by Alex Irvine
“How about I go with you for some moral support?” Jake asked, brother to sister. “Never been to Sydney. Hear it’s great.”
“I’m glad you offered,” she said with a smile. “Because I’ve already requested Gipsy Avenger for Honor Guard at the Council Summit.”
“Whoa, hold up. Honor Guard? That’s not what I meant.” Jake had been thinking more along the lines of hanging around backstage before Mako headed out onto the summit dais, so he could crack jokes and let her know that no matter what happened someone was on her side. But the Jaeger Honor Guard?
“What about my moral support?” she needled him.
“Gipsy is Lambert’s ride.” That was the real problem. How was Mako going to justify that to Nate? The shouts of nepotism would echo all the way to Sydney before they ever got there.
“His copilot works for Liwen now. He needs a new one,” she said. Then she let him figure out the rest… which didn’t take him long.
She hadn’t followed him up here to try to make him feel better about the possibility of the Drones kicking all the Rangers out of their jobs. She was focused on the here and now, maximizing the abilities of the Rangers she had… and trying to keep Jake from bolting again now that she had just gotten him back in the program. “One that you already know is Drift-compatible, right,” he said. He couldn’t help but laugh. “I see what you’re trying to do, putting me back in a live rig.”
Her smile returned. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“All right, sis. I got your back.” A thought occurred to him. “But I want to be there when you tell him. He’s gonna be so pissed, he’ll make that dumb face like…” He imitated Lambert’s rigid, Ranger tough-guy pissed-off expression. Tight jaw, frown, crease between the eyes. Mako laughed.
On that moment, Jake headed off. If he had to be in Sydney tomorrow, he had a lot of preparation to do.
Watching him go, Mako’s smile faded.
9
THIS IS LYLE SCALABRINI, NEW SOUTH WALES Radio. I’m on the ground in the plaza outside the Pan Pacific Defense Corps Council Building, and the atmosphere is pretty intense. Police are four ranks thick around the long half-circle driveway coming off the street up to the front of the building, in full riot gear, holding back a crowd that must be in the tens of thousands. Everywhere you look there are banners. Over on the far side of the driveway from where I am, a pocket of Kaiju cultists have staked out a spot. People who served in the Kaiju War, and survivors’ groups, have surrounded them and there’s some… well, let’s just say I can’t get too close or else you’ll have to bleep out most of the audio. The cult group is largely ignoring everyone else. They’re praying, and they’ve brought with them some Kaiju bones out of which they’ve made a sort of shrine, right on the sidewalk close to the eastern end of the driveway. I’m a little too far away to hear what they’re saying, but it certainly looks like in the midst of all this chaos, they’re holding a prayer service. I’m going to try to get a little closer and find out exactly what their reasons are for being here, because it doesn’t seem like they’d have any reason to care one way or another whether Jaegers are piloted remotely or not. More in a moment, the police are starting to move us out of the—
* * *
Like most of the other great cities ringing the coasts of the Pacific Ocean, Sydney had been hit hard during the Kaiju War. But unlike, say, Southern California, Sydney had been largely rebuilt because it was the home of the Pan Pacific Defense Corps Council. Individual Marshals and other high-ranking officers exercised control over what their Shatterdomes did, and how their resources were deployed in their specified coastal territories. Here in Sydney, the entire organization chose its directions and presented a unified front to the world. The Council headquarters loomed, gleaming and new, at the center of the city, visible from anywhere in the harbor. Massive anti-Kaiju cannon emplacements ringed the harbor and the outer coastline, from Middle Head all the way into Potts Point, in the shadow of the rebuilt harbor bridges. A tighter ring of cannons protected the Council Building complex itself. Sydney was a symbolic place now, the nerve center of the PPDC and the Jaeger defense forces—and more broadly, the symbol of international cooperation that had defeated the Kaiju invaders and thrown the Precursors back into their Anteverse.
Around the Council Building, the streets were swarmed with crowds of demonstrators and curious onlookers. Every group on Planet Earth, from Jaeger fan clubs to the Kaiju-worshipping cults, had staked out a spot in the plaza surrounding the Council Building. A cluster of Kaiju-worshipping monks, solemn and imposing in their robes, stood praying in the center of a circle formed by other Kaiju zealots. They shouted and waved signs, preaching the cult gospel that the Kaiju had been sent by God to purge humanity of its sins.
Jake caught all this on a feed from inside Gipsy Avenger as a pair of Jumphawks ferried them across the harbor toward the Council Building. Scattered fights were breaking out between knots of demonstrators, and PPDC security had its hands full keeping a lid on the situation.
As Gipsy Avenger came into view, many of the hostile demonstrators stopped tangling with each other and turned their attention to the Jaeger. Fans cheered and chanted slogans. Some of them tried to rip signs out of the hands of the Kaiju worshippers, and security forces tried to keep them apart without escalating the situation. It was a powder keg, waiting for someone to really lose his temper and light the fuse.
The Kaiju cults had gotten a lot bigger since the beginning of the Kaiju War. Their doctrine was that any resistance to the Kaiju was an affront to God, and therefore the Pan Pacific Defense Corps was an abomination. Crazy times bred crazy people, was Jake’s opinion on the topic. Anyone who thought the Kaiju were divine had a real strange idea about God. He’d heard all the sermons—you couldn’t avoid them in any of the coastal ruins. The cults sent preachers out looking for converts among the poor and displaced, and sometimes it seemed like they were on every street corner in California. You could argue with them, reason with them, it didn’t matter. The best thing to do was ignore them.
And in any case, Jake had more important things on his mind right now. He was in a Drift cradle for the first time in years, paired with Nate Lambert, who radiated hostility. In the internal feed from the LOCCENT back in the Moyulan Shatterdome, Marshal Quan kept checking with techs to make sure he and Lambert were maintaining a steady neural handshake. It didn’t feel all that steady to Jake, but it was holding. They were both trying to be professional about a situation that neither of them liked.
“All you have to do is stand there and look pretty,” Quan said over the comm. “Stay focused and try not to fall over.”
“Roger that, sir,” Lambert said—but Jake could hear him thinking that they would be lucky if Jake didn’t screw things up. That made Jake even more nervous than he already was at being dropped into a Jaeger without any prep after years of trying to forget he’d ever been a Ranger.
“Go for drop in three… two… one… drop!” Quan’s command echoed in their ears, and the Jumphawks released the cables holding Gipsy Avenger. The Jaeger dropped from an altitude of less than two hundred feet, landing with a thunderous boom on the reinforced drop pad near the Council Building. The shockwave of the impact raised a cloud of dust that billowed over the crowd—and helped obscure the fact that Gipsy nearly lost her balance on landing.
In the Conn-Pod, Lambert shot Jake a look. Jake tried to play it off. “It’s all coming back. Relax.”
The closer Kaiju worshippers, outraged at the presence of a Jaeger, started throwing bottles and trash at Gipsy’s legs. PPDC security waded in and started making arrests as the situation threatened to get out of hand.
“Got some fans, huh?” Jake commented.
“Kaiju nuts are always stirring it up,” Lambert said dismissively. “And hey—we’re in each other’s heads, so I’d appreciate it if you’d stop thinking about Jules. Not gonna happen.”
“How about you stop thinking about kicking my ass,” Ja
ke shot back. “Not gonna happen either.”
Mostly Jake was thinking about handling the Jaeger gear that had changed and updated since his last time in a Conn-Pod. Back then, they had stood on an actual floor, with their drivesuit boots locked into fixtures and physical instrument podiums in front of them.
But now the Conn-Pod and the operating system were largely holographic and virtual. Each Ranger locked boot soles onto a glowing rectangle on the floor. Then, once the Jaeger’s operating AI had measured their initial location so it could interpret motions, the floor dropped away, leaving them suspended in a maglev field that also held the Drift cradles. Every motion within the field accompanied by a direct thought from the Ranger caused an immediate response, with less lag and more powerful signal transmissions than previous versions of Jaeger operating systems had allowed. It was a more immersive experience, that much was certain. Once a Ranger’s legs were locked into the maglev harness instead of the old-fashioned rigs he’d trained on, it was easy to feel like you were actually moving as the giant machine. That difference was on Jake’s mind, and because of the Drift, it was on Lambert’s, too.
Jake could feel Nate’s anger in the Drift, and behind it Nate’s hurt feelings he tried to hide. There weren’t any secrets in the Drift, though. Part of the reason Nate gave Jake such a hard time was that he knew what lay behind Jake’s actions—which meant he knew that Jake knew he’d let himself down, let all of them down, let his father down…
Both of them refocused their attention when a signal pinged on Gipsy Avenger’s HUD. An incoming helicopter. The HUD readout identified it as belonging to the PPDC and displayed the name of the single passenger: MAKO MORI, SECRETARY GENERAL, PPDC SECURITY COUNCIL.
* * *
Inside the helicopter, Mako looked up from the Kaiju sketch on her data pad. She had Kaiju on her mind, for reasons she hadn’t been able to share with Jake, but when she looked up to see Gipsy Avenger towering over the gathered crowds, she smiled. It was good to know Jake was there. After his wandering years, he was back where he belonged—in the Conn-Pod of a Jaeger. She was also glad because the Jaeger program faced a threat that few in the organization knew about, and with Jake around, Mako knew she had an ally in what might be a dangerous time.
* * *
At the grand front entrance of the Council Building, PPDC security held back the crowd to permit the approach of a limousine. It rolled to a stop and Shao Liwen climbed out, followed by Chief Kang and the rest of her security detail. The crowd got even more frenzied as people caught sight of her. She had fervent fans screaming her name and waving for autographs, jostling for position with angry anti-PPDC protesters and Kaiju-cult zealots who rained abuse on her. She ignored all of them, walking with calm purpose toward the entrance. On this day she had only one focus: operationalizing the Drone program. Years of work had prepared her for this day, and nothing was going to stop her now that she had gotten so close to her goal.
* * *
Inside Gipsy Avenger’s Conn-Pod, Jake and Lambert perked up as a massive signal pinged on Gipsy’s HUD. “Gipsy to Command,” Lambert said. “You reading this?”
The signal was the size of a small cargo ship, but moving in a way that no ship could. Jake heard one of the LOCCENT techs say something in Mandarin to Quan, who relayed it to them in English. “Gipsy, this is Command. Be advised we have an unregistered Jaeger, no call sign designation.”
An unregistered Jaeger? These were extremely rare, but a moment later, they got a visual contact that confirmed their suspicions. The Jaeger exploded up out of the harbor, landing in a crouch near the waterfront avenue that passed in front of the Council Building. The crowd gawked in amazement, most of them too stunned to flee. Jake and Lambert scanned the unidentified Jaeger. It was sleek, nimble, matte black with vivid orange lights. The HUD picked out several spots on the Jaeger’s armor that were likely weapon mounts, but they couldn’t tell any specifics about its armaments.
“What is that?” Jake asked. “Is that one of ours?”
Lambert toggled Gipsy Avenger’s loudspeakers. “Pilots of unregistered Jaeger, power down and exit your Conn-Pod.”
The Jaeger didn’t respond. It stood up straighter and looked around, surveying the surrounding area.
Lambert issued a second order, per PPDC procedure. “I repeat: Power down and exit your Conn-Pod immediately—”
The Jaeger’s response was a barrage of plasma missiles.
10
From: Mako
To: Jake Pentecost
TRANSMITTING…
TRANSMISSION INTERRUPTED
RETRY? Y/N
Y
TRANSMITTING…
TRANSMISSION INTERRUPTED
RETRY? Y/N
Y
Marshal Quan’s voice cut through the chatter coming from the LOCCENT. “Missiles fired! Multiple ordnance inbound!”
The first salvo of missiles annihilated the anti-Kaiju cannons. Jake just had time to think that the Jaeger had been pausing to target each of them, planning how it was going to engage, when a tight following barrage slammed into Gipsy Avenger. Other missiles streaked past and the facade of the PPDC Council Building disappeared in a cluster of explosions.
Multiple impacts rocked Gipsy Avenger. Alarms wailed, some inside the Conn-Pod and some coming through the comms from the LOCCENT. Jake fought a rising sensation of panic. He was a simulation cowboy, unbeatable in VR exercises… but he had never been in combat. Time seemed to slow around him, and his sense of his surroundings started to fade. There were voices in his head. Lambert was shouting, but the voice that penetrated into Jake’s struggling mind was Stacker Pentecost’s. You don’t belong in a Jaeger, he said. Jake felt himself falling back into his memories, the rabbit hole that was an ever-present danger in the Drift.
“Jake! Stay connected! Jake!” Lambert’s voice. But Jake was already gone. Gipsy Avenger staggered and started to lose her balance as he fell back into the past, inexorably drawn by the sound of his father’s voice.
* * *
“Jake!” Lambert was shouting. Alarms wailed as another volley of plasma missiles nearly knocked Gipsy Avenger off her feet. “Pentecost!”
Jake snapped out of the memory, climbing up out of the rabbit hole with the tears of his fifteen-year-old self still hot on his face. Still disoriented, he tried to get a handle on what was going on. “What… what do we do?”
“Stay focused. Follow my lead and—look out!”
A house-sized piece of the Council Building, destabilized by missile impacts, toppled off the front toward the crowd below. Trapped by the crush of people trying to get away from the hostile Jaeger, the people in its path could do nothing but scream.
In the Conn-Pod, Lambert shot out one hand.
Gipsy Avenger caught the chunk scant feet above the heads of the crowd. Just outside the shadow of Gipsy’s arm, Chief Kang and the security detail hustled Shao Liwen back into the limousine. It gunned its engine, nosing through the crowd toward the vacant spaces near the street.
More missiles crashed into Gipsy Avenger. They weren’t penetrating her armor yet, but external systems were taking damage, and the kinetic impacts kept Gipsy off balance.
“We’re losing power!” Jake shouted, as alerts flashed across the system’s monitoring screen. The missiles were doing damage even if they weren’t getting through Gipsy’s armor.
“Rerouting systems,” Lambert said. He worked the holo screen on his side of the cradle.
“Jake!” Mako’s voice was splintered by static. “That Jaeger’s power reading is the same as—!”
In a flare of white noise, her voice cut out. Jake saw readings on the monitors that told him the Jaeger was jamming comms. Someone had planned this attack for this moment, right when Shao was about to announce the end of piloted Jaegers. Right when she and all the PPDC administrators would be in one place.
Jake wondered who. Kaiju nuts? Some terrorist group that had gotten
hold of Jaeger tech? How could that have happened?
He looked in the direction of Mako’s helicopter, and in his field of view saw the strange Jaeger raising and powering up what looked like a particle cannon… aimed at the helicopter.
“Nate,” he said, his voice high and tight with fear.
Thanks to the Drift, Nate understood instantly. “Power’s up!” he said—and in the next instant, Jake threw the chunk of the Council Building across the plaza at the hostile Jaeger.
Debris showered down over the crowd as the multiton chunk of concrete and steel smashed into the hostile Jaeger, knocking it off balance and ruining its aim at Mako’s chopper.
Jake and Lambert sprang forward in the cradle, and Gipsy Avenger charged toward the Jaeger, barreling into it and trying to grapple. But the black Jaeger was quicker than they had expected. It shook Gipsy off and raked her armor with claws.
Gipsy reeled back into a building, shattering its front walls and windows. She planted her feet, narrowly avoiding the crowds of fleeing people in the street below. That moment of inattention to the hostile Jaeger cost them. It caught Gipsy Avenger by one leg and smashed her into another building, driving her down to the street in a pile of collapsing rubble.
Then the black Jaeger sprang onto Gipsy and sank claws into the armor around the Conn-Pod, trying to rip her head off.
Inside the Conn-Pod, Jake wrestled against the Jaeger’s grip. Lambert punched commands into the holo pad projected from the forearm of his drivesuit. Gipsy Avenger’s chain sword shot out from her forearm, forcing the hostile Jaeger to let go. Pivoting as she got to her feet, Gipsy swung, but the other Jaeger was too fast—much faster than any other Jaeger they’d ever seen. It dodged the sword stroke and kicked Gipsy into another building. The street was treacherous footing now, with collapsed facades and destroyed cars littering the pavement.
Answering Gipsy Avenger’s chain sword, the other Jaeger flexed its arms and twin plasma weapons sprang from its forearm mounts. At first Jake thought they were swords, but then he saw the edges start to spin. Chainsaws. It had plasma chainsaws.