by Alex Irvine
Before the Kaiju War, he’d heard it was a nice place. But now it was a half-destroyed slum, full of people picking through the ruins to survive. The old pedestrian mall was now an open-air market, and farther south, the towering bones of the Kaiju Insurrector lay on the beach where it had fallen, after destroying much of the Santa Monica Pier. Scavengers and black-market entrepreneurs had stripped the body of everything from its blood to the parasites wriggling in the gaps under its armor plating. All of it was valuable, and most of it was lethal if the scavenger crews didn’t take adequate precautions. You could get dissolved by Kaiju blood, infected by Kaiju germs, suffocated when the decaying tissue trapped you inside their corpses. They decayed incredibly fast once exposed to the foreign atmosphere of Earth. And that was if other scavengers didn’t jump you before you could get your goods to market. Jake had steered clear of the trade in Kaiju parts, by and large. The sight of their monumental skeletons dotting the coasts filled him with sadness for what the Kaiju had done to the world, and behind it a more distant sadness about his father. Jake missed the world he’d been born into. He wanted it back.
Well, sometimes, anyway. Then there were the mornings when he got up and there was a sea breeze as the light of dawn crept along the tops of the bluffs falling toward the Pacific, and he’d just pulled off a score that was going to set him up for months… then this world didn’t seem so bad. If he was smart and a little bit lucky, he’d have one of those days tomorrow, after he got the capacitor back and moved it. Already he was deciding he wouldn’t sell it to Sonny. At this point it wouldn’t stop the man from trying to kill him again, so Jake figured he might as well get something out of the capacitor.
As dawn broke, Jake followed the tracker through the decaying ruins of Santa Monica, passing buildings tagged with the symbols of various Kaiju cults. Kaiju worshippers clustered in ruins like this one, to be closer to the bones of their gods. He passed beggars, and people trying to sell worthless junk so they wouldn’t be thought of as beggars. Ignoring them all, Jake followed the tracker’s signal. The plasma capacitor was somewhere on the other side of the pier.
He had to climb the rubble of buildings destroyed years ago by Insurrector before he got a good look at where the thief had gone. There, on the other side of the pier, the PPDC had built a shipyard for support vessels and barges big enough to transport damaged or incomplete Jaegers. Now the whole thing was decommissioned and abandoned, had been for years. There were dry docks, hangars, huge old warehouses, all of them filled with squatters and lowlifes… including the thief who had his plasma capacitor.
That capacitor had already caused Jake a lot of trouble. So he and the thief would have to reach an understanding.
Actually, it would be better if he and the thief never met. If Jake was lucky, the thief was tired from the trip, and Jake could get into the shipyard, find the capacitor, and get back out without them ever knowing he was there.
He started the long scramble down the bones and rubble, aiming for a warehouse at the water edge of the shipyard. The tracker said the capacitor was somewhere inside.
* * *
He worked his way along the edge of the warehouse until the tracker said he was as close as he was going to get. Then Jake pried open the closest window, wincing at the creaking sound. He swung through and dropped into a room that maybe used to be an office or a break room. Now it was clear someone was squatting there. A dirty mattress in the corner, surrounded by food wrappers and other personal trash, told him that much. The rest of the floor was covered with bits of machinery and tools.
Jake scanned the walls and knew he was in the right place. Whoever was living here had a serious obsession with Kaiju and Jaegers. The walls were plastered with magazine pages, newspapers, printouts from online stories—all of it a chronicle of the Kaiju War from the very beginning, the opening of the Breach. A blurry photo of one of the old Mark II Jaegers was taped up next to it. Someone had written “HOW BIG?!!!” in silver Sharpie. The rest of that part of the wall was a gallery of shots of Jaegers and Kaiju, with other notes.
Then the wall’s focus shifted to Shao Liwen, a one-time computer prodigy who now ran a multi-billion-dollar company, Shao Industries. She had been a pioneer in several different aspects of Jaeger design, and the most recent headline suggested she still was. SHAO INDUSTRIES: THE FUTURE OF JAEGER TECH?
Jake wouldn’t know. He’d been out of touch with that world for a long time.
Scanning down the wall, he stopped when he saw a faded Time magazine cover portrait of Raleigh Becket. The only words were Raleigh’s name and his dates: 1998–2026.
Seeing that hit Jake hard. Raleigh had been one of his idols when he was a kid and Raleigh was the young loose cannon. And he had served under Jake’s father. Then he had been the hero of the Battle of the Breach, surviving the mission that had taken Stacker Pentecost. Jake had a lot of complicated feelings about then that he’d spent the last ten years ignoring, so he wasn’t going to start now. He moved on, toward the door at the far end of the room. So far he hadn’t heard a sound other than his own quiet footsteps.
On the other side of the door was the main floor of the warehouse, acres of concrete with a roof maybe fifty feet high. And in the middle of that expanse stood a homemade Jaeger. Not full-sized, but its head was close to the ceiling. For a moment Jake just stood, amazed at the sight. Someone in the midst of all this chaos and misery had built a Jaeger out of spare parts. It was ugly, cobbled together from mismatched junk, including some scavenged armor plating Jake recognized as coming from a Mark II. But others could have started their service life in any machine from a water pump to a blast furnace. The overall effect was strange compared to a full-sized Jaeger. This one was maybe forty feet tall, with no room inside its head for a Conn-Pod, but the designer had given it two lights there, like eyeballs. Jake remembered an old engineer telling him people always wanted to humanize machines, even if it didn’t make design sense, because somewhere deep down inside they thought of machines as their children. Jake wasn’t sure how seriously to take that idea, but he’d been remembering it for a long time so it must have meant something to him. The Conn-Pod—or what passed for one—in this little Jaeger was set into its torso. Armored window frames gave pilots and passengers a view of the world beyond their wannabe Jaeger creation. One of its hands was a three-fingered pincer, and the other arm ended in a… Jake wasn’t sure what it was in the gloom. Some kind of saw blade.
Whoever had put this thing together was a seriously gifted tinker… and now, it occurred to Jake, he was in the presence of a truly great score. The plasma capacitor he’d been after was plugged into a hatch in the mini-Jaeger’s ankle, but Jake was already thinking bigger. People were always trying to build Jaegers to make some kind of personal statement, but not too many people could actually do it. This thief had pulled it off, and by the look of it there wasn’t a big gang involved. They wouldn’t have let something this valuable sit around without security. But whoever had built it, well, they must not have understood how the real world worked, because there it was. Who did Jake know with enough assets and ego to pay for a functioning personal Jaeger…?
He felt movement in the room. Behind him. Instinctively Jake skipped to the side and turned toward the person coming at him. He saw a length of pipe swinging toward his head and caught it. The assailant was wiry but small. Jake wrenched the pipe loose and in the same motion slammed the thief down to the floor. He’d learned a long time ago that when a fight started, you didn’t let it end until you were sure the other guy wasn’t going to get up again, so he raised the pipe—and then froze in mid-swing.
The figure on the floor was wearing dirty jeans and a hoodie. Impact with the floor had pushed the hoodie back far enough for Jake to see that the thief was a young teenager, and also a girl.
“What—how old are you?” he asked, still holding the pipe.
She sat up and pulled the hood the rest of the way off. Dark hair, a face that in other times would have led
the homecoming parade—but those eyes, they were all grown up. Tough and smart and angry.
“Old enough to kick your ass,” she said, and started to get up. Jake planted the pipe in her shoulder and nudged her back to the floor.
“Let’s take a minute,” he said. Cocking his head back toward the mini-Jaeger, he asked, “You build this thing yourself?”
“What do you think?” she snapped.
“I think I could sell your little toy for a whole lot of money.”
“Scrapper’s not a toy,” the girl said. “And she’s not for sale.”
Scrapper, Jake thought. Good name. Evocative of both attitude and origin. You had to admire the resolve, but this was business. “The man holding the pipe says she is, so—”
Sirens sounded from outside the warehouse. The girl looked toward the main hangar doors at the far end of the room. “You led them here!?”
“What?” Jake was offended at being called out by a little runt squatting in the Santa Monica slum. “Nobody follows me! It must have been you.”
He glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the sirens and the girl seized her chance. She kicked the pipe out of his hands and rolled to her feet, scrambling away across the floor toward the mini-Jaeger.
“Hey!” Jake started to go after her, but he was almost certain that would end up with him arrested in the back of a PPDC van. She kicked the capacitor hatch closed and scrambled up Scrapper’s leg to the Conn-Pod in its torso. She powered it up as she got settled in a gyroscopic cradle.
“Yes! It works!”
Wait, Jake thought. Is this the first time she’s used this thing?
The sirens were closer, and there were a lot of them. Jake took another look at Scrapper’s Conn-Pod. There was room for two, and if it worked, it worked…
He headed for the mini-Jaeger and hauled himself up just as she had, diving in next to her just as she slammed Scrapper’s chest plate shut. “Hey!” she shouted. “Get out!”
Jake turned around in the tight compartment. “Where’s the other one?”
“The other what?” Busy powering up various subroutines, the girl wasn’t looking at him.
“The other cradle! Jaegers need two pilots!”
“Scrapper’s small enough to run on a single neural load,” she said proudly.
“Then move over and let me pilot!”
“Screw that!” Then she punched a final command, and Scrapper’s power gauges surged to max readings. The little Jaeger charged forward, smashing through the warehouse wall. Sheet metal and broken glass scattered over the pavement in a parking lot full of PPDC security vehicles. Scrapper kicked them aside, sending PPDC personnel scattering.
“Woohoo!” she cheered, like she was having the time of her life. “Told you she’s not a toy!”
“You’re gonna get us killed. Now come on…” Jake started trying to uncouple her from the gyroscope so he could take her place in the cradle. She couldn’t have known this, but he knew his way around a Conn-Pod.
“Stop it.”
“I can get us out of here.”
“I just got us out. Get off! Hey!”
They stopped struggling as a huge bogey appeared on Scrapper’s HUD. It wasn’t as fancy as a full-scale Jaeger’s heads-up display, but it was a pretty slick piece of work for a teenager working with scraps. She skidded Scrapper to a halt, throwing Jake to the floor.
“Oh my God,” she said, as they got a visual. Straight in front of them was a huge Mark VI Jaeger, one of the newest in the fleet. Steely gray, with black accents and a blue tinge to its exterior running lights, it looked every bit the part of the law-enforcement Jaeger—which it was. Jake recognized it. So did she. “That’s November Ajax!”
A moment before, Jake had been trying to get her away from the controls, but now there wasn’t time. November Ajax was the PPDC’s designated patrol Jaeger for the whole of the devastated area from Santa Monica down through Long Beach. Occasionally it was called into service to handle social unrest, but the PPDC typically didn’t send November Ajax out unless there had been an attack on a PPDC installation… or a theft of PPDC property. This meant the PPDC had tracked the theft of the plasma capacitor just as Jake had, and decided it warranted a full response. If they were caught, there would be serious consequences. They’d use them as examples to other would-be thieves, and put them away for a long time. “You’re gonna get us nicked!” Jake said, his voice tight. “Keep moving!”
“Pilots of unregistered Jaeger.” The voice boomed from November Ajax’s external speakers, shaking the two of them in Scrapper’s small Conn-Pod. “This is the Pan Pacific Defense Corps. Power down and exit your Conn-Pod.”
The girl raised her hands.
“That’s it?” Jake was disappointed. “You give up way too easy, kid.”
“That’s what they think,” the girl said.
She clenched her fists and smoke canisters shot out of sockets in Scrapper’s arms. Clouds billowed around November Ajax’s legs, hiding Scrapper—who shot between the larger Jaeger’s legs and barreled down the street.
Jake got a grip on one of the cables connecting the Conn-Pod capsule to the counterweights inside Scrapper’s torso. They were there to deaden momentum shifts and prevent the pilot from getting knocked around when Scrapper made sudden movements. A primitive solution, but a workable one—as long as you were in the gyro cradle. Jake wasn’t, so just had to take his lumps and hang on for dear life.
“Hang on!” she yelled as November Ajax turned and caught up to them with one long stride.
“I am hanging on!”
“Hang tighter!” She was working her command array, and she punched a final command.
The next thing Jake knew, he was upside down. Then right side up again, then rolling over and over and bouncing hard off the inside wall of the Conn-Pod.
Scrapper had apparently curled into a ball and was rolling in tight figure eights around November Ajax’s feet. The girl stayed upright and level the whole time—Jake had to hand it to her, she’d done the cradle design just right—but Jake slammed around until he got himself jammed into one of the counterweight alcoves. It wasn’t a dignified solution, but it would keep him from getting knocked out or breaking an arm while they escaped November Ajax.
If they escaped November Ajax.
November Ajax swiped down at Scrapper, but the girl had seen it coming. She ducked her body to one side and Scrapper careened that way, crashing off palm trees and over burned-out cars. She rolled Scrapper fast up a high pile of rubble and it came crashing down through the wall of a partially collapsed building.
For a moment everything was silent except the sound of debris shifting around them. Jake started to get himself back together now that he knew which way was up again.
“See?” the girl said triumphantly. “I just out-piloted November Ajax.”
Jake shook his head. “You didn’t.”
“Did,” she insisted.
With a huge rumble, November Ajax tore away one wall of the building Scrapper was hiding in.
“Didn’t,” Jake said.
The girl froze. He could see she wasn’t sure what to do next. “Okay. What do you got? And I’m not getting out.”
This was a point where it paid to have plans go wrong all the time, Jake thought. It meant you were always ready to come up with a new one on the fly. He glanced around the Conn-Pod, figuring there must be something in there he could use. To do what, he didn’t know—but Jake was an optimist, at least when it came to his ability to get out of tight situations. He’d find something.
There.
He pointed at a pair of ion cells set into the Conn-Pod’s wall. “One of these ion cells redundant?”
The girl frowned. “No.”
Jake figured Scrapper could run for a little while without it. Ion cells usually weren’t mission-critical, since they were normally wired to different yields than the plasma capacitors that powered the mainframe and systems. They handled things like reserve power
, backup systems.
In other words, things you didn’t really worry about when November Ajax was chasing you down.
He primed the subroutine that would eject one of the ion cells. The eject chute was on the outer hull. Cells were typically only ejected when their power reserves were exhausted. There was a reason for that, as November Ajax’s pilots were about to find out.
“Is now,” he said. “Get us close to Ajax’s head. Go!”
She was steamed, but she did it. The girl gunned Scrapper forward and climbed straight up November Ajax’s arm, which was maybe three times as long as Scrapper was tall. The minute they got level with the Jaeger’s head, Jake hit the eject button. “Go! Go!” he shouted.
Scrapper leaped away from November Ajax. Jake was not looking forward to the two-hundred-foot drop, but the girl piloting Scrapper was ahead of him. She aimed for the roof of a building across the street. It looked like it might once have been a bank.
Behind them, the ion cell clanged off November Ajax’s head and ruptured, releasing a blast of ionized energy that crackled around the Jaeger’s head and upper torso like a localized lightning storm. November Ajax staggered as the surge disrupted its systems.
They landed on the roof, with Jake craning to get a glimpse of the drunk-looking swaying of November Ajax. He wanted to gloat over the success of his plan a little. But all he caught was a glimpse before Scrapper’s weight caved in the roof and they were falling through the shattered interior floors toward the ground level.
When they hit, the pilot was still smooth and cool. But it took Jake a minute to get his breath and focus his eyes after the jarring impact. She was looking at him. He could see the surprise on her face even though she was trying to play things cool and hide it. She wanted to know how he knew that would work. But she wouldn’t ask, and Jake wasn’t going to tell her.
She saw that in his eyes, or perhaps he was imagining it. In any case, she charged forward and Scrapper plowed through the rubble around the bottom of the building out into the street. A warning flashed on the Conn-Pod HUD: RESERVE POWER AT 12%.