by Alex Irvine
“Yeah, great names,” Jake said. “Sound like real a-holes.”
Lambert was frowning at the patterns of the Kaiju’s motion. “Shrikethorn and Raijin are moving away from the cities, towards the ocean.”
“Maybe they’re trying to link up with Hakuja in the East China Sea,” Liwen suggested.
This was possible, Jake thought. Kaiju hadn’t been known to look for each other like that before. During the war, they had sometimes emerged in pairs, but only once had PPDC forces fought three Kaiju. That was the Battle of the Breach, when Stacker Pentecost had blown his own Jaeger’s reactor to buy Gipsy Danger the time and space to get into the Breach.
Now Jake was about to take on three Kaiju, just like his father had. At least it looked that way, because the three trajectories of the Kaiju were loosely converging. They weren’t headed directly for each other, though, which made Jake wonder. “Newt would know what they’re up to, if we could get it out of him,” he said.
“Have to find him first,” Lambert commented.
“He escaped in a Shao V-Dragon,” Shao said. “My men are trying to track him, but he disabled the transponder.”
“Then that’s off the table,” Jake said. There wasn’t any time to worry about things they couldn’t control. Nodding at the screen, he asked, “Any Jaegers closer to those Kaiju than us?”
“What was left from the Chin-do and Sakhalinsk ’domes tried to intercept,” Gottlieb said. “Emphasis on ‘tried’.”
Lambert stared harder at the map. “There’s gotta be something there. Something in the East China Sea…”
Jake looked too, sure there was something they were missing. If you looked at all of the trajectories, maybe—
That was it. All of the trajectories. “Maybe that’s not where they’re headed,” he said. “Pull up a map of Kaiju movement from the war.”
Surprised, Lambert looked over at Jake. “You know something we don’t?”
“You said you have to understand your enemy’s objective to know you’ve beaten them,” Jake responded, needling Lambert a little but also letting him know that speech had stayed with him.
A map displaying Kaiju incursions from the war appeared on the screen as Gottlieb brought it over from the PPDC strategic records server. Jake started working the screen, drawing lines that extended the Kaiju’s paths if Jaegers hadn’t stopped them. “What if the Kaiju weren’t blindly attacking our cities during the war? What if we were just in their way?”
Jake was no artist, but the more of the lines he traced, the clearer it became that they intersected at a single point.
“Mount Fuji, Japan,” Lambert said.
Gottlieb started performing the same course extrapolations for Hakuja, Shrikethorn, and Raijin. There it was, just as Jake had intuited. Their courses were also set to intersect at Mount Fuji. That left the million-dollar question, given voice by Shao Liwen. “But why?”
Hermann Gottlieb gave a quick gasp of understanding. “Rare earth elements,” he said slowly. “Mount Fuji is a volcano, rich in rare earth elements.”
“Why are you looking like you’re gonna pee your pants?” Jake asked. If Gottlieb was this scared, Jake felt like he should probably be scared as well, but he wanted to have a good reason.
“Because Kaiju blood reacts violently with them. It’s the basis of my thruster fuel experiments.”
“That sounds bad,” Lambert said. “That’s bad, right?”
“Very,” Shao said. “Mount Fuji is active. A geological pressure point.”
Gottlieb worked the holo screen, doing rapid math that the screen translated into visuals. A cross section of Mount Fuji, showing the lava reservoir below it, appeared, with a simulated Kaiju crawling into the caldera at the top of the mountain. “Based on the blood to mass ratio of the Kaiju…” He was running back-of-the-envelope calculations of Kaiju blood volatility versus the ratios of different rare earth elements in a volcanic interior. Astonishing stuff to do just off the top of your head, Jake thought. There weren’t many people in the world as smart as Hermann Gottlieb.
The screen now showed a map of the entire Pacific Rim, with active volcanoes marked. The region was known as the Ring of Fire, because of the intense volcanic activity in the areas where the Pacific tectonic plate ground against its neighbors in Asia and North America. On the screen, volcano after volcano began to erupt. When Gottlieb spoke, his tone was low and somber. “The reaction would cause a cascade event, igniting the Ring of Fire around the Pacific Rim.” The simulation continued, wreathing the globe in a gray blanket. “Billions of tons of toxic gas and ash will spew into the atmosphere, wiping out all life.”
Shao understood. “That would finish terraforming Earth for the Precursors.”
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Lambert objected. “Why not just open a Breach right over Fuji and drop the Kaiju in?”
Lambert had a sharp tactical mind, and Jake chimed in with another angle on the same problem. “Or send one so big nothing could stop it?”
“From the data we recovered from Dr. Geiszler’s files, the Precursors can only penetrate dimensional ‘soft spots,’ as he called them, between universes,” Shao explained. “Every location the Drones chose corresponded to one of these.”
“And a Category Five is theoretically the largest Kaiju they could send through, since the energy it takes to widen a Breach exponentially quadruples as the—”
“Yeah, science is our friend,” Jake said. This was the downside of being a genius like Gottlieb. You started talking a language normal people couldn’t understand. “We get it.”
“We can’t let them reach Mount Fuji,” Lambert stated flatly. That was their mission objective, the only one that mattered.
“I’ll check with Jules, see where we are with the Jaeger repairs,” Jake said.
“Even if you had a hundred, there’s no way to intercept in time,” Shao said, looking at the distances on the map. “The Drones destroyed your Jumphawks and my V-Dragons aren’t built to carry that kind of load.”
There was a long silence. Jaegers couldn’t outrun Kaiju without getting into the air. If they couldn’t figure that part of the battle plan out, they would just have to sit here in the war room and enjoy satellite images of the Kaiju crawling into Mount Fuji and ending the human race.
Then Lambert looked away from the screen to Gottlieb. “What about your thruster pods?”
Jake remembered Gottlieb talking about those right when Jake was arriving at Moyulan. He’d been puzzled at the time, seeing Newt dismiss the idea and warn Gottlieb away from working with Kaiju blood. After all, coming up with new ideas about how to fight the Kaiju—understand them better—was the whole reason for K-Science’s existence. Now that they knew the truth about Newt, that conversation took on a more sinister meaning. Had Newt done it on purpose? How much control did he have? It didn’t seem possible that Newt could have carried around a Precursor in his head for ten years without either going crazy or letting something slip. Maybe he didn’t always know it was there? Jake figured that if a Precursor could use the Drift to get into Newt’s head across a dimensional barrier, it could probably also hide its existence from him. But that was all speculation. Right now they needed concrete solutions to concrete problems. Like the problem of whether they could use Gottlieb’s thruster pods to catch the Kaiju before they got to Mount Fuji.
“They’re not ready,” Gottlieb said.
Shao got right to the point. “Can they be?”
Gottlieb considered the question. “In theory, maybe, with your help.”
“What does that mean, ‘in theory’?” Jake asked. They didn’t have time to deal in theories. They needed results. Immediately if not sooner.
Gottlieb heard the challenge and lifted his chin a little, understanding the task ahead. “Today it means yes,” he said.
27
THEY HAD A CREW OF HUNDREDS, THANKS TO the reinforcements from Shao Industries—but not much time. A quick assessment of Valor Omega determined
that she would have to be scrapped, and Titan Redeemer was also too badly damaged to take any part in the current fight. It might have been possible to repair her damaged leg, with parts scavenged from Valor Omega’s remains, but Titan had also suffered catastrophic damage in the uncontrolled fall. Her guidance systems needed a complete overhaul and the interior of her Conn-Pod had been almost destroyed by missile strikes after she fell. That left four Jaegers to be the focus of the tech team’s work. Gipsy Avenger needed repairs to her armor plating and Conn-Pod housing to get her fully combat-ready after her engagement with Obsidian Fury in Siberia. Bracer Phoenix, Saber Athena, and Guardian Bravo had all suffered damage in the Drone attack. They couldn’t go into the field at all without at least some repair. And then there was the question of the thruster pods. They had to get the idea from Gottlieb’s notes to the Shatterdome tarmac in less than twenty-four hours or none of the repairs to the Jaegers would matter anyway.
Added to that was the widespread damage to support vehicles and the docking mechanisms. The first thing Shao’s crews did was get four of the cradles welded back together so they could hold the Jaegers that needed repair. Then the Jaegers were towed into place and the real work could begin. The Jaeger bay was controlled chaos, with J-Tech and Shao teams crisscrossing it on repeated trips from parts and electronics warehouse storage to the docking cradles.
Outside, Hermann Gottlieb oversaw a caravan of tankers carrying Kaiju blood. Large reserves of it were kept in anaerobic storage in tanks deep below the Shatterdome, along with other Kaiju tissue and genetic material used in K-Science research. Now Gottlieb followed those tankers out onto the arm of the tarmac where the Jumphawk gantries stood. He thought the gantries would be strong enough to hold the Jaegers upright and true at the ignition of the thruster pods, if he could get the thruster pods built and integrated into the Jaegers’ command systems soon enough.
Near the gantries he had set up an outdoor assembly line. Crews of welders and engineers took repurposed fuel tanks and thruster cones adapted from V-Dragon engines. They had to build the rest on the fly: fuel lines and valves, electronic control systems that could be quickly mated to the Jaegers’ operating software, ignition chambers designed around catalyzing ingots of rare earth metals, brackets and housings to attach the thruster pods to the Jaegers at the correct angle so firing the thrusters wouldn’t knock the Jaegers into an uncontrollable spin. There was also the problem of waste heat from the thrusters, which according to Gottlieb’s calculations was a danger to the electronics in the Jaegers’ midsections and legs. He ran back and forth from the tarmac to the Jaeger bay, making sure crews were adding heat shielding to the backs of the Jaegers and also installing thruster shunts below the exhaust nozzles to direct as much of the heat away from the Jaegers as possible. Then that meant he had to go back and recalculate the impulse angles to keep the Jaegers from spinning or tumbling… There were, as the saying went, a lot of moving parts. Gottlieb had no doubt that his math was correct, and the Kaiju blood would yield enough thrust to get the Jaegers airborne. The rest of the design would just have to go into the field untested.
Inside the bay, medical teams had removed most of the wounded and were working on recovering the dead. The base infirmary was more than two hundred percent over capacity, and wounded filled the barracks closest to the infirmary level. The dead, numbering in the hundreds, were zipped into body bags and held in the base morgue, which was also filled far beyond its design capacity. The traumatic aftershocks of the event would set in soon, but at that moment every member of the Shatterdome’s crew was working toward one overriding goal: stopping the three Kaiju from reaching the top of Mount Fuji.
Triage of the damage to the four Jaegers they needed to achieve that goal yielded a long list of necessary repairs. Bracer Phoenix had suffered some of the worst damage. Her right arm was completely burned out, and they had no way to repair it in time. Jules had puzzled over this problem until she had an idea that she took to Lambert and Jake. She found them elbow-deep in Gipsy Avenger’s Conn-Pod, retuning the maglev field generators. “Bracer Phoenix is down an arm. No time to get her combat-ready,” she said.
“Bracer’s railgun doesn’t need her arm, right?” Lambert asked. “It’s not ideal, but that team might just have to go out with one arm.”
“Or…” Jules looked out over the dock floor. Crews had moved parts of Titan Redeemer out of the way toward the collapsed rubble of the LOCCENT. The torso was still in place, but the limbs and head were already pushed aside—except for Titan Redeemer’s left arm, which hung in a cable sling between two mobile cranes. “Titan Redeemer’s not going to be using that one anymore.”
Both Jake and Lambert looked down at the detached arm. Then they looked at each other, and then back at Jules. “That’s Titan Redeemer’s left arm,” Jake pointed out.
“Yeah,” Jules nodded. “But we don’t have to use the whole thing. Most of the damage to Bracer is elbow down. We can take the Morning Star Hand emplacement, flip it over, and mate it to Bracer’s right arm. From there we can run new conduits to the main combat integration system that feeds the HUD in the Conn-Pod, and the crew shouldn’t notice any difference.”
“I like it,” Jake said.
“I do too,” Lambert said. “Except Bracer’s crew won’t have trained with it. Will they know what to do? It’s going to change the balance of how Bracer moves. That thing is heavy.”
“Better than nothing, right?” Jules waited for one of them to contradict her. When they didn’t, she said, “All right. I’m going to get to it.”
* * *
Amara and Jinhai paused in their work at the side of Bracer Phoenix’s head to watch as the twin cranes carrying the Morning Star Hand lifted it into position. They were a hundred feet above it all, but the scale of the Jaeger parts made it all seem closer—until you realized how tiny the people looked, swarming around the monumental limb. Jules’ crew had disassembled most of Titan Redeemer’s arm, leaving only the Morning Star Hand and the internal spool holding the cable. From the spool housing, cables as thick as a human thigh dangled, waiting to be spliced into Bracer Phoenix’s guidance systems. While Jules had been working on Titan Redeemer’s arm, a crew from Shao Industries had pulled off Bracer Phoenix’s arm below the elbow, and stripped away the external plating up to Bracer’s shoulder. They had the new cable junctions ready. Other crews were standing by with the interlocking plates of Bracer’s armor, waiting to refit it over the Morning Star Hand assembly.
Bracer rocked in the holding cradle as the crew banged the assembly into place against her elbow. Amara and Jinhai got back to work. One of the Drone missiles had hit the Jaeger square in the side of the head. Bracer’s cranial armor had mostly held together, but the blast wave had destroyed the complicated gyroscopic mechanism that served Jaegers the way the inner ear served a human being. Without it, the Jaeger wouldn’t be able to keep its balance. Heading back in through Bracer’s Conn-Pod hatch, they worked their way past Vik, who was tack-welding brackets back into place after she had repaired the damaged electronics servicing the gyroscope.
Amara and Jinhai got their hands under the gyroscope. They locked eyes. “One,” Jinhai said. Two and three were silent, but they lifted at exactly the same time, grunting and staggering with the gyroscope over to its housing. They got the edge of it resting on the flanged edge of the housing, but it started to overbalance as Jinhai shifted to get a grip on the side and ease it in. Before it could tumble out, Vik rushed over and braced it. The three of them, working together, got it in place. They exchanged exhausted fist bumps and Vik got back to her welding. Jinhai fired up a compressor powering an impact wrench to bolt the gyroscope into place, and Amara went back out onto the catwalk.
Suresh and Ilya were there, waiting for her to tell them what to do with a cart full of parts she’d sent them to get from a locker below the docking cradles. “Next thing we need is that shock absorber,” she said, tapping her hand on a six-foot-long hydraulic absorber. It was one
of eight that spoked out from the gyroscope housing, keeping the Jaeger’s balance modulator from being bounced around too much in combat or deployment. Suresh and Ilya maneuvered it past her and in through Bracer Phoenix’s Conn-Pod hatch.
Amara went down the catwalk toward Saber Athena, in the next bay, to see how things were going there. She was exhausted from work and lack of sleep, but she was also riding a wave unlike any she had ever felt before. Jake had put her in charge of what he called “Scrapperizing” some of the repairs. The way he explained it, that meant Amara had to figure out how to rig up on-the-fly solutions for repairs that they didn’t have time to do according to the procedures in the Jaegers’ technical spec. Amara had almost refused, since she was the new kid at Moyulan and didn’t want to be put in the position of making the other cadets treat her like the teacher’s pet. Jake had cut her refusal off. “Look,” he’d said. “You’ve built a Jaeger. They haven’t. So we need what you know and there’s no time to worry about how anyone feels about it. If they’re giving you trouble, save it for later.”
After we ride Gottlieb’s experimental thrusters over hundreds of miles of ocean into combat against three powerful Kaiju, with all of our Jaegers held together essentially by duct tape and baling wire. The more Amara thought about it, the more she realized Jake was right not to worry about how anyone would feel about it tomorrow… because the odds of there being a tomorrow didn’t look all that good.
But if they were going to go down, they were going to go down fighting.
Renata and Ryoichi hung in rappelling harnesses from the catwalk ringing Saber Athena’s berth. They were welding a plate closed on Saber’s chest, covering a crack left by a plasma missile. Saber was in decent shape overall. Her weapons systems were housed on her back, so the missiles hadn’t affected any of them directly. But her front side had taken a lot of impact damage. A small army of J-Tech and Shao personnel hung in other harnesses, welding repair plates into place. It wasn’t going to be pretty, but Amara thought they had figured out a way to get the repairs done without compromising Saber Athena’s superior speed and agility. At least she hoped they had.