by Alex Irvine
Then he started talking about his kids. Raleigh sighed and flipped down his safety visor. He wouldn’t be able to hear Tommy over the sound of the welding torch... he hoped.
***
That night they did what they always did, and stopped by the commissary to pick up the day’s rations. Raleigh was walking away from the booth where a bored functionary stamped cards when he heard the word “kaiju”. He looked up.
The preferred dining area for the Wall crew was a tent with a bunch of tables in it, where the crew drank beer, ate bad food, and watched the world slowly come to an end on screens around them. Now, Raleigh’s food was slightly less bad because of the red ration card.
He ducked into the tent, as usual the TV was on, and a chirpy talking head was saying, “Less than an hour ago, a Category III kaiju breached the Sydney barrier.” In the middle of the sentence, shaky cell-phone footage of the event replaced the image of the reporter. A scrolling feed along the bottom of the screen identified the kaiju as Mutavore.
Raleigh stopped and watched. The kaiju tore through the wall built around the perimeter of Sydney Bay, hopscotching islands along an artificial archipelago that had been built in order to keep kaiju out. Aircraft fired missiles at it, as they always did, and Mutavore ignored them, as kaiju always did. It slogged through the harbor, swamping ferries and pleasure boats on its way to the city.
“That thing...” said a voice. Raleigh looked over and saw that even here, he couldn’t avoid Tommy. “It went through the Wall like it was nothing.”
Just like Stacker Pentecost had always said, Raleigh thought. Pentecost hadn’t crossed his mind in a long time. Raleigh lived in the moment. What other choice did he have? In the past, there was mourning. In the future, an endless stretch of the Wall.
The TV reporter kept talking.
“This is the third such attack in less than two months. Two more Jaegers were destroyed.”
Cued by the change in topic, the feed cut to a Jaeger sinking in the coastal shallows, its torso ripped open and flames roaring in the open ruins of its head. Raleigh recognized it as Echo Saber. The broadcast cut again, to Mutavore hammering away at another fallen Jaeger, beating it into scrap with the Sydney Opera House in the background. Raleigh knew this doomed Jaeger, too: Vulcan Specter, a Mark III just like Gipsy Danger, launched the same year. He couldn’t suppress a shiver.
Then the news anchor’s tone brightened.
“But the Australian Jaeger, Striker Eureka, a Mark V piloted by father and son team Herc and Chuck Hansen, finally took the beast down.”
At the mention of the pilots, service portraits of the Hansens flashed across the screen, quickly replaced by a ground-level view of Striker Eureka and Mutavore going at it. Raleigh had never been inside a Mark V. None had existed when he was a Ranger. He couldn’t help being a little bit awed at Striker Eureka’s speed and power. It could have broken Gipsy Danger over its knee. Raleigh felt a little bit envious, but mostly what he felt was the anger and guilt he’d carried with him for the past five years. If he’d had one of those, Knifehead wouldn’t have lasted thirty seconds... and Yancy would still be alive.
He’d fought with Striker Eureka once, in Manila. Together they’d taken down a big Category 4. That was Gipsy Danger’s last engagement before Knifehead.
On the TV screen, Striker Eureka lit Mutavore up with a rocket barrage from short range. The rockets dug into the kaiju’s carapace and detonated inside it, blowing away huge chunks of flesh and shell. Mutavore staggered and Striker Eureka finished it off with some kind of bladed weapon. The dying kaiju slumped and then toppled over sideways at an angle from the Sydney waterfront deeper into the city, crushing an entire block of condos and tourist shops as it fell.
Before concrete dust and smoke obscured the monster, Raleigh saw it hit the ground hard enough that the impact bounced parked cars into the air—the feed was nearly overwhelmed with alarm sirens. The dying kaiju’s blood, bright blue and as corrosive as any substance found in nature, smoked and sizzled its way across the asphalt and concrete.
The feed cut to overhead footage, probably from a helicopter. Raleigh had seen similar shots before, but he was stunned every time by just how big the kaiju were. The immense carcass lay stretched out across three blocks. Between it and the water was nothing but rubble and fire.
“Hey, who wants to hear a joke?” a voice said and Raleigh immediately knew it was Miles, and by the slight slur and hoarse tone it was obvious that Miles had devoted his ration stamps for the day to beer. “What do Jaegers and my marriage have in common?”
Raleigh turned and stared at him. Miles saw him and kept right on going.
“They both seemed like a good idea at the time, now they ain’t working, and they’re both still costing a fortune!” Raleigh started to move. Enough was enough. You insulted the Jaeger program, you were insulting Yancy’s memory, is how he saw it. But before he took a step he felt a hand on his shoulder.
“Hey,” Tommy said. “It’s not worth it, man.”
Maybe he was right. Miles winked at Raleigh across the room, as if to say: Come on, flyboy. You want to go? Let’s do it. But you won’t have a job tomorrow. So I can say whatever I want. Which was true.
Raleigh sat down and shuffled through his ration cartons looking for whatever was least bad. He registered the sound of a helicopter and at first thought it was coming from the TV, but on the screen a reporter was interviewing Herc and Chuck Hansen. They still looked exactly how Raleigh remembered them. Herc was rugged, straightforward, no-nonsense. The kind of guy whose every motion and look said Get to the point. Chuck was looser, always with a chip on his shoulder about everything, eager to prove himself even to people who didn’t care. At least that was Raleigh’s recollection. He hadn’t known them really, just been on a couple of training exercises with them and then the Yamarashi drop.
No. He wasn’t going to think about that. He wasn’t a Ranger any more.
“Sergeant Hansen,” the reporter was saying, catching Herc as he walked somewhere on the grounds of the Sydney LOCCENT...
Wait, Raleigh thought. Couldn’t be. The Sydney Shatterdome was decommissioned. Must have been some other borrowed Pan-Pacific Defense Corps facility, letting the Jaegers stage there out of courtesy. Or pity.
“With the loss of more Jaegers today, do you think this supports the theory the Jaeger program isn’t a worthy defense tactic anymore? Should the program end?” The reporter glanced at her cameraman to make sure he had the right angle.
Herc looked at her like she had just crawled out of the sewer.
“We stopped the kaiju, yeah?” The reporter nodded and started to speak, but he cut her off. “Then I have no further comment.”
He started walking again but his son hadn’t yet learned Herc’s restraint.
“I do,” Chuck said, leaning into the camera view. “We bagged our tenth kill today. Kind of a record.”
Herc started to pull Chuck away, but the reporter saw her opening and took it.
“You’re still keeping track at a time like this?” she said, putting on a show of fake incredulity for her viewers.
“What else is there to do, sweetheart?” Chuck shot back, adding a wink.
That was enough for Raleigh. He turned away from the TV and saw Tommy.
“Say, Raleigh,” Tommy said. “If you could help out, you know, with a few extra rations... cereal, maybe? I got five mouths to feed.”
“Take the cereal,” Raleigh said, flipping boxes at Tommy. “But cut the crap, Tommy. You don’t have any kids.”
Unfazed, Tommy said, “Who can, in a world like this?”
Good question, thought Raleigh. He went outside into the snow, preferring the cold to watching the Jaeger program get carved up by media vultures and people like Miles, who couldn’t have made the Ranger cut if he’d had his whole lifetime to try.
The helicopter he’d heard was just touching down on the other side of the briefing area where Miles handed out daily assignments. Ral
eigh recognized it as a Sikorsky, a small single-rotor transport, but there was too much snow and blowing crap to see any insignia on it. Raleigh watched. It had been a while since he was in a helicopter. Five years, as a matter of fact—and just as he had that thought, he recognized the figure of Marshal Pentecost emerging from the storm kicked up by the Sikorsky’s rotors.
“Mr. Becket,” Pentecost said, as if they’d planned the meeting an hour before.
Raleigh nodded. “Marshal. Looking sharp.” It was true. Pentecost was wearing a tailored suit under a fine-looking topcoat, all shades of navy blue and charcoal except for the pale blue shirt. The only thing different was there were no stars on Pentecost’s collar.
Pentecost shook Raleigh’s hand and they got clear of the rotor wash from the waiting helicopter.
“It’s been a long time,” he said.
“Five years, four months,” Raleigh said. He didn’t add the days and hours, though he could have.
Pentecost thought about this.
“Seems like longer.”
“No,” Raleigh said. “It’s been five years, four months.”
Pentecost nodded.
He understands, Raleigh thought. He’s lost people, too. Pentecost had put in his time in a Jaeger and he knew what it was like to soldier on in the midst of losing people you cared about. Not a brother, but Raleigh wasn’t self-centered enough to go around thinking his losses were worse than anyone else’s just because they were his. But he also knew that he was the only man alive who had survived the death of his co-pilot. That set Raleigh Becket apart. Brother or not, two people who Drifted together achieved a kind of intimacy that didn’t exist in normal human relationships.
When you had suffered that kind of a loss, time was exactly what it was. It didn’t move faster, and it never seemed to pass too slowly. That was one of the worst things about losing Yancy, the way it had doomed Raleigh to experience every single moment of time without being able to fool himself into just letting it slip away. He couldn’t forget. He had to be present in every moment to remember.
“May I have a word?” Pentecost said, formally
It seemed to Raleigh that they already were. He nodded anyway.
Pentecost looked around, up at the Wall and then back to the collection of tents and temporary barracks, surrounded by heavy equipment for moving earth and steel.
“You know, there used to be a Jaeger factory around here,” he said. “They made a few of the Mark Is here: Romeo Blue, Tango Tasmania.” He looked back at Raleigh. “Know what they do with Mark Is now? Melt them down for pins and girders and feed them to the Wall. Probably you’ve welded part of a Mark I in here somewhere.”
“Yeah, well, I guess they’re still helping,” Raleigh said.
Pentecost started walking and Raleigh, having nothing better to do and drawn by the Marshal’s personal gravity, went with him.
“It took me a while to find you,” Pentecost said. “Anchorage, Sheldon Point, Nome...”
“Man in my position travels with the Wall. Chasing shifts to make a living.”
“I’ve spent the past six months activating everything I can get my hands on,” Pentecost said. “There’s an old Jaeger I’m getting back online. A Mark III. I need a pilot.”
Raleigh stopped and pretended to try to remember something.
“Didn’t you have me grounded for insubordination?”
“I did,” Pentecost agreed. “But I’m a great believer in second chances, Mr. Becket. Aren’t you?”
Pentecost’s face was showing the strain of the Kaiju War. He was a little grayer, a little thinner, missing some of the vitality Raleigh remembered from his Ranger tour. Raleigh had heard that the Jaeger program was on the way out. Now Pentecost wanted him back in. What was going on here?
“I’m guessing I wasn’t your first choice,” he said.
“You were,” Pentecost said. “All the other Mark III pilots are dead.”
I bet they are, thought Raleigh. He saw Yancy, tangled in the debris of Gipsy Danger’s Conn-Pod. He heard Yancy, crying out in Raleigh’s mind in the last moment before the neural handshake was broken. Raleigh shook his head.
“I don’t need anyone else in my head again,” he said. “I’m not a pilot. Not anymore.” He paused. “Without Yancy I have no business being one.”
He started walking back toward the tent, suddenly preferring the TV and the contempt of his fellow workers to the company of Stacker Pentecost.
“Haven’t you heard, Mr. Becket?” Pentecost called after him. “The world is ending. This is your last chance. Would you rather die here, or in a Jaeger?”
Wrong question, Raleigh thought.
The real question was how many beers he could get with his fancy new red ration card.
***
Back under the tent, the TV was still covering the kaiju attack on Sydney. Raleigh put his card on the table, got a hole punched in it and a can of beer. The bartender glanced up and over Raleigh’s shoulder at the exact moment Raleigh heard Miles’ voice.
“Flyboy! And here I thought we might be losing you to your fancy military friend.” Raleigh turned and saw Miles right behind him, flushed and full of malice. “Oh, hey, that reminds me,” Miles went on as he went over to his table. “How many Jaegers does it take to change a light bulb? None! ’Cause these days, everybody knows they can’t change a thing.”
A switch flipped inside Raleigh. He took a step toward Miles, beer in hand.
“Easy, boy,” Miles said. “Don’t you forget I’m the one in charge around here.” He sat down and kept his eyes locked on Raleigh.
Raleigh raised his beer.
“Then let’s drink to that,” he said, and took a sip. Then he set the can down on the table in front of Miles. He had to bend over a bit to do it, and Miles clapped a hand on Raleigh’s shoulder as soon as Raleigh was within reach.
“Where’s mine?” he asked.
Raleigh didn’t miss a beat.
“That one’s yours,” he said. Then with one hand he caught the back of Miles’ head and slammed him face-first onto the beer can. Foam exploded across the table, across Miles, and across Raleigh’s work coveralls. But that was okay. He wouldn’t be needing them anymore.
Miles fell sideways out of his chair. A few of the other workers looked like they might make a move. But several were laughing. Then someone clapped, and that was what caught on. The applause spread until even the bartender put down his rag and joined in.
Time to go, Raleigh thought. He flipped his ration card to Tommy, who was staring bug-eyed from a nearby table.
“Hey, Tommy,” he said. “Knock yourself out. Feed those kids.”
By the time he got outside, he was almost jogging, and by the time Marshal Pentecost slid the Sikorsky’s side door open, Raleigh was feeling like he couldn’t get away from the Wall fast enough.
“Change of heart?” Pentecost shouted over the thump of the rotors and the whine of the engine.
“I lost my job!” Raleigh shouted back. “How come you waited?”
Pentecost smiled. It wasn’t something he did very often.
“I figured it’s been five years, four months,” he said, a little more quietly. “Another five minutes wouldn’t hurt.”
The chopper lifted away into the storm, and Raleigh was a Ranger again.
5
RALEIGH’S FIRST VIEW OF THE PAN PACIFIC Defense Corps compound in Hong Kong came through a driving rainstorm as the Sikorsky came in low and touched down on the helipad at the edge of the complex. From the air, Hong Kong looked unaffected by the Kaiju War, but Raleigh knew enough to be able to pick out the general area of Hong Kong’s Boneslum.
It sat right in the heart of Kowloon, built around the massive skeleton of the first kaiju to attack Hong Kong, and only the second kaiju the world had seen. The Hong Kong Exclusion Zone officially prohibited rebuilding and residence in that area—but this was Hong Kong. Nobody paid attention to laws where there might be a dollar to be made. In the time si
nce the kaiju had gone down under a nuclear barrage, Kowloon had regrown over its bones, almost organically. Raleigh had never seen anything like it.
The kaiju’s corpse had absorbed some of the radiation, and then been picked clean for black-market sales. The world was full of crazy theories about the health benefits of kaiju tissue. Raleigh couldn’t tell for sure because of the rain, but it looked to him like parts of Kowloon were integrated right into the kaiju’s skeleton, and there were all kinds of weird decorations and lights on the giant skull.
There were other Boneslums, Raleigh knew. He’d seen one in Thailand, and there was a place in Japan where survivors of a kaiju assault had positioned the creature’s skull on their coastline, the way you would put an invader’s head on a stake on your city walls. Raleigh didn’t think the kaiju would care. They didn’t seem like the caring kind, about each other or about anything else.
He and Pentecost stepped out of the helicopter and crossed the helipad in the direction of what Raleigh took to be the command center. He was full of questions, and Pentecost hadn’t answered many of them on the long trip from Alaska to Hong Kong, via refueling stops in Petropavlovsk, Sapporo, and Shanghai. Which Mark III needed a pilot? Why him? Why come looking for a guy you’d first grounded and then watched walk away, after more than five years? The academies were still producing Rangers, though Raleigh knew there were fewer and fewer Jaegers for them to pilot. They were being redirected to other tasks within the PPDC, or seconded to national armed forces of member nations.
Pentecost, in fact, had said practically nothing. Great company, that guy. Same as always. Raleigh would have slept, but since Knifehead he’d discovered insomnia, so he’d stared out the window for hours, chewing over his questions. Also, a couple of times he wished he’d taken another shot at Miles, just for emphasis.
All that was behind him now, though. Here he was in Hong Kong.
Walking away from the Sikorsky, they passed a cargo helicopter with its loading bay open. A team of pilots guided a huge jar down the ramp, and in the jar—Raleigh did a double-take—was a piece of a kaiju brain. Raleigh had seen images in training seminars. The brain tissue didn’t look like human gray matter. It looked more like a giant octopus raddled with tumors and unusual fibrous extrusions. Standing off to the side of the crew were two men in white coats under rain gear. Raleigh immediately pegged them as scientists. As soon as he heard them speaking, he knew he was right.