by Alex Irvine
The techs scattered to their workstations. Holo screens blinked into existence all over the lab as they feverishly ran testing simulations and revised code. Newt strolled among them, letting them know he was watching, and then he came to the large observation window that looked out over the factory floor. Row after row of Drone Jaegers stood on the floor, with automated machinery making final adjustments to their external components. Other factory robots were fitting each Drone with data cores. Could they be done in forty-eight hours? Despite his promise to Shao, Newt wasn’t sure.
He took another look at the techs, wondering if he’d taken the right tack. He wasn’t ordinarily a high-pressure, threatening kind of guy. He preferred to glad-hand, make people feel good, impress them with his savvy and make them feel like he was the kind of boss who deserved their best effort. But he was under a lot of pressure, and desperate times, as the saying went, called for desperate measures.
15
STATUS REPORT ON CADET CLASS, MOYULAN SHATTERDOME
RANGER NATHAN LAMBERT
The current cadet class has made satisfactory progress toward Drift fluency and Jaeger technical understanding. Interpersonal rivalries and personality clashes are within expected ranges.
Current provisional backup assignments to Moyulan’s Jaeger detail would be:
Ilya/Bracer Phoenix
Jinhai/Valor Omega
Meilin/Gipsy Avenger
Renata/Saber Athena
Ryoichi/Saber Athena
Suresh/Guardian Bravo
Tahima/Titan Redeemer
Viktoriya/Valor Omega
UPDATE: The late addition of Cadet Amara Namani has destabilized the equilibrium of the class. Her skills are still being assessed but this writer questions her overall fitness for the program due to her background and lack of discipline. Assignment to a Jaeger would be premature.
The cadets were clustered around a stored newsfeed of the Sydney attack, swiping back and forth through Obsidian Fury’s battle with Gipsy Avenger. Amara held the data pad, mesmerized by the rogue Jaeger. Had someone really built that? She knew how hard it was to design and make something even the scale of Scrapper. How had someone found the resources to do this without the PPDC noticing? They kept track of the international trade in technologies used in the creation of Jaeger systems. Drift tech was strictly controlled. Had someone invented it independently? Or was there a mole in Shao Industries or one of the other companies that manufactured Jaeger parts?
However it had happened, Obsidian Fury was an impressive piece of work.
Tahima, leaning over her shoulder, snorted. “Obsidian Fury. Doesn’t even sound like a real Jaeger name.”
“I don’t think Tahima sounds like a real name,” Renata shot back, “but your mama did.”
Amara ignored the sniping. It was all part of the cadet game, the way they established their pecking order. She didn’t want to be part of it. “There’s never been a rogue like this. How’d the Kaiju nuts build it? Ones where I’m from couldn’t change a battery without getting fried.”
“Maybe they stole it,” Ryoichi suggested.
“Da,” Ilya agreed. “You can steal anything in my country with overalls and a work order.”
“These pilots… they’re too fast. I don’t understand how they’re exceeding the neural load.”
“Ballerinas,” Jinhai said, for maybe the hundredth time that day. “I’m telling you.”
For some reason this idea drove Tahima crazy. “Shut up with that crap, man. You know how many people died in Sydney?” He acted like it was an insult to them that Jaeger pilots might have ballet training, but to Amara it made sense. Learning that kind of balance and grace couldn’t help but be an asset in a fight.
“Newsfeed said they’re posting a dozen Jaegers at the memorial,” Meilin said. A dozen Jaegers. That was a real mark of how much respect Mako Mori had commanded.
“When I die, I want that many to send me off,” Suresh said.
“Your pop’s gonna make you work with boobs when you wash out,” Renata said.
“Jaegers do not show up when the boob guy dies,” Ilya observed.
“Your dad works with boobs?” Amara had never heard this.
“He’s a plastic surgeon,” Suresh explained, exasperated. “He doesn’t just work with—” He caught himself, realizing he was wasting his breath. “And I’m not washing out. I’m gonna be a pilot.”
“Still,” Jinhai said. “You die—meh. I’d post one Jaeger at your funeral. Maybe half a Jaeger.”
“I heard that’s where they found Amara,” Vik said. “In half a Jaeger.”
Amara dropped the data pad on her bunk and stood up. She wasn’t going to stand there and be insulted when she was the only one in the room who had ever done anything like build Scrapper. “It was a whole Jaeger. It just wasn’t very big, Viktoriya.”
The other cadets went quiet when they heard Amara use Vik’s full name. That was a challenge, and all of them knew it. Vik stepped up to Amara, looming over her. She was used to scaring people with her size and strength. “Bigger is better,” she said.
Amara sized her up. She was starting to reconsider her strategy of escalating the confrontation. It was one thing to stand up for yourself, another to get your ass kicked for no reason. “Look, uh…” Amara paused, trying to remember what she’d learned from Jinhai the day before. “Idi na fig.”
Ilya’s head snapped up. He was the other Russian speaker in the group, and his reaction told Amara she hadn’t said exactly what she meant to say.
Vik laughed out loud in disbelief. “What did you say?”
Amara tried again. “Idi na… fig?” She looked over at Jinhai. “Am I saying that right?”
Jinhai, clearly trying not to laugh, nodded and said, “Yep.”
Amara had just figured out that Jinhai had pranked her when Vik lunged forward and grabbed her in a chokehold. Amara struggled, but Vik was much bigger and much stronger. She couldn’t break free.
“Whoa!” Jinhai said.
Ryoichi tried to break them up. “Vik, come on, let her go—”
“I worked every day of my life to be here! You didn’t do anything! You were just picked up off the street like garbage,” Vik snarled, squeezing harder.
The insult snapped something inside Amara. With strength she hadn’t known she possessed, she broke free of the chokehold. But she didn’t try to get away from Vik. Instead she used Vik as a pivot point, scissoring her legs up and around Vik’s neck. The counterattack knocked Vik off balance and she went down, with Amara now in control.
“Know where I learned that?” Amara hissed. “On the streets, you big dumb—”
“Namani! Malikova!”
Every one of the cadets—even Vik, thrashing against Amara’s scissor hold—looked over at the barracks door to see Nate Lambert.
“Ranger on deck!” Ryoichi shouted. All of them except Amara and Vik snapped to attention. Amara let Vik go and scrambled to her feet. “She jumped me—”
Now Vik was on her feet too. “She does not belong here—”
“Enough!” Lambert snapped. He glared at both of the combatants, daring them to say another word. Neither of them did. Amara could tell he wasn’t just angry. The day’s events had wounded him, and he was not in the mood to deal with dumb status fights among his cadets.
He let them stand at attention for a long moment before he started speaking. They were expecting an angry dressing-down, but instead Lambert’s voice was quiet and level. “When I first joined the Corps, I was just like you,” he said. “Worse even. I was nobody. From nowhere. But Mako Mori told me I could make a difference.”
Over Lambert’s shoulder, Amara saw Jake drifting in from the hall. He’d probably heard the scrap just like Lambert had, and come to see what was going on.
Lambert kept talking, his voice tight with emotion that he was trying hard to control. “She said whoever you are, wherever you come from, the minute you enter this program, you’re part of a family. And
the people beside you are your brothers, and sisters.” He had noticed Jake by now, and Amara thought this part of the speech was directed at Jake as much as at the cadets. “No matter what they do… no matter how stupid they act… you forgive. And you move on. Because that’s what family does. Start believing that out here and you’ll start believing it in a Jaeger.”
Amara was normally immune to inspirational speeches, but this one resonated. Family. She didn’t have one anymore. Everyone in the room, cadet or Ranger, had lost someone. That loss bound them together into a new kind of family, even if some of the other members were assholes sometimes. She caught Vik’s eye and saw Vik was understanding the same thing. Sheepish at the way they’d goaded each other, they exchanged a nod. And by the doorway, Amara could see Jake Pentecost thinking along the same lines. She didn’t know exactly what had happened between them, but she knew Jake had kicked out, and she knew he and Lambert had been partners. Hearing Lambert’s speech and seeing Jake’s reaction, Amara started to put two and two together. Lambert was forgiving him. He was walking the walk, doing himself what he demanded of the cadets.
Amara had spent her whole life trying not to feel anything, but she’d never been around a group like this. In that moment she would have died for all of them. This was her family now.
Jules, the J-Tech beauty that both Jake and Lambert were after, stuck her head into the room. “Hey.” When Jake and Lambert turned toward her, she said, “Marshal’s looking for you guys. Says Gottlieb found something.”
* * *
Back in the K-Science lab, Jake stood with Lambert and Quan as Gottlieb swiped away a number of programs he’d had running and exposed Mako’s Kaiju-head drawing. “It isn’t something,” he said, “It’s somewhere.”
He worked a holo screen, moving Mako’s drawing over a section of a satellite map. The outline of the head matched the topography perfectly. Jake drew in a breath. She had been sending a message. Staring death in the face, Mako had kept the presence of mind to make sure that this knowledge wouldn’t die with her. “Severnaya Zemlya,” Gottlieb said. “Off Siberia’s Taymyr Peninsula.”
Next to the overlay of the drawing and the map, a larger-scale map appeared, showing the whole peninsula and the scattering of islands reaching north from it into the Arctic Ocean.
“What’s there?” Quan asked.
“Nothing anymore,” Gottlieb said. He zoomed the map in, focusing on the area under the eye of Mako’s drawing. “A facility roughly in this location was used to manufacture Jaeger power cores early in the war. But it was decommissioned years ago.”
“Why would Mako be trying to tell us about an abandoned factory in the middle of nowhere?” Lambert wondered. He was eyeing Jake as he said it, and Jake could read between the lines easily enough. He was making Jake an offer. Challenging him. If they really wanted to find out what Mako had been trying to tell them…
Jake turned to Marshal Quan. “Sir, permission to take Gipsy Avenger and see what the hell’s out there.”
Quan considered, but not for long.
16
PPDC FACILITIES DIVISION
SEVERNAYA MANUFACTURING FACILITY
CONSTRUCTED: June 2019
PRODUCTION: Power cores and plasma capacitors, Mark II and Mark III Jaegers; cabling and conduit insulation; reactor housings
STAFFING: 267
DECOMMISSIONED: December 2022
REASON FOR DECOMMISSIONING: Remoteness of location offered protection from Kaiju attacks but caused difficulties in shipping. Personnel suffered from low morale and resultant low productivity as a result of isolation. Shipments were vulnerable to theft due to multiple transfer points en route to Shatterdome locations. Errors in siting survey resulted in nearby glaciers causing shifts in subterranean areas of the manufacturing floor.
METHOD OF DISPOSAL: Attempts to sell or lease the facility to PPDC industrial and manufacturing partners were unsuccessful. Personnel reassigned to Anchorage and Vladivostok, December 2022. Critical machinery removed February 2023, facility abandoned March 2023. No current monitoring or plans for reuse.
From Moyulan to the Taymyr Peninsula was a long trip via Jumphawks. Gipsy Avenger, with Jake and Lambert holding their Drift, arrived thirty-six hours after Gottlieb’s revelation, dropping from the Jumphawks down through a blizzard to the frozen ground of Siberia. The PPDC had built a number of factories in places like this, far from the Pacific Ocean and therefore less likely to be lost in Kaiju attacks. But this one had been mothballed during the war, according to the records Gottlieb had retrieved. Newer power core technologies pioneered in China and Washington state had relocated much of the manufacturing to those places, and the Severnaya facility had been completely abandoned for more than a decade.
They got visual contact on the factory from a distance of a few hundred yards, right at the limit of visibility given the weather. It had been built into the side of a mountain, and since its abandonment a glacier had overspread part of the complex. Cascading ice had almost obscured it, and what they could see looked dilapidated and partially collapsed.
Lambert had Gipsy doing full-spectrum tactical scans of the complex, and he wasn’t finding anything. “No life signs. Looks like Gottlieb was right. Place is abandoned.”
The scanner chirped and Jake saw a signal of some kind on the readout in front of him. It was tuned to different energy signatures than Lambert’s, and until that moment it hadn’t shown anything either. Jake looked more closely. “Wait a second.” The signal was faint, fluctuating. The scanning package couldn’t identify it. “I’m picking up some weird readings,” Jake said. Lambert leaned over to look at Jake’s scanner. Neither of them could make sense of what they were seeing.
Both of them were so focused on interpreting the scanner’s readings that they missed an alarm from Gipsy’s defensive sensor package. When the first volley of plasma missiles streaked past them, they jumped, instinctively flinching away from the paths of the missiles. But they weren’t the target. The missiles exploded across the wall of the factory, destroying it and bringing down the whole face of ice and rock. Whatever evidence the factory might have contained, it was blasted to atoms now, and buried under a million tons of mountain.
Gipsy spun around to see Obsidian Fury looming out of the blizzard.
With a snarl, Jake leaned forward in his Drift cradle, pushing Gipsy Avenger into a charge. The last time he’d seen Obsidian Fury, he’d been scared, uncertain, still wondering if he’d done the right thing getting back into a Jaeger.
Now he was feeling only one thing: the overwhelming vengeful need to beat Obsidian Fury into the ground and find out who was inside. Mako was going to have justice.
Obsidian Fury slowed Gipsy down with a missile barrage, but they kept charging. Alarms sounded in the Conn-Pod, cataloguing damage to Gipsy’s systems. “Get him off his feet!” Lambert shouted.
Jake roared a battle cry and sprang up in the Drift cradle. Gipsy Avenger leaped forward, tackling Obsidian Fury and skidding across the ice. Still locked together, the two Jaegers slid over the edge of a crevasse.
In the fall, they separated. Gipsy unleashed her chain sword and Obsidian Fury answered with its twin plasma saws. They struck at each other as they slid and bounced down the steep bed of the crevasse, neither landing a damaging blow in the confined environment.
First Obsidian Fury and then Gipsy Avenger smashed through a wall of ice at the bottom of the crevasse, tumbling through onto a large ice floe in the shallows off the coast. The floe rocked as Obsidian Fury got to its feet first. The deep orange light in its chest emplacement glowed suddenly brighter, and Gipsy Avenger barely got her chain sword up in time to deflect the blast of Obsidian Fury’s particle beam. The sword scattered the beam’s force in ribbons of energy that flared between them and brought bursts of steam from the ice floe.
“Systems are overloading!” Lambert shouted over the wail of alarms. The chain sword wasn’t designed to absorb energy, and soon the feedback would destroy it—
probably along with Gipsy’s arm. “We gotta get out of here!”
To where? Jake wondered. An idea struck.
He reared up and drove one fist down. Gipsy Avenger did the same, smashing a hole through the ice floe at her feet. Gipsy dropped down through the hole, disappearing into the black water. Inside the Conn-Pod, Jake and Lambert reeled, trying to hold Gipsy’s balance as she sank. The water was deep enough to cover them, and as they landed on the bottom, Jake could feel Lambert in his head wondering what the hell they were going to do now.
“Wait for it,” he said. Above, the hole in the floe was a bright glow against the dimmer background of the heavy ice.
A shadow appeared in the brightness: Obsidian Fury, looking down through the hole. “Now,” Jake said.
Gipsy Avenger fired its own missile volley, straight up through the hole. Each missile was programmed before it left its launch tube, to go up through the hole… and then straight back down, to explode on the ice around Obsidian Fury’s feet.
As the explosions sounded in the water, Gipsy leaped up from the sea floor, powered by maneuvering jets built into her lower legs. She surged up through the enlarged hole as Obsidian Fury crashed down. Gipsy caught Obsidian Fury before the rogue Jaeger could regain its balance, driving it back up through the ice and pounding it as they rolled.
But Obsidian Fury reacted quickly, absorbing the first blows and wrestling Gipsy down. The plasma saws appeared again, ready to impale Gipsy Avenger.
Jake stayed calm. They were never going to win a straight-up fight with Obsidian Fury. The last encounter had taught them that much. They had to keep surprising it. The drop into the ice had given Gipsy a chance to do some damage. Now Obsidian Fury thought it had Gipsy down, and it was time to spring another surprise. “Plasma cannon now?” he said.