by Alex Irvine
“Easy, easy!” one of them was saying. “That’s a live specimen and important learning tool!” His inflection was Grade-A Imperious Nerd. “How would you like it if someone sloshed your brain around like that?”
“Well,” the other scientist said, in a cadence that started off German and got uptight from there, “if my brain had been removed and placed in a jar, sloshing it around would probably be the least of my worries.”
They glared at each other like an old married couple, deciding which of their ancient quarrels to restart. The kaiju brain rolled away in its jar, and behind it came two smaller jars, also filled with bits of kaiju. Raleigh added several more questions to his list.
“So this is it,” he began, by way of breaking the ice, in the hope that Pentecost would finally open up.
“Hong Kong,” Pentecost said. “The very first Jaeger station.” There was fondness in his voice. “And the last one standing.”
A young Japanese woman in some kind of uniform Raleigh didn’t recognize bowed to Pentecost and glanced at Raleigh from under her umbrella as they approached. Apparently she had been waiting for them, and Pentecost explained why, as she extended the umbrella to cover him as well.
“Mr. Becket, this is Mako Mori. She’s one of our brightest, has been for years now. She’s in charge of the Mark III Restoration Project.”
Mako bowed to Raleigh as well, not as deeply, but Raleigh was still surprised.
“Honored to meet you,” she said.
Raleigh wasn’t sure how to respond to that. Had anyone ever been honored to meet him? The thought distracted him enough that it took him a second to realize that Mako was talking to Pentecost... and another second after that to register that she was speaking in Japanese.
“I imagined him differently,” she said.
They waited at the door of a cargo elevator. Distant pings and groans from its shaft mingled with the sounds of machinery and the shouted conversations of the work crews back out on the helipads.
Gotcha, Raleigh thought.
“Chigau no? Yoi ka warui ka?” he asked with a little wink. Different how? Better or worse?
Nobody did embarrassment like the Japanese. Mako blushed right to her hairline and bowed several times.
“My apologies, Mr. Becket,” she said in English, before switching back to Japanese. “Takusan no koto wo kikimashita,” she said. I’ve heard so much about you.
He would have continued the conversation—and also tried to let her off the hook for the little linguistic gaffe— but one of the scientists from the cargo helicopter started shouting at them as the elevator door opened.
“Hold the door! Hold the door!” he cried.
Raleigh did so, and the two scientists crashed into the elevator, both dripping wet and cradling sample jars with what must have been smaller bits of kaiju organs culled from the larger holding tanks outside. The doors began to close.
“This is Dr. Geiszler,” Pentecost said, indicating the man who’d shouted. Geiszler was the kind of brash, graceless nerd who had BOY GENIUS written all over him. Raleigh recalled hearing his name during his Ranger tour... well, his first Ranger tour. At least he thought he had. The scientists all seemed the same to him.
Pentecost turned to the other man, a blonder and more stuffy variant on the lab-coat stereotype, and added, “And Dr. Gottlieb.”
“Newt Geiszler, please,” Geiszler said. To his partner he added, “Say hello to the humans, Hermann.”
“I asked you not to refer to me by my first name around others,” Gottlieb said stiffly. “I am a doctor with over ten years of decorated experience—”
“He doesn’t get out of his cage much,” Newt said. He shifted his grip on the sample jar and the arm of his coverall rode up over a sleeve tattoo of a kaiju.
“Nice ink,” Raleigh said. “Who is that, Yamarashi?”
Newt nodded. “Good eye, though you’d have to be a moron not to recognize him.”
“Well, my brother and I took it down in 2017,” Raleigh said, keeping his voice level. Gotcha again. “Cut its head off, if I remember right.”
Newt’s whole attitude toward Raleigh changed.
“Whoa,” he said.
Raleigh couldn’t help it; he glanced over at Mako. Who could get off a line like that and not check in on the closest pretty girl to see how it had registered? She was looking at him but looked down and away. Newt kept blathering.
“He was one of the biggest Cat-IIIs ever. Two thousand five hundred tons of awesome.”
Los Angeles, October 2017. Raleigh remembered exactly how big Yamarashi had been, lumbering up onto the Long Beach waterfront and snapping the Queen Mary in half before smashing the Queensway Bridge and stomping across Terminal Island. Gipsy Danger had dropped at the mouth of the Los Angeles River as part of a two-Jaeger response. When their partner’s missiles bounced off Yamarashi’s armor, Yancy and Raleigh had been forced to take over, even though it was their first combat drop. They’d fought Yamarashi through the Port of Long Beach and back to the oil tanks along the Harbor Freeway. He and Yancy had garroted the kaiju with a cargo-crane cable, tearing its head off. It was their first kill, and the gouts of blood from the decapitated Yamarashi nearly dissolved the Conn-Pod around them before they rinsed off in the bay. Raleigh remembered looking at his brother afterward, feeling a mix of exhilaration and dumbfounded confusion. Yancy had been pure cool, shrugging like they’d already done it a hundred times.
Old memories. A lot had happened since then. Yamarashi was bulldozed bit by bit into the channels and a new cargo terminal built on top of it. Gipsy Danger had been nearly destroyed and then refitted. Yancy... well. Anyway, Raleigh questioned Newt’s characterization of Yamarashi.
“Awesome?” he asked.
“I mean awful,” Newt said. “Or awesome in the old sense of the word. Awe-inspiring.”
“He’s a kaiju groupie,” Gottlieb said. “He loves them.”
“I don’t love them,” Newt said. “I’ve just studied the things, like, my whole life, and never seen a live one up close.”
Raleigh had heard this spiel before, from other people who romanticized the kaiju even as the kaiju set about destroying human civilization.
“Trust me, you don’t want to,” he said.
That didn’t stop Newt.
“Well, they are the most immense, complex living entities to ever walk the earth,” he said, in a tone that indicated his certainty that nobody had ever thought of this before. “Way I see it, if you wanna stop the kaiju, you have to understand them.”
“Or you just blow ’em to chunks,” Raleigh said.
Newt pursed his lips and clutched his sample jar more tightly. Raleigh was glad when the elevator door opened and Pentecost escorted him out.
“This way,” he said, pointing down a hallway. Holding the door briefly, he looked back at Newt and Gottlieb, who weren’t coming out. “Debrief in ten, gentlemen.”
Gottlieb saluted as the door closed. Newt transferred his patronizing disapproval from Raleigh back to his partner, where Raleigh figured it spent most of its time.
Through the closing doors, Raleigh heard Newt say, “What, are you an officer now, too?”
Scientists, Raleigh thought.
“Our Research Division, Kaiju Science,” Pentecost said, referring to Newt and Gottlieb as they walked along the hall with Mako. “Unorthodox, but very effective.”
“That’s your whole research division?” Raleigh couldn’t believe it.
Pentecost saw what he was thinking. Five years ago...
“Geiszler and Gottlieb were the first two we brought in. Now things have changed, and they’re the last two we’ve got left,” he said. “We are not an army anymore, Mr. Becket. We’re the resistance.”
Interesting, Raleigh thought. The resistance. He kind of liked the idea. Mako leaned ahead of them and pressed a code into a keypad, opening a double sliding door at the end of the corridor. Raleigh looked through, and his pulse quickened.
�
��Welcome to the Shatterdome,” Pentecost said.
You mean welcome back, Raleigh thought.
* * *
PAN-PACIFIC DEFENSE CORPS
SHATTERDOME FACILITY STATUS REPORT
DECEMBER 30, 2024
ANCHORAGE
Completed November 23, 2016. Decommissioned October 12, 2024. Sold with Kodiak Island academy facilities to private buyer.
HONG KONG
Completed November 25, 2015. Remains active. Current site of Mark III Restoration Project under direction of J-Tech leader Tendo Choi. Active Jaeger assets: Cherno Alpha, Crimson Typhoon, Striker Eureka. Inactive: Gipsy Danger.
LIMA
Completed August 9, 2016. Decommissioned October 18, 2024. Sold to Peruvian government.
LOS ANGELES
Completed July 11, 2017. Decommissioned December 20, 2024. Incorporated into Long Beach Anti-Kaiju Wall segment.
PANAMA CITY
Completed November 23, 2017. Decommissioned November 9, 2024. Deeded to consortium of Central and South American government kaiju-response authorities.
SYDNEY
Completed May 25, 2017. Decommissioned December 29, 2024. Disposition pending. Partially destroyed during attack of kaiju Mutavore, December 27, 2024. Striker Eureka seconded to Hong Kong Shatterdome.
TOKYO
Completed December 15, 2016. Decommissioned October 29, 2024. Sold to private buyer.
VLADIVOSTOK
Completed December 4, 2016. Decommissioned December 11, 2024. Deeded to Russian government in exchange for landing, refueling, and airspace rights. Cherno Alpha seconded to Hong Kong Shatterdome.
* * *
6
THE DOME ITSELF WAS MAYBE FIVE-HUNDRED feet high at its peak. Its ceiling was constructed to open up and out like the petals of a flower, but at the moment it was closed. From a central staging area, seven tracks radiated out. Six led to Jaeger bays, tall enough to accommodate the huge robots and framed with catwalks and platforms allowing access to any part of a Jaeger from any angle.
The seventh spoke led to Scramble Alley, the ramp a deploying Jaeger took to the ocean doors. Outside the ocean doors, just like at the Anchorage and Lima Shatterdomes where Raleigh had previously been stationed, was a staging pad where Jumphawk helicopters could hook up a waiting Jaeger and fly it to its drop point.
The spaces outside the marked spokes and their conveyor platform tracks were a tangle of equipment, spare parts, and work crews. It all looked like home to Raleigh and now that he’d had five-plus years to stew on it, he couldn’t figure out what he’d been thinking when he left. This was where he belonged.
Opposite Scramble Alley, a mezzanine stuck out over the floor. It contained the Hong Kong LOCCENT, the Shatterdome’s nerve center, wall-to-wall monitors, holodisplays, and workstations. Everything that happened in the Shatterdome or any of its Jaegers was represented on a screen in the LOCCENT. Behind it, Raleigh guessed, would be the mess hall, living quarters, lab facilities... all the stuff a Jaeger resistance needed to keep itself fed, fit, trained, and ready to save the world.
Looming over the interior of the Shatterdome was a huge clock. Not even a digital clock, an old-fashioned flip clock. Only it was twenty feet across and each of the flipping panels must have been as big as a movie poster. That was different. It wasn’t showing the local time, and Raleigh didn’t remember seeing anything like it at previous Shatterdomes he’d seen.
Pointing up at it, Pentecost said, “War clock. We reset it after every kaiju attack. Helps keep everyone focused on a common goal.”
“That time’s Sydney?” Raleigh asked. Pentecost nodded. Raleigh took a moment to consider that. Fourteen hours before, he’d been standing in the frozen mud at the base of the Wall. Now he was in the Hong Kong Shatterdome, ready to be a Ranger again. “How long until the next reset?”
“A week,” Pentecost said. “If we’re lucky.”
He led Raleigh and Mako along a raised portion of the Shatterdome that looked down on maintenance bays and the radiating array of deployment tracks. Some kind of thumping synth beat boomed through the space, echoing so Raleigh couldn’t tell where it came from at first.
“This complex used to lodge six Jaegers, and you’ll remember there were seven other Shatterdomes,” Pentecost said. “Now they’ve all been mothballed and we have only four Jaegers left.”
“Is it really that bad?” Raleigh asked. Maybe being the resistance wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
“It is,” Pentecost replied.
They got to a railing and Pentecost pointed.
“Crimson Typhoon, out of China.”
Raleigh recognized the unique design, with its bifurcated lower left arm giving the Jaeger three effective hands. He’d seen Crimson Typhoon before—but he also remembered that Stacker Pentecost was a big believer in doing things by the book whenever possible. In this case, reintegrating a Ranger after a five-year absence called for a full guided tour. A lot had changed.
“Piloted by the Wei Clan,” Pentecost went on. “Triplets, the only ones we’ve ever been able to get to Drift together. They have successfully defended Hong Kong Port seven times. They use the Thundercloud formation. Very powerful. Hong Kong was Crimson Typhoon’s home base from its first mission.”
At the base of Crimson Typhoon the Wei triplets were doing something complicated with a basketball, dribbling and passing it in an intricate pattern near a hoop bolted to a stanchion. They shot once in a while, but the point of the game didn’t appear to be scoring. There was an ease and fluidity about it that was all the more surprising when Raleigh noticed that most of the time none of the three were looking at either of the other two.
Raleigh had no idea what the Thundercloud formation was, and Pentecost didn’t linger. He pointed to another Jaeger bay, whose occupant Raleigh also recognized.
“That tank is Cherno Alpha, down from Vladivostok. Last of the T-90s.”
Cherno Alpha had no humanoid head like the rest of the Jaegers. Its designers had located its Conn-Pod in mid-torso for a number of reasons related to safety and energy efficiency. The Jaeger’s head was a massive cylinder containing reserves for its power supply, as well as tanks of fuel for its twin incendiary turbines, located on either shoulder. It was squat and heavy, built to get close and take a punch to give one.
Pentecost pointed down to Cherno Alpha’s feet, where a huge slab of a man was working on what appeared to be a neural relay with an ordinary-sized woman who looked like a doll next to him.
“Aleksis and Sasha Kaidanovsky, husband and wife pilot team. They hold the record for longest sustained neural handshake, over eighteen hours.”
“I’ve heard of them. Perimeter patrol on the Siberian Wall,” Raleigh said. The Kaidanovskys were also the source of the music that growled and thudded through the Shatterdome.
“That’s right. Under their watch, it went unbreached for six years.”
The music got louder and one of the Chinese triplets shouted at the Kaidanovskys.
“Your music is horrible!”
“Horrible!” another echoed.
“Don’t disrespect the Dome!” added the third.
All the while they kept dribbling their basketball. It was too instinctive for them to be doing it purposefully. Had to be some kind of hangover from the neural handshake? Raleigh had seen it before, or thought he had. He and Yancy had experienced kind of the same thing once when on leave from Lima, back when kaiju attacks were months apart and it didn’t seem too likely that the world would be ending. They’d started finishing each other’s sentences, handing each other stuff before being asked... the girls they were trying to pick up at an off-base bar had been impressed at first, then spooked. They’d spent the rest of the night playing chess, to an endless series of draws.
Aleksis stood, looming over every other human in the Shatterdome. The size of him, Raleigh thought.
“If you have problem with Ukrainian hard house, you have problem with life,” Sasha said. “If you h
ave problem with life... maybe we can fix that.”
Ukrainian hard house, Raleigh thought. So that’s what you call it. He glanced over at Mako, who didn’t seem to think much of Ukrainian hard house either. She hadn’t said a word during Pentecost’s running introduction. What was her role? Raleigh thought he remembered a new graduate of the Jaeger Academy named Mako, coming into the Anchorage Shatterdome right as he was leaving. Was she that Mako? Now that he’d played his little language trick on her, he thought he’d either broken the ice or soured her on him forever.
Back down on the Shatterdome floor the two support crews, for Crimson Typhoon and Cherno Alpha, appeared and clustered behind their pilots. Raleigh smelled a fight coming. He glanced over at Pentecost, who didn’t appear the slightest bit concerned. He was already moving on to the next Jaeger.
“And this is Striker Eureka. The only surviving Australian Jaeger. First of the Mark Vs. Fastest Jaeger on earth. Relocated from Sydney just a couple of weeks ago. Good timing.”
He glanced over at Raleigh to see if Raleigh had gotten the joke. Raleigh had, but it was so unexpected coming from the usually dead-serious Pentecost that Raleigh’s laugh reflex had shorted out.
Striker Eureka looked pretty good for a Jaeger that had seen action just the day before. Techs had disassembled its blade retractors and were cleaning noxious kaiju gunk out of the mechanisms. Other crews ran hoses to various ports on Striker Eureka’s legs, replenishing coolants, lubricants, and oxygen. A third crew was cleaning the six rocket tubes. Nearby, a crane held a fresh magazine of K-Stunner ramjet rockets.