by Alex Irvine
Then bam, Drift flashback: Breach in Pangaea, on the edge of a shallow sea, brighter brighter brighter the trees around it begin to die the water around it begins to ripple an animal comes through hulking and plated, head low and sniffing
“But the atmosphere wasn’t conducive, so they waited. What, a hundred million years? That’s nothing to them. Now, with ozone depletion, carbon monoxide, polluted waters... hell, we terraformed it for them!”
Testing, send the probe ten centimeters long segmented arthropod brain tissue threaded down the length of its exoskeleton create a small bubble as a test for where the gate must be placed later
Yes
Success
Life forms on the target planet have taken the predicted course temperature and atmospheric compositions approach ideal ranges
Prepare second generation
Deploy
“The kaiju... the reason I found identical DNA in two separate samples is because they’re grown. Fabricated, assembled. Made of spare parts.”
Bioslurry spawning pool shapes growing and changing within sacs clustered in ranks that reached to the horizon of bone and dying flesh the planet is dying around them unless they can clear a path
“They are living weapons, Marshal. The first wave was just the hounds, categories one to four. Their sole purpose was to clean out the vermin. Us. Aiming for our populated areas... the next wave is the exterminators—”
In Newt’s head, a vision of something gigantic formed, with kaiju swimming around it like speedboats around an aircraft carrier. It was so fragmentary it wasn’t even a sensory impression, more like a synaptic ghost of something that his brain had traced over from another being’s brain. That might have been called a sensory impression when it originated, but...
“—They will finish the job. Then the new tenants will take possession.”
And again, the other creatures. The creators of the kaiju. Newt couldn’t get a clear image of them, but he could feel that the kaiju feared them. God, he thought.
It saw him it recognized him
There’s something out there that scares the kaiju, and they’re coming for us. He wished he could remember the term that had floated through his head during the Drift. Could he recover it from the drive he’d set up to capture the Drift? How had that worked? He looked around for Hermann, who was sulking over on his side of the lab.
“Hermann, quit feeling sorry for yourself just because I was right and I’m Pentecost’s new favorite,” he said. “Did you get a chance to look at the Drift recording?”
“I was otherwise occupied with saving your life, Dr. Geiszler,” Hermann said.
“For God’s sake, Hermann.”
“Dr. Geiszler, what is it you need?” Pentecost asked.
“I tried to make a recording of sensory impressions from the Drift,” Newt said. He stuttered as the language centers of his brain were momentarily shorted out by a Drift flashback.
Time after time after time they came up from the spawning pool they burst from the sac they made the trip up toward the Breach it looked out over their great city like a promise that soon they would leave their dying world for another
And kill that one too
Stegosaurus dimetrodon plesiosaur mosasaur gorgosaurus
We named them but they were something else before
Now we have made the pathway clear
Now we have created the world they only dreamed of before
They knew we would
“Dr. Geiszler.” Pentecost’s voice.
Newt’s eyes focused again. “Hermann,” he said. “Stegosaurus. They’ve done this before...”
“You mentioned that,” Hermann said. “Your kaiju Drift recording is fragmentary. Practically useless. Perhaps an image here and there that might help Kaiju Science progress.”
Coming from Hermann, that probably meant the recording was in pretty good shape and Newt could learn a lot from it as soon as he got the chance to sit down and sift through the data.
“I need you to do this again,” Pentecost said. “I need more.”
Oh, sure, Newt thought. Let me just run right out and do that again.
“I can’t,” he said. “Unless you happen to have a fresh kaiju brain lying around.” He laughed at his own joke.
But Stacker Pentecost wasn’t laughing.
“Wait,” Newt said. “Do you?”
14
IN THE CONN-POD, AN ALARM TONE SOUNDED.
“Neural bridge initializing,” said a digital voice.
Raleigh waited. Outside in the Shatterdome, everything had stopped. The other crews were watching. The Russians had turned off their music. The Wei triplets had even stopped dribbling their basketball.
Tendo Choi started the countdown.
“Initiating neural handshake in ten... nine...”
“Here it comes,” Raleigh said. “Watch the memories go by. Like they don’t belong to you. Don’t chase the rabbit.”
Mako was looking at him like he had two heads.
Tendo said, “Six...”
“Random Access Brain Impulse, if you want the technical term” Raleigh said. It was a phrase from training that he’d always hated because it overcomplicated a simple idea. “Memories. Don’t chase them in the Drift. Let them flow. Don’t latch on. Stay in the Drift... the Drift is silence.”
“One...” said Tendo.
***
At her father’s side, the glow of the forge lighting his face: Tatara satetsu and patience. Break the kera. Find the Three Steels, hochotetsu, tamahagane, nabegane. Hochotetsu is the core, the others are the skin. Fold the steel, Mako. When you have folded it sixteen times and forge-welded it sixteen times, it is ready to become a blade.
Could use a piece of gum
Was that an earthquake I never felt an earthquake before!
You are my only daughter whatever anyone tells you never believe that I loved you any less than I would have a son
Never never believe that
Fold the metal
Forge-weld it again you can be the steel but first you must be forged. We have forged steel for twenty generations Mako and it has forged us as well
Mako and Raleigh, consciousnesses overlapping, each hearing the other’s childhood ambitions: When I grow up I want to be Spike Spiegel Neil Armstrong Winston Churchill Towa Tei Paul McCartney a Sasuke champion
Mom
Dad
Shadows of conflicting emotion swirling through Mako’s mind: Cancer I must go to Tokyo for treatment. But Mako-san we will make a day of it, we will make something good of this
Mom
Dad
What is that alarm?
Red shoes one of my laces broke Mom Dad
Now Mako feeling Raleigh’s fear: Yancy where are you?
Whoa we’re here now, we’re here
I saw the shadow of it first the demon-hag that stole them
***
In the silence of the Conn-Pod, their bodies twitched. Gipsy Danger lifted its right arm.
Cheers rose from the assembled crews and techs below. Tendo Choi was riveted to the displays. The graphic projections of Raleigh and Mako’s brains superimposed. With a slight flare, the Pons remote monitoring system indicated perfect superimposition.
“Neural handshake one hundred percent. Holding strong and steady,” Tendo said.
“At least he remembers how to turn it on,” Chuck said. “It’s the driving part I’m worried about.”
“Show some respect,” Herc said. “When his brother died, he got the Jaeger back to shore. On his own. Only know one other pilot that’s been able to do that.”
Chuck just glared back.
Gipsy Danger lifted its left arm.
Inside the Conn-Pod, Raleigh took a step into a formal defensive stance. Mako completed the move.
“Can you feel it?” Raleigh asked. “The Jaeger’s an extension of yourself.”
She nodded, but even before that he could feel her in his mind agreeing.
This was what he’d felt in the Kwoon, only multiplied by a factor of a thousand, a million, a number so large that the word multiply didn’t mean anything anymore. The connection they’d felt in the Kwoon was like a distant glimpse of this. He felt her out, tested the places where his psyche ended and hers began.
Yancy, he thought.
Drift with Yancy had been like riding white-water rapids when you weren’t sure who had the oars. You always got there, but a lot of the force and current were invisible and impossible to control. Mako was different. She was... well, there was a reason her first Drift thoughts had been of swords. She was steel, forged and folded, brought to a lethal edge and polished... and then left in a scabbard where she yearned to be drawn, to no longer be Sensei’s ornament. To be a weapon against the enemy that had helped to forge her.
Yancy had been so different. They’d joined the Jaeger Academy when someone bet them they couldn’t pass the screening tests. Thousands of people had been trying to qualify in those days, with the paint still drying on the Academy’s front door and the first kaiju attacks still open wounds in the psyche of humankind, bleeding fallout and fear. They’d torn through Jaeger training and beat out a nation full of would-be Rangers for the chance to ride Gipsy Danger.
Gipsy Danger belonged to Raleigh and Yancy Becket. Couldn’t really be any other way.
He caught that thought and reeled it back in but Mako was already reacting. The strength of their neural handshake wavered.
No, he said. I didn’t mean that. That was this history. It’s real but it’s gone and I have to learn that. You’ve got a history you need to learn to let go of, too. I haven’t seen all of it but I have a feeling I’m about to.
From Mako, peace and strength and determination. Raleigh realized that this was more important to her than it could ever be to him.
Be in the moment, he told himself. Take your own advice. She’s not Yancy, she never could be Yancy, and if you try too hard to hold onto Yancy’s memories you’re going to screw up this Drift right now.
He would hate to do that, especially after that powerful feeling he’d had in the Kwoon. They were going to be a great team, him and Mako.
“One step at a time, Gipsy Danger,” Tendo said in the holo. “You know the drill.”
I do, Raleigh thought. I guess Mako does too, but for her it’s just a drill. I’ve done it for real... and I’ve felt it break for real.
***
“There are certain individuals whose business is the preservation and exploitation of kaiju parts,” Pentecost said.
“Black market dealers, sure,” Newt said. This he knew. “Best people to go to if you want a rare flipper or tusk or something from your favorite kaiju.” He realized he might have said too much, and lamely added, “Or so I hear. I mean, you know sometimes we have to deal with these people to get specimens. Someone said it was all right. I have a form signed somewhere. Probably you signed it.”
Newt knew he was babbling and couldn’t help it. He was partly still in the Anteverse. Was he ever going to come all the way back? Some of those images were tattooed on his cerebral cortex the way Yamarashi was in the skin of his arm—and Hammerjaw on the back of his calf, and another kaiju, from Shanghai the year before, spreading its vestigial wings across Newt’s shoulders. He thought of getting the Anteverse inked on him, but realized there was no way he would ever be able to explain what he wanted. If only I could draw, Newt thought.
“In fact I’m sure you signed it,” Newt said. “You said I could buy those organs and that was the only way to do it.”
“Dr. Geiszler, please stop talking and do a little more listening,” Pentecost said. “I don’t care who you buy kaiju tissue from. I don’t care whether you took a pair of wire cutters to the door of the old Shaolin Rogue repair bay. What I care about is that you understand what you are about to do. So please return your attention to the monitor.”
Newt did so. The crew was still working on the dead kaiju.
“They go in and out, and in a matter of hours they neutralize the corrosive factor of the blood and harvest what they need,” Pentecost said. He powered up a display on the closest lab table and with a few quick strokes across the screen brought up a grainy, time-lapse video. It showed a dead kaiju that Newt recognized as another Striker Eureka kill. Tiny human figures swarmed around and over it against the background of the Malaysian city of Kuching. Not far away, PPDC rescue crews were dropping toward the wreckage of the Jaeger Mammoth Apostle, which had fallen to the kaiju before Striker Eureka could finish it off. The video was only three months old.
Pentecost tapped the screen. The video froze and he enlarged one of the figures, standing off to the side watching the harvest.
“Hannibal Chau,” he said. “He runs the kaiju black markets in Asia.”
Newt had some questions about this. He glanced at Hermann and saw that he was not alone.
Pentecost, seeing their expressions, explained. “When our funding ran out, I turned to him for help. In return, I granted him exclusive rights to all kaiju remains in the region.”
“You did that?” Hermann said incredulously.
Newt was almost as surprised. The entire Pan-Pacific Defense initiative was funded by a black marketeer who recouped his investment by selling parts of the kaiju whose killing he had financed. And some of the parts were purchased by Kaiju Science! Newt probably had tissue and organs on his lab tables that came from this Hannibal Chau person.
Now that was a public-private partnership, Newt thought admiringly.
“Last days of the war, gentlemen.” Pentecost held a piece of orange paper out to Newt. “Go to the corner of Fong and Tull. If anyone can help us, it’s him.”
Newt took hold of the paper, but Pentecost didn’t let it go.
“A word of advice, though: Don’t trust him.”
As if I needed to be told not to trust a gangster who traffics in the organs of extra-dimensional beings, Newt thought. Pentecost let the paper go and Newt looked at it. It was blank. He turned it over. The other side was blank, too.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” he asked.
Pentecost was already leaving.
“You have a luma lamp?” he said over his shoulder, right before he left Newt and Hermann alone in the lab.
PAN-PACIFIC DEFENSE CORPS
RESEARCH REPORT—KAIJU SCIENCE
Prepared by
Dr. Newton Geiszler
Dr. Hermann Gottlieb
SUBJECT
Kaiju “Onibaba” — Category II
Onibaba exited the Breach on May 15, 2016, with an estimated mass of 2040 tons. Visual surveillance suggested crab-like appearance, which was confirmed when Onibaba made landfall in Tokyo. Coyote Tango responded, with pilots Stacker Pentecost and Tamsin Sevier.
Onibaba displayed mixed behaviors, aggressive toward infrastructure but primarily defensive when confronted with active opposition. Striving to avoid a direct confrontation in the center of Tokyo against a dug-in and heavily armored Onibaba, Coyote Tango decoyed the kaiju to a less densely populated area, saving thousands of lives.
Like the crustaceans it apparently took its shape from, Onibaba was vulnerable along the underside of its exoskeleton. Postmortem analysis indicates its primary foreleg claws had a crush force of 50,000 psi. These measurements are confirmed by analysis of damage to Coyote Tango's cranial frame and Conn-Pod. Its cephalothorax was heavily armored and withstood both physical and energy assaults from Coyote Tango.
Kaiju Blue and other associated postmortem toxicity from Onibaba was moderate. Few of its organs could be recovered intact. Some other tissue and exoskeletal material was preserved for Kaiju Science use. Specific experimental results using these materials are noted in Kaiju Science reports.
NOTES
Onibaba was one of the first kaiju whose body was scavenged for black market uses. This practice has since become common. Onibaba's cranial exoskeleton, intact after death, was severed from the rest of the remains and rel
ocated to the headlands of the Miuri Peninsula. PPDC contributed a Jumphawk to carry the head. A statement issued by the Japanese government said it stands as a “monument to the resilience of humanity and warning to our enemies.”
15
GIPSY DANGER PERFORMED THE PRESCRIBED initial move set flawlessly. Raleigh felt the immensity of the Jaeger around him like he’d never left her—almost as if Gipsy Danger remembered him and was welcoming him back. Scientists were skeptical, but Rangers knew that the neural handshake never went away completely once it had been fitted into your brain. The new pathways created by Drifting with another human, and moving a thousand tons of machinery like it was your own body— how could those just disappear?
Raleigh had heard stories of crews being surprised in the maintenance bays by Jaegers twitching and shifting even though their Conn-Pods were deactivated and empty. It was part of Ranger folklore that sometimes when you dreamed about your Jaeger, the Jaeger felt the dream and moved with you. Raleigh believed it.
Should ask Herc about that, he thought. Mako scoffed at him, and Gipsy Danger’s motion hiccupped in the middle of a pivot between offensive and defensive shallow-water stances.
Raleigh glanced over at her, thinking, Okay, smooth out, no distractions...
...But Mako wasn’t there.
Raleigh was.
He was looking at himself. He was Yancy
“No—” Raleigh said.
***
On the command mezzanine, the neural handshake display showed distortion. The two pilots’ minds were no longer in perfect union.
“Gipsy Danger...” Tendo Choi said wary.
The Jaeger spasmed and flung itself away from an invisible blow. Its right arm tensed and swung around as if fighting off an invisible kaiju.
***
Knifehead tore half of the Conn-Pod away. Raleigh fell back into himself, stopped chasing the rabbit. He knew what was happening, knew he had to get it under control, but there it was.