by Alex Irvine
“Hell yeah!” Lambert thrust out his left hand, and Gipsy Avenger’s left hand rearranged itself into a plasma cannon. The blast rocked Gipsy Avenger back, and sent Obsidian Fury flying back across the ice floe to land on its back, trailing smoke.
Gipsy Avenger rose, deploying her chain sword again. Obsidian Fury got up, but not as fast as it had before. They were doing some damage. Obsidian Fury charged, brandishing its plasma saws—only when it redeployed them, they multiplied into a storm of whirling blades on each arm.
“Oh shit,” Jake and Lambert said in unison. Gipsy Avenger’s armor plating wasn’t going to stop those saws for long. But Jake was already watching the nuances of Obsidian Fury’s stances. He remembered the fight in Sydney. If Obsidian Fury did what it had done last time, there would be an opening.
Obsidian Fury shifted its weight to slash one of its plasma saws at Gipsy Avenger’s head, the move triggering an alert from the combat-readiness program built into Gipsy Avenger’s sensors. Yes. They had seen this before.
And the answer was… “Follow my lead!” Jake cried out.
Gipsy Avenger was already ducking as they saw Obsidian Fury begin the move. Sidestepping under the incoming plasma saw, they struck out with the chain sword as Gipsy Avenger slid along the ice, tearing open Obsidian Fury’s torso. Obsidian Fury staggered past, pieces of its armor shedding onto the ice. Its power core was exposed, leaking energy that started small fires inside it.
“He’s hurt!” Jake crowed.
Lambert leaned into a charge. “Go for his power core!”
Obsidian Fury parried the first blows of the chain sword, and Jake got a little too eager. He extended Gipsy Avenger’s arm in a thrust meant to destroy the exposed power core, but Obsidian Fury was still fast. It dodged to one side and the chain sword drove into its thigh. Planting its other leg, Obsidian Fury slashed a plasma saw down and amputated their chain sword.
The sudden loss of mass changed Gipsy’s center of gravity and sent her tumbling. Jake and Lambert barely got her up and turned around before Obsidian Fury came at them again with the saws. Gipsy Avenger caught Obsidian Fury’s wrists, but the plasma saws gouged into the side of Gipsy’s head.
The Conn-Pod shook and small electrical fires filled it with smoke. Jake and Lambert stopped the saws’ progress, grunting with the effort and slowly… painfully… beginning to push them back.
If they hadn’t already damaged Obsidian Fury, it would never have worked. But they had, and Obsidian Fury gave way, inch by inch, until Gipsy Avenger had twisted the saws away from her head. Jake and Lambert felt the rogue Jaeger’s balance shift, and they seized the advantage, torquing Obsidian Fury’s arms around and jamming its plasma saws straight into its own chest.
The energy discharge flared through Obsidian Fury as Gipsy followed up with a shattering head-butt straight into its face. They beat the rogue Jaeger down, batting aside its weakening defenses. Still dangerous, Obsidian Fury dragged the saws free and almost caught Gipsy with a desperate strike—but as Gipsy ducked the blow, Jake and Lambert reached out and yanked the broken chain sword out of Obsidian Fury’s leg. In the same motion, they reared up and drove the blade into Obsidian Fury’s neck. With one hand on the sword, Gipsy Avenger drove Obsidian Fury back. Her other hand punched into the Jaeger’s torso and tore out the power core.
The surge from the destabilized core burned through Obsidian Fury, frying its systems. Energy arcs flared out from its head and torso as its limbs spasmed out… and then went limp. Obsidian Fury crumpled to the ground. The ice floe rocked gently and stabilized.
Gipsy Avenger stood over the downed Jaeger and tossed away the smoking power core. Steam hissed away from the spot where it landed on the ice. Time to see who had done all this, Jake thought. Time to meet the people who killed his sister.
He reached down, and Gipsy Avenger lifted Obsidian Fury’s faceplate off.
Steam rose from the interior of the Conn-Pod as the warm air inside came into contact with the freezing Arctic air outside. As it cleared, Jake was stunned by what he saw. “What the hell is that…?”
There were no red-suited Kaiju cultists inside, no rogue mercenaries in pseudo-military rip-offs of the PPDC drivesuit… in fact no humans at all.
The interior of Obsidian Fury’s Conn-Pod was unlike anything Jake had ever seen. Where an ordinary Jaeger had an open, hemispherical space with the Drift cradle and consoles in the center and critical sensor equipment surrounding it, the inside of Obsidian Fury’s head was almost entirely filled by a pulsing mass of Kaiju brain tissue. Nerve tendrils webbed out by the hundred, woven into electronics with no human interface to be seen. The Kaiju brain was clearly damaged by the surge of energy from the failure of Obsidian Fury’s data core. Parts of it were scorched and inert. Black streaks marked the interior of the Conn-Pod where circuitry had overloaded and loose conduits dangled near nerve endings that hung in blackened curls from the wounded part of the Kaiju’s brain. The scene was beyond nightmarish, a perversion of everything the Jaegers stood for. Jake reeled with the implications of it. Someone, somewhere, had kept a Kaiju brain and redesigned a Jaeger from the ground up to use it.
As they watched, astonished and revolted, the brain tissue began to convulse and seep both Kaiju blood and other unidentifiable fluids. A minute later it was dead and cooling, leaving Jake frustrated and at the same time even more determined. He had eliminated the tool used to kill Mako, yet he hadn’t really found her killer.
But he would.
17
INVENTORY REPORT: KNOWN SAMPLES OF KAIJU BRAIN TISSUE
THIS REPORT COMPILES ALL KNOWN KAIJU BRAINS HELD BY PPDC PERSONNEL OR AFFILIATED CIVILIAN RESEARCH PROGRAMS. THE FOLLOWING INSTITUTIONS POSSESS LICENSED SAMPLES:
[LIST REDACTED]
At the request of Marshal Quan, urgent contact was initiated with all parties on this list to confirm the status of their samples. All parties reported their samples were present and intact. Further, all parties confirmed that they were not currently engaged in any effort to replicate existing tissue samples or grow new tissue. Parties provided evidence in the form of mass-spectrometer scans and visual documentation, as well as documentation of all experiments performed on individual Kaiju brains held. Inventory of Kaiju brain tissue was confirmed at one hundred percent, with no losses and no initial evidence of misuse or violation of research regulations.
Conclusion: Obsidian Fury brain tissue did not originate with any PPDC facility or affiliated civilian research program. Other possible origins include black-market sellers. PPDC Intelligence Division is pursuing this possibility.
Technician K. McKinney, Moyulan Shatterdome
They debriefed on the move from the Jaeger bay toward K-Science, Jake walking down long maintenance corridors alongside a heavy forklift with Lambert and Quan. The J-Tech driving the forklift looked sick from the smell. Obsidian Fury was at that moment being lowered onto the tarmac outside the Shatterdome—not far from where Jake and Amara had first disembarked from the PPDC transport. Was that only a few days ago? Life comes at you fast, Jake thought. He had already brought Quan up to date in broad strokes, talking about the visual on the factory, his realization that they couldn’t stand and fight with Obsidian Fury but had to outsmart it… and then their discovery of what was inside the rogue Jaeger’s Conn-Pod. Quan had taken one look at the brain and gone stiff, the expression on his face almost religious in its revulsion. And it wasn’t just the smell, either, although the Kaiju brain by then was beginning to stink like nothing Jake had ever smelled before. They got it back under the tarp, as much to contain the stench as to hide the brain, and followed the forklift into one of the big testing rooms at the edge of the K-Science wing. Gottlieb had been warned they were coming in hot with something important, and he was there waiting for them. “Whatever was in that facility, Obsidian Fury didn’t want us getting a look,” Jake said as he saw Gottlieb approach. “Guessing it has something to do with this.”
He swept back the tarp coveri
ng the forklift’s cargo, revealing the decaying remains of the Kaiju brain from inside Obsidian Fury. The brain had suffered in transit, and they hadn’t been real delicate when they took it out of Obsidian Fury’s head, so in a lot of ways it looked worse than when Jake had first seen it in the blizzard up at Severnaya Zemlya. It was also rotting quickly, as Kaiju flesh and organs did, and the minute Jake lifted the tarp, a wave of odor rolled out from underneath, a miasma that made Jake’s eyes water even though he had been smelling it for more or less the last twelve hours.
The first thing Gottlieb did was try to stop himself from vomiting. He gagged visibly, turned away, hunched over… and then just barely held himself together. When he turned back around, the picture of composure again, Lambert said, “No pilots. Just this—whatever it is.”
“I want to know everything about it,” Quan ordered. “Inside and out.”
The look on Gottlieb’s face made Jake uneasy. It was part disgust and part relish, or even a weird kind of intellectual lust. Jake knew Gottlieb had Drifted with a Kaiju brain once. That was part of PPDC lore, along with Raleigh Becket bringing Gipsy Danger in on his own after his brother Yancy was killed, and Stacker Pentecost facing down Onibaba solo after his partner went down. But Jake had heard Gottlieb didn’t like it, and the experience had hardened him against the Kaiju, given him a visceral hatred of them he hadn’t felt before being in direct touch with their minds.
Gottlieb never talked about it, so nobody really knew the truth but him, and maybe Newt Geiszler. Right now, Gottlieb looked like a man who knew he was going to have to suffer, and also knew that the prize would be sufficient reward.
“I’m going to need a chainsaw,” Gottlieb said.
* * *
And he put it to good use, cutting away parts of the damaged exterior layers of the brain to see the intact tissue beneath. It was messy, stinking work, and by the time Gottlieb was done his industrial rubber coverall and gloves were covered in splatters of toxic goo. He set down the chainsaw he’d used to get at the inner parts of the brain and peered at the organ while Jake, Quan, and Lambert watched. Gottlieb got instruments from a nearby table and took samples before the tissue reacted too much to the ambient atmosphere. Then he stood up and said, “It’s definitely Kaiju. A secondary brain. Used to control the hindquarters.”
“Like the dinosaurs?” Lambert asked. He’d heard stories that the dinosaurs were engineered by the Kaiju’s creators, known as the Precursors. It was rumored that Newt Geiszler and Gottlieb had learned this from Drifting with a Kaiju brain, back in the darkest days of the Kaiju War. No PPDC official had ever confirmed that, or the other rumor that Raleigh Becket had learned the truth during his cataclysmic visit to the Anteverse itself. If the dinosaur story was true, the resemblance made sense, and the comparison was a natural one.
“Actually that’s a persistent myth,” Gottlieb said, immediately sidetracked by his scientist’s instinct to make sure everyone had their facts straight. “Sauropods did have a sacro-lumbar expansion once thought to—”
Jake didn’t care about the details of sauropod or Kaiju anatomy. There were more pressing questions. “How’d it get into our world?” he asked.
“Hasn’t been a Breach in ten years,” Quan added. “Sensors would have picked it up.”
“I don’t think there was a Breach,” Gottlieb said. He was back at a lab table, squinting at the tissue sample and passing various instruments over it. The readings appeared on a holo screen, but they didn’t match the baseline readings from the PPDC’s database of known Kaiju specimens. “Kaiju flesh has a distinct radioactive half-life signature, particular to the Anteverse. This specimen doesn’t.”
Jake looked from Gottlieb to Lambert, wondering if Lambert was thinking the same thing he was. They’d both had the thought in the Drift, in the first shocked moments after they’d seen the inside of Obsidian Fury’s head. “You saying it came from our universe?” Lambert asked.
“The genetic fingerprints indicate distinctly terrestrial modification techniques.” Gottlieb watched a screen as a genetic analysis scrolled by. To Jake it looked like a column of random numbers next to a representation of a DNA molecule like any other DNA molecule, but that’s why he was in the Rangers instead of K-Science. Gottlieb was fluent in whatever data language was being displayed, and he nodded at the screen. “Probably engineered from Kaiju tissue left over from the war.”
Marshal Quan hadn’t been there in Siberia, so he was just now getting his head around the idea. “Precursors didn’t do this,” he said, as if convincing himself. “Humans did.”
“How’d a bunch of crazy Kaiju worshippers do all that?” Jake wondered. It didn’t seem possible.
Gottlieb agreed. “Doubtful they could have. Only a dozen or so biotech companies in the world could even take a run at it.”
“We need to narrow that list down,” Quan said. “Fast.”
Gottlieb didn’t need to be told twice. Every bit of Kaiju tissue used for approved research purposes was catalogued and the results of the research published in a central, PPDC-administered database. That database didn’t cover all Kaiju tissue out there in the world, because there had been a lively black market in Kaiju parts during the war, but it did cover the vast majority of the biotech research conducted on permitted samples. It was the best place to start because most of the companies working with black-market samples didn’t have the facilities to create something like an engineered Kaiju brain. That kind of project took large-scale replication and cultivation laboratories, not to mention large groups of top-notch biologists and genetic engineers. So Gottlieb’s instinct was that the source of this brain was probably somewhere in the PPDC database. It made sense.
Once Gottlieb was working, he ignored them. Quan observed him for a while, then turned to Jake and Lambert. “Good work,” he said. “Mako would be proud.” To Jake he added, “So would your father.”
Jake appreciated the sentiment, but he wasn’t so sure. Stacker Pentecost had never given any sign that anything Jake did had made him proud.
* * *
From one of the human-sized access doors at the side of the Jaeger bay doors, each taller than any building left standing in Los Angeles, Amara looked out across the tarmac at the broken hulk of Obsidian Fury. The rogue Jaeger’s remains lay on the tarmac surrounded by Shatterdome security details, with J-Tech crews swarming over it in the first phases of analysis and investigation. The revelation about Obsidian Fury’s Kaiju brain had swept through the Shatterdome like wildfire, sparking a thousand rumors about whether or not there were other Kaiju out there. Had a Breach reopened, somehow undetected by PPDC satellites and geological sensors? Or had they missed other Kaiju during the war? Or had someone in a gene lab managed to create a Kaiju? Because Marshal Quan wasn’t talking—at least not to cadets—any story seemed possible.
She’d been with a group of other cadets watching as Gipsy Avenger returned. The marks of the battle with Obsidian Fury scarred Gipsy’s armor, and Amara was especially chilled to see the damage to Gipsy’s head. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to try and keep your cool while those plasma saws were chewing away at the Conn-Pod plating. The more she learned about Jake, the more she—well, not quite admired him. She wouldn’t go that far. But she did have some respect for him, at least compared to how she felt when he was holding a broken pipe over her head back in the squat in Santa Monica.
Lambert, too. He made such a point of being a humorless, overbearing tight-ass to the cadets that it was easy to forget how good he was at piloting a Jaeger. He and Jake had taken down Obsidian Fury, after barely escaping with their lives the last time the Jaegers clashed. Put together with the inspiring speech he’d dropped on the cadets a couple of nights ago, and Amara was starting to think Lambert was more of a human being than she’d suspected.
It seemed like Jake had felt the same way after that speech, and now the results of their newfound spirit of cooperation were there for anyone to see. Obsidian Fury’s torso w
as wrenched open, the black armor plating peeled back to expose the structural systems beneath. Its power core, crumpled and streaked with its lenses shattered, lay next to the main body of the Jaeger. The chain-sword wound gaped in its leg. Like its torso, Obsidian Fury’s head lay open to the sky. A specialist J-Tech detail was working inside, beginning its analysis of exactly how Obsidian Fury’s creator had learned to integrate the biological systems of a Kaiju brain with the complex electronics guiding a Jaeger.
They’d all seen the brain go by, on a pallet held up by a forklift. A crew had covered it on the forklift, but before that, they dug the brain out of Obsidian Fury’s head and laid it on a tarp. Several of the J-Tech team puked on the tarmac, and Jules yelled at them to keep it away from the tarp so they didn’t contaminate the samples K-Science would be taking. The cadets couldn’t believe what they were seeing. “That hunk of Kaiju was part of a Jaeger?” Suresh couldn’t believe it.
“Really thought it was going to be ballerinas,” Jinhai commented. If Vik had been around, she might have punched him.
They’d been bantering like that ever since, hanging around the perimeter of the investigation area and hoping that someone would ask them to do something. It hadn’t happened yet, but Amara at least wasn’t giving up. The idea of a Jaeger that fused Kaiju biology and human tech… it horrified her and fascinated her both, but mostly fascinated. Immediately she intuited that the direct brain interface accounted for the speed of Obsidian Fury’s reactions. Even the best Drift cradles had a slight delay as the Rangers’ brain signals were processed and transmitted to the Jaeger’s control systems. Could a human brain be wired directly? Probably. But what would it do to the pilot?
The other question she had was purely technical. Even without considering the quicker responses due to the direct brain–Jaeger interface, Obsidian Fury was nimbler and quicker than any other existing Jaeger. There were tech innovations there in its ruined body, and Amara really wanted to know what they were. She had to know. Staying there looking at it, she felt a physical itch in her fingers, so powerful was her need to get into that Jaeger and see how it worked.