by Alex Irvine
“Warning. Pilot exceeding neural limits.”
—Amara!—
—It’s Jake’s voice but also her father’s voice. He stretches a hand out across the gap. The Kaiju looms, its roars loud enough to shake the pier under her feet. You have to jump! Amara hesitates, terrified of the churning water below. Please, baby, jump to me! I’ll catch you, I promise! Amara!
She runs and leaps with all the strength she can muster, but just as her feet leave the boards, the Kaiju’s foot comes down, obliterating the pier in front of her and everyone on it. Her father is gone in that instant, and her mother and brother and hundreds of other people. Her hands grasp empty space and she plummets into the water. Eyes wide with shock, she registers the shadow of the Kaiju passing overhead, and feels the pull of its gargantuan step. The water churns around her and her chest begins to burn. She can swim a little, but only on the surface and only with a wacky noodle. She kicks and flails her arms but the surface of the water still seems far away. Light ripples around her again but she’s sinking down among the shattered timbers and the dark floating shapes she will not think about. Someone grabs her by the shoulder—
“Amara! Come on! Hey!”
It’s Jake. She’s not in Santa Monica, she’s not four years old. She’s in the Drift training room of the Moyulan Shatterdome and she’s fifteen, but it was all just right there, it was real…
“I was back home,” she said. “I felt it…”
She was shaking, trying not to panic, and also feeling the first waves of embarrassment and shame at Jake seeing her so vulnerable. She looked up at him and saw the sympathy in his face. “I felt it too,” he said. Was the Drift always like that? Did you have to let your partner all the way into your head, to see everything you’d ever been afraid of or sad about, every weakness behind the brave front you put up so the world wouldn’t look too closely?
Jake’s comm crackled. “Jake, it’s Nate. You there?”
Still looking at Amara, Jake found his comm. “Yeah, I’m here.”
“Meet me in the lab right away. Marshal wants to see us. And lose the robe.”
“Check,” Jake said, rolling his eyes for Amara’s benefit. “No robe.”
Already she was feeling better. She wasn’t going to be afraid. She wasn’t going to let that stop her. This was her chance.
“I want to try again,” she said.
Jake’s voice was surprisingly gentle. “That’s enough for one night,” he said.
“I thought you were going to help me,” Amara said. She almost took a shot at him about wearing his dad’s hat and saluting like a little boy soldier, but with an effort she stopped herself. As much as she hated to admit it, this wasn’t a time to resort to her typical social strategy of acerbic bravado. So instead she went for a flippant remark that she hoped would tell Jake how much this meant to her. “I didn’t even figure out what Sarah’s favorite candy bar is.”
“It’s an Almond Joy,” he said.
“That’s not helping, that’s cheating, you dick!”
On his way out the door, Jake couldn’t help but smile.
When he was gone, Amara sat looking at the Drift rig again. Already she felt wrung out, but she wasn’t going to give up now. After all, she’d already relived the worst moment of her life, and with Jake Pentecost right there in her head. What could the Drift do to her now?
She swiped at the holo terminal and Sarah the brain slid back into position. Amara shook her hair back and put the practice helmet back on. “Okay, Sarah,” she said. “What else do you like besides candy…?”
She stabbed a final command and initiated the Drift again.
13
EDITORIAL: I HATE IT WHEN I’M RIGHT
The dead are still being counted in Sydney, thanks to a still-unidentified rogue Jaeger attacking the Pan Pacific Defense Corps for reasons nobody seems to be able to figure out. Don’t believe the Kaiju nuts who claimed the attack. Even if they could build a Jaeger, why would they attack when another Jaeger was there to fight back? Terrorists don’t like an even fight. They would have sent that Jaeger out to massacre innocent people, or maybe gone after the Council at one of its meetings when Gipsy Avenger wasn’t there to fight back. Right? It doesn’t make any sense.
The real problem here is that the PPDC doesn’t know where this Jaeger came from. You saw what happened. That thing kicked Gipsy Avenger’s ass, and if it had wanted to, it could have put her down and then done whatever it wanted with the rest of Sydney. So why didn’t it? What does that tell you?
I know what it tells me. Someone out there has tech that equals anything the PPDC can put into the field, and we don’t know who they are.
That ought to scare you a lot more than a bunch of Kaiju nuts trying to claim something they obviously didn’t do.
Jake asked Lambert what was up as they headed for the K-Science wing of the Shatterdome, but Nate didn’t want to get into it. “Better you see for yourself,” he said. “I’m going to let Gottlieb tell you.”
When they got to the lab, Gottlieb was squinting at a holo screen that showed a fragmented swirl of color and numbers. Marshal Quan was there observing. He looked up and nodded as Jake and Lambert came in. Jake looked at the screen, unsure why Gottlieb would have wanted him to see it.
“What is it?” he asked.
“A message,” Quan said. “From Mako.”
This hit Jake hard, bringing back that last image he had of her, palm pressed against the chopper window as it slid away from Gipsy Avenger… He blinked and tried to keep his attention on the here and now.
“She was trying to send it from her copter right before she—” Gottlieb caught himself. He looked at Jake, unsure how to go on, then cleared his throat and stuck to the facts. “It’s a data packet. High density.”
“Obsidian Fury was jamming comms,” Lambert said. “How’d her signal get through?”
“It didn’t,” Quan answered. “At least not intact.”
“So it’s gone,” Jake said. What was he doing here then?
Gottlieb was still squinting, but now he was also running another program in parallel with the fractal swirl of data. “‘Gone’ is relative in the digital realm,” he said as he tweaked the program he had up on the parallel screen. “By running a modified fractal algorithm, I might be able to reconstruct a few megabytes…”
Code unspooled on the screen. Gottlieb muttered to himself. Jake got restless, standing there watching a scientist wrestle with data while he wondered if there was going to be a last note from his sister… or not. He wished they’d figured out if they could salvage anything before they brought him here. Now that he knew the message existed, if Gottlieb couldn’t unscramble it Jake would spend the rest of his life wondering what it said.
“There,” Gottlieb said.
The image on the main holo screen coalesced and resolved. There was still static, but… “Is that… is that a Kaiju?” Jake wondered aloud.
It sure looked like one. Sketchy and unfamiliar, but definitely a Kaiju head. Gottlieb worked his terminal, running pattern recognition software on the image, sorting through known Kaiju. “No match against the database.”
“Maybe it’s a symbol?” Lambert suggested. “Something connected to the Kaiju cults?”
Now Gottlieb ran a search on all symbols, icons, and patterns related to the branch of Kaiju worshippers. “No match,” Gottlieb said again.
“Keep looking,” Marshal Quan ordered. “Whatever this is, it was important to her. I want to know why.”
He left, presumably to brief PPDC intel on the existence of the drawing to see if that could help pin down the origin of the rogue Jaeger they were calling Obsidian Fury. Lambert was still looking at the drawing. “You don’t stop fighting till the enemy’s down,” he said. Then, glancing over at Jake, he added, “If you’re really a soldier.”
With that, he followed Quan out. Jake couldn’t take his eyes off the holo screen. This drawing was the last thing his sister had ever made. She had
known what was going to happen to her, and she had wanted him to see it.
Why?
The question preoccupied him long after he’d left the lab. Mako had known she was going to die when the chopper was going down. She wouldn’t have expected Gipsy Avenger to save her. Actually, trying to save her had been a stupid idea, Jake thought. It was never going to work, and it took Gipsy away from the main objective: stopping Obsidian Fury. The rogue Jaeger had slunk away into the ocean when it saw reinforcements coming, but Jake couldn’t help but think he might have been able to find a hole in its technique if they’d been able to analyze it a little longer. Gipsy had taken a beating, that was for sure. Techs were working her over in the Shatterdome right now. But Jake had learned a long time ago that sometimes you had to take a punch to give one… so you had to make sure your punches counted when you got the chance to throw them.
Now he was spoiling for the chance to meet Obsidian Fury again and land that final punch.
But the truth was, they’d never seen anything like that speed and fluidity in a Jaeger. There had been other rogue Jaegers, sure. People built them once in a while, with discarded tech and cobbled-together armor. Jake could remember one in Serbia, and he thought he’d heard Lambert mention others in Uzbekistan and somewhere in South America, too. It was rare but not unheard of. Oh, and there was also Scrapper. It was a lot smaller than your average Jaeger, but Amara had good instinct. She had built something impressive, considering the obstacles.
Drifting with Amara had helped Jake understand her. A gearhead, into all things with engines as a kid—but was that her, or was that because her dad was into that stuff and she did whatever he did?
That was a question Jake had often asked himself about the Jaeger Corps. Had he gone into it because he believed in it, or because his father was Stacker Pentecost?
He didn’t have the answer right then, and maybe it didn’t matter. However you got yourself into a place in life, you were there, and had to deal with it as it was. Earlier that day, when he’d watched the Drone presentation, Jake had been ready to walk away from the Jaeger service, put the whole Pan Pacific Defense Corps in his rear-view mirror. Then he’d felt the tug of the Drift, and realized how much it meant to him to be in a Conn-Pod again… and then came the fight against Obsidian Fury, and Mako…
He wasn’t going to leave now. He’d come close, but it wasn’t going to happen. This was as close as Jake Pentecost would ever get to believing in destiny. He was going to get back into Gipsy Avenger, and he was going to find Obsidian Fury, and put that evil rogue down. The day was coming—soon—when he would see the pilots coming out of Obsidian Fury’s Conn-Pod, defeated, and he would know he had begun to answer for Mako’s death.
Until then, he would look at the drawing his sister had left for him, and he would try to understand.
14
MEMO
PRIVATE TO SHAO LIWEN
Pursuant to your orders we have undertaken off-hours surveillance of Dr. Newton Geiszler, and a general program of intelligence collection concerning his personal behaviors. Observations:
Dr. Geiszler frequently drinks to excess at bars near his apartment.
The electricity bills at his apartment are much higher than any others in that building or others similar to it in the same district. None of his other expenses are notable apart from a large amount of money spent on expensive wines.
He has not been observed to keep company with any other scientists or engineers employed by Shao Industries’ competitors, or with any Pan Pacific Defense Corps personnel.
He has not been observed to speak about his work with anyone in public, no matter the degree of his intoxication.
He has not been observed in public with a romantic partner despite frequent overheard references to a woman named Alice. Her identity is unknown.
Provisional conclusion: Dr. Geiszler is not a security risk at this time, though continued surveillance is likely warranted and will continue.
—Kang
Newt knew that Shao kept an eye on him when he wasn’t at work. He didn’t especially like it, but he saw why. She didn’t like uncertainty, or surprises, and she didn’t understand Newt. He had lived his life skipping from flash of brilliance to flash of brilliance, suffering through the periods of stagnant frustration in between. She was another kind of genius, taking a particular brilliance and ruthlessly applying it, like it was a kind of math she could use to solve the problem of life. She’d gotten rich, and after joining Shao Industries Newt had, too. They sure paid a lot more than the PPDC. Newt didn’t mind if she had him followed when he hit the bars or went out on the town. That was fine. She could disapprove, make disparaging comments to Chief Kang or whomever else. Newt didn’t care. As long as he was in the lab making the Drones better, Shao would leave him alone.
All this was running through Newt’s mind when he walked into his lab at Shao Industries, late at night after the shocking attack of Obsidian Fury on the PPDC Council Building that day. It was too bad about Mako, he thought. He’d always liked her. He’d seen her develop from a shy, jumpy cadet to the Secretary General of the PPDC, keeping the flame of the old Rangers alive after the rest of them were all gone. Newt hadn’t thought about it that way until just then, but Mako was the last of them. Only she and Raleigh had survived the Breach, and Raleigh had been gone for… well, Newt wasn’t sure, but it was years. He’d been in a lab most of the time, chasing the visions in his head.
Some of those visions came from the time he and Hermann had Drifted with the Kaiju brain. No point in denying it. Newt knew Hermann felt that experience more keenly than he did, but Hermann had never gotten out of the PPDC bubble, and he didn’t have Newt’s ability to leave things behind. Those had been good times, Newt thought, him and Hermann trying to save the world from the dumpy K-Science labs back when the survival of the human race depended on a couple of misfit Rangers piloting a Jaeger that was already obsolete when it took the field against Otachi, let alone Scunner and Raiju.
Names to conjure with. Newt carried them all in his head. He carried a lot in his head, not all of it good. That was what still tied him to Hermann after they had Drifted with that Kaiju brain back during the war…
Newt was still thinking of this when he walked into his lab and saw Shao Liwen. What was she doing in his lab?
At the moment, digging around in the fiber-optic guts of a Drone Jaeger data core. She hadn’t noticed him yet.
Newt sidestepped toward one of the techs working on neural network stability in the Drones. He couldn’t remember her name… Dai-something… Daiyu, that was it. He leaned in close, startling her, and asked, “How long has she been here?”
She stared up at him. Newt realized she didn’t speak English. Mandarin was the lingua franca of Shao Industries. “Time? When?” he asked in Mandarin, nodding over at Shao.
“Almost an hour,” she said.
Newt crossed the lab toward Shao, cursing a blue streak under his breath the whole time. She was tinkering with the data core’s interface, with Burke standing near her in a Drone telemetry suit complete with a VR helmet rig that would let him operate the Drone via its data core. It was kind of like Drifting, only without the messy complications of interacting with another human mind.
“Hey, boss,” he said, forcing himself to smile. “Sorry, thought you were still in Sydney.”
She didn’t return his greeting. “The Council has approved Drone deployment in an emergency session,” she said, getting right to the point, as usual.
Obsidian Fury’s missile barrage had apparently killed a number of the PPDC Council members, leaving the rest of the group short of a quorum. Instead of naming new members, they had declared a temporary suspension of the quorum rules and approved the Drone initiative before the fires in the Council Building had even been extinguished.
“Wow,” Newt said. “That’s—that’s great.”
Burke was giving him a funny look. “Thought you’d be a little more enthusiastic, Doc,”
he said. Newt knew Burke was one of the members of Shao’s inner circle who didn’t trust him.
“No, I am,” he said. “It’s just, you know. Why they’re approving now. Because of the attack.”
“I was there,” Shao snapped at him. “I know what happened.” She went on in Mandarin. “And it wouldn’t have, if our Drones had been in the field. Now everyone sees that.”
“Yeah,” Newt agreed. Something about her tone of voice made him unsure of himself. “I guess they do.”
“Which means the attack was positive, all things considered.”
Ah, there it was. Shao the business tycoon, the Drone evangelist, looking at the day’s destruction and finding it good for business. “If you look at it sideways and squint, then yeah,” he said, “I guess.”
Shao was still dividing her attention between Newt and the data readouts from the core. She disconnected Burke from it and said, “There’s a point five micro delay in the uplink to the data cores.”
“I know. I’m working on boosting the connection—”
“Any other irregularities I should know about?”
“No. All systems double thumbs.” He gave her two thumbs up.
“Push your data to my server. I want to run a diagnostic. The Council expects full deployment in forty-eight hours.” Switching back to English so Burke and the other non-Chinese there could see her ordering Newt around, she added, “Get it done.”
Then with Burke at her side, she swept out of the lab. Newt called after her.
“Sure! No problem! I’m on it like a…” For some reason, words failed him. “…like a guy that’s really, really on it.” Words never failed him! He felt unsettled by this: He was slipping gears once in a while, but also doing some of the best, most amazing work he’d ever done.
Even so, getting the Drones online, tested, and deployed in forty-eight hours was a tall order. The tech crew appeared stunned by Shao’s ultimatum. “What?” Daiyu looked aghast. “No way we’ll be ready!”
“Way? Way? Yes, way,” Newt said. He had to make this happen or he would be out of a job, and the consequences of that… “Know what? You’re fired,” he said, trying to put a little fear of God into the techs to get them moving. Then he immediately reconsidered. He needed Daiyu. She was too smart to fire right then. “No, get this done, then you’re fired. Or promoted. We’ll see how it goes. But probably fired. Go! Shoo!”