by Alex Irvine
“You learned this...?” Pentecost trailed off, waiting for confirmation.
“We Drifted with the brain of a fetal kaiju,” Newt said. “Otachi was pregnant. Incredible. But never mind that. We know, that’s what we learned. If you don’t do this, the bomb will deflect off the Breach... and the mission will fail.”
***
Inside Striker Eureka, Pentecost and Chuck looked at each other. Chuck shrugged.
“Long odds before, anyway,” he said. “We knew it was a snake when we picked it up, as my Grams would have said.”
His words pretty much matched Pentecost’s take on the situation. They looked back at Scunner, which was swimming back and forth a hundred meters or so from Striker Eureka, keeping them pinned at the cliff’s edge. They could just barely see Gipsy Danger locked up with Raiju farther away, where the silt cloud thickened again.
An alarm on the heads-up drew their attention back from outside.
“Striker, I have a third signature emerging from the Breach,” Tendo Choi said, his voice tight with tension.
“Oh, God. I was right,” Gottlieb said.
“What? How big?” Pentecost asked. Striker Eureka backed a few steps away from the cliff edge, feeling turbulent currents churn up from the depths of the trench.
“Our first Category V,” Tendo said. Pentecost glanced at his face in the LOCCENT feed. He looked terrified.
Pentecost didn’t feel terrified. He knew he was going to die. The only thing that mattered to him was completing the mission first. His entire life had brought him to this point.
Something dimmed the glow of the Breach. A moment later a wall of flesh heaved over the lip of the cliff. It was three times the size of Striker Eureka, easily twice the mass of any previous kaiju.
It opened its mouth and roared, the wall of sound dislodging part of the cliff face and breaking over Striker Eureka like the blast wave of a bomb.
“My God,” Pentecost said.
From the LOCCENT there was only a stunned silence... and the filtered sounds of Mako and Raleigh as Gipsy Danger fought for her life.
“Bitch is big,” Tendo Choi said.
Pentecost’s voice came right back at him.
“Don’t use that word. Call it ‘Slattern’ if you must.”
And so it was named, the first Category V the PanPacific Defense Corps had ever encountered.
Slattern.
32
FIGHTING THIS DEEP UNDERWATER, AGAINST an enemy as nimble underwater as Raiju, had Raleigh thinking that the Kwoon training course needed to add a couple more techniques to the existing fifty-two Jaeger exercises. They were just getting the hang of it, he and Mako—and she’d figured it out before he had. You had to start your moves a little earlier, rely a little more on inertia to do your work for you, because the density of the water made it impossible to change direction as fast as you could up in the sunlit, air-filled real world, where a Jaeger was designed to fight.
Raiju didn’t have this problem. It was seemingly built for submarine combat, nipping in and skipping out with a speed Gipsy Danger couldn’t hope to match. They’d done some damage to the kaiju, but it had also done some damage to them, and it was maintaining the upper hand by keeping them separated from Striker Eureka—which at that moment was backpedaling and trying to avoid the first blow from the category-busting third kaiju.
Striker Eureka was the finest piece of combat equipment humanity had ever built, and she stood absolutely no chance against something the size of this new kaiju. None.
Whoa, Raleigh thought. You keep your damn hopeless quitter’s thoughts out of this. You didn’t come down here to quit. You didn’t come down here to give up because the monsters got bigger.
You came down here to drop a goddamn nuke into the goddamn Breach and that’s what you’re going to do.
Was that Mako or him? He couldn’t tell.
“Move!” Mako cried.
They couldn’t move, though, because their every move was countered by Raiju, which was now clearly fighting to keep the two Jaegers separated. Probably had been since it first engaged, Raleigh thought. Keep us apart, wait for the big boy—or girl—to come on in and finish us off.
Doesn’t matter, Raleigh thought. The mission was to get Striker Eureka to the target. They’d heard the exchange between Striker and LOCCENT, even though they’d been too busy with Raiju to contribute. Now they churned toward the other Jaeger as the third kaiju slammed Striker Eureka down to the seafloor with an unstoppable blow. It followed through and landed on the Jaeger, grabbing Striker’s left arm and wrenching at it. An electrical discharge from tearing circuitry flared in the water, dissipating across the kaiju’s hide.
Chuck screamed, and for a dangerous moment Raleigh flashed back to Knifehead, to losing one of his arms.
“Don’t reach back,” Mako said. “Don’t hold on. Ride in the moment.”
He looked at her, hearing the echo of his own advice.
“Left arm offline!” Pentecost yelled over the comm. Striker Eureka was holding the kaiju’s jaws closed with one arm as it twisted and tore at the damaged limb. Raleigh glanced at the Conn-Pod feed from Striker and saw that the sensor patterns on Pentecost’s arms and chest were burning from the overload.
Yeah, he thought. I know that feeling too.
“We ain’t got the torque to hold on!” Chuck cried out.
Mako, anguished, pushed Gipsy Danger harder.
“It’s killing them!” she cried out.
“Time to see what this old girl can do,” Raleigh said. He spawned the Chain Sword startup on the HUD and with his other hand entered the pre-firing command code for both plasma cannons.
If they were going down, they were going down guns blazing.
Gipsy Danger pushed Raiju away. Mako ratcheted the swords into place and at the same time the water around Gipsy Danger’s forearms began to boil even at this incredible depth and pressure, as the plasma cannons started to warm up.
Raiju came at them again, but now Gipsy Danger could parry and counterstrike with the sword. Raleigh let Mako lead. She knew swords, even if she’d never fought with one seven-plus thousand meters under water. The water slowed the strokes, but not as much as he would have thought. Either the superconductivity of the blade’s surface lessened its drag, or Mako had just worked some of that ancient Mori swordmaker’s magic.
He stayed with her, adding power to her sword strokes and countering Raiju’s raking claws with Gipsy Danger’s other arm.
Who said the Moris wouldn’t have any more sword-makers, Raleigh thought, and through the storm of the fight he felt her mind brighten with gratitude and pride.
He kept an eye on the pressure and containment readings from the surface ports they’d had to open for the I-19 batteries and the Chain Sword. Everything was doing okay so far, mostly because the heat from the charging plasma cannons was keeping too much water from getting into the compartments.
Raiju ducked back from a slash and set itself for a charge. Raleigh knew what was coming. He felt Mako understanding what he understood.
Raiju charged, jaws wide.
Gipsy Danger set herself against the charge and stuck her non-sword arm straight out, bleeding tendrils of superheated plasma into the frigid water. Raiju clamped down on Gipsy’s gauntlet and forearm, gnawing through the exterior armor. Sparks discharged through the water.
Gipsy Danger’s other gauntlet grabbed Raiju and held its head, jamming the cannon deeper. “Now!” Raleigh said.
With a wordless cry, Mako pulled the trigger.
The plasma cannon did not fire.
Raiju thrashed its head back and forth, spitting out Gipsy Danger’s mangled gauntlet and forearm. It batted away Gipsy’s other arm and scrambled back. They went after it, landing shots with the mangled gauntlet even though Mako cried out in pain at every impact. Her arm sensors were beginning to overheat, just like Pentecost’s already had. The plasma cannon was shot, Raleigh could have seen that even if the sensors hadn’t told
him. The abyssal pressure had collapsed the lensing and intensification arrays that made it work, and Raiju had done the rest.
Raiju escaped them, and rocketed around in a wide arc across the seafloor, coming back for another shot at Gipsy Danger.
“Come on!” Raleigh said. As they ran toward Striker— well, limped toward Striker on a leg that wouldn’t hold much longer—he tried to close the plasma-cannon plates.
No dice. Raiju had done too much damage. Liquid-path neural arrays were holding, and Tendo’s new hyper- torque motor nodes were proving to be pretty tough, too... but none of them would last too long exposed to these kinds of temperatures and pressures. At least the reactor was holding steady. Nothing like immersion in an infinite amount of thirty-three-degree water to give you a great heat sink.
Around came Raiju, cutting off Gipsy Danger and arrowing in.
One chance, Raleigh thought. He felt Mako understanding. Timing would be everything.
Raiju closed. Scunner broke off its patrol, sensing an advantage, and dove in toward the vulnerable Striker Eureka.
“Both kaiju are converging on Striker,” Tendo Choi said.
Yeah, Raleigh thought. We know.
The giant kaiju, Slattern, bit down on Striker’s damaged arm, cracking it again before it let go and clamped down across Striker’s torso. Striker threw a punch straight down into the monster’s eye, leaving a visible dent in the orbital bone. The kaiju let go, a bubbling plume of blood gushing out into the water. Striker got free and onto her feet just in time for Scunner to land on her from another angle, torquing Striker’s good arm and biting down on the edge of Striker’s torso, where the larger kaiju had just let go.
Raiju came in for the kill on Gipsy Danger, and at the last moment Raleigh and Mako raised the arm they had left, whipping out the Chain Sword and hoping against hope that the tensioning mechanisms would still work.
The crocodilian Raiju weighed nearly three thousand tons, and was moving at close to sixty miles an hour. The tip of its muzzle hit the blade of the sword just as the tensioners had racked it into full utility with a spill and crackle of overflowing energy. Raiju’s momentum carried it forward, its body dividing in half with incredible smoothness around the blade of the sword.
Your father’s daughter was a hell of a swordmaker, Raleigh thought to Mako. Her pride flashed back at him, colored by grim determination to see the mission through.
Bisected almost perfectly lengthwise, Raiju fell apart, the two halves’ cross-sections glowing with the plasma energies of the Chain Sword and the organic illumination of Raiju’s vital fluids boiling out into the oceanic depths.
Sensei, Mako thought.
Raleigh was right there with her. They needed to get to Striker before the other two kaiju tore it apart and the whole mission went up in smoke. Gipsy Danger limped across the seafloor, with Raleigh and Mako doing everything they could to mitigate the damage inflicted by the kaiju. Gipsy was ambulatory—barely—and combat-ready—barely, with one plasma cannon possibly still functional and the Chain Sword a definite maybe after abyssal pressure and corrosive salt had already started to chew away at the sword housing and inner works.
They were ready to fight, but Gipsy Danger wasn’t fast, and for Striker Eureka, time was running out. The kaiju tore at Striker Eureka and pounded her, Slattern seemingly toying with the Jaeger and allowing the smaller Scunner to do most of the damage.
“Defenses down!” Chuck shouted. The sounds of kaiju blows boomed through Gipsy Danger’s Conn-Pod from Striker’s feed.
“Hull is compromised,” Pentecost said, more calmly. “LOCCENT, we cannot deliver the payload.”
“Hold on!” Raleigh called out. “We can still get to you!”
He was crying, but they were Mako’s tears.
“Listen to him!” she cried. “We are coming for you!”
“No,” Pentecost said. “Listen to me—”
The feed cut out as Scunner landed a monstrous blow to the back of Striker Eureka’s head. Then it came back.
“—Raleigh,” Pentecost said. “You know what you have to do.”
And Raleigh did. He flashed, though the Drift, back into the memories all Rangers carried in common with any Ranger who had ever Drifted. He remembered himself saying, Gipsy’s analog. Nuclear.
Mako realized it too.
Gipsy Danger ground to a halt and started backing away from Striker Eureka and the kaiju.
“I hear you,” Raleigh said. “Heading for the Breach.”
“What the hell are they doing?” Newt said, two thousand miles away.
Herc answered what Raleigh would have.
“Finishing the mission.”
“Cannons not responding! Arms offline!” Chuck shouted over the alarms going off in Striker Eureka’s Conn-Pod. “We can’t do anything!”
Pentecost spoke calmly, but his commanding tone cut through. Everyone in the Shatterdome heard it. As did Raleigh. Most importantly, as did Mako.
“We can clear a path for the lady,” he said.
“Marshal,” Mako said. “Sensei. No...”
Pentecost looked directly up at Gipsy Danger through his Conn-Pod feed.
“Mako. You can finish this. I’ll always be here. You can always find me in the Drift.”
A tearing blow from Scunner burst Striker Eureka’s Conn-Pod open. Water flooded in and circuits started to go dark. Both kaiju stood over the fallen Jaeger, tag-teaming it, tearing and hammering it into pieces. The video from Striker Eureka went out, leaving only the sound of Chuck’s voice.
“My father always said: if you have the shot, take it. It’s been a pleasure serving with you, sir.”
Silence from LOCCENT.
A moment later, Stacker Pentecost detonated the nuclear payload.
33
IN THE LOCCENT, STRIKER EUREKA’S READOUTS went dark.
Through one of the Super Sikorskys’ belly cameras, they watched a dome of water rise from the ocean, pushing the fog back as the blast wave from the nuclear payload breached the surface. Pieces of kaiju were visible in the churning base of the mushroom cloud that broke through the mist before the Sikorsky peeled away in evasive maneuvers.
Tendo Choi looked at Herc Hansen, who knelt beside his dog, head down, mechanically scratching Max’s ears. All of us are mourning, Tendo thought. But only Herc is mourning the loss of a child.
***
On the seafloor, Gipsy Danger got back to her feet. A huge scalloped gap in the face of the cliff was the only sign of the explosion. Radiation readings ticked higher than normal, but Raleigh ignored them. It wouldn’t matter, where they were going. With the one arm Gipsy Danger had left, they picked up half of Raiju and started dragging the corpse toward the cliff. Gipsy Danger wasn’t moving too well with the damage to her leg. It wouldn’t be long before seafloor pressures put the leg out of commission entirely. After that, the clock would really be ticking, because having sustained this kind of damage, Gipsy Danger was looking catastrophic collapse right in the face.
They had to get moving and make sure they could take care of business before business took care of them.
“Dropping into the Breach,” he said.
Gipsy Danger jumped off the cliff. They sank, seeing the radiance of the Breach below them. Maybe the scientists were right. Maybe they wouldn’t be able to get all the way in. But maybe the scientists were wrong. There was only one way to find out, and if they didn’t find out, the kaiju would just keep coming. Raleigh and Mako didn’t speak as Gipsy Danger sank toward a ledge in the cliff, just above the Breach. That would be as good a spot as any to start the reactor-overload sequence.
It was something he’d learned way back during his first training on Gipsy Danger, when nuking the kaiju was still part of the standard response protocol. Way down in one corner of the HUD console were toggles to activate the self-destruct response and trigger the escape-pod mechanism. Raleigh had hoped he would never have to use either one, but life was like that.
He could
feel Mako, stunned and withdrawn. She operated Gipsy Danger mechanically, without feeling. It was easy to stop feeling when all you could control was the way you were going to die.
An alarm went off in the Conn-Pod. Raleigh and Mako looked at each other, then at the heads-up.
It showed a bogey, closing fast. But nothing had come out of the Breach.
No, Raleigh thought.
They turned in mid-fall, looking up and along the wall of the cliff, which receded away into darkness above them. Swimming toward them like a mountain-sized missile, disfigured and burned and missing an arm, was the giant kaiju. They just had time to see it before it plowed into them.
The impact threw both of them to the floor of the Conn-Pod and smashed Gipsy Danger down onto the ledge Raleigh had been aiming for.
Raleigh had a whole series of thoughts all at once. How did it live through that? Are we going to make it long enough to trigger the overload? What if we—?
Wait a minute, he thought. If Newt and Gottlieb were right, this is our chance. Maybe a better chance than trying to sneak through with half a dead kaiju.
The kaiju clawed at Gipsy Danger. Mako and Raleigh answered it blow for blow, but they couldn’t hurt it. It was too big, too frenzied—just too much. A secondary series of alarms went off as part of Gipsy Danger’s armor collapsed and fell away with a section of her interior, crumpling in the abyssal pressure and dropping toward the Breach. The kaiju tore at the exposed area, and an explosion of bubbles burst from the wound in Gipsy Danger’s side.
Combined with the missing arm and the crippled leg, the damage was the beginning of the end for the old Jaeger. Raleigh just hoped they could stave off the end long enough to do this last, crucial, job. All they had to do was make it long enough to get through the Breach and start the reactor overload sequence. Piece of cake.
“We are losing power,” Mako said robotically. “We—”
She cut off as another alarm pinged and the heads-up flashed a warning.
“Mako’s oxygen line is cut!” Tendo warned them.
Raleigh looked over at her. Already she was starting to fade. The kaiju tore at Gipsy Danger’s head...