Doctor Who: The Evangelion Error (Book One)

E4 Part 2: The sound of a thunder that roared out a warning

Tokyo-3 First Municipal Middle School

The Doctor leapt to his feet and paced across the rooftop. "C'mon, think think think think think. Got to think!"

"You've got to tell them!" Shinji jumped up, his hands shaking. "They're planning to wait until it gets to the city! They won't do anything until it's too late!"

"No, no, no." The Doctor shook his head. "I don't trust them yet. And even if I did, they wouldn't believe me. Big organization like that, they'd have to think it was their idea somehow. They'd need it to come from the inside."

"But -"

"Shhh." The Doctor suddenly held up a hand. "Do you hear that?"

Shinji closed his mouth. Back on his laptop, Ritsuko's presentation had reached the point where it cut to static, after the camera on the helicopter had been destroyed.

The Doctor dashed back to the computer's side. "There's another audio stream," he explained as he held the screwdriver up to the chip. "It's been deleted. But if I can reconstitute the memory fragments, we might -"

"- this be the Sixth Angel, then?" Ritsuko's voice asked through the laptop's speakers.

"No," another voice said. Shinji stiffened. It was his father. "From the enemy's physical profile, I suspect that we're dealing with Shamshel again."

"'The fiery sword that turned in all directions,' eh?" Vice-Commander Fuyutsuki's voice. Ritsuko must've briefed them with this same presentation before Misato woke up, Shinji thought. It was the only explanation.

"Regardless, I believe I mentioned to the Committee the dangers of allowing an active fission reactor to be built in Japan." Ritsuko's voice trembled slightly. "Especially after the incident on the train earlier this month. There's no telling how much damage it will do before it's brought under control."

"Have those old fools in the JSSDF tried to use a full N2 mine assault yet?" Fuyutsuki asked.

"No." Ritsuko sighed. "Sanity's prevailed, at least for the moment. Even they recognize that would just spread the fallout at this poi-"

Her voice cut out. The Doctor dropped the chip. "That's all I can recover. They said N2 mine. What's that? What's an N2 mine?"

"Um. It stands for Non-Nuclear, I think." Shinji tried his best to remember his history classes. "They banned all of the old nuclear weapons and reactors years ago after Second Impact."

"There's something about that. Something there." The Doctor rubbed his chin. "Why would you do that? I mean, on the one hand, nasty things, yay humanity. But on the other hand - why wouldn't you use them against enemies that are mostly organic? And why ban reactors, too? Unless..."

He slapped his head. "OH! Of course! FISSION! The Angels - they're dimensionally transcendent! Like great big multiforms. Why didn't I think of that?"

"What?" Shinji asked, entirely lost.

"The Angels - they must come from outside normal space-time." The Doctor waved his hands around in a vague, ball-like shape. "They naturally exist in higher dimensions than the usual four we inhabit. So in order to manifest on our level of reality, they have to build themselves forms here out of existing matter. That's where fission comes in - splits atoms apart, you see? All those spare quarks and neutrons and hadrons running around - everything a growing Angel needs to make its own body. Or steal someone else's.

"That's what happened on the train." The Doctor ran a hand down his face. "All this time, I thought it was the rift energy that drew it in. It wasn't. It was the fission cell I was using in my collector. Only it wasn't throwing out enough subatomic particles for the Angel to create a new body from scratch. So it just took over poor Mr. Sadamoto's instead. And now they're doing the same thing with a great big robot that was practically built for them to inhabit."

"I don't understand," Shinji said slowly, trying his best to catch up. "If that's the case, and if my fa- if NERV knows about this... why would they let something like Jet Alone get built in the first place?"

"Someone must've not gotten the memo," the Doctor said grimly. "Or maybe had the memo hidden from them. Hard to say right now." He spun around and started to pace around the roof, scratching his head vigorously. "Urrgh, but this doesn't help us stop it! Think, think, think! Basic nuclear chain reaction. How do you stop something like that?"

Shinji's head felt about ready to explode. He sat back down on the rooftop and stared at the Doctor as he walked back and forth in a circle.

"Don't have the technology for a containment shield." The Doctor ticked off invisible possibilities from his hands. "Can't teleport it away like the Cyberking. OH! We could drown it in seawater! - but it's too far inland, we'd never be able to transport enough in. We could disable the mechanical bits with an electromagnetic pulse - no, no, it has to be protected against that. And even if it weren't, if it can telekinetically compress its own fuel, there's no reason it couldn't just create an implosion and set itself off like a bomb. So whatever we do is not only going to have to survive the Angel itself, but a full-on nuclear explosion whenever it decides to throw in the towel. Urrrrghhhhhh!"

"What could do that?" Shinji asked, dazed.

"I don't know! Some big collection of exotic material - probably a crystal of some sort. Like diamond, but denser and tougher."

"Uh. A crystal?"

"Right." The Doctor tusseled his own hair. "And it'd have to be big - huge! Like solid-block-the-size-of-Millennium-Stadium huge!"

"Um, Doctor?" Shinji stood up.

He pointed to the immense corpse of the Fifth Angel in the distance, still being disassembled amid the downtown skyscrapers.

The Doctor didn't notice. "Like some kind of carbon-lead nanofiber... But where would we be able to get that much?"

"Doctor," Shinji said. "Look."

The Doctor glanced in the direction he was pointing, then back. "What?" he asked.

Shinji, at a loss for words, simply pointed again.

"What?" The Doctor looked behind him. It finally clicked. "Oh. Oh. OH!"

The next thing Shinji knew, the Doctor was back at the laptop. His fingers ran over the keyboard, faster than Shinji could see. "Japan Heavy Chemicals, Japan Heavy Chemicals," he muttered. "Resources, production plants, c'mon, c'mon... THERE!" He slapped the ground. Shinji, startled, jumped back. "Biochemical plant in Kofu. Which is just down the road from..." He traced a line across the screen. "Uenohara! Town and a big valley. Thirty-one kay-em north of the city."

The Doctor sat back from the computer, looking slightly stunned. "It could work. It could actually work."

"What could?" Shinji asked, helplessly.

"Shinji." The Doctor shot back up onto his feet, a somber expression on his face. "I'm going to have to ask you to be brave. Braver than you've ever been before. Just for a little while. Could you do that for me? Do you think you could manage it?"

"I - I guess," Shinji said. "Why? What are you going to do?"

"Isn't it obvious?" The Doctor grinned. "You and me, Shinji Ikari. We're going to save the world."