by Alex Irvine
They barely got their own chain sword up to block the first strikes, in a shower of sparks and discharged plasma. Arcs of energy shattered nearby windows and scorched buildings. The hostile Jaeger cut loose with a wild swing that nearly split an office tower down the middle from roof to atrium.
Gipsy stepped back, looking for another opening to attack, but both Jake and Lambert knew they were up against an opponent that was faster than they were. If they went in recklessly, they were going to end up in pieces.
The other Jaeger dropped into a fighting posture and came at them again.
* * *
Mako’s pilot was turning the chopper in wide circles, looking for a safe place to land. “We need to land!” he shouted.
“No!” Mako wasn’t going to leave Jake alone to fight this thing. Gipsy Avenger was clearly overmatched—even if she knew Jake and Lambert would never admit that. They would go down fighting. “We have to help them! Target that Jaeger!”
The pilot complied, but she could see on his face he didn’t think it was a good idea. “Target locked,” he said.
Mako’s eyes narrowed. This was her brother’s life on the line. “Fire!”
* * *
Jake and Lambert were pushed to the limit of their abilities countering the foreign Jaeger’s attacks. It was faster than any Jaeger they had ever seen, and so quick on its feet that they felt like they were in an old Mark I trying to tackle a Mark V. Jake was getting into the rhythm of operating Gipsy Avenger again, after so many years, and he felt his Drift connection with Nate getting more solid as they worked together—but it wasn’t enough. The hostile Jaeger scored hits on Gipsy’s torso and shoulders. If they couldn’t find a way to anticipate its technique, sooner or later it would land a fatal blow with the plasma chainsaws.
Pressed back by a fresh assault, Gipsy sidestepped to avoid a crowd of people trapped by a cascade of rubble from a nearby office building. The other Jaeger took advantage, rearing up for a downward stroke before Jake and Lambert could get Gipsy’s chain sword up.
But as the plasma weapon arced down, a barrage of missiles from Mako’s helicopter detonated on the hostile Jaeger’s arm and head, deflecting its stroke. Missing Gipsy Avenger by scant feet, the plasma saw chewed through several floors of another building. It jammed against something in the building’s interior, and the Rangers saw their chance.
Gipsy Avenger pounced, using the time Mako had bought them to power up another of Gipsy Avenger’s combat abilities. The Jaeger’s right arm had a force-multiplying rocket piston assembly designed to accelerate the velocity of a thrown punch. The rockets fired at the moment before impact, turning an ordinary punch into a supersonic impact that in testing had destroyed older model dummy Jaegers with a single blow.
This opponent was tougher than a practice dummy, though. The punch connected with an echoing boom that blew out nearby windows and sent the hostile Jaeger flying down the broad avenue. It slowed itself down by thrusting the plasma saws out to either side, using them to drag itself to a halt as they gouged through several blocks of office towers. Immediately it had arrested its slide, the other Jaeger unleashed a fresh missile salvo. Some of the missiles hit Gipsy Avenger, but most streaked by and exploded across a large expanse of Sydney’s downtown. Civilians who thought they were safely away from the battle fled anew as the missiles collapsed buildings and parking structures.
One of the missiles hit high on a skyscraper near Mako’s helicopter. The blast wave jolted the chopper, cracking its fuselage windows and sending it into a crazed spiral. Electrical fires sparked to life in the cockpit.
Jake saw Mako’s helicopter dropping, its tail spinning around as it lost control. “She’s going down! We need to move!”
Lambert was right with him. “Activating Gravity Sling!” he called back.
Gipsy Avenger’s right hand reconfigured itself into a force-projecting assembly that could manipulate gravity in its limited cone. The Gravity Sling swept up a cascade of falling cars from a collapsing parking garage, and whipped them in a single mass at the hostile Jaeger. The force of the impact punched it over backward into an uncontrolled tumble.
Before it had even hit the ground, Jake and Lambert had Gipsy sprinting across the distance between them and Mako’s spiraling helicopter. Jake tried to get the gravity sling to redeploy and catch the chopper, but it wasn’t responding after its initial use. “Come on!” he shouted, straining in the Drift cradle, pushing Gipsy Avenger to maximum speed.
He and Lambert leaned forward as one, and Gipsy Avenger dove forward, covering hundreds of yards in the air, hand outstretched to catch the falling helicopter.
Through the Conn-Pod window, Jake saw Mako, frantically tapping something into her data pad. She looked up at their approach, putting a hand flat on the inside of her window as the helicopter scraped off Gipsy Avenger’s fingertips. Jake was screaming, maybe just in his mind, as the chopper spun down at an angle and smashed into the pavement below. It tumbled, shedding broken rotors and pieces of its fuselage, crashing off parked cars and finally rolling to a halt in a smoking ruin.
A moment later Gipsy Avenger smashed down from her desperate leap, the impact bouncing debris up into the air and shattering nearby windows. Glass was still showering down as Jake disengaged himself from the Drift cradle and threw open the hatch on the side of Gipsy Avenger’s head.
“Jake, wait! Jake!” Lambert called after him. But in that moment, Jake didn’t care about the hostile Jaeger, or Sydney, or the PPDC. All he cared about was his sister. He ripped off his helmet and sprinted the stretched-out length of Gipsy Avenger toward the wreckage of the helicopter. He knew what he was going to find. He’d seen the impact, and he knew no human being could have survived it. But he wasn’t going to believe it until he called for his sister and she did not answer.
Far behind him, the rogue Jaeger started to approach Gipsy Avenger… then it paused. Coming in from the north, a formation of Jumphawks was bringing three Jaeger reinforcements. The Jaeger watched them, seeming to assess its odds. Then it turned around, moving fast and low back toward the harbor. By the time the Jumphawks were close enough to drop the reinforcements, it was gone beneath the waters.
11
We who have seen the divine truth celebrate this glorious strike against the heretics of the Pan Pacific Defense Corps and their mechanical forces of darkness. The would-be dictators of the PPDC Council have paid the ultimate price for their heresy, and the power of the Anteverse is on the rise. Sydney chose its fate, failing to learn the lesson of Mutavore when it consented to be the site of the Council citadel.
Our forces have struck a decisive blow against the unbelievers. We rejoice in the destruction of those who would hide the true nature of God and rebel against the Kaiju who are its truest evidence.
We will continue our crusade against the forces of blind humanist arrogance. We call on all humanity to repent of its sins, acknowledge the divine nature of the Kaiju messengers of God, and humbly pray that the Breach will open again, showing us the way to Paradise.
In the name of God and His Kaiju messengers,
We Who Have Seen
Jake had been back at Moyulan for less than an hour, after debriefing on the flight and then sitting through a short after-action follow-up session with Marshal Quan. Then they had let him go, sensing that he needed some time to grapple with his personal loss before he would be able to help them figure out where Obsidian Fury, the rogue Jaeger, had come from… and who might have created it.
He had wandered through the halls, not meeting anyone’s eyes, until he found himself in the so-called Hall of Heroes. A plaque on the wall read IN HONOR OF THOSE WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES IN THE SERVICE OF THEIR WORLD. Beyond it, lining both sides of the corridor, were digital memorials to fallen Rangers. The Becket brothers, Yancy and Raleigh. Chuck Hansen. The Wei Tang triplets. Sasha and Aleksis Kaidanovsky.
Jake was standing in front of the memorial to his father. On the screen, Stacker Pentecost stood in full Ma
rshal dress uniform, looking sternly out at his prodigal son, at last returned to his Ranger duties.
Just past Stacker Pentecost was a new memorial. Jake hadn’t expected there to be one so quickly, but there it was: Mako Mori, Secretary General and former Ranger, in full uniform, beaming out from the screen next to her adoptive father. The floor near Mako’s memorial was piled with flowers and candles, little tokens and handwritten testimonial notes. The whole Shatterdome mourned the loss of one of its own.
I’m the only one left, Jake thought. The whole family is gone now except for me. He stepped up to Mako’s memorial screen and addressed her. “I’ll hit ’em back for you, Mako.”
Then he taped a photograph to the edge of the screen. It showed Stacker, improbably smiling, his arms draped around Jake and Mako when they were… Jake couldn’t remember exactly. Young, anyway. Before Jake and his father had really started to butt heads. Before everything had gone wrong.
Now it was too late to ever set any of it right.
12
PPDC SECRETARY GENERAL MORI KILLED IN ROGUE JAEGER ATTACK
WIRE SERVICE REPORTS
Among the dead in today’s rogue Jaeger assault on the meeting of the Pan Pacific Defense Corps Council was the PPDC Secretary General Mako Mori. Mori was en route to the meeting when her helicopter was downed by a missile from the rogue Jaeger, which has already acquired the moniker Obsidian Fury.
The PPDC did not immediately confirm Mori’s death despite multiple sources corroborating the initial report.
Before becoming Secretary General, Mori was a Ranger who copiloted Gipsy Danger’s final mission to close the Breach in 2025. Both she and Raleigh Becket, the other Ranger on that mission, survived, though Becket would later succumb to a rare cancer. Mori’s adoptive father, PPDC Marshal Stacker Pentecost, died during the mission. Her career as a Ranger was nearly ended before it began, due to Pentecost’s opposition, but she persevered and rose to the top of the Corps before moving into her Council role.
She is survived by her brother, Jake Pentecost, formerly a PPDC Cadet who was last seen in the slums of Santa Monica, California. Attempts to locate him have been unsuccessful.
Someone was yelling behind one of the doors just down the hall, the sound muffled but unmistakably angry. Jake walked in that direction, remembering that cadet Drift training used to be located in this wing… and sure enough, the noise was coming from a door labeled DRIFT TRAINING – CADET LEVEL 1. What they used to call “Drifting for Dummies”. More yelling came from inside.
Jake walked in and saw Amara sitting at a training rig. A computer voice said, “Neural connection failed.” Amara threw a punch at a holo screen representing her Drift pattern, her fist passing through it as she noticed Jake. She dropped her hand and looked embarrassed, which made Jake feel embarrassed. Then after a prolonged pause Amara said, “So I’m not great with feelings, but sorry about your sister. Half-sister…?”
“Her parents died in the Onibaba attack,” Jake said. “My dad took her in. She was my sister. My family.”
Amara wasn’t sure how to handle the emotional weight of what Jake was dropping on her. So she went with her tried-and-true strategy, making a joke out of it. “Better not let Ranger Lambert see you out of uniform. He’ll take the stick out of his butt and beat you with it.”
He couldn’t help but smile. “Think I’m safe. It’s wedged in there pretty tight.”
Coming closer, Jake checked out the Drift rig Amara had been beating on. He couldn’t help but grin when he saw that one side was wired to a tank containing a human brain, suspended in a tank of synthetic cerebrospinal fluid. On the base of the tank was a plaque Jake knew by heart. THIS IS SARAH. SHE DONATED HER MIND SO THAT YOU COULD TRAIN. TELL ME HER FAVORITE CANDY BAR.
“They’re still using Sarah, huh?” Jake remembered the hours he’d spent learning to Drift with her. It almost made him feel sentimental.
“I can’t get her to Drift with me,” Amara said, her voice part growl and part whine. “The other cadets have been training forever. I hate feeling like the slow kid.”
“You gotta relax or you’re just grinding gears,” Jake said. It was a lesson he’d learned again that day—and that thought started to lift his mood. He could maybe do some good here, on a day that had been so terrible so far.
Leaning in, he punched a series of holo commands. Sarah retracted and a regular Drift rig appeared to take her place.
“Relax,” Amara said, back to her normal sardonic self. “Got it, coach.”
“Don’t call me coach,” Jake said.
“Sensei?”
Jake slid the practice helmet on. “Just clear your mind. Can’t connect if you’re running your mouth. You ready?”
Nervous but trying not to show it, Amara gave him a double thumbs-up.
“Let’s see if we’re Drift-compatible.” Jake tapped in a fresh series of commands. The Drift rigs connected, and Jake felt the psychic rush of entering a Drift with another human mind. Amara felt it too, more powerfully than Jake did because she was so new to the experience. She gasped out loud and the two of them fell into the melding inter-cognitive non-space of the Drift, their memories jumbling and pouring over each other—
—Amara as a young girl, chasing her brother across their back yard. They’re laughing, and as they pass her parents they smile and lean into each other a little, feeling the simple joy of happy children and a life together—
—Amara on her bicycle, a birthday gift. She’s just been to the store with her mother and as a reward for good behavior she got noisemakers to put on the spokes. She pedals faster and faster, as the slapping sound of the noisemakers becomes a whir—
—Amara in the garage with her father. A car engine, partially disassembled, hangs from a block and tackle. He is showing her how the pistons work in the cylinders. On a workbench next to the block and tackle, the engine’s head sits drying after they’ve just cleaned it. Once it’s dry they’ll set the head gasket and put it back on, and after that they’re going to drop it into a car—
—Jake, eight years old, in his father’s study. Stacker is at the Shatterdome inspecting the Jaegers. Jake picks up different things on his father’s desk: a pen, a folder containing cross-section blueprints of machine parts he doesn’t understand. Next he finds his father’s Marshal hat, hanging on a coat rack behind the desk. He takes it off its peg and puts it on. It’s way too big, covering his eyes. He tips it back so he can see, and catches a glimpse of his reflection in the study mirror. His father is an important man, doing important things. Jake knows this. One day he’s going to be like his father. He salutes, feeling big and important himself—
—Jake in cadet training, jogging alongside Nate Lambert. They’re both teenagers, filled with grand ideas and ambitions. At night after training they talk about saving the world, being the first line of defense if the Kaiju ever return. The run is punishing, mile after mile in the hills outside the Shatterdome, but if it meant getting into a Jaeger Jake would run to the moon and back. He is Stacker Pentecost’s son. Nothing is going to stop him from being worthy of his father’s example—
—In the combat training room, Mako comes at Jake with a staff. He tries to parry, but she slips his defense and her staff taps him along the ribs. She backs away and shows him what she did, teaching him what to look for, little shifts in the opponent’s weight or the direction of her gaze. They do it again. He comes closer, but she still gets through. They reset. She’s telling him he can do this, but he’s going to have to focus, block everything else out except this moment, only this moment—
“Warning. Neural connection unstable.”
Jake snapped out of the Drift fugue and saw the Drift connection meter on the training rig’s monitor. The strength of their connection was dropping, close to the red zone where it would break apart and they would have to start all over again.
“Stay focused,” he said, channeling what Mako had said to him so long ago.
He felt her renewed conc
entration, the revitalized clarity of her thoughts and her presence in the Drift. “That’s it,” he encouraged. “The stronger the connection, the better you fight.”
She grinned, and Jake felt the flush of her happiness as she felt herself getting the hang of the Drift. “This isn’t so hard,” she said. “You lived in a mansion!?” Then a memory struck her and Jake felt her shock—
—She’s on the Santa Monica Pier. The sun is shining but a long shadow falls over part of the boardwalk. She holds a Polaroid picture in one hand. All around her people are running and screaming. There’s a noise, like nothing she’s ever heard, and a smell cuts through the seaside odors of salt and caramel corn and grill smoke—
Don’t let a memory pull you in! Let them pass through you! Amara!
Jake’s voice. She turned to see him, but instead—
—Her father, smiling, holding a Polaroid camera. Amara! Get in there! he says, pointing to where her mother and brother are already at the pier railing. They press close together and her father raises the camera. Click. The Polaroid photo slides out of the camera. Amara rushes to her father and takes it from the camera, then dashes back to the railing. She shakes the photo, enchanted as always by the way the picture slowly comes into being from the uniform gray of the exposed film. She starts to see the shapes of their bodies, then their faces, against the endless expanse of the Pacific Ocean.
Amara! You need to let it go—
—There is a sound like an earthquake, and a Kaiju, Insurrector, rears up from the water. Waves surge outward from it, battering the pier’s piling. The pier shakes and the Kaiju crushes an entire section, which tumbles into the water. The air fills with screams and Amara freezes, Polaroid in her hand. Her mother and father and brother are on the other side of the shattered gap in the boards—