by Alex Irvine
And she hoped they hadn’t missed anything when they did the repair analyses on Gipsy Avenger or Guardian Bravo. Of all the Jaegers, Guardian Bravo seemed to be in the best shape. That was why Suresh and Ilya were free to help with the repairs to Bracer Phoenix. They’d already worked through all the diagnostics they could run on Guardian Bravo. The Arc Whip was good, hull integrity was good, Conn-Pod stability checked out okay… the only repairs Guardian Bravo needed were basically cosmetic, and could wait for another time. So while crews swarmed over the other three Jaegers, Guardian Bravo was moving slowly on a tracked platform out to the launch gantries on the far end of the tarmac. They had a path cleared, largely by bulldozing destroyed Scramblers and Jumphawks out of the way. Then outside crews had covered the missile craters in the tarmac with armor plates taken from Valor Omega and Titan Redeemer. It was ugly, but it worked well enough to get Guardian Bravo into place on a gantry. The crew waiting there locked her into place and cranes lifted the twin thruster pods up. Once they were swung into place near Guardian Bravo’s back, the whole gantry lit up with the flare of welding torches and rang with the sound of impact wrenches.
Gottlieb watched the final maneuvers, clutching a data pad and a sheaf of papers with his original notes on the potential energy of Kaiju blood. He had hit a snag in the process because he couldn’t get the fuel equation to balance. If they’d had the time to design a second component to add to the fuel mixture and create a hypergolic combination that would self-ignite, everything would have worked brilliantly. But as it was, they had to use the raw Kaiju blood, and its properties were not fully understood—at least not where potential energy was concerned. All the simulations he had run with raw Kaiju blood and a single ignition component came out slightly wrong. They either led to insufficient thermal energy release, or caused a runaway reaction that could not be controlled in the combustion chamber. In short, despite Gottlieb’s best efforts so far, the Jaegers either wouldn’t get off the ground or would explode at liftoff. He was starting to panic under the pressure.
Shao Liwen was also working on the fuel equation, and Gottlieb decided to run back inside and see how her work was going. If they couldn’t crack the problem together, there was no way on Earth to stop the Kaiju from entering Mount Fuji… except for multiple nuclear strikes.
28
KAIJU CONVERGE ON JAPAN
INTERNATIONAL NEWS AGENCY STAFF REPORTS
Three Kaiju have survived the eruption of numerous Breaches around the Pacific Rim and appear to be converging on Japan, according to information released by the Pan Pacific Defense Corps.
The three Kaiju, first seen along the east coast of the Asian mainland, appear to be taking different routes that will intersect at some point in Japan, though the PPDC cautioned that their future movements could not be projected with any certainty.
A source within the PPDC, requesting anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the details of the Breaches’ appearance and collapse, said an unknown number of other Kaiju died while crossing Breaches that closed suddenly when the Drone Jaegers were simultaneously deactivated. The PPDC and Shao Industries have declined to address questions about this event, but it is known that at least nine other dead Kaiju are present in the shallow waters near various Pacific population centers. PPDC facilities near those areas are offering help with environmental remediation as they prepare to remove the partial Kaiju carcasses. With rumors flying that the rogue Jaeger Obsidian Fury and the hacked Drones were all using Kaiju biotechnology, control over the samples of the creatures’ tissue becomes even more important for future security…
Shao was calling his name, and Hermann snapped back to the present. He had wandered back into the Shatterdome and now he looked up to see Shao coming toward him, falling into step so he could see her new calculations as they walked on. “See,” she said. “The raw fuel will undergo a chain reaction in the presence of any pure lanthanides, but there is possibly a way to use smaller amounts of the raw fuel in a primary combustion chamber and then inject the full supply into a secondary combustion chamber where the—”
“Yes!” Hermann said. “Yes. We must get to the lab and run these simulations immediately.” Reaching out to a nearby Shao Industries technician, he started to explain what he needed. Shao took over, instructing the tech in careful Mandarin exactly what modifications the gantry crews needed to make to the thruster pods. She sent him on his way and joined Hermann for the short walk to his lab, where they would find out if it had any chance of working.
Her idea was sound. To stop the Kaiju blood from undergoing a chain reaction and consuming the entire supply at once—in other words, from going off like a bomb—they had to use extremely small amounts of the catalyzing lanthanide to ignite small amounts of the Kaiju blood. But then they had to feed that ignited Kaiju blood into a second combustion chamber where it would mix with an unburnt supply fed in through a second line. If they modulated that mixture correctly, they would have an amount of thermal release sufficient to fly a Jaeger but not overload the engines.
Outside on the launch pad, the gantry crews were already installing the second feeder lines and adding the secondary combustion chamber. They had to refit the exhaust nozzles and rewrite the operating software as well, and they could not complete that second task until Gottlieb and Liwen could provide a stable fuel-mix equation. They were close, but still not there. Liwen was moving numbers around on a holo display while Gottlieb worked the same numbers on the screen at his main terminal. At this point, it was a process of elimination. There was a value that would succeed. They just had to run the sequence over and over again until they found it. Part of that process could be automated, but part of it had to come from the intuition of scientists working in the lab.
“Gottlieb,” Shao said. He looked over and saw she had found a solution.
He rushed over to the terminal next to hers, checking her numbers and running them again several times to make sure there was no error. The equation checked out. They had a primary combustion ratio.
Hermann felt a spike of sorrow as he realized he could not share this discovery with Newt. It was the kind of work they had done together once, and now Hermann was forced to do it again because Newt had fallen under the sway of the Precursors. Where was he now? What was he doing? Was he able to watch the Kaiju make their slow progress toward mainland Japan, and ultimately the slumbering caldera of Mount Fuji? Hermann hoped there was a way to cure Newt, if PPDC forces did not kill him when he was found. A sane Newton Geiszler would appreciate what he and Shao had done. He was one of the few people on Earth who could… which of course was what made him such a dangerous adversary as a tool of the Precursors. But if he could be cured…
“Gottlieb,” Shao said. “Do you confirm my result?”
He nodded. “I do. Superb. This is going to work.”
* * *
Outside it was morning. Four Jaegers stood at their launch gantries, with four new sets of thruster pods attached to their backs. Separate smaller impulse thrusters were also attached to their lower legs. Gipsy Avenger already had these, and J-Tech crews had added them to the other Jaegers to increase maneuverability. At dawn, Bracer Phoenix had paused on her journey out to the gantry so tech crews could do a test deployment of the Morning Star Hand grafted on from Titan Redeemer. With everyone in the Shatterdome watching, a remote operation team ran the Morning Star Hand system, raising Bracer’s right arm.
The target was one of the fallen Drones, dragged out of the Shatterdome and now lying near the oceanside lifts. Jake and Lambert were back in the ready room, putting on their drivesuits and running pre-deployment checks on their Drift helmets. Over their commlinks, they heard the tech crews arguing about something in Mandarin. Then one of them ordered Bracer Phoenix to fire.
Jake and Lambert looked up at the video screen in the ready room, which was set to a feed from the tarmac. The Morning Star Hand exploded from Bracer Phoenix’s arm, crossing the hundred yards of tarmac in less t
han a second. The impact on the torso of the fallen Drone sounded like a bomb going off. Pieces of the Drone’s armor spun away over the water and the target itself was blasted off the ground, landing with a splash that slopped waves up to the edge of the tarmac. The water churned around the sinking Drone as Bracer Phoenix snapped the Morning Star Head back into place. Waiting Jumphawks, among the few that had survived the attack, dropped cables down to retrieve the Drone. As they pulled it up out of the water, they could see the enormous dent in the side of its armor. Both of them were imagining what that would do to a Cat-4 or Cat-5 Kaiju, gauging whether it would be enough.
Jake glanced over at Lambert. “Guess it works,” Lambert said.
There wasn’t much to add. Bracer wasn’t their ride, anyway. They finished getting ready and headed for the Shatterdome.
* * *
Hours after they’d started work on the Jaegers, Jules caught up with Jake and Lambert in the Shatterdome to update them. They were in their drivesuits, headed for the launch pads and the long ride up the gantries to Gipsy Avenger’s Conn-Pod hatch. Destroyed vehicles and discarded Jaeger parts and armor formed mounds of debris around the cleared areas of the Shatterdome deck. If Gottlieb’s crazy plan was going to work, they would all find out soon. The last time they’d talked to him, he was full of enthusiasm, but they couldn’t follow the technical details of what he was saying, so they just nodded and let him run out of steam. But the upshot, at least as far as they could tell, was that Gottlieb and Shao Liwen working together had solved the critical problem with using Kaiju blood as fuel. So Jake was cautiously optimistic that the thruster pods wouldn’t incinerate them all as soon as someone gave the ignition command.
“Saber Athena, Guardian Bravo, and Bracer Phoenix are good to go,” Jules said. Jake and Lambert had already signed off Gipsy Avenger.
“Not a lot to work with,” Jake said. He was wishing they had Titan Redeemer still, but there wasn’t time to get her back up and running—especially not since they’d cannibalized several hundred of her parts, including her main weapon system, to speed up repairs to the other Jaegers.
“Liwen’s team kit-bashed some Fury tech into Gipsy that might help,” Jules added.
Jake was about to ask what, but Lambert didn’t seem to care. They’d find out sooner or later anyway.
“Prep everything we’ve got for deployment,” Lambert said. PPDC policy called for full deployment of an individual Shatterdome’s complement of Jaegers only in extraordinary circumstances. During the war several Shatterdomes had suffered attacks while defenseless, so the policy made sense, but if ever there had been an extraordinary circumstance, this was it. No point in holding reserves back now.
A moment passed between Jules and Lambert. Jake stayed out of it, deliberately looking the other way. There was nobody to see him off and wish him well. Hadn’t been in a long time. He was used to it, and he would fight the good fight anyway. “Don’t get yourself killed, okay?” Jules said, and kissed Lambert on the cheek.
Then she turned to Jake, surprising him. “You either,” she said, and kissed him too.
Jake and Lambert watched her go. “Well, that’s confusing,” Jake said. Here he’d been telling himself how nobody cared, and then Jules had to go and confuse everything.
With a frown, Lambert said, “Let’s stay on point. We only have four Jaegers. Against two Category Fours and a Fiver.”
Feeling optimistic in the wake of Jules’ kiss, Jake said, “Better than just Gipsy.”
“Still need pilots,” Nate said, not willing to concede the point.
Jake started walking again, skirting pieces of Titan Redeemer’s discarded armor plating. This was the one part of the plan he wasn’t worried about. “We have them.”
* * *
The cadets stood in a tight group, wearing their cadet drivesuits and holding their helmets. All of them were there but Meilin and Tahima, who had been too severely wounded in the Drone attack to serve. Jake and Lambert walked up to them and nodded. Jake hoped the gesture was reassuring. He could have used a little reassurance himself. Out in the world, the Kaiju-worshipping cults were rejoicing. They knew Kaiju had returned, and they had also gotten wind about exactly how the Drone program had been corrupted. The sites of the fallen Drones were crowded with Kaiju worshippers, touching the Drones and ritually scarring themselves with the Kaiju blood that still seeped from the tissue within. The PPDC and local law enforcement were too overwhelmed trying to cope with the damage to stop them.
Cities around the world were burning from the Drone attacks, and a fresh wave of fear was causing unrest even in places that hadn’t been directly attacked. The Kaiju were back. Ten years since the closing of the first Breach was enough time for people to begin to believe that it would never happen again. Thus the calls to scale back the PPDC, devote its resources elsewhere, lower expenses by putting Jaegers under Drone remote control. Mako had fought hard on the PPDC’s behalf, arguing that the costs of being caught unprepared were unimaginably worse than the costs of keeping up the PPDC. Who could say the Precursors would never open another Breach? How could they ever know? And how would they look the people of the world in the eye if the PPDC was shut down and a new Breach opened and there was nothing to defend them with?
Jake was choked with emotion as he considered how she hadn’t lived to see just how right she was… and then rage crackled through him. Whether he was under Precursor control or not, Newt Geiszler had built the Jaeger that killed Mako because she was about to reveal his plan. Jake still didn’t know how she’d found out, and PPDC intel services were digging into her records to see what they could learn on that front, but the details weren’t important in the end. She had known, and Newt had killed her for it. Or the Precursor inside Newt’s mind. At that moment Jake wasn’t sure he cared about the distinction.
He stood before the cadets, aware of their eyes on him, their expectations of him. He wasn’t his father. He wasn’t going to come up with a great line like “Today we are canceling the apocalypse.” But he could come at things from a different angle, an angle he understood because he’d lived it.
“If my dad were here, he’d probably give a big speech, make you all feel invincible,” Jake began. “But I’m not my father. I’m not… I’m not a hero like he was. Like Raleigh Becket and Mako Mori. But they didn’t start out that way, either. They started as cadets, just like you. We remember them as giants because they stood tall. Because they stood together. It doesn’t matter how many tries it took to get here. Or who your parents are. Or where you came from. Or who believed in you and who didn’t. You’re part of a family now.”
He glanced over at Lambert and saw his partner acknowledging Jake’s callback to Lambert’s speech to the cadets a couple of days before. “This is our time. This is our chance to make a difference.”
The cadets were standing straight and tall now, their young faces set in expressions of resolve. Jake looked from one to the next, making eye contact with each one. He was asking a lot of them, and they wouldn’t know if they were up to the challenge until they were inside a Conn-Pod with a raging Jaeger on the HUD. There was no training for the flicker of terror any human being felt on seeing that.
After he’d had a brief moment with each of them, he nodded. “Mount up and let’s get it done.”
29
WORLDWIDE PANIC
EVACUATIONS ACROSS PACIFIC RIM AS KAIJU PASS THROUGH MULTIPLE BREACHES
PPDC CONFIRMS THREE KAIJU
Humanity’s worst nightmare came true yesterday, as multiple Breaches opened up across the Pacific Basin, resulting in the appearance of three Kaiju and the destruction of many of the Pan Pacific Defense Corps’ Shatterdome bunkers.
The Kaiju did not immediately make landfall after appearing separately in the East China Sea, the Sea of Japan, and the Sea of Okhotsk. Their current pathways appear to be taking them toward Japan, but all coastal populations are being urged to evacuate.
The PPDC refused to confirm report
s that the Breaches were created by Drone Jaegers. Multiple eyewitness accounts claim to have seen Drone Jaegers coordinating the Breach creations, but Shao Industries spokespeople have vigorously denied this, saying Shao Industries and the PPDC are continuing to work in partnership to fight all Kaiju threats.
The catastrophic failure of the Drone program, which resulted in rogue Drones destroying several Jaegers and causing incalculable damage in Pacific Rim cities from South America to Russia, is stimulating calls for investigation of Shao Industries and its founder, Shao Liwen. She was understood to be at the Moyulan Shatterdome near Shanghai and was unavailable for comment.
More on this developing story as it becomes available.
On the gantries, Ranger teams exited the elevators and ducked through their Conn-Pod hatches. Techs making last-minute adjustments still scurried up and down the scaffolding, mostly around the thruster pods. Everything else they’d done was working with existing systems that had been tested over a period of years. The thrusters not only hadn’t been tested, they hadn’t even been through a design process. They were cobbled together from Jumphawk fuel tanks, repurposed V-Dragon thrusters, and fuel lines adapted from plasma feeders. The software controlling them was a series of patched-together code blocks borrowed from other systems. The math checked out, and the materials had been tested under other circumstances, but the history of rocketry was a story of unexpected failures that only had obvious causes after engineers spent months picking through the pieces. Neither the PPDC nor the human race as a whole could afford that today.