The Angel of Terror.

The red-lit sign above the doorway read 'EMERGENCY MEDICAL TREATMENT IN PROGRESS'. Asuka sat outside the door with her hands in her lap, clutching a small box. She waited patiently, even though the chair she sat on was hard and growing ever more uncomfortable. She waited silently even though all she wanted to do was scream.

The light above the doorway flicked off.

Chief Technician Maya Ibuki sat on her barstool staring at the glass of scotch in her hand. The down-town bar was noisy and crowded and flashing lights and pumping music from the dance floor in the next room permeated the smoky air. She was here to relax, to take her commander's advice and take a break, but she just couldn't. The tension wouldn't leave her muscles as the events of the past few weeks kept playing and replaying in her head.

The Angel spoke...

It opened up a whole host of questions. If the Angels could speak, that suggested the possibility of communication, something that had always been thought to be impossible before now. And if communication was possible...

The Angel spoke... She spoke...

It had been a she. The body was interred in the tanks of Logos Omega, but to Maya, the body of the Angel seemed a terribly fragile thing, quite unlike the geometric monster that had assailed Tokyo 3 and difficult to marry to the thing that had caused so much destruction at Neo Nerv headquarters. When she looked at the tiny and frail blue body, Maya couldn't banish the image of a little girl, one that was frightened and lashing out with power beyond her control.

It was ridiculous. The thing was an Angel. It had murdered scores of base personnel, colleagues and friends. And yet...

She groaned at the tumult of thoughts and emotions wrestling within her.

"Another drink to go with the one you haven't touched?" asked the barman as he passed. The comment was light-hearted in nature, but dug at her nonetheless. She took one last look at the drink then set it down on the bar.

"No thanks," she said, as she climbed down from the barstool. "I should be going anyway. I have... work tomorrow."

The barman nodded.

"You should come back during the week. It's quieter, easier to think." He nodded to the flashing lights and loud music coming from the dance floor, then looked back at her and grinned. "Maybe meet someone who isn't a drunken idiot!"

Maya gave the man a tired smile as she turned to leave.

"Yeah... I might do that," she told him.

Although, thinking is the last thing I want to be doing right now. And meeting someone...

As she gathered her bag and left the bar, she didn't see the tall man with dark hair watching her from the corner. She didn't see him rise from his seat as she made her way through the exit.

Half an hour later she was walking into her old apartment. She threw her handbag into a chair and retrieved a bottle of ramune from the kitchen fridge, popping the marble, before flicking on the TV to the late night news report, just so there wouldn't be silence in her home.

There was a news item about the localised earthquakes that had shaken parts of the city several days earlier, but no mention was made of the Angel attack... understandably, as the news outlet – the only one now running on the new Council television network – basically ran the stories that Emergency Housing Committee (and behind them, Nerv) wanted them to run. So far, they seemed to be managing to keep a lid on the Angels, but Maya thought it was only a matter of time before one did something on the surface and in full view of the public – something that couldn't be denied in the press.

How would Nerv cope then? Maya wasn't sure they would.

After the news item, the programming moved on to lighter topics and more of a magazine style format, with guests and musicians and articles about food and local business. A cat that had given birth to a record-breaking litter of kittens was brought out, much to the delight of the female co-host. Maya sighed and crossed to the window, looking out on the street that she, Asuka and Rei had first caught sight of the agents who had proved to be their first glimpse of the new Nerv organisation and the terrible news they brought of humanity's worst nightmares reborn.

She scanned the darkened street, and her eyes fixed on something.

There was a man standing in the shadows on the other side of the street, looking up at her apartment window. He was dressed in dark clothing and was tall, his face very pale under the street lamps. She didn't recognise him, though in truth, she hardly got a glimpse at his face, because when she looked down at him, he turned and walked away.

Maya stood, unsettled by the incident. Was it some Nerv employee, or someone else, entirely unconnected? What was he doing looking up at her apartment window?

"He's watching you."

Maya turned quickly, but it was only the television. The male co-host was talking about a kitten he was holding, who seemed more interested in the female co-host.

Maya let out a slightly shaky breath. She turned back to the window, but the tall man was gone.

"A member of Section Two?" she wondered out loud. "Why would he be watching my apartment? Does Misato have agents watching her subordinates?"

"He isn't the only one."

Maya's head snapped back to the television, and she realised with a shock that the male host was staring directly into the camera, directly out of the screen – directly at her. For a long moment, the co-host held her gaze, then he looked away and the programme moved on to another section with an up and coming comedian who had been touring the clubs recently.

Maya remained frozen, wondering if that had really just happened.

The phone rang, making her jump. She crossed to it and picked it up with trembling fingers.

"...Hello?"

"Maya?" It was Misato. "I just wanted to tell you, Rei just came round. Asuka's with her right now."

"Thank goodness, that's a relief," said Maya, relaxing at the sound of a familiar voice, "how are they both doing?"

"Asuka's trying to act tough, but she's been crying, I know. Rei still has bandages around her eyes, so she hasn't been able to see that. Coulsen thinks she'll make a good recovery, though. Her vision shouldn't be permanently impaired and her burns aren't too bad..." There was a pause. "Her AT field... it was lucky she's so strong. Anyone else would have been vaporised."

"Anyone else but one, maybe. I hope that man Sho knows she saved his life, stepping in front of him like that... The rest of Daemon, too."

"I will be sure to make that fact abundantly clear to all three of them."

Maya smiled, but the smile felt fake on her face. Since the incident with Ramiel – if it truly had been Ramiel – Maya had a feeling something had changed in the commander... or something had come to light that she hadn't known about before.

"Misato... that Angel..."

Misato's tone suddenly hardened.

"What about it?"

There was a coldness to Misato's voice at the mention of Ramiel that perturbed Maya.

"... nothing. It doesn't matter."

There was a long pause on the other end of the phone, a silence that was difficult for Maya to gauge. Then Misato spoke again.

"Well then, see you bright and early tomorrow morning?"

"I'll be there, Commander."

She hung up, then remembered she hadn't asked about the figure she had seen. Briefly, she considered calling the commander back, but then thought better of it. Misato didn't need to hear about some guy who just happened to glance up at her window. She looked at the television, but the programme had changed to a rerun of an old anime. Silly. No way the television could have been talking to her, either. She was just stressed. It was no wonder Misato had suggested she get more rest. Her mind was starting to play tricks on her.

Maya watched the anime for a few minutes. She thought she might recognise the show, but couldn't place it. It was something with big robots fighting invading aliens, anyway.

Maya smiled ruefully. At least there was no need for those any more...

It was only a few days later that the next Angel attacked.

Maya was in the command room, its main doors freshly painted with its new codename: Logos Alpha, overseeing the upgrading of the detection systems using data obtained from Sandalphon's dimensional prison within the room now known as Logos Omega.

"So this will mean we can detect and track the Angels with accuracy outside the base?" asked Misato from her command chair.

She was sitting with her legs crossed, an elbow resting on the arm of her chair, hand propping up her chin. She looked bored.

Maya sat at a console nearby, tapping away and issuing instructions to her subordinates. The room was awash with technicians and even Makoto worked at another terminal, having offered his services.

"Just like old times," he had called across to Maya, a grin on his face.

"Just try to keep up," Maya had replied with a smile, "hopefully command duties won't have dulled your technical skills too much!"

That had been about an hour ago. Now, the bulk of the delicate programming and tuning had been completed and they were almost ready to reboot the detection systems. Maya turned in her seat to answer the commander's question.

"It'll mean we can pinpoint an intruder within the base much more effectively, but no, we won't be able to do the same in the city above." That wouldn't be the case until the UN launched their new satellites, and due to budgetary issues, that wouldn't happen until the end of the next month. "Not yet, at least," continued Maya, "although our proximity warning range will be expanded dramatically."

"Right, right," said Misato, the bored look never leaving her face.

"Are we ready?" asked Maya. The technicians around the room all reported readiness one by one. Makoto was the last. He nodded to Maya. "Okay everyone, here we go," she said.

She typed in the activation command. The main viewing screen filled with code that began sorting itself before their eyes.

"How long will this take?" asked Misato as a technical image of the various Disciple cores flashed up on the screen.

"A few minutes at most," replied Maya, grinning at Misato. "Then you'll have your Angel detector, commander."

The screen filled with red warning messages.

Everyone in the room froze.

"What's going on?" asked Misato, sitting up.

Maya whirled back to her console, her fingers flying over her keyboard.

"Disciple is under attack," she replied, "the system is going into automatic lock-down and deploying countermeasure programs."

"An Angel?" asked Misato.

"It must be," replied Maya, "nothing else could possibly match this processing speed."

A siren sounded.

"Nathanael has been contacted!" exclaimed Makoto. "Incursion is progressing quickly."

"Is it an external attack," asked Misato.

"No," replied Makoto, "it's coming from within the base."

"Just like last time," muttered Misato. "Can you lock down the source?"

"Negative," replied Makoto, "I can't pinpoint the point of attack. If it's a corrosive nano material like before... well, we don't have the range of offensive automata we had at old Nerv to hunt it down and destroy it physically."

Misato and Maya exchanged looks.

"Clear the command room," said Misato, standing up. "All non-essential personnel make your way to the evacuation centres. Maya, do we need to shut down?"

"No, commander, I have this."

This was precisely what she had been working so hard for, why she had devised Disciple in the first place. No Angel was going to wrest control of her own system. Not today.

Maya stood.

"I'm ready. Let me take care of this, commander."

She looked at Misato, who studied her for a moment, then nodded her head.

"You have the command room," she replied.

The determined look on Maya's face became a tight smile.

"Thank you, Misato," she told her friend. Misato nodded, then spoke into the general broadcast system.

"This is Commander Katsuragi speaking, as of this moment command control has been passed to the chief technician. All orders are to go through her. Personnel of clearance D and below should begin evacuation of Nerv Headquarters by assigned routes."

Maya crossed to the command consoles and spoke to the two lieutenants there, who nodded and stood. Without another word, they left the room. At almost the same moment, two others entered, a young man and a young woman. They were dressed in uniforms of black rather than tan.

"What is this?" asked Misato, as they took the vacated seats. "Who are these people, Maya?"

"Specialists," replied the chief. She looked at the commander and at Makoto at his terminal. "You have your special forces. Well, now, so do I."

One of the black uniformed technicians, the male, turned in his seat. He had short dark hair and tanned skin, and appeared efficient, though there was a roguish twinkle in his eye.

"First lieutenant Shiro Murasame," he said, "this is first lieutenant Haruna Akizuki."

"Introductions later, Shiro," said the female, her fingers already dancing over the keys of her console. She had quick dark eyes and her fluffy short hair was dyed an impressively rich purple. "The Angel's already making serious inroads into Nathanael."

Shiro nodded and turned back to his console. Their fingers began flying across their keyboards at an incredible rate. On the screen, warnings began disappearing, sections of the Nathanael graphic turning back from red to green.

"Amazing," breathed Makoto, his eyes widening in appreciation.

"This will be over before it's even begun," stated Maya, confidently.

"Don't be so sure," said Misato, leaning forward.

A second infection of the Nathanael core had begun and was spreading rapidly. Maya pursed her lips in annoyance.

"What's the status of the invader?" she asked.

"It is progressing quickly," replied Shiro, "the infection is evading all of our decoy entries and our barriers are proving ineffective."

"Estimate twelve seconds before it contacts the next core," added Haruna.

It was gaining a foothold in her system. To all intents and purposes, things looked bad.

Maya folded her arms and smiled.

"Very well. Let the Sons of Thunder loose on this bastard invader."

Two further cores flashed up on the screen. One was labelled James and the other John.

"The siblings are contacting Nathanael," said Haruna. "Counter programs engaged."

Maya looked at Misato, providing information for her unasked question.

"The sibling cores are named after James and John, who were known as the 'Sibling Sons of Thunder'. They were aggressive and strong minded and so are these two cores. Normal cores can only attack infections within their own systems, but the siblings are capable of taking the fight into connected systems. In concert, they can simulate a counter infection and fight the invader at its own game."

"By subverting the invader's own programming?" asked Misato.

"Yes," replied Maya, with a nod. "We're much better prepared for an Angel level attack this time round."

"I hope you're right," replied Misato, sitting back in her chair and staring at the screen.

On it, counter waves of green had begun spreading across the red, even as the red had finally reached the last of the blue pixels that made up Nathanael's core. That final pixel flickered briefly before returning to blue and the counter-attack began pushing the red flood back.

It became slow going for both sides, blocks were gained and blocks were lost as the two cores duelled with the infection, but eventually they succeeded in forcing the red back almost to its source.

Haruna looked up at Maya, a triumphant look on her face.

"James and John have beaten back the infection. It's just a matter of cleansing the remaining subroutines and we'll have complete contr–"

"Simon is coming under attack!" shouted Shiro, suddenly. "The infection is spreading beyond the range of the siblings!"

"How is that possible?" asked Makoto. "Simon isn't directly linked to Nathanael!"

"Enforcer programs are being subverted... Simon has recognised the infection as the strongest core! It's going to side with the invader!"

"What's going on?" asked Misato.

"Simon is an enforcer," said Maya, "it automatically sides with the majority and adds weight to their decisions. It shouldn't side with an outsider, something's wrong, here..." She gritted her teeth, then turned to Haruna. "Turn the siblings on Simon! Do it now!"

"But the invader..."

"The invader will win a foothold we'll find difficult to shift if we let it have Simon now. Do it!"

"Rerouting attack," said Shiro, through gritted teeth. His fingers flew in a blur across his keypad as James and John were directed against one of Disciples own systems. "They're holding Simon, but infection of Nathanael is progressing once more."

"Have Philip bolster Nathanael and James the Less try to draw the Angel's attention with its decoy systems. Maybe we can buy enough time for the siblings to bring Simon back to task..."

"Infections detected in Jude and Peter! They're spreading independently!"

"What is this?" gasped Maya, looking at her monitor. "These are unconnected systems! How is the infection spreading from core to core without us..." Her eyes widened. "Haruna! What's the status of Andrew?"

"Free of infection," said Haruna, frowning, "why should that..." Then her own eyes widened in horrified realisation and she turned her seat towards the chief. "We're being fed misinformation?"

Maya whirled back to her station.

"Bring up the overview of Andrew's subsystems and filter by unreported commands and actions."

The main viewing screen highlighted the relevant core, a box shaped icon printed with the legend 'The Path'. A myriad of thin lines spread from Andrew, connecting all of the other cores on the screen sometimes a great many times. Most of these lines were now flashing red, as was the core itself.

"What is this?" asked Misato. Maya gritted her teeth.

"Shut Andrew down," she told Shiro.

"If we do that, we'll lose a huge amount of processing power! Certain sections of the base will be disconnected from the server. We may lose power. Any staff who are evacuating may become trapped."

"We have no choice," replied Maya, "do it."

Shiro looked conflicted, but then typed in the command. The lights in the room flickered and then dimmed, but didn't go out. On the screen, the Andrew core blinked and then greyed out, as did the myriad connections leading from it.

"Cycling logic mode," said Haruna, "rate of infection has dropped to zero-point-two-four."

Maya breathed a sigh of relief. The Angel had stolen several marches on her, but at least she had slowed it down. The question was, could she win the situation back?

It came as a sickening realisation, as she surveyed the near catastrophic damage done by their first engagement, that she simply didn't know.

In Logos Omega, deep in the belly of Nerv HQ, Helen Coulsen sat at a desk in the specimen room eating her dinner, such that it was. Cup Ramen was often all she had time for in her hectic day split between supervising the science teams in Logos Omega and overseeing treatments in the medical facility. She sat on a stool, directly in front of her latest specimen. 'Ramiel-chan', as many of her staff had begun referring to the dead Angel, floated in her tank, the strange blue hair that seemed to part and flow like ordinary hair, yet which apparently had no distinction between strands or follicles except where it was physically pushed apart, billowed in the slightly green tinted water around her. The blank blue eyes stared out, unmoving and unseeing, yet still feeling like they looked into her very core.

It might have sounded strange, but Helen liked the sensation. She found the very alien-ness of the Angels fascinating and was beginning to appreciate the work done by the xenobiologists at old Nerv, Ritsuko Akagi's in particular. She'd spent many nights poring over her predecessor's old papers and notes, and many days applying what she learnt to her own studies on the Angel's physiology. She was rapidly coming to the conclusion that these new Angels had found some way to combine the extradimensional tissue that composed their old forms with human DNA, but in a way that allowed for infinitely greater information storage capacity. The discoveries she was making were helping in the production of more up to date Eva Gear as well as stronger reactive armour for their vehicles and a myriad of other improvements.

Helen slurped more ramen from between her chopsticks and stared at Ramiel-chan. She (it was difficult to think of the Angel in any other way than as a 'she', though she had no discernible reproductive organs) had died in much the same way as Matarael had. A single bullet wound to the head, and with the changed solution in the specimen tank, there had been none of the alarming regeneration displayed by the spider-like Angel.

She glanced at the Ibuki device to her right, its eerie black pool like a doorway to the alternate dimension that acted as a prison to Sandalphon, though that doorway was in actuality the prison itself. It always made her feel uncomfortable, something that was next to impossible to comprehend with her normal senses, and difficult to understand, even with an extensive knowledge of theoretical physics. Sometimes she thought the device itself was whispering to her, some kind of low-level language that just evaded her ability to understand, always slightly beyond the threshold of her hearing, even when the lab was silent, like it was now.

There was no doubt, the scientific advances they were making at the moment were remarkable, but Helen knew it was only a matter of time before they ran into a wall. Eventually a living specimen would be required if they were to truly understand how the Angels functioned. Maybe it was time to start thinking about recovering Sandalphon from its prison, or even capturing another Angel alive somehow. She would have to discuss the matter with Misato soon.

But Misato was another concern for her. She had not come to any of her medical appointments, nor had she visited the specimen room since her run in with Ramiel. Helen couldn't assess what effect the encounter had had on her commander. In spite of her alien-ness, Ramiel looked so much like a human child, it could not have been anything but affecting to have had to shoot it. But Misato refused to talk about the matter.

Her gaze travelled past the Ibuki device to the huge head of Unit 02, that sat impassively in it's glassed in bay. It was a reminder that Misato wasn't the only one with issues that needed monitoring. Asuka had taken to sitting in front of the glass in the quieter moments of her day, staring at the gigantic reminder of her past. It was easier to read her situation, though: Unit 02 was a very real representation of her mother and of a time before Nerv that was full of repressed pain, something that had been brought sharply back to her by the unexpected activation of the head, during the fight with Matarael. While it wasn't easy to help Asuka, it was at least easier to understand and sympathise with her pain. Misato, on the other hand...

With a sigh, she put her empty cup down on the surface next to her and climbed wearily to her feet. Whatever Misato might be going through, it couldn't concern her at the moment. There were always more tests to run and more experiments to devise and she should get back to work.

Unfortunately for her work, however, as she turned away from Ramiel's tank, the lights went out.

A short time before the Angel began its attack on Disciple, and before Doctor Coulsen was plunged into darkness in Logos Omega, Asuka was visiting Rei in her hospital room. The blue haired girl was recovering well, her body healing itself with the aid of Coulsen's expert care. Large patches of her skin were still bound and bandaged to keep particularly bad burns from becoming infected, and Rei was forced to wear oversized dark-tinted goggles to prevent her eyes from suffering further damage that could have occurred even under the soft lighting in her recovery room.

The goggles were large and covered much of her upper face, making it even harder to gauge her emotions than normal. She sat up in bed, beneath clean white sheets, with Asuka occupying a seat at her bedside. An opened package sat on the nightstand next to the bed, its contents sitting on the bed, not far from Rei's right hand. Asuka had given it to her the day she had awoken from unconsciousness, though Rei hadn't been able to see it until the bandages around her eyes had been removed, so it had remained unopened until now. Asuka had presented it to her again, not really sure what reaction she had been hoping for.

It was a locket. She had seen it in a trinket shop in Kaibyaku about half a year before Rei returned, had found it buried amongst a whole pile of virtually worthless costume jewellery of paste and glass, and had bought it on impulse with the entirety of one of her early pay cheques. In truth, it was probably worth much more – or at least, it would have in the world pre-third impact. She still couldn't say why she had bought it, but upon giving it to Rei, she was glad she had.

"I've never been given a gift by anyone but Ikari-san before," Rei told her as she drew the locket from its modest box. "Asuka... thank you."

The locket was small, pretty. It was diamond shaped and enamelled half in a rich crimson and half in a pale aquamarine. One side held a tiny ruby at it's centre, the other, a sapphire. Rei had held it up in front of her, where it had spun and sparkled in the hospital lighting.

"It's... beautiful..." said Rei. "What is it?"

Asuka had burst into laughter.

"You're totally hopeless, you know?" she grinned at Rei, feeling warm at her companion's reaction to receiving it. "It's a locket, Rei. You wear it around your neck."

"It's beautiful," repeated Rei, still holding it in front of her face.

"There's space inside for pictures," continued Asuka. "When you find someone... ummm... special... you can put their photo in there... or something..." She had blushed and looked away.

Rei put the locket carefully back into its box and laid it on her bed.

"Asuka... I'm sorry."

"What for?" asked Asuka, looking back at her, startled.

"I... don't have a gift for you..."

"Baka!" laughed the German. "I didn't give you this because I wanted something in return! And besides, how could you possibly have got anything for me? Quite apart from the fact you're in a hospital bed, you can't even go outside!"

"Still..." said Rei. And the forlorn sound to her voice made Asuka laugh all the more, until even Rei couldn't keep from smiling.

Eventually conversation turned inevitably to the confrontation with Ramiel. Rei fell silent at the mention of the strange blue Angel, but Asuka turned bellicose. She chastised Rei for her reckless actions stepping in front of the Daemon operative. Surprisingly enough, however, Rei defended herself.

"Do you believe I should have let Sho die?" she asked, quietly.

"No, of course not!" chattered Asuka. "But there must have been some other way that didn't involve you nearly dying!"

Rei shook her head slowly.

"There was no other way."

"There's always another way!" insisted Asuka. "Did you even think about what I would have done if you'd died?"

The goggles may have prevented much of Rei's facial expressions from being discerned, but it was still obvious the girl was surprised by this question.

"What you would have done?" she asked, slowly.

Asuka blushed fiercely.

"Forget it, Rei," she said, quickly. Rei shook her head.

"I don't understand, Asuka, what would you –"

"I said forget it!" insisted Asuka, standing up. She suddenly felt frustrated and angry and she didn't really understand why. Rei simply sat propped up in her bed watching Asuka. Or, at least, Asuka thought the girl was watching her, it was difficult to tell behind the dark goggles.

She opened her mouth to say something else, but it was at that point that the warning sirens started and the room door closed and locked.

"Iruel," said Misato. She leant over the desk in her private office and looked around the table at her assembled staff members. "I think we're all in agreement that, due to the similarities to our previous engagements with the Angels, we're dealing with Iruel. Is that correct?"

There were murmurs of assent from the assembled technicians. Maya was there, looking somewhat chastened, but no less determined. So was Makoto, steady as always. The two specialists, Shiro and Haruna, sat side by side. Shiro was tapping away at a laptop, ensuring someone was keeping an overview of the Angel's incursion, even as this briefing was taking place. Maya's prodigal assistant, Cho Lau, completed the complement of high ranking technical staff. All of them looked grim, but she could see the agreement to her statement in their faces.

"What is our next move? I'm assuming the solution we used last time isn't an option?"

"Explosive evolution?" shrugged Makoto. "It's a possibility, but I think we have to assume Iruel will have learnt its lesson from our last encounter. Besides which, none of the other Angels have been exactly the same as last time, I think we can safely assume this one will come at us from a different angle."

"It already has," Cho spoke up, suddenly. She instantly looked contrite for speaking out of turn and she gave an apologetic nod to her superior, who lifted her eyebrows and shook her head to indicate that no apology was necessary.

Misato ignored the brief wordless exchange, and glared at Maya.

"What does she mean?" she asked.

"This incursion only appears on the surface to be the same as last time," said Maya. "Last time, Iruel attacked head on, challenging us on raw processing speed alone. If we hadn't had Ritsuko's... I mean, Doctor Akagi's genius on hand last time, we would have been beaten down by sheer weight of numbers. That time, Iruel showed a degree of adaptation, but little forward planning, only reacting to our defences when things didn't go its way. This time is different. This time it's displayed tactical thinking."

"Tactical thinking?" queried Makoto, with a frown.

Maya nodded to Haruna, who stood and leaned over the table on which was displayed a simplified schematic of Disciple and its cores. She pointed at one of these cores in particular.

"Andrew," she stated, "was the key to its attack..."

The technical operator was interrupted as the door to Misato's office opened. Forster entered, with Daemon following behind.

"I was wondering when you were going to do me the courtesy of inviting me to this briefing," he told Misato without preamble. She rose from behind her desk, stepping out in front of the man.

"My apologies, general, but this is a technical issue. I didn't think it fell within your remit."

"I wouldn't call our base of operations coming under attack from an Angel a 'technical issue', would you?" he growled.

"Nevertheless, this attack won't be resolved by your soldiers shooting things," replied Misato, coolly.

Relations between the two commanding officers had improved since Forster had first arrived at the base, but they were far from on friendly terms. Forster was a representative of an outside power exerting influence over Neo Nerv's operations and Misato disliked that fact. It brought back bad memories of distrust, secrecy and ultimately the bloody attempted coup shortly before Shinji initiated third impact.

"And did you think about the possibility of another Angel taking advantage of us while the power was down?" returned Forster. "Parts of the powergrid are inoperative, sections of the base are cut off. We're at our weakest moment. An attack now could be catastrophic."

"I have every confidence in my security staff," said Misato. "Communications are yet to be disrupted, we have a security net in place. If an Angel were to show itself, we will counter it as we always do."

"With all due respect," said Forster, smiling grimly, "we have already been attacked by one Angel, and your so called 'security net' gave us no warning whatsoever. It won't look good in my report to the Secretary General – assuming we all live through this."

Misato bristled.

"We are countering the threat as we speak," she said in a dangerously low voice. "But if you wish to sit in on the briefing and offer whatever insight you have, be my guest."

A tense air held between them as they stared one another down. Over Forster's shoulder, Misato could see Chiyoko, Mal and Sho ill at ease, glancing between the pair. She had taken them on as her personal special forces and bodyguards, but they still answered to Forster, ultimately. She briefly wondered where their loyalties would lie in a confrontation, then dismissed the thought. It wasn't really a difficult question to answer.

"Very well," said Forster, finally. "Then I wish to be informed of our current situation."

"Maya, bring the general up to speed."

She turned away from the man, returning to her seat behind the desk as Maya explained their situation to the general. She outlined the events of the morning, culminating in the shutting down of Andrew and the loss of power.

"But you've stopped the infection?" said Forster. Maya shook her head.

"We've slowed it. Delayed it. We've lost processing power, but so has the invader. The infection will continue to spread, but without instantaneous connectivity, its progress into other cores will be severely hampered."

"How did it spread so quickly in the first place?"

Maya nodded to Haruna, who stood up again.

"Who are these technicians?" asked Forster of Haruna and Shiro. "I don't think I've ever seen them before."

"They're my elite staff," replied Maya, "in much the same way as you have Daemon, general, Haruna and Shiro are my specialists." Haruna stood straighter at this, in unconscious imitation of the members of Daemon standing at attention behind Forster, but Shiro merely glanced up and smiled, wanly. "They've undergone extensive training in hacking and counter-hacking, training specific to the Disciple system, although they both worked in similar fields before Third Impact."

Shiro cleared his throat, though he didn't look up from tapping on his laptop.

"Well... I worked in similar fields," he put in, "Haruna pretty much did whatever she wanted."

Haruna glared at him.

"Idiot! You don't need to bring any of that up," she admonished him. Then she turned back to the general. "Andrew is in charge of the super fast connections and data transfer within Disciple. It's linked to everything, every single one of the cores. We lost control of Andrew almost as soon as the incursion began."

"But how could that happen without you noticing?"

"Nathanael," replied Maya, looking grim. "Nathanael was the first core attacked and it wasn't random chance that's what happened. Nathanael houses the majority of the verification programs that watch over Disciple. He checks the veracity of all outside commands, the decisions of Disciple as a whole... and even the data submitted for transmission to our monitors. Iruel must have altered some of those programs before it did anything else, manipulating what we saw of its incursion. The subsequent attack on Simon was simply a diversion to allow it to fully infect Andrew unmolested. And from there, it had unfettered access to all the cores via Andrew's high speed data links."

Letting the implications of this sink in, Maya looked around the room. Cho, Shiro and Haruna were fully aware of the significance and looked grim because of it. Forster and the members of Daemon weren't, and it was obvious in their uneasy looks. She saw Misato and Makoto glance at one another, some form of unspoken communication passing between them, though she didn't know what thought had linked their two minds for that brief moment. Frowning slightly, she stored it away for later consideration. In the end, it was Forster who gave voice to the question in the air.

"What does that all mean?"

"It means," said Maya, resting her hand on the table, "our enemy has insider knowledge about Disciple. It means it has learnt of our defences prior to launching its attack. It means Iruel was already on this base – and most likely has been for days, if not weeks, preparing its attack."

"Forward planning and tactical thinking," muttered Misato, curling her hands into fists on the surface of her desk.

Silence fell around the table, horror appearing on the faces of many of those present. Of all those in the room, only Sho Akagi appeared impassive, as unmoved after this revelation as he was before, or indeed ever was.

Forster, on the other hand, looked angry.

"So why didn't we detect it?" he growled. "Where was it hiding?"

Maya shrugged.

"A science terminal? One of the lab computers? It could have been stowing away in the vending machines for all I know. Iruel may be an angel, but in many ways it's simply more like data. There's no reason to expect data would produce a pattern blue or orange response for Disciple to lock on to. "

"But it did last time."

"It did while it was in Angel form," agreed Maya, "maybe its form this time was more diffuse before it became data. That might be why we had all those problems with the detection system for all those weeks and months. Perhaps Disciple knew there was an intruder on the base, but Iruel wasn't in a concentrated enough space for it to lock onto. I've said it before, but Disciple has nowhere near the power of the Magi system. It wasn't intended to supersede Doctor Akagi's work, merely supplement it and compensate for some of its inherent flaws."

Misato stood up.

"This is all very interesting, but we need to know how to fight this thing. With the knowledge you now have about this iteration of Iruel, can you go toe to toe with it, Maya?"

Maya chewed her lip.

"I... believe so," she replied. She looked across at Haruna and Shiro and saw they were both watching her. Each nodded at her in turn. Maya looked back at Misato, confidence reappearing on her face. "We still have a few tricks left, commander. Let us have another shot."

Rei looked ahead at Asuka as they crawled through the venting. With the goggles over her eyes, she could barely make out the form of the German girl in the darkness of the crawlspace. She wanted to take the goggles off, but Doctor Coulsen's stern warning that she could permanently damage her eyesight if she did still rang through her head, so she kept them on as they made their painstaking way through the facility.

Up ahead, Asuka was still fuming. She had been bubbling over since Misato had called Rei's room and told them to stay put, before sealing them in when Asuka had objected.

"Keep us locked in a room, will she? 'Keeping us safe', is it? More like keep us out of the way! I'll show her!"

Evidently, Misato's request that they stay where they were hadn't gone over well with the fiery redhead. Doubtless, Misato believed she was keeping them safe, but Asuka might have had a point when she stated they were just waiting around, defenceless, to be attacked by 'any Angel that might come along!'. That was why she had followed her when Asuka had removed the ceiling vent cover and hauled herself up from Rei's bed, pulling Rei up by the hands afterwards.

"Trust me," she had said. "I know what I'm doing!"

That had been almost two hours ago. In the darkness ahead, Asuka cursed the commander again.

Rei found herself smiling slightly. Asuka's antics hadn't used to amuse her, but having lived with her for a while, and having Asuka visit her religiously every day in hospital since she had been injured by Ramiel, she found herself looking forward more and more to her visits, and to her outbursts of bluster and bravado, and even her moments of vulnerability.

Asuka had cried at her bedside. It had happened when her eyes were still bandaged. The German didn't know that Rei knew, she certainly hadn't been able to see it happening at the time, but Rei had listened to her gentle sobbing, feigning sleep and trying to contain her disbelief. Asuka had been crying for her. The thought still sent thrills of amazement through her.

"You better not be looking, back there!" growled the German, making Rei smile wider. Rei could hardly not look if she didn't want to crash into Asuka's plugsuit clad behind whenever she stopped at a junction to ascertain the correct direction to take. It wasn't as if she could see much, anyway, it was so dark in the vent, with only the occasional wall mounted led light to provide any illumination or direction. Fortunately, Asuka had discovered an engineer's evacuation pack in a wall recess not far from the entrance to the vent which had contained a hand held torch and miniature tool set, as well as hard hats and a variety of other gear she had immediately discarded as useless. There was only one torch, though, and that, naturally, had to be in the hands of the leader. And that, naturally, was Asuka.

Naturally.

"Asuka..." She spoke the name almost without thinking.

The young German stopped.

"What is it Rei?"

"Can we..." Rei struggled to find the words, to formulate her request. She wanted them to be together more. She wanted to see Asuka more than she currently did, both at Nerv and at their shared home. The amount of time they had spent together since her injury only served to fuel that desire.

Misato said I loved her...

But how to put that into words without having Asuka scoff at her? The idea of Asuka's dismissal, the potential for her rejection only served to make Rei more confused.

The object of her confusion turned around in the tight crawlspace, until they were face to face.

"Are you feeling sick?" she asked, suddenly attentive. "Are your injuries hurting?"

Rei's heart lifted at Asuka's concern for her. She shook her head and tried to go on.

"Asuka... I want..."

What did she want?

She wanted to feel warm and contented. But, more than that, she wanted Asuka to feel warm and contented. She wanted to be the one that made Asuka feel warm and contented.

But how could she articulate that without troubling the young German? How could she articulate that when she didn't even understand what it meant, herself?

"I want... us..." she struggled to find more words, but didn't find them forthcoming. But, suddenly, Asuka was turning away to hide a blush.

"We don't have time to talk about personal things, Rei. We're under attack, you know?"

"Yes," agreed Rei, unhappily.

"I seriously can't believe Misato would leave us like this!" said Asuka, crawling forward again. "I mean, come on! What does she expect us to do? Let her save the day all on her own?"

"Yes," agreed Rei, again.

"Yes, yes, is that all you can say?" fumed Asuka. "You really need to assert yourself more, Rei! Ah, where the hell are we even going!? I can't see a thing in here!"

She crashed a fist against the wall of the vent. There was a hissing sound and the panel there lit up.

"Oh," said Asuka. "That's not good."

The floor of the vent opened up and they both tumbled through with a cry of dismay.

Maya stood in the command room, bathed in the red light of the warning labels that covered all the screens. She stood with her arms crossed, surveying the scene as a general would survey a battlefield.

"I hope you know what you're doing," said Misato from her command chair behind her.

"So do I," replied Maya. "If Iruel takes over Disciple, it could do anything it likes to Nerv HQ: overload the terminals, switch off the air..."

"It's worse than just that," muttered Misato.

"What do you mean?" said Maya looking round.

Forster cleared his throat from his position observing at the back of the room.

"The Disciple supercomputer is hard-wired into the whole base, it can access all of it's functions. Self defence turrets, security checkpoints..."

"The auto-destruct sequence," finished Misato.

"Auto-destruct...?" began Maya.

"We're humanity's last line of defence, just like the old days," said Misato, "and just like the old days, that's our last line of defence."

"I never agreed to this!" exclaimed Maya. "Commander, when were you going to tell me about this self-destruct protocol?"

"When it became relevant," replied Misato. She shrugged. "It just did."

Maya stared at her for a few moments, then swung her gaze back to the main viewing screen.

"Well then, we'll have to stop it taking Disciple, won't we?"

The various technicians around the room began reporting readiness, Shiro and Haruna the last among them to do so.

"What are you going to do?" asked Misato. "You have a plan, I take it?"

"Of course," replied Maya, "but we'll adapt if things aren't going our way. That's why Disciple was created, after all: adaptability. Every core has its own speciality and capabilities. Iruel may have learned a few tricks, but it's going to have to become a full grown magician if it thinks it can take on the rest of Disciple and win."

"It has the use of several of your own cores," reminded Forster.

"That won't matter to Peter," said Haruna, from her seated position. There was a grin of anticipation on her face.

"Explain," demanded Misato. Maya looked around at her and Forster again.

"Not all of the cores are created equal. Peter is the rock on which the Disciple system is built. It contains the base code, and the majority of the computational power."

"So if Iruel starts getting too cocky," said Shiro, "we can use that rock to squash him."

"Then why not do that straight away?" growled Forster.

"Because it's not surgical," replied Maya, "Iruel is not like a simple organism, general. If you cut off its head, if you crush its body, it won't necessarily die. We could end up with lingering infections that end up plaguing us for the rest of time. The only way of defeating Iruel is to remove every part of it very carefully from our systems, then – and only then – we can squash it at it's source."

"But you still don't know what its source is," replied the general.

"Only a matter of time," replied Maya. "All manipulation of data leaves a trail. Something of Iruel's magnitude, doubly so."

"We're getting ahead of ourselves," said Misato.

"You're right, commander," replied Maya. She looked around at all of her staff. They all looked back expectantly, eyes bright and eager in the darkened command room. "Then let's do this."

"Well, I told you I knew what I was doing!" said Asuka, handing Rei her plugsuit. "It was never in doubt!"

The vent had dropped them, quite literally, into a storage room on the same floor as the hospital room Rei had been staying in. In fact, it was in the same suite of rooms. Two hours of crawling around in the ducts had brought them precisely one corridor away from where they had started.

Still, it had proved a fruitful journey. Rei's belongings were here, and so were two plugsuits, placed in storage for just such emergencies as an Angel attack while Rei was still hospitalised.

"Now we just need to find an auto-armourer," said Asuka, "and we'll be all set."

"I don't think Iruel is like the other Angels," said Rei, as she hit the button that evacuated the air from her suit, "the Eva-gear probably won't be much use..."

"Can't hurt to have it, though," replied Asuka, likewise hitting the button that made the plugsuit hug to the curves of her body. Rei caught herself watching, and turned away with a faint blush on her cheeks.

"Are you feeling okay?" asked Asuka, misreading the reaction to her new attire.

"Yes," said Rei. "I'm fine."

These things hadn't used to bother her.

"Now," said Asuka looking around. "We just need to get to Logos Alpha..."

She strode to the door and hit the release. Nothing happened.

"Uh, Asuka, the base is still on lockdown," murmured Rei. Asuka stood aghast.

"Well... what was the fucking point of all that!" she exclaimed furiously.

"We can still use the vents," suggested Rei.

"I've had it with vents!" said Asuka, pulling a rifle out of the storage locker. "Stand clear of that door."

The counter-attack began in a flurry of information, of quick gains and sudden losses, but then settled into a pattern of move and counter move, like a game of chess. Iruel still outclassed them by processing speed alone, but Maya and her team held the edge in terms of the raft of responses they could use. Responses she had specifically developed to combat an Angel of Iruel's make-up. With Andrew still offline, the going was much slower as each core challenged and counter challenged through the lower speed connections. Slowly, the red warning icons that washed the viewing screens changed to green and vanished.

"Have Peter hold the Zealot and bring the siblings against Nathanael, we need accurate unfiltered information if we're going to find Iruel's hiding place."

"Yes ma'am," said Haruna.

"The infection in Jude is still spreading," said Shiro, "Peter has beaten off the attack on his core."

"Good, have Thomas start cleansing Jude's subroutines," replied Maya. "Jude's the moral centre of Disciple, if we lose his ethics database, we can expect Iruel to start using the cores it still has a foothold in to do some pretty awful things to the base."

"Such as?" asked Misato.

"Turning off the air? Switching off the life support systems in the hospital wing?" said Maya, looking round. "Like I say, Jude is the conscience of Disciple. It evaluates all of the supercomputer's actions against a set of preprogrammed ethics and objects to anything that contravenes those ethics. You can be certain Iruel will get a lot more nasty if Jude is subverted."

"There's another infection spreading in James the Less," said Haruna.

"Bringing Philip's core to counter," said Shiro.

"This brings back memories, doesn't it?" Haruna called to him.

"Not pleasant ones for me," replied Shiro, steadily. "But then you never really worried too much about my feelings."

"Ah, admit it, you had fun," grinned Haruna. "You've never really felt alive since then. You're melting inside at the chance to work with me, rather than against me for a change."

"And you're delusional," replied Shiro, though there was a smile on his face as he concentrated on his screen, his fingers flying over his keyboard. "You have no idea how much trouble you caused me back then."

Haruna pouted.

"Shut up, you two," said Maya. "No one wants to hear your life stories."

"Actually, I'm interested," said Misato, sitting forward, "I've been wondering where Maya dug you up since you first walked into my command room."

"I was a hacker," said Haruna, her fingers still flying as she fought off an intrusion into the Philip core, "hacked everything there was, even the Nerv database once. You had some pretty interesting things going on back then, commander."

"You don't know the half of it," replied Misato. "Who were you working for?"

"Anyone who'd give her a big enough pay cheque," replied Shiro.

"But mainly for myself," grinned Haruna. "It was fun, I liked playing around in other people's systems. Especially if they didn't think it was possible for anyone to get in. Shiro was the one who caught me in the end, though."

"How?" asked Misato. Haruna shrugged.

"I got cocky. I'd never been caught. When you feel invincible, you make mistakes. I made a mistake, I left a tag in a restricted system and Shiro followed it through."

The other computer expert glanced at his colleague before turning back to his keyboard.

"I'm a policeman... or at least I was. Counter-hacking and cybercrimes. I had to pick up the pieces every time Haruna was feeling 'playful'. Her escapades cost millions in corporate damages. I even had to go up against her directly on several occasions. You could say we have a lot of history."

"And now we're fighting together against an alien menace," said Haruna. "Isn't it romantic?"

"Like I say," Shiro looked up at Misato with a wry smile on his face, "delusional."

Cho suddenly spoke up.

"Chief, I'm tracking an unusual –"

A warning klaxon interrupted her and the screens filled with red once more.

"What happened?" asked Maya, striding to her console.

"I don't... We just lost one of the siblings. James."

"How?"

"I don't know, there was no path of attack that I can see, one second James was clean, the next..."

"The other sibling is turning on James," called Shiro. A look of horror was dawning on Haruna's face.

"James and Simon are reprogramming the second sibling. Access channels are being shut down. We're losing, I don't think we can beat Iruel back with our current access to Disciple."

"Secondary infection beginning in Jude," said Shiro, "Philip... Judas... Peter... we're losing access... projected loss of all of Disciples systems in one hour and fourteen minutes."

"It can't be," said Maya, leaning over her console and studying the flying data. "How is Iruel doing this? I don't see routes of attack... How do we stop it?" She looked desperately around the room. "Ideas... anyone?"

Cho turned in her seat.

"Chief, I... I think I have one."

The stream of bullets tore through the locking mechanism and the door juddered half open. Asuka wrenched it the rest of the way and then checked her rifle.

"I'm down to half a clip."

Rei looked at Asuka in the half-light of the corridor. They had just spent half an hour making laboured progress through the darkened base. The rifle was okay if they were breaking through doors that didn't deadlock, but they were trying to get to the command room, and every route they tried ended with a security door that they couldn't hope to break through. Asuka was gradually getting more and more frustrated, currently simmering below the surface, but looking like she might blow in the not too distant future.

"Everywhere we go, we're blocked by that damned Disciple being offline. All the stairwells are locked behind security doors, all the elevators are powered down. Even the vents are barred between floors. We'd need to get heavy duty cutting equipment to break through any one of them, but all that kind of junk would be in the engineering bays or garages and they're on the surface! If we could get up there, we wouldn't need the bloody equipment!"

"We could try the elevators?" suggested Rei. Asuka rounded on her.

"Didn't you hear what I just said? The elevators are powered..." Realisation hit her and her demeanour instantly changed. "The cables! We could climb up or down them, even if the car is blocking the shaft, the main elevators are a bank of four, we'd just exit one and climb into another! Rei, you're a genius!"

Rei blushed at the praise, but Asuka didn't see, she was already wheeling away and heading off in the direction of the main elevator shafts. The blue haired girl hurried to follow.

When she caught up, Asuka was already prying the door open on the first lift. She immediately set her hands into the gap and pulled the other door in the opposite direction. Eventually, the doors slid apart and stood agape, a black mouth with a seemingly bottomless throat.

Asuka stuck her head into the shaft and looked up, shining the torch. A single floor above, the car blocked their passage. There was no access door underneath they could climb through.

"Not this one, then," grumbled Asuka. She turned to the second set of doors and they again pulled them open.

Fifteen minutes later, Asuka hurled the torch to the floor, incensed.

"All of them? Why the hell are all of the cars one floor above? That can't just be random bad luck!"

Rei was inclined to agree. Was this something engineered by the latest Angel to deliberately stymie them? Likely it was an attempt to keep them confined. If so, why? Why would an entity with no real means of physical manifestation and no form except possibly within virtual environments need to keep them in one geographical location?

"Well screw this," said Asuka, "I'm not staying on this floor any more. If down is the only way to go forward, I'm going down. Maybe we can find Coulsen in Logos Omega and work out some other way of getting up to Logos Alpha."

She swung into the elevator shaft and grabbed onto the elevator cable. Clinging on, her body swaying backwards and forwards with the momentum of her leap, she looked back at Rei.

"Are you coming, or not?"

She wasn't sure it was a good idea, but she nodded anyway. Trust in Asuka was something that seemed to come easily these days. As Asuka began descending, hand over gloved hand, Rei picked up the torch and clipped it to her suit. Then she swung out into the elevator and grabbed the cable next to Asuka's and followed her down into the depths.

"It's certainly gutsy..." said Misato. "But won't giving Iruel another core just mean it's that much more difficult to fight the Angel off?"

She and the others were gathered around Cho's terminal, on which she had just outlined her plan.

"It's a sacrifice," nodded Cho, "but I think it's a gamble worth taking at this point." She looked up at Maya. The chief's face was inscrutable, but after a moment she nodded as well.

"I still don't understand... how will sacrificing Judas to Iruel help us?" asked Makoto.

"Judas is a special case," said Maya. "He isn't treated like an ordinary core. In fact his sole purpose is to challenge and attack the other cores."

"That's his function?" frowned Makoto. "How is that helpful to Disciple?"

"He's there to test Disciple's robustness. As far as Judas is concerned, he is a separate entity, covertly trying to bring the system down from within. But that's a deliberate feature. We built a series of hidden back routines into him that constantly feeds information to Peter to allow him to learn to better respond to similar attacks from the outside. Judas essentially is constantly betraying himself in order to help strengthen Disciple."

"So by giving Judas to Iruel, you're hoping he'll unwittingly betray the Angel in exactly the same way? Impressive!" whistled Makoto.

"I don't like it," said Forster. "If Iruel discovers or somehow knows about these hidden routines, you'll be giving it the additional processing power of another core for no appreciable gain."

"That's very unlikely," said Maya. "Only three people know about the full functions of Judas: Cho, myself and Misato. Iruel would have to have access to our personal files, or my programming notes, all of which are heavily encrypted, in order to learn of Judas's true function." She looked at Misato. "It should work."

The commander stared back at her with her arms folded. After a long moment, she nodded.

"Do it."

With renewed purpose, they all turned to their respective tasks.

As the slow losing battle against the Iruel's incursion into Disciple was continued by Shiro and Haruna, Cho Lau, overseen by Maya, put the finishing touches to their scheme. They couldn't be seen to be simply giving Judas to the Angel, for fear of potentially giving away their ploy. Thus, they had to make it look as though Judas was being sacrificed for tactical gains.

Misato sat in her command chair and watched as Maya directed Cho at her console.

"If this goes wrong, what are our next moves?" she asked the chief.

Maya straightened and looked hard at the commander, before glancing at Forster, who stood at the back of the command chamber, arms folded, still as a statue as he observed proceedings.

"If this goes wrong, then we may be running critically short of options. With only a few cores left uninfected, our ability to fight back will be severely restricted."

"At which point, we use Peter to squash Iruel. That's what you said, right?"

Maya chewed her lip and didn't answer for a moment.

"Perhaps. Perhaps not."

"What does that mean?" asked Misato, glaring at her chief.

"With all the secondary infections we keep getting..." Maya looked at Misato. "You can squash an ant with a rock... but a colony of ants? Iruel keeps finding new ways to attack us and we can't even follow some of them. Up until now, we've just about managed to keep ahead of it, but we're running out of options."

"What if you were to fight back with all the cores at once?" asked Misato, but Maya shook her head.

"That's too dangerous. I've purposefully tried to keep certain cores out of the firing line due to their sensitive nature. Jude would be one due to his ethics database, Nathanael would be another, which is probably why they have both been targeted by Iruel. Thomas has little offensive potential. Matthew is the most important, though. Matthew houses the collected knowledge of Disciple, and of Neo Nerv itself. It's a storage repository for everything Disciple learns and also for all of the security codes and protocols for the entire base, including Logos Omega. It has its own barriers that are intended to buy time as a last resort, but once they are breached... If Peter falls, losing Disciple becomes inevitable, but if Matthew falls, we're as good as dead."

"So if Iruel defeats Peter, we have to shut down Disciple?"

"It would be nice if that were still possible... in truth, we may no longer have that ability if it gets to the point that we lose Peter."

Misato looked across at Makoto, who nodded and stood up. Maya watched him cross the command room to a console near Misato's. He produced a key from a chain around his neck that had been concealed under his uniform and slid it into a slot in the console's surface. Misato similarly took a key from her uniform pocket and slid it into her own console.

"What are you doing?" asked Maya

"Our last resort that doesn't involve us all committing suicide," replied Misato. "If it comes to it, the commander and the lieutenant colonel have the authority to trigger a hidden contingency measure."

"Which is?" asked Maya suspiciously.

"The design of each room housing a core incorporates explosives to nullify Disciple should it become a danger to the base. The wiring for the trigger system is entirely isolated from all other systems on the base and only accessible through the command consoles in Logos Alpha."

Maya looked shocked.

"You never trusted my work from the beginning!"

"It isn't a matter of trust," replied Misato, grimly. "It's a matter of planning for every eventuality. This was a decision taken before you were even brought onto the base."

"Then why didn't you tell me about this contingency once I was here!?"

"This isn't the time to argue, Maya. We're under attack and close to losing. If you don't want us to have to destroy Disciple, you'd better beat Iruel back, and quickly."

Maya gritted her teeth, but nodded and turned back to the battle at hand.

The plan was simple, a two pronged attack by Philip and Judas, backed up by Peter, against the siblings James and John. An exchange of cores, Judas for either James or John, would be seen as an acceptable result, and good cover for Judas's infiltration of Iruel.

It took half an hour for the exchange to play out. At first, things appeared to go well. Even though both Philip and Judas couldn't stand up to the siblings attack protocols, Philip was able to divert them into sacrificial systems of little importance that waylaid them long enough for Judas to make a serious incursion into James. John came to his sibling's aid, quickly overpowering Judas, but Peter moved in and finished off the liberation of James. Judas was now in enemy hands and James immediately became locked in a battle of wills with John, and though Philip had expended much of its defensive data, the manoeuvre was apparently a complete success.

Maya watched her screens intently as the data from Judas's back routines began flowing into the command chamber.

"This is incredible..." she murmured. "I've never seen code like it. Each infection is apparently distinct from the others, but somehow they're able to remain in concert to some kind of central directive. Almost like a consciousness... Are we looking into the soul of an Angel in data form?" She looked up at Misato. "Doctor Coulsen needs to see this data, Commander. This could be the key to deciphering the Angels in their current form."

"Is it enough to start fighting back?" asked Misato.

"I think so," nodded Maya. "It's incredibly complex, but I think I see routes of attack that we can take."

"Good. Then do it."

Maya nodded and straightened. With a tight smile of satisfaction on her face, she took a breath. Before she could issue any instruction, her specialist gasped.

"Andrew's coming back online!" cried Haruna. Maya gaped.

"What?!"

"The core is powering back up! All infected super fast connections are back online!

Maya rushed to Haruna's terminal.

"How?"

"I don't know!"

"Multiple infections spreading from Andrew's connections!" shouted Shiro. "We're losing Nathanael, Philip, James the Less..."

"James has sided with his sibling," broke in Haruna. "We've lost both the sons!"

"Jude has fallen! Air filtration is cycling down!" continued Shiro.

Maya beat her fists on Haruna's console.

"Who do we have left?" she asked.

"Just Peter, Thomas and Matthew! They're not going to–"

"Peter's fallen! We've lost the base code! Matthew isn't protected! Iruel can deploy the bomb!"

"Cycle logic mode!

"No effect!"

Misato stood up.

"Maya, we have to shut down!"

"There's no time, Matthew's falling too fast!

At the back of the room, Forster turned sharply and signalled to Daemon. They then marched to the door. It steadfastly refused to open at his command, however.

"Misato, open this door," he growled.

"If it's not opening, that has nothing to do with me," replied Misato.

The lights in the command room failed, plunging them all into gloom lit only by static washed screens and scrolling data. A timer started up on the main viewer.

"Ten seconds!" yelled Shiro, somewhat unnecessarily. Maya whirled towards Misato.

"Commander! Blow the cores!" yelled Maya.

"The chain takes thirty seconds!" replied Makoto, "it won't be done in time!"

"Iruel's locked us out of the command protocols. Five seconds!"

Haruna turned to look at Shiro, her wide eyes shone with fear in the low light.

"Shiro..." she murmured.

Shiro reached across from his console and took her hand, squeezing it tight.

"Three... two..."

Misato slumped into her command chair and closed her eyes.

"One... zero..."

Shrio and Haruna shut their eyes tight, the girl grabbing on to Shiro and pulling him into a vice-like embrace.

Then nothing.

Nothing happened.

Cautiously Misato opened one eye. The timer on the screen said "00.00.14", and was holding steady, refusing to tick away the final fourteen milliseconds that would see the deployment of the bomb.

The commander sat up in her chair.

"What's going on?" she asked.

Shiro looked down at his monitor, where data was flying across it at an incredible rate, the look of incomprehension on his face changing to dawning realisation.

"It's Thomas," he said. Then he laughed. "Thomas has stopped the countdown!"

Maya strode over to his console, looking at the comparatively tiny screen, following the flow of data passing across it. Misato followed her.

"How?" asked the commander.

"He's objecting to the self destruct order..." breathed Maya.

"What does that mean?" asked Misato. Maya glanced up at her, then looked back at the screen, trying to make sense of what she was seeing.

"Thomas performs an almost mirror function to Simon. Where Simon unthinkingly throws his weight behind the majority, Thomas doubts. He queries, he questions. His role is to make the other cores think differently, so all sides of a situation are given due consideration." She leant over Shiro's shoulder, reading what shouldn't have been possible on his screen with growing amazement. "Thomas is running a cycle of objections to Disciple's decision to self destruct... no, he's creating an evolving list, blocking every command from Peter with a query."

"How is that possible? I thought you said Matthew was the knowledge base for Disciple.

Maya laughed in disbelief.

"They're all nonsense! All of his queries. Iruel tells him to fall in line, Thomas responds with a nonsense question... like he's saying 'but, what if the sky is green?' to the directive 'begin self destruct.' Iruel is being forced to answer each one in turn in an attempt to pacify the final core! Disciple is following Thomas's lead!"

"How long will that hold the Angel?"

Maya shook her head.

"I don't know," she replied. "Minutes? Hours?" She looked at Misato and shrugged. "Seconds?"

"Great. So we could die at any moment and we won't know it's coming." Misato looked across at Makoto. "We have no way of fighting back against Iruel now the whole of Disciple is compromised. We should blow the cores."

"Wait! What if Iruel isn't just data?" said Cho. Everyone looked at her. Maya realised the look of a sudden epiphany and she crossed to her protege's side.

"You've got something, haven't you? Where are you going with this?" asked Maya. Cho looked nervously up at her mentor and direct superior.

"All of the other Angels we've re-encountered have taken on human forms and characteristics. Why wouldn't we at least suspect the same of Iruel? But we've always dismissed anything other than this Angel being data..."

"Bring up a map of the base," snapped Maya. A three-dimensional technical map flashed up onto the main viewing screen. "Highlight the cores... number them in the order they were initially infected."

Maya leant forward on Cho's console, staring at the map.

"They're all over the base," said Cho.

"No," replied Maya, "Highlight the cores that we couldn't determine the route of attack and add timestamps, remove everything else from the list. Add in Andrew at the moment it came back online."

The cores blinked off the map, leaving only Nathanael, Simon, James and Andrew and suddenly it became clear.

"There's a geographical route through the base," gasped Misato. "It's using the corridors, vents and elevators."

"It's moving from place to place and infecting the cores physically," groaned Maya. "Why didn't I think of that?"

"Then where is it now?" asked Misato.

"Andrew was the last core to be directly manipulated... His core is housed in the scientific sector."

"Inside Logos Omega..." said Makoto.

"The Ibuki device," whispered Cho. They stared at one another in horrified realisation.

"Find a way to get hold of Asuka," said Misato.

Coulsen cursed under her breath as the metal bar she was trying to pry the heavy door to the specimen room open sprang free, almost hitting her across the face before she flinched backwards to avoid it. The bar clattered to the floor, sliding into the deeper shadows in the corner of the entry way. In the dull red emergency lighting, it took a moment to locate the dull metal bar against the dull metal floor.

Two hours ago, the lights had gone off and Misato had called down to Coulsen to stay put until the angel incursion was dealt with. Well, that was all well and good, but she hadn't heard anything further in the following two hours and it was beginning to feel like she had been forgotten. If Disciple truly was under attack, and the relevant systems decided to shut of the air, she would suffocate without even having the chance to escape, or to link up with the others.

So she had come to the decision of trying to force the door.

The fact that the angels floating in their tanks, and the pool of inky blackness that was the Ibuki Device (that looked more and more like a mouth each passing minute), were creeping her out, only added impetus to her desire to escape.

She retrieved the sturdy bar of metal and set its end back into the groove between the two heavy sliding doors, leaning into it. The spar was from being used as a support in one of the scientist's experiments and was solid and strong, but even then, the metal creaked when Coulsen put her full weight against it. The door didn't even budge. After several moments of straining, she slumped over the bar, breathing heavily.

What were they doing up there? Were things going badly against this latest Angel offensive? If so, what could she hope to achieve by escaping Logos Omega? Did she really think she'd be able to make a difference against this latest Angel? Especially as its manifestation was so far outside her area of expertise...

On the other hand, she wasn't doing any good trapped here. And those tanks containing the Angels... She couldn't shake the feeling their occupants were watching her in some way.

As her breath stilled, she looked up and realised with a shock Ramiel was looking straight at her. The blue eyes still stared sightlessly out of the tank, but the Angels head was turned towards her and the change in position was unsettling enough to get her straining at the bar again with renewed determination bordering on panic. The next time she dared look, Ramiel's head was once more turned forward and angled slightly down, and she found couldn't truly say if it had moved at all.

With a final desperate shove, the bar sprang free once more, but this time the doors moved! They hissed smoothly open and, unbalanced, Coulsen staggered a few steps forward. There she found herself faced by a figure. She looked fearfully up into a pale, begoggled face...

The tall man in the technician's uniform looked down at her for a moment before raising a pistol. Coulsen yelped and fell backwards, scrambling across the floor away from the intruder.

"Who are you!?" she asked.

The man didn't answer and simply advanced into the room, whereupon he hit the door release and the heavy doors closed behind him. Coulsen suddenly realised the lighting in the room had returned to normal levels, but she couldn't say when that had happened. She scrambled away, rounding a bench and hiding behind it.

The man in dark tinted goggles seemed to ignore her and instead made his way over to a console connected to the Ibuki device. He placed a hand on its surface and Coulsen was amazed when the console reacted to his touch. It sparked and lit up, and suddenly the line that plunged into the depths of the Dirac Sea, the line that was connected to the case which had held Sandalphon, began to reel in.

"No!" cried Coulsen. "You can't! Sandalphon will burn the whole of Logos Omega!"

The man didn't even look at her, but the pistol whipped up with horrifying accuracy. Coulsen threw herself back behind the bench as the pistol fired and ricocheted off the floor next to her.

A shriek was growing from within the Dirac Sea. The man stepped away from the console, seeming to suddenly become unsure of his actions. Fire lapped at the edges of the black spot that was the barrier between dimensions.

Coulsen took the moment of the man's confusion to throw herself from her cover and charge recklessly into him. He reacted late and was barrelled to the floor by the doctor's wild tackle. The goggles were knocked askew on his head and for a moment Helen saw what lay beneath. The man had no eyes, only empty pits that contained impossible sparks of electricity, or energy, or something...

She tried to grapple with the man's wrists to wrest the gun away from him, but his skin burned her own and she recoiled in pain. This was no man.

It sat up and callously backhanded her across the face. She screamed in pain as his skin contacted her face and she was sent spinning to the floor. Then he was on his feet unnaturally quickly and aiming the pistol down at her.

She waited for the searing pain of the bullet, but at that moment, a grille in the roof was knocked free and clattered to the floor, distracting the Angel standing over her. Two forms dropped through the hole, landing neatly on the lab floor. One was bright red, the other white, with dark tinted goggles that mirrored those sported by the faux technician. Neither girl wore any more than their plug suits, but they were both armed.

The Angel spun towards them, but before it could fire, two rifles opened up, slicing into the technician's uniform and throwing the Angel against the tank that held Ramiel.

It was down, but not yet defeated, and from a kneeling position, it raised the pistol once more, aiming at the figure in red. Before it could fire, the room shook with a deep machine yowl of power and pain. Coulsen looked towards the Ibuki device, but Sandalphon was not the source of this cry of anger. The room washed with bright green light.

Unit 2.0! Coulsen realised. It's started up again!

Beyond its thick glass barrier, the working eye lenses were glowing bright green. It's mouth hung open and another yowl of anger shook Logos Omega, before a blinding bright beam of light smashed through the glass, straight into the begoggled man. An AT field briefly flared and died, then the parts of the Angel caught in the beam simply vanished. The beam struck the wall of the chamber and smashed straight through it in a flash of vaporising metal. Coulsen cried out and tried to shield her eyes and ears, but the beam blinked out of existence again and the scorched pieces of the Iruel that remained after its passage dropped to the floor.

Doctor Helen Coulsen, head of the Neo Nerv science team, became aware of hands shaking her. She looked groggily up into the panicked face of Asuka as the girl shook her hard. Her dazzled eyes showed the girl in hazy brush strokes of red and orange.

"Doctor! Get up! The Dirac Sea! Sandalphon is still coming through! You have to shut it down!"

"Shut it down..." her senses sharpened as the shock ebbed slightly. "No! If I shut it down, we'll lose access to that dimension forever! When we restart it, another dimension will superimpose the one holding Sandalphon! We'll never get it back!"

"It's too late for that!" yelled Asuka. "The Angel has already been born!"

Coulsen looked up in alarm. The room was still quaking and the black spot was ringed with fire. A shriek of alien awakening pummelled the room and its occupants. The temperature in Logos Omega had risen to that of a furnace.

"The console! Get me to the console, quickly!"

Asuka and Rei both took hold of the woman and hauled her upright, virtually carrying her to the console attached to the Ibuki device. With every step closer, the temperature seemed to climb by a degree. She began typing in the sequences to safely neutralize the Dirac Sea projected on the block of concrete. Even as she typed, clawed hands the colour of molten lava grasped at the edges of the hole and a hideously misshapen head, far too large for the body supporting it, pushed through into the real world. The heat in the room jumped another notch as another deafening shriek issued from Sandalphon. The huge head swung towards them, misplaced eyes, perfect circles of black in white regarded them. Then it began pulling itself from the hole. It looked like an embryo, but larger than a man, with spindly arms and legs that ended in oversized clawed feet and hands. Where it touched the concrete, rivulets of superheated stone flowed down its surface.

"Done!" cried Coulsen, and collapsed back in fear, trying to get away from the terrifying visage before her. A hand reached towards the three and at that moment the dark spot shrank and faded. A scream erupted from Sandalphon, who was still halfway through the hole as it closed. It's lower torso was effectively bisected between the two dimensions as the pathway between ceased to exist. A terrible scream. A death scream. The upper half of Sandalphon slumped, its fiery claws trailing to the floor and instantly cooling as whatever inner power source was snuffed out by its death. The rivulets of melted concrete stopped rolling down its surface and steam began to shroud the scene.

Asuka, Rei and Doctor Coulsen looked on in amazement at the dead Angel that was fused at the waist with the concrete block behind it.

Two Angels...

Two Angels defeated in one afternoon. If it wasn't for that fact that killing Sandalphon had been very far from planned, or that Disciple had suffered catastrophic damage, or that Logos Omega had been breached and now sported a very fetching hole through one of its three metre thick walls, one might have said the day had been a resounding success.

And that didn't even take account of the mysterious reactivation of Unit 2.0...

Misato sat in her command chair, her chin resting on one hand as myriad technicians and scientists buzzed around Logos Alpha, recording data, repairing shorted wiring and chasing away any lingering infections that still affected the operational side of Nerv HQ's systems

Disciple had been shut down as a precaution, and Maya estimated it would be several weeks until it was running optimally again. Her chief technician hadn't appeared in the best state of mind, so Misato had dismissed Maya, with instructions to get a few hours rest before she even thought about tackling the mountain of new problems she faced. Makoto had followed the chief shortly after.

On the whole, though, Misato was satisfied. They had come close to annihilation, it was true, but Disciple had proved itself just robust enough to stave off utter defeat, and it had to be admitted, they now had two less Angels to worry about.

"Six down, ten to go..." she mused to herself.

Forster appeared through the main doors and moved to stand in front of the commander's chair.

"Are you here to congratulate me?" asked Misato, looking up at him.

"Far from it," growled Forster, completely missing the irony in Misato's voice. "Everything that happened today has been made note of."

"Has it?" replied Misato, evenly.

"It has indeed and I will be making my reports to the Kaibyaku Emergency Housing Committee and to the Secretary General himself. Rest assured, commander, I will be informing them that, however briefly, you surrendered control of Nerv HQ to an Angel."

"I hope you'll also mention that the most potent threat to Disciple has now been dispensed with? We can expect our supercomputer to remain unmolested by the remaining Angels now that Iruel is dead. We've effectively gained an extremely important piece in this game of chess, General."

"You assume the timetable for the dead sea scrolls still applies, Commander. That may yet prove to be a dangerous assumption."

Misato sighed.

"You're right, it may. You make whatever reports you deem necessary, General." She stood up, looking Forster dead in the eye. "But just remember: that's six Angels Neo Nerv has defeated now. Tell me again how many Angels you and the General Secretary have beaten?"

Forster clenched his jaw, but refused to rise to her bait. After a moment, he turned on his heel and marched from the command chamber. Misato watched him go.

I hope we don't end up on different sides of a war at some point in the future, General...

She sighed again, then made her way to her office for a few moments of peace.

After being dismissed from Logos Alpha by Misato, Makoto immediately went in search of Maya. The chief hadn't looked in a good frame of mind after the encounter with Iruel. Professionally speaking, that was bad, but also on a personal level, Makoto wanted to make sure she was alright. They had been friends and colleagues for a long time, after all, and seeing her in mental turmoil disturbed him as well.

After a good long while searching, he finally found her. In truth, he probably should have guessed where she would be straight away...

Maya stood before the doorway leading to Thomas's core, her arms folded and her back resting against the far wall of the corridor that ran perpendicular to the entrance to core room. Makoto approached her, but when she saw him, she turned, making to move away from the lieutenant-colonel.

"Maya, wait," he called to her, jogging to catch up. She stopped, but didn't turn.

"What do you want, Makoto?" asked the chief. "I'm not in the mood to chat..."

"I just wanted to say good work."

Maya turned, an incredulous look on her face.

"Good work...?"

"Of course! If Disciple hadn't been so robust, we would never have lasted long enough for Asuka and Rei to find the Angel and defeat it."

"And what about Disciple? It'll take weeks, if not months to repair the damage done to it. It was supposed to be able to defeat an Angel all on its own! It was the whole point of creating it, and of me being here..."

"But we defeated the Angel," said Makoto. "That's all that matters. Disciple saved us."

Maya looked away, her teeth gritted.

"No," she said. "Not Disciple. Aoba saved us."

"Aoba?" asked Makoto in confusion. "What do you mean?"

Maya walked back to the door that passed into the chamber housing Thomas's core. 'The Doubter' was printed on the entrance in large red letters. She rested her hands on the paintwork.

"Do you remember how Ritsuko was with Magi? How she told us it was her mother's cloned brain matter that formed its organic centres?"

"Of course," frowned Makoto. "The three cores were supposed to form the three parts of Naoko-sensei's personality, one being the scientist, one the mother and one as Naoko as a woman."

Maya nodded.

"These cores work in much the same way, except the organic matter used in each core doesn't come from just one person, which is why it is so hard to get them to work together. I thought it would introduce more adaptability that way."

Makoto was frowning.

"Whose brain matter is used, then?"

Maya looked at him, directly.

"Ours," she stated. Makoto looked taken aback, but Maya continued. "Old Nerv kept DNA records and stem cell cultures for all of the staff on the base. The centres of each core are formed by each of the top ranking members of Old Nerv. Peter houses Misato's DNA, Asuka and Rei are the Sibling Sons of Thunder. I'm very much a part of Andrew, the Path. Gendo was Judas." She laughed. "Though I wasn't aware of the irony of that when I first designed the system."

"What about me," asked Makoto, trying to keep his unease in check.

"Simon the Zealot," replied Maya.

"Hah! Well, I don't know what exactly to make of that..." he said.

"You're steadfast and unwavering in support of Peter – of Misato – of course," replied Maya. She looked back at where her hand rested on the painted letters, falling silent.

"And Thomas?" ventured Makoto.

"Thomas..." repeated Maya. "The doubter. The cynic. The one who didn't believe in anything. Who else could it be but Aoba. Bloody minded Aoba. That idiot saved us all."

She turned and walked away, leaving Makoto staring uneasily at the painted lettering on the wall by the entrance.

Kuro stood with his hands thrust into the pockets of his dark jacket as he waited on the corner of the street. His breath misted in the frosty night air as he waited, praying the girl would be along soon, if for no other reason than he could get out of the cold.

And there she was, stepping up the steps out of the subway. She would go to the bar she always went to and there she would nurse a single drink without ever taking a sip, alone on her barstool.

She moved down the pathway towards her regular bar and Kuro straightened, shrugging his shoulders against the cold, and followed her.

It played out exactly as he knew it would. She sat alone. She held a drink. Nothing much happened. Kuro was hoping that eventually someone would join her at the bar, someone he could cross reference, maybe even a former Nerv employee, but no one ever arrived.

He had her apartment under surveillance (if standing in the street and looking up at her window counted as surveillance) but no one ever joined her there, either. He had followed her in the mornings when she set off for work (she had never been to the courier company she had supposedly worked for, and when he checked the outfit out, they told him she had quit months ago), but always at some point along her journey he somehow lost her. Some days she didn't even return to her apartment.

Kuro was getting frustrated. With no way of discovering just what was going on, the endless repeat of events he observed while watching the girl was beginning to grate on him. With no other lead to go on, he was rapidly coming to the conclusion that he would have to take more direct action in events.

He watched her holding onto that glass and staring at its contents as if all of life's problems were contained within it. She wouldn't drink, she never did. Kuro didn't know exactly what was going through her mind at times like this, nor why she refused to drink, even after buying the glass of whisky. It was some kind of ritual that never changed.

She raised the glass to her lips. The movement actually startled Kuro, it was so unexpected. The amber liquid drained from the glass and she returned it to the surface of the bar with her eyes closed. Then she signalled to the barkeep for a replacement.

Kuro was moving before he realised it, threading his way across the bar to her side. Something had changed – that was all he knew – and now he was acting in response.

"Excuse me," he said, making Maya Ibuki look up in surprise. "Would you mind if I paid for that drink?"