by Alex Irvine
Quan introduced himself in Mandarin and extended a hand. “Ms. Shao. Marshal Quan. It’s an honor to meet you.”
Shao just looked down at it, clearly uncomfortable. Newt rushed up to explain. “Sorry, sorry! She doesn’t do the whole hand thing.” He shook Quan’s hand instead. “Dr. Newton Geiszler, head of research and devel—whoa, that’s a firm grip.” Turning to Liwen, he explained in Mandarin what he had said.
She addressed Quan, clearly going through the motions of greetings and asking where the demonstration was going to happen. Quan indicated Lambert and gestured for them to follow, speaking in Mandarin until he glanced over at Mako. “We’ll be in the War Room, Madam Secretary.”
She nodded. “Thank you, Marshal.”
Jake couldn’t help himself. He grinned at Mako. Having her here made him feel more a part of everything. “Good to see you again.”
“You too,” she said, taking in his dress uniform and Ranger jacket. “That’s a much better look on you.”
Apparently Liwen agreed. As she passed, Jake saw her give him a long, lingering look. Some kind of interest there, he thought… but he wasn’t sure what. Quan and Burke followed her.
Newt Geiszler trailed behind, making a big show of approaching Jake. “Is this him? What am I talking about, of course it’s him!” He took Jake’s hand and pumped it like he was performing for photographers. “Newton Geiszler, pleased to meet you. Gotta say, huge fan of your old man.” His voice dropped into a weird approximation of Stacker Pentecost’s cadence. “‘Today, we are cancelling the apocalypse!’ Love that, use it all the time.”
Jake couldn’t believe this slick phony was the same Newt Geiszler who had Drifted with a Kaiju brain and helped save the world. If that’s what corporate money did to you, he’d stay with the PPDC… or go back to hustling on the black market.
Hermann Gottlieb appeared out of nowhere, calling out to his old colleague. “Ah! Newton! I was hoping you’d be tagging along. I could use your help on an experiment—”
Newt cut him off, his tone friendly but patronizing. “I’m on the job here, buddy. I got time after, we’ll play with your test tubes.”
“The demonstration is not scheduled for some time yet,” Gottlieb said. “And with your interest in Kaiju physiology, I think you will want to see what I am developing.”
Newt glanced over at Shao, who wasn’t looking at him. He turned to Jake and Mako with a shrug. “All right! Give me a minute for the show-and-tell, okay? Then you better be ready to see something really cool.”
* * *
Gottlieb hustled into his lab with Newt in tow. “This will only take a moment,” Gottlieb said. “I don’t want to impose, but—”
“Hey, come on,” Newt said. “We’ve been in each other’s heads. Without the intel we yanked from that Kaiju brain, Raleigh never would have been able to close the Breach. That was you and me, pal.” They enjoyed that brief moment before Newt glanced at his watch. “But I am running a little tight, so…”
“Yes, umm…” Gottlieb started searching among the notes cluttering the desktop near his computer terminals. When they’d shared a lab, Gottlieb had been the neat freak. Since then, apparently a little of Newt’s (mostly) controlled chaos had rubbed off on him. He came up with a set of papers. “Deployment!”
“Deployment?” Newt echoed.
“Of Jaegers. Deploying them into combat via Jumphawks takes too much time. The amount of damage a Kaiju can inflict before…” Gottlieb seized another set of papers. These were blackened and curled around the edges. “Ah! Here! I think I’ve found a solution.”
Newt looked over the notes, starting to chuckle before he’d gotten past the first page. “Rocket thrusters? There’s no fuel in the world with that kind of boost-to-mass ratio.”
“From this world, no,” Gottlieb said. When Newt looked up, he saw Gottlieb was holding a vial of blue liquid.
“Kaiju blood?” Newt said. He didn’t like seeing it even in a lab setting. The stuff was dangerous…
“Exactly!” Gottlieb cried. “I’ve discovered it’s highly reactive when combined with rare earth elements—cerium, lanthanum, gadolinium—”
“Dude, you can’t be fooling around with this stuff,” Newt said. “You’re going to blow yourself up.” He took another look at the notes. “Look at these! You already did, didn’t you? You done went and blew yourself up.”
“I just need to balance the equation,” Gottlieb went on, completely unconcerned. “No one knows more about Kaiju morphology than you. If you could just take a look—”
“Buddy, it doesn’t matter. Once my boss’s Drones are approved, deployment time’ll be a non-issue. Within a year we’ll have Drones everywhere.”
“So you won’t help me?” Gottlieb was quietly hurt. Proud but also wounded. Newt wavered. He and Gottlieb had been a great team… but now there were other factors involved.
Newt’s watch beeped. He glanced down at it and saw it was time to get to the demonstration of Shao’s new Drone Jaegers. “Sorry,” he said. “Duty calls. Been nice catching up.”
“Newton?” Something in Gottlieb’s tone stopped Newt before he got to the door. He turned and saw Gottlieb looking sad and haunted. “I—I still have nightmares. About what we saw. When we Drifted with that disgusting Kaiju brain.”
“Yeah,” Newt said. He understood. “But sure was a hell of a rush, wasn’t it?” He’d been working apart from Gottlieb since right after the close of the Breach, and pursuing some of his own side projects. That made it easy to forget how close they had once been. They were bound in a way by that shared experience, even though judging from Gottlieb’s mood they had processed it in very different ways.
“No one knows what it felt like. To be in its mind. Except us. You and I. Together.”
Newt felt Gottlieb’s plea for… what? Support of some kind? What appeal was he making? Newt didn’t know how to help him, but he did want to. Gottlieb was kind of a hopeless doofus, but they had saved the world together.
He stood there trying to figure out how to resolve his conflicted feelings, and Liwen’s Security Chief Kang popped into the lab, saving Newt from the old tug of loyalty he didn’t really want to feel anymore. “Dr. Geiszler,” he said in Mandarin. “Time to go.”
* * *
He hustled down the corridor that led out of the K-Science wing toward the War Room, catching up with Shao and the rest of her entourage. “You and Dr. Gottlieb were close, weren’t you? During the war.” She spoke Mandarin, and Newt tried to tell her they’d shared a lab, but apparently his attempt didn’t pass muster.
“English,” she snapped, still in Mandarin. “Your Mandarin makes you sound like an idiot.”
“Um, yes,” Newt said. He didn’t think he sounded like an idiot, but she was the boss and he wasn’t going to cross her—at least not right now. “We shared a lab.”
“He was your friend?”
Newt hesitated over this. He’d never had many friends, had always preferred the company of instruments and diagrams to people… but his past with Hermann… “Yeah,” Newt said. “He was.”
They were at the edge of the Shatterdome’s Jaeger bays, cutting across toward the War Room. Groups of Rangers, cadets, and J-Tech mechanics crisscrossed the floor. Shao seemed to be framing another question about Newt and Hermann, but before she could ask it, one of the teenage cadets saw them and broke away from her group. “Miss Shao?” She was bright-eyed and breathless, starstruck by seeing the great Shao Liwen in person. “I just wanted to say—everything you’ve—I made my own Jaeger, a—a small one, with a lot of parts from Shao Industries—”
Shao looked at Newt. “They let children in here?”
“I think she’s a cadet.”
“I’m going to be a Jaeger pilot, ma’am,” the girl said. Her name tag said NAMANI.
Shao switched to English, something she almost never did. “Congratulations,” she said, and added a smile. She didn’t have a lot of practice smiling, and it didn’t look natura
l at all. But the cadet didn’t seem to care. She basked in Shao’s attention until Shao added, still in English, “Please move out of the way.”
Crestfallen, the girl stepped aside, and Shao led the group on. Newt threw the girl an apologetic glance, but she wasn’t looking at him. He hustled to keep pace with Shao. “The smile was good, but next time maybe throw in a little chit chat,” he suggested. “Or just the chit—”
In Mandarin again, she asked, “What were you and Dr. Gottlieb talking about?” as though the encounter with the cadet had never happened.
“Nothing. Just some nutty idea he has about thruster pods—”
“I can’t afford a misstep before Secretary General Mori makes her recommendation at the Council Summit,” she said, speaking so fast Newt could barely keep up. “No more contact with Dr. Gottlieb until after the vote.”
An hour ago, Newt would have been glad to avoid contact with Hermann, but seeing him had brought back some fond old memories of the time they’d spent crusading together. Also, Newt didn’t like being told what to do, and Shao’s imperious attitude toward him made him want to defend Hermann all the more. “But he’s harmless—”
She stopped, pivoted to face him, and unleashed a torrent of Mandarin that Newt couldn’t parse. “Uh… could you say that again?” he asked. “About eighty percent slower?”
In English, enunciating slowly and carefully, Shao said, “I said don’t make me question your loyalty.”
“No,” Newt said, trying to keep his tone light. Shao knew him as agreeable, glib Dr. Geiszler. He didn’t want the hassles that would come if she thought he was going to start challenging her. “No question. We barely ever talk anyway.”
“Then it won’t be a problem,” she said. “And work on your Mandarin. I don’t like to repeat myself, in any language.”
8
JAEGERWATCH—
AN OPEN LETTER TO MAKO MORI
We are trying to wrap our heads around this Drone thing, Madam Secretary General, and we have to say it’s not easy. Would Gipsy Danger still be Gipsy Danger if she didn’t have the stories of the Becket brothers tied up in her history? Would Hong Kong Harbor have memorials to Crimson Typhoon if the Wei triplets had not piloted her, or Cherno Alpha if the Kaidanovskys had not died inside? You know the answer. Nobody ever built a monument to a machine. And maybe that’s all right. Maybe it’s time we stopped building memorials. The Kaiju War is over, isn’t it? There are still great things for Jaegers to do—remember when November Ajax stopped a highway overpass from falling on the commuter train in Los Angeles?—but maybe those things could be just as well done by machines.
And maybe not. Rangers were heroes, and we need heroes. People need heroes. And only people can be heroes.
So if you’re listening, Mako Mori, remember that. Machines can be spectacular, and they can do great things… but they can’t be heroes.
In the War Room, Shao Liwen stood before a massive hologram of a Drone Jaeger. The prototype was designed along the lines of other Jaegers, because it was more efficient to repurpose the existing structural technologies than completely redesign the Drone Jaeger’s body. The primary visual difference from human-piloted Jaegers was in the structure of the Drone’s head. There was no need to dedicate space for a Drift cradle or human life-support systems, so the Drone’s head was smaller and set lower between the shoulders. Where a human-piloted Jaeger typically had a window so the pilots could visually supplement their input from sensors and instruments, the Drone had a single red light that gave it the appearance of a mechanical Cyclops. The “eye” was in fact a multispectrum visual and motion sensor, located in the Drone’s “face” as a concession to human nature. Shao could have put the sensor anywhere, but she knew the Drones would be less likely to frighten ordinary people if they retained some semblance of a human aspect.
Arrayed around Shao was a mixed group of Rangers and J-Tech personnel. They looked on skeptically, some with outright hostility visible on their faces. Mixed in among them were Secretary General Mako Mori, Hermann Gottlieb, and security staffers.
Shao had chosen Dr. Geiszler and Burke to stand with her for the presentation. They would be able to answer the questions that were sure to arise, and Burke had the added clout of being a former Ranger, not to mention Nate’s former copilot, who left the PPDC to take a job in the private sector.
She had already introduced the mechanical specifics of the Drones, and was now moving on to the real paradigm-shifting innovation at the heart of the project. “The system I designed processes commands through a quantum data core,” she said, as a holographic diagram of the core appeared. “Thus relieving the neural load. This means that a single pilot can operate the Drone via remote link from anywhere in the world. As soon as the Council approves deployment, the days of struggling to find and train Drift-compatible pilots will be a thing of the past.”
Shao had anticipated questions at this point, and planned a pause so Burke and Dr. Geiszler could address or deflect them. Her anticipation proved accurate, as dissatisfied murmurs immediately swept through the room at the suggestion that the PPDC would no longer need Drift-compatible Rangers. The Council in Sydney, composed of delegates from all PPDC member states, would make the final decision on Drone deployment, but Shao knew implementation of the plan would be smoother if she could pre-emptively address concerns coming from individual groups of Rangers.
Ranger Lambert spoke up on behalf of his colleagues, who seemed particularly incensed by the Drone presentation. Again, Shao had expected this, and she had rehearsed answers to a number of different possible questions. “You think a bunch of desk jockeys playing with their joysticks can stop a Kaiju attack?” Lambert asked, scorn clear in his tone.
“Not only can they stop it, they can do so without putting pilots at unnecessary risk, Nate,” Burke answered.
“Contrary to what you may have heard,” Shao added, “we’re not here to shut you down.” She made an effort to sound diplomatic and collegial, even though neither of those qualities came naturally to her. She didn’t necessarily need the Rangers’ support to push the Drone program through PPDC approvals, but the less friction accompanied the process, the better.
“Cooperation between our programs has never been more vital,” Burke added. “If there are any questions…?”
The room exploded in an uproar of questions from both Rangers and techs. None of them believed for a single moment that Shao had any intention of working with them. The whole point of the Drone program was to get them out of their Drift cradles and behind desks, and they were not going to go quietly. “We don’t want your damn Drones!” shouted a Ranger by the name of Huang. “We’re pilots, not a bunch of overpaid office workers!”
Jake felt exactly the same way, but rather than join the shouting, he turned and walked out of the room. He needed to calm himself down before he said something he regretted. This was one of the times when having the surname Pentecost made him self-conscious. Whatever he said would carry more weight with the Rangers because of his father, despite the fact that many Rangers still carried a grudge against Jake for getting kicked out of the Ranger program back when he was barely out of his teens.
He climbed a steel staircase toward a catwalk that ringed one of the outer levels of the Jaeger bay. The magnificent machines stood at attention, waiting for the next time they would be needed to defend humanity… but if Shao Liwen had her way, that moment would never come.
Behind him, he heard other footsteps on the catwalk. Mako came up next to him. “That was pretty slick,” he said. “How long before they shut all this down and I can go home?”
“I don’t trust the Drone tech,” Mako said. “Not yet, at least.”
“Looked dialed-in to me,” Jake said.
“Remote systems can be hacked or compromised.”
Interesting, Jake thought. She had been a Ranger. She understood. “Well, you’re the key vote, right? Your decision, so there you go.”
“I wish I could just
go ahead and approve them. If we’d had Drones back in the war, maybe Dad would still be alive.” She gazed out over the expanse of the Jaeger bay, in the direction of Gipsy Avenger. Jake could see her thinking back to Gipsy’s predecessor. “And Raleigh,” she added quietly.
Jake wasn’t following this. “What did that have to do with the war? News said it was cancer.” He saw the sorrow on her face, and realized he couldn’t understand what it was like for her to have lost a partner. Someone she’d fought with, Drifted with…
“You all right?” he asked.
She nodded. “Everything about the other side of the Breach is still classified,” she said, turning back to Jake’s first question regarding Raleigh’s death. “There’s a kind of radiation, in the Anteverse. We didn’t know how bad it was until it was too late.” She paused, and Jake realized she might be trying to tell him something. She’d been down there, on the edge of the Anteverse, with Raleigh…
“Are you all right?” he asked again, tensing as his mind ran over all the awful possibilities.
She nodded. “Raleigh ejected me. I got sick and couldn’t pilot anymore, but I’m fine. He got the worst of it.”
Jake knew that part of the story, about Raleigh ejecting Mako and then priming Gipsy Danger’s reactor to detonate before ejecting himself. But he hadn’t known about the Anteverse radiation. The Pan Pacific Defense Corps kept a lot of secrets, even from its Rangers.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know.”
“We can’t change the past.” She was still looking at the Jaegers. “But the future is ours to make. A lot of people want to see the Drones deployed. Nearly half the Council is backing Liwen. They aren’t going to like my decision.”