lying.
The hovering, impossible monstrosity opened up with its main batteries, shooting out long lines of eye-searing violet-white energy that lanced into mountains and ripped them apart with the contemptuous ease of nuclear weapons shredding wooden houses. Streams of blue lighting whip cracked across the sky, batting aside fighters and missiles inbound with frightening ease. Not even the nuclear artillery shells could make it through the screen of firepower, leaving the monstrous ship utterly untouched by the best humanity could throw at it. Worst yet from the perspective of the young man on the ground, waves of fresh fighters and ground attack craft were being disgorged by the alien warship.
This was it, this was the end. The battleship’s point defences were too good; no human delivery system could get a weapon capable of hurting it within range. Even as Papa wind control stirred up tornadoes to rip apart the beast, it just swatted away the creatures controlling the storms while the wind battered uselessly against its impervious hull. Nothing could-
The world went white, his faceplate going dark and failing against the tremendous glare. His whole body felt tingly and warm for a moment before the shock wave punched him in the chest and sent him flying into the ground. For what seemed like an eternity that wonderful, awesome, terrible light lasted, but it could have only been for a second, and when it cleared, there was only the muddy darkness of a fried and cracked faceplate.
Stripping off the now useless mask, the young man finds himself blinking away the spots in his vision as the scent of cooking plastics and ceramics reaches his nostrils. Staring down, he finds the entire front of his suit a charred, smoking ruin of crusted over material that had temporarily gone molten. Had he been wearing anything less, he would no doubt he thrashing about on the ground in agony now, his body covered in burns.
Staring up into the sky, he sees high above the battleship starting to fall, a bit removed from it where the fireball had touched directly, yet the rest of the ship still intact even if everything alive within was no doubt now dead and ash. The air was also swept clean of enemy craft, no doubt torn to pieces by the thermonuclear fury unleashed.
As the echoing crackle of the blast faded, it seemed like the whole world held its breath, just staring up in shocked awe as the battleship slowly fell from the sky, slain by whatever conjuring trick had allowed humanity to slip a strategic nuclear warhead through its defences. Even then, the majority of the monster had survived the unholy destruction unleashed upon it, clamping down on the celebration that had to beat within the hearts of every human alive that gazed up at the spectacle. Not even a direct nuclear strike could obliterate the technology of their enemies.
Stinging air washing over his face and an acrid burn in his lungs, the young man remembered that his NBC suit was also for the cocktail of acids and toxins kicked in the air by the years of volcanic eruption that had ruined the world. Slinging off his pack, he pulled out a back-up gas mask, nowhere near as good as his destroyed rebreather, but at least it would offer him some protection from having his lungs liquefy inside his body, even if his intestines were probably already well on their way in that direction anyway.
Snow flash melted in the blast had turned the hills into a muddy, soupy mess, the long dead, brittle foliage offering little resistance to the downward sagging of the terrain. Slogging through the muck, hoping the hillside would not collapse before he could find firmer terrain, he looked up once more, to find something that made him pause in near religious wonder.
High up, above the point of initiation for the warhead, the blast had shoved aside the thick clouds for just a moment to let a dirty smudge of sunlight through, the first real sunshine anyone had seen in years. Had fear, exhaustion, and despair not already sapped him, the young man would have fallen down crying, but his eyes had no tears left. Instead, he just watched until the darkness consumed the world again, leaving only the burning hell of the surface bellow the clouds.
Perhaps he had died years ago, perhaps they had all died years ago, back when the southern lands had disappeared in a flash of light. Perhaps this was hell, a punishment for a rebellious youth by forcing him to fight an eternal war against alien monsters on a planet not fit for human life. If he perished here, would he return to that night all those years ago, woken in his bed by his parents, frantically telling him to get up because the mother of all tsunamis was coming for their home? Would he relieve the years of hunger and deprivation, of scuttling about scavenging while people died all around him? Would he relive the privation of being drafted into the UN Armed Forces, the last technological army, so that he could be thrown into the fire of conflict against the tides of aliens bent on finishing the job of exterminating humanity before they all died from a collapsed ecosystem? Would he lie in some ditch here, his gear ruined and his cells cooked with radiation, to puke his guts out and die, only to start the endless cycle all over again?
Shaking his head, he decided that he must be dying from radiation poisoning. He was getting philosophical; a sure sign of neural degradation. Then again, he could just be concussed; his ears were still hurting a bit from that last nuclear initiation.
His radio a pile of slag, he tossed it aside and decides that he was going to have to make his way back to his own lines to report for reassignment. With the ground starting to freeze solid once more, if into a crumbling, unstable heap, he was only reminded a bit more of how much good his armour had actually done. His ears were starting to sting from the whining wind whipping across the exposed flesh.
Stopping, he paused to look around, as the whining sound on the wind seemed to grow louder and more insistent. Turning skyward, he found the answer to his question in the form of a great dark shape like a mythical roc descending from the sky, talons outstretched towards him. Running as quickly as he could across the broken terrain, he ends up diving to the ground as with a tremendous roar the thing passes over his head, shoving him deeper into the icy mud with a blast of hot air.
Picking his face out of the muck, the young man finds something like one of the American F-22s, a rare plane even before everything had happened, landing nearby. But whatever was out there was definitely not an F-22, seeing as how it had legs. A pair of reverse jointed mechanical legs stuck out of the bottom, jets directed towards the ground as the bizarre aircraft settled down on a flat patch of terrain, sinking half way up the first leg segment in the soft ground.
The plane looked slightly molten at first glance, its exterior having wax like ripples and flows over it along with significant directional blackening that suggested it had been in the air when the nuclear weapon that killed the battleship initiated. How it had survived and landed with its strangely complicated structure was a mystery as its avionics should have been fried, but it was clear that it would not be flying again anytime soon.
While the craft finished settling in, the young man approached it cautiously and warily, wondering if it were some sort of trick or if it were some sort of weird prototype from before the destruction of society. It certainly could not be new; the infrastructure to build something this advanced had died with the rising of the seas and the blotting out of the sun. With nearness, he noted that there appeared to be no cockpit, just a sort of forward bulge, so perhaps it was some sort of unmanned drone. This could be the fighter he had seen dancing about the sky earlier.
Approaching closer still, he could hear the ticking sound of metal cooling as the war machine settled in ways that were not entirely mechanical in nature, bits of plane reduced to slag slumping down and producing weird stress patterns. Slush pattered off the metallic skin and sizzled away, producing a low bank of lukewarm fog about the plane.
With a hiss of pressure that made the young man leap back in startled surprise and fear, a seam he had not even seen opened up about the bottom section of the forward bulge where the cockpit would have been in an F-22, a bottom panel swinging open like the jaws of some yawning serpent. From within a human shaped form tumbled out, hitting the cold ground below with a terrible thud.
Swaddled in a form concealing anti-G-suit and a face hiding helmet, the figure was quickly if rather drunkenly scrambling up to claw at the helmet, ripping it off to reveal a rather striking woman’s face that was quickly marred by the act of explosively emptying the contents of her stomach.
The young man felt his own stomach drop with the sight. He had the briefings, he knew the signs. That strategic warhead’s thermal energy went a lot further than its ionizing energy, but she must have still taken a massive amount of radiation, if not from the big one then from all of the air bursts and fallout clouds in this battle. She was probably in the ‘walking ghost’ level of exposure, where the damage was so intense it took time to notice.
Before she had even finished emptying her stomach contents, the young man was next to her, supporting her as waves of nausea washed over her. He found himself strangely attracted to her despite the hellish battlefield conditions and her doomed state. Perhaps it was the fact that she was the first human being he had seen in hours, and the first woman he had been close to, let alone touched, in weeks. Or perhaps it was a transferral of pity for knowing that she was already numbered amongst the damned.
Of course, whatever it was, he was sure that in less pressing circumstances he would have been attracted by her anyway. Of particular note was her hair, cut short enough to fit into her helmet let still as long as possible, and with a rather strange colour. Very dark, it had a strange purple lustre that suggested that it was approaching from the depths of the ultraviolet end of the spectrum rather than straight black.
Taking a few deep breaths from the chill, polluted air and breathing out little fogs of steam, the woman looked up at the young man and he was struck by the fact that she could be little older than him. Their eyes met for a moment before she broke contact and stuttered out a quiet, “T-thank you.”
Taking his hands off her shoulders like he had been burned by some force he did not understand, the young man said, “It’s not a problem ma’am.”
She sort of moved in a way that suggested she was gravitating back towards him before she seemed to withdraw and she instead asked timidly, “W-what is y-your-r name?”
Staring dumbfounded at someone so shy yet who was still entrusted with a multimillion dollar aircraft and seemed able to use it rather effectively, the young man said, “I am Forward Observer Ryoji Kaji.”
“Second Lieutenant Misato Katsuragi,” she says with a touch more conviction that before, although the well worn patterns of rote behaviour is obvious.
“Well then ma’am, we should probably get to shelter away from this plane-” Kaji begins, only for Misato to interrupt him with unusual force and conviction.
“NO! We can’t leave it!” She cried out desperately, grabbing on to his arm and looking pleadingly into his eyes.
Kaji just stared down at her for a few moments, trying to hide the wince that threatened to erupt as her grip tried to fuse his ulna and radius into a single bone, before he relented and said, “Of course ma’am, you are the superior officer here.”
He had no more optimism. He would die here, probably puking his guts out alongside this strange, insecure woman in half an hour or so. He could feel death staring him in the face, the grim reaper’s rictus grin upon him, and all he could do now was grin back. So he just moved to the leeward side of one of the legs on the strange war machine and slumped down, out of the chill, toxic wind as best he could and stripped off his mask, so that he could see the world through unfiltered eyes before he went. So he could see Misato.
His ears burning in the cold and his skin stinging from the acidic precipitation, Kaji reached into his bag and pulled out a ration pack. Ripping it open and hoping by some miracle of a nonexistent god it had been transformed into the delicacies of his childhood, but instead he just found more algal gruel. For nearly five years he had eaten the stuff, along with everyone else still alive on this damned planet. Some sort of genetically engineered crop that could be grown with the crudest of components and the barest of light and heat, it apparently had everything a person could need nutritionally, but the taste was rather lacking. In fact, it had the consistency of pond scum and the flavour of pork flavoured soy.
Looking up at Misato, he asks, “Want some while we wait?” He tacitly avoids mentioning what exactly it is he is waiting for.
A sour look coming over her face as she squats down in front of him, Misato replies, “N-no. I… I… I j-just-t d-don’t like tha-at st-stuff.”
Shrugging, Kaji replies, “Neither do I, but its all the food anyone has had for years.” He guesses she is probably embarrassed about the fact that her stomach is no doubt doing radiation somersaults and food is completely unappealing at the moment. With nothing he can do about that, he just begins to slurp down his last, runny meal.
While he eats, the wind blows and soon more thermonuclear fireworks are going off all across the battlefield, low yield tactical weapons for swatting Mike fighters out of the sky or vaporizing the obscenely tough Foxtrot Papas. Misato seems to flinch at every new fireball, but she also never takes her eyes off of Kaji as he eats, a strange expression somewhere between horrified fascination and infatuation.
Finally, unable to take anymore of the stares or slop, Kaji puts his meal down and looks back at Misato. Her hair is starting to come loose in the corrosive wind, the follicles already dead from the radiation and now being chewed away by all of the various unpleasant chemicals manufactured in the clouds by nuclear and volcanic fallout. Still…
Tossing the half eaten packet away, Kaji asks, “Misato, would you like to make out before we die of one screaming, agonizing death or another?”
The blunt question knocks Misato out of her knees hugging squat and on her ass, and she looks up in shock at Kaji. “W-wha-at?”
Shrugging and leaning back further into the metal of the plane’s leg, he says, “Well, even if we don’t get shot by Mikes, ripped apart by Papas, or made unfortunate victims of friendly fire, we have both sucked up more radiation than is survivable, so I figure even if it is fraternization, its not like it will matter in a few hours, and without your plane or my radio neither one of us can do our jobs as soldiers, so we might as well have some enjoyment before our organs attempt to crawl out of the nearest orifice. So what do you say?”
Misato just stares at him like he has grown a second head before she starts stuttering uncontrollably, unable to articulate properly. Her face also goes brilliant red with a flustered blush, and Kaji can’t help but smirk at how cute she looks like that. Finally she turns away and mutters something. Turning his ear to her, he asks, “What was that?”
Her blush deepens in the twilit hell beneath the plane, and she manages to stutter out while getting up a bit, “I-I-I-I d-d-d-don’t-t-t-t-t kn-n-n-n-ow-ow-ow-ow h-h-h-h-how-ow-ow-ow.”
Kaji bursts out laughing and says, “Don’t worry, you don’t need to,” before he reaches out and grabs onto Misato by a strap on her anti-g-suit and awkwardly hauls her into him, although the impact nearly drives the breath out of him as she is unexpectedly heavy. Always the gentleman, he fails to mention that fact and instead brings their lips together.
For the briefest moment an electric spark of something passes between them, making Kaji thinks she will push away and slap him, but then her trembling body calms. She seems to flow into him. Going with it, his tongue probes out across her lips, and he can feel a hunger awaken with her. In the few women he has been with in the past few years, he has known this need before. The need for contact with another, no matter how shallow, how crude. The need to make intimate contact with another, to feel their body heat and the smooth texture of their skin, to know that there are other living things out there and not just pale ghosts drifting in the shadows.
In a world without a sun, the only warmth was other people.
They sat there for a time, sitting in the frozen mud and driven snow beneath the strange plane while the wind howled and the thunder of nuclear warheads shook the world about them. They drank each other, revelling in the taste and smells of another human being, the sweet and the sour all together, combining into something real, something unlike the wastelands or the artificial shelters where people existed rather than lived.
Their intensely clumsy and passionately shallow kissing and groping was ended by the curious buzzing rattle that Kaji had come to associate with pure death itself. A long line of metal near the nose of the fighter disappeared, replaced by rapidly expanding globs of bright orange metal and ceramic that sprayed everywhere. Shoving Misato to the ground, he scrambled about for his gun while he tried to keep both his head and Misato’s down.
Throwing himself into a little lump of snow and hardened earth that might provide him a little protection by way of obscurity, he tried to line up on the enemy out in the swirling storm, sweat leaping to his chilled skin through raw fear alone. More invisible beams hissed through the air, their passage marked by lines of vaporized snow in the wind and lines of molten fire gouged in the soil of ground or the metal skin of the plane.
Figuring on a general direction, Kaji pulled the trigger to try and get the damn Mikes to get their… well, heads he supposed, down. Instead all he got was the trigger refusing to budge, and for a brief moment he thought his weapon had been damaged or jammed, but when he looked down at the gun he found that in his panic he had not moved the fire selector from the ‘Safe’ position. Cursing, he shoved it all the way to the full auto position and then turned about to scream at Misato to run while he distracted them, but instead he found her gone.
A keening, wailing scream kicked up over the wind and the sound of the beams trying to rip apart the area where Kaji was laying. For a few moments he tried to figure out what was going on, but eventually he decided to just take advantage of whatever was happening and he sprayed bullets in the general direction of the enemy. At least a standard bullet could damage Mikes to some extent, unlike the Foxtrot Papas that could soak up rifle rounds like spit balls.
After a few more bursts the beams stopped trying to hit Kaji’s position, even though he could still hear the sound of their activity mingled in with the storm and that strange wailing noise. Then everything returned to the way it was before, the sounds of battle fading away, replaced by the thunder of Kaji’s own pulse in his ears.
With great trepidation, Kaji rose from his prone position and crept over to the rise where he thought that the enemy fire had come from. What he found there was the windswept snow stained with fluorescent yellow fluid and bits of what could charitably be called meat strew about, with Misato standing in the centre of the carnage.
Snow whipping in his eyes and poor illumination all about, for a moment Kaji thought that he saw a sword or something like that in Misato’s left hand, but when he blinked to clear his eyes nothing was there. It must have just been a trick of the shadows. Still, how had Misato managed to do all of that?
Approaching, Kaji wanted to say something, but when Misato turned to him her face was splattered with alien blood and streaked with tears, and then she turned and began to run away, leaving Kaji with the choice to stand there dumbfounded or chase after her.
He took off in a sprint.
He caught up to Misato rather quickly, as she doubled over to puke her guts out, her exotic dark hair falling out in clumps about her face, blowing away in the wind as she heaved dark bile onto the frozen ground. Moving to comfort her, Kaji was instead blown on his ass by a sudden burst of hot wind. Looking up, expecting to see another fireball in the sky or mushroom cloud rising, he instead found some sort of VTOL craft coming in for a landing on a pillar of hot jet wash.
Thumping down, the doors opened up to reveal faceless troopers pouring out of a rear bay. They surrounded the two for a moment before they took off towards where the plane had landed. They had to be some sort of recovery team.
Then the entire aircraft shifted slightly as something that had to be close to two and a half metres tall stepped out. Some sort of enormous robot, it was squat with no visible head but numerous sensors about the torso. Most prominent of all were the large, glowing orange lenses at the centre. The metal thing stared down at the two of them before a smooth man’s voice said, “We will retrieve the prototype and repair it. Will you be ready for the final battle?”
“Y-y-yes s-sir,” Misato stuttered out.
“Good. Climb aboard,” the man said, and Misato moved to comply.
Getting up while looking dumbfounded, Kaji burst out, “Sir! With all due respect this woman is dying from extreme radiation poisoning! She is in no condition to fight.”
“We have a cure,” the man behind the steel machine replied flatly. He then asked, “And who are you?”
“Forward Observer Ryoji Kaji, sir,” Kaji said, the last bit practically a spit curse.
The machine was silent for a long moment before the operator replied, “You are rather young to be an FO, are you not?”
“They took me, and I’m the last member of my unit left alive after we got cut off, so clearly I’m not. Sir,” Kaji replied, staring defiantly at the mechanical monster towering before him, even as he felt his organs liquefying.
The wind whipped between them for several long, tense seconds before Misato interrupted and said, “Sir… sir, please don’t hurt him, h-he helped me.”
The ‘face’ of the machine turned towards Misato, and then back to Kaji before the occupant said, “Forward Observer, you are to accompany us back to base where you will receive medical treatment for radiation poisoning. You are clearly intelligent and strong willed enough to be an asset to our operation.”
Kaji was dumbstruck, but he just nodded as the robot gestured for them to board the transport. Misato and Kaji both readily got aboard, the robot following behind, tilting the suspension on the craft for a moment. It then sort of folded up into a special restraint made for it, its limbs all neatly folded away in a tight bundle, the ‘hands’ of the machine resting just below the orange optics in a bridged position.
Kaji just sat in silence, rather spooked by the whole thing and the giant robot sitting across from him. The tech being casually thrown about had no precedent that he knew about, and even if he had not been the most tuned in about the military research before the world went to hell, this sort of gear looked like the sort that would have been making the press decades ago.
Also, he was silent because he was fairly certain he could hear his DNA unravelling from all of the radiation he had soaked up, and it was making him more than a little queasy, which when added to the uneven motion of the transport made keeping what little fluid he had in his stomach an exercise in concentration.
After perhaps half an hour in the air, the transport began to go into a circling pattern, and despite not being able to see outside, Kaji knew from this that they were beginning to land. As such, when the doors opened again and they were inside some sort of building, illuminated overhead by harsh fluorescent lighting, he was not surprised. What he was surprised at though was that everything was new.
Stepping out in awe, he looked about at the clean concrete lines, the gleaming metal, and the general lack of grime. Shiny new electronic equipment was evident everywhere, and the various machines of nearly every description all looked like they still had factory-floor polish on them. Up above solid metal doors finished closing with a clang, their obvious point of ingress.
Gaping at it all as he climbed, Kaji asked accusingly, “Where did you get all of this stuff? Hundreds of millions of people barely have enough to survive, let alone build new things.”
“Advanced construction equipment, not yet revealed to the general public before Second Impact,” a female voice said from somewhere behind the transport. Rounding a corner was an attractive Japanese woman in her mid to late thirties, dressed in a lab coat and looking over a few things on a clip board while walking up to the transport.
“Is that what they’re calling the end of the world now?” Kaji asks bitterly.
“Yes,” the woman states before looking up at the robot emerging from the transport, frowning, and asking, “Did you really have to go out in person?”
“Yes. If the prototype was suffering control difficulties then an override signal would be required, and with the current EM disturbances caused by the use of tactical nuclear warheads it would have to be delivered at short range,” the robot states while the front begins to crack open and unfold like some sort of metal ribcage during open heart surgery, revealing within a rather stern looking man secured in a rather cramped cockpit. With a hiss several pressurized lines disconnected and he unfolded from the foetal position he was in so that he could lower himself out.
Taking a pair of orange glasses out of a pocket, the man then flips them open and puts them on, blinking a few times beneath the tinted lenses while the woman just glared at him. Finally, he just sighs and says, “I will avoid such behaviour in the future.”
“Good. You know how devastated Shinji would be if he lost either one of us,” the woman says. For the briefest second something flickers over the man’s face before he schools his features and nods. Mollified, the woman turns to Kaji and raises an eyebrow. She asks, “Picking up strays now?”
“Blame Lieutenant Katsuragi,” the man offers, before he adds on, “Speaking of which, both of them are suffering extensive radiation damage.”
The woman looks like she is about to say something, but glances at Kaji before she does and instead says, “Right. Dr. Akagi’s girl can run the therapy rig, I’ll have her paged.”
The man nods and gestures for two guards to come over, ordering, “Take Forward Observer Kaji to Medical Wing Charlie.”
Now feeling like total shit, his body aching as it fell apart at a cellular level around him, he lets the guards lead him through the base, his mind nearly incoherent as the massive cell and organ death now occurring throws all fluid balances out of check, leaving him feeling like he has been set on fire while suffering the accumulated hangover of every frat boy in Cancun before the world went to hell. He is practically dragged the final leg of the trip, at which point he is nearly incoherent.
There is something of a cooling sensation over his body, then a pressure at his back as he is laid down on something. Just before it all goes black, he feels an indescribable pain, like his body being torn apart from the inside, and then everything goes mercifully dark.
Eyes open to the clean, clinical lighting of fluorescent lights gleaming off the lens of a mask staring up at him, the blue eyes just behind the transparent plastic staring at him with wide-eyed curiosity. Kaji tries to recoil, but finds his limbs and body securely restrained, and worse yet, he quickly realizes that the restraints are probably to keep him from ripping out the numerous long needles driven deep into his body, piercing all the way to the bone.
“Hello,” the voice behind the mask says in an immature female tone weirdly distorted by the filter over her face.
Kaji blinks and refocuses as best he can on what is going on. It takes him a second to realize that the girl standing before him in the muted red survival outfit has to be one of the few children born after the disaster that blotted out the sun and brought the alien invasion. Rare and protected fiercely, they had grown up only knowing the hell Earth had become and were rarely seen outside their suits, used to the clothing like second skins.
Kaji had always found the thought of what the next generation was becoming more than a little unnerving, but being up close to one of the actual children was both reassuring and reinforced his initial concerns. He could see the eyes behind the mask at this range, but the fact that she did not take off her suit even when inside was deeply unsettling.
“Hello,” he managed as he turned his head away, staring up at the lights up at the ceiling, the only motion he could actually do with the restraints, needles, tubes, and sensors stuck in and on him.
“You look funny,” the little girl stated.
“I’m sick,” Kaji noted unenthusiastically.
“Is that why you’re hooked up to all those machines?” The girl asked while wandering about him.
“Yes,” Kaji states weakly. Surviving a near death encounter with radiation poisoning via unknown medical treatments has a way of sucking the enthusiasm out of a guy.
“Will they take off that growth then?” The girl asks.
“What growth?” Kaji asks, now worried. He does not need cancer now.
“The one hanging between your legs,” the little girl asks.
If he could have, Kaji would have spontaneously combusted with embarrassment. He did not need a four year old staring at his genitalia on a day like today. He starts to stammer something out when a thankfully more mature voice cries out, “Asuka! How did you get in there?”
The indistinct shape twirls about to face the accuser and exclaims, “I’m playing hide and seek!”
“Well play somewhere else! This is a hospital room and the patient doesn’t need a little girl interrupting his rest,” a young woman of perhaps Kaji’s age says as she enters the room. Wearing a lab coat, she seems to be a doctor of some sort, even if she is ridiculously young for that sort of profession. Then again, these days’ people did what they had to regardless of age or proper experience.
Shooing the little girl, apparently named Asuka, out of the room, the woman says, “Go! Go play with your friends somewhere where you won’t bother the grown ups!”
“But that idiot is too chicken to go where he’s not supposed to!” Asuka protests.
“Well then good on Shinji for not breaking the rules. Now out!” The woman says before shutting the door to the room behind the girl. Turning back to Kaji, she walks over to him, a bit of a blush on her face as she picks up something from the floor and then lays out a sort of towel on his lap.
“Sorry about that, I have a lot on my plate right now and I wasn’t watching the door as closely as I should have,” the woman says.
With his own blush subsides and the exhaustion he felt in his bones returns to him, Kaji says, “That’s all right, only my pride was hurt I suppose. Still, thank you Dr…”
“Miss Ritsuko Akagi. I haven’t earned my doctorate yet, even if I am doing the work of an MD and PhD under my mother’s tutelage,” the woman corrects.
“Ah. Well, thank you Miss Akagi,” Kaji states. He then glances about at the metal and plastic octopus colony assaulting him and asks, “Umm… what exactly are you doing to me?”
“Well, there’s the basic painkiller drip, but we have also added in a rather potent chemical cocktail of stimulants and steroids to promote healing,” Ritsuko says, pointing to a series of saline bags hooked up to him. She then points to another bag with a rather odd violet fluid in it and says, “This here is a chelating solution designed to latch on to a wide variety of toxic and radioactive compounds in the body and carry them safely out. This leads us to the pair of dialysis machines you are hooked up to that filter your blood while your kidneys are regenerated,” she points to a pair of faintly humming machines with blood filled pipes leading in and out of them. “We also directly add in replacement blood units and maintain your osmotic balance in the face of near catastrophic cell death, above and beyond the normal function of dialysis machines. Despite that, we still have seven different body cavity fluid drains in you to take out excess liquid build up.”
Finally she taps the largest and most needle laden machine and says, “And this here is what makes all of the rest of the equipment even worthwhile. This nasty contraption is keeping your body pumped full of stem cells that attach to damaged areas and replace dead cells, especially in the red marrow of your long bones. Without this machine your body would have gone into a cascade of cell death, damaged cells dragging down any surrounding healthy ones and causing massive organ failure. As it is, you currently have a fifty percent chance of survival over the next thirty days instead of one hundred percent fatality within… two days ago.” Ritsuko concludes as she checks the time.
Kaji’s eyes going wide at all of this information and he gulps. “What about that pilot… Second Lieutenant Katsuragi? She took more radiation than I did…”
“The test pilot received additional treatment even more experimental than this and is currently in a sortie against the extraterrestrials known as Mikes, by the military abbreviation,” Ritsuko states.
Kaji goggles at that, unbelieving that it could be possible.
“You have been out for approximately six days Mr. Kaji. With the loss of their battleship the Mikes are in general retreat and Lt. Katsuragi is helping to maintain air superiority. Without the distraction from the Mikes the ground campaign can concentrate on the Foxtrot Papas, and has been pushed them back to their last city, the objective of the Japanese Campaign. By tomorrow the Papas will be extinct and we will be able to claim their massive underground settlement, free from the contamination of Second Impact,” Ritsuko explains.
“Then… then…” Kaji begins, not believing his ears.
“This is the end for the Papas, and likely the end of the Mike invasion… for now. We can focus on rebuilding instead of fighting,” Ritsuko says before injecting something into one of the saline drips. “Now get some rest Mr. Kaji, if you survive the military will want to pin a bunch of medals on you.”
Once more, Kaji’s eyes fluttered shut and he went to sleep, but this time knowing that the end was in sight. Not for him, not for humanity, but for this fucking war. That was something to want to wake up to.
That and Misato.
