by Alex Irvine
But unless Gottlieb had another idea, that was exactly what Jake planned to do. He still felt the Drift, and could still link with Gipsy Avenger’s systems. He tried to stand. Gipsy got part of the way up and a blinding pain shot through Jake’s head, right behind his eyes. His nose was bleeding. We Pentecosts, we always seem to get nosebleeds, he thought. But only when we’re about to do something heroic.
Another voice cut through over the comm. “Gipsy Avenger, this is Amara Namani! Stand by for assist!”
On the HUD, Jake saw Amara’s signal, moving fast along the rooftop of a nearby building. It was partially destroyed, its interior exposed and bits of concrete cascading in small slides down its exterior walls. She was running hard toward Gipsy Avenger.
Jake had just gotten Gipsy up on one knee. He wasn’t sure he could get her any farther.
Amara kept coming, at a dead sprint. Jake understood what she was about to attempt… and understood it wouldn’t work. “Amara, don’t! You won’t make it!”
“I’m gonna,” she panted.
“Don’t!”
“Gonna!”
With that last word, she jumped, kicking out over the void between her and Gipsy Avenger. She was never going to make it. She started to fall, not even halfway across the gap.
Jake surged forward, feeling the blood pour more freely from his nose as he leaned out and extended Gipsy Avenger’s hand, fingers spread. In that moment, he saw Mako again, felt the sorrow of her death and his admiration that even knowing she was going to die, she had made sure he would be able to finish the work she had started. His overtaxed mind slipped back to the Drift with Amara, to another time when she had jumped across a gap and no one had been there to save her. But this time, she did not plunge down into dark water, and no Kaiju annihilated the loved ones she was trying to reach.
Gipsy Avenger caught Amara just before she would have crashed down into the rubble of concrete and rebar in front of the building.
Jake barely kept his balance, raising her up so she could scramble in through the hole in Gipsy Avenger’s face shield. Barely keeping it together through the agony in his head and the unpredictable shifts in his mind under the neural load, he tried to glare at her. “Told you,” he said.
“Since when do I listen?” she shot back. But in her eyes he could see how shocked she was to see the state of Gipsy Avenger’s Conn-Pod. Not to mention that Jake was in rough shape, and Lambert much worse off than Jake.
“Amara,” Lambert said, barely clinging to consciousness. “You’re up.”
Amara rushed over to the maglev platform and initialized Lambert’s ejection sequence. She took his Drift helmet and stepped back. “What are you doing?” Jake asked.
“Getting out of the way,” Lambert said. He grimaced as he tried to move out of Amara’s way. “Thank God you’re crazy enough to kick that thing’s ass.”
Then he looked over at Jake and they locked eyes. “You got this, brother. Show ’em what you can do.”
Behind that, Jake heard Lambert telling him that he could have been great.
Well, now he would have to be.
Jake gave Nate a nod. Amara hit the final command in the ejection sequence. Nate’s Drift cradle opened and he was raised up into the escape pod. There was a soft popping sound, and a whoosh. “Escape pod ejected,” Gipsy Avenger’s AI said.
Amara was already locking herself into Lambert’s empty Drift cradle. “You ready for this, smallie?” Jake asked.
“One way to find out,” she said, looking straight ahead and getting her helmet settled.
Jake reset the Drift initialization and let Gottlieb know. “Stand by, Command. Initiating neural handshake.”
Gipsy Avenger was still on one knee amid the debris, looking as beaten as the devastated city around her. Jake felt the Drift fade out. His mind relaxed, clearing of the crazy superimpositions he’d felt while trying to handle Gipsy Avenger on his own. He looked over at Amara as the reboot brought them both into the Drift together, through the welter of images and impressions and on into a strong and steady neural handshake.
As one, they stood, and Gipsy Avenger stood, rocking her left fist into her right palm. They started to march forward—and Gipsy’s right leg buckled. Alarms blared in the Conn-Pod. A hologram of the leg appeared on the tactical HUD, showing extensive damage in the battle with the Mega-Kaiju. She crashed back down to one knee. Amara frantically punched commands.
“Right leg’s down!”
Gipsy Avenger’s AI voice calmly described the nature of the problem. “Warning: cascading failure. Multiple systems.”
“Reboot!” Jake yelled.
Amara worked her holo screen furiously. “I’m trying!”
“Command to Gipsy. Hostile is two kilometers out and closing fast on the summit of Mount Fuji!” Gottlieb warned.
Satellite and virtual overlays showed the Mega-Kaiju plowing steadily through the forested terrain of Mount Fuji’s slopes leading up to the treeline. Above the Kaiju, the steep snow-covered shoulders of the mountain were all too close. “We need to intercept!” Jake said.
“How? We can’t even stand up.” Out of sheer stubbornness, Amara tried to get Gipsy to her feet again, but it wasn’t going to happen.
Jake had an idea. It was crazy and virtually certain to fail, but it was better than nothing. “Maybe we don’t have to.” He started punching commands into the holo terminal. Amara, understanding through the Drift what he was thinking, looked at him like he had lost his mind.
“That’s a really bad idea,” she said. No snark, no insults, just a simple declaration. That alone told Jake how scared she was by what he was contemplating. But he figured she could sense that he was just as scared, and fear couldn’t be allowed to stop them now.
“Gottlieb,” he said. “Is there enough fuel left in any of your thrusters to get us into the atmosphere?”
“The atmosphere?” Gottlieb echoed. They heard him mumbling to himself as he ran some quick equations. “Possibly, but there won’t be enough to slow your re-entry.”
“Not going to slow down. We’ll come in hot and drop Gipsy right on top of that thing.”
Jake heard Amara’s thought before she said it out loud. “We’ll use my escape pod, smallie,” he reassured her.
“Jake,” Gottlieb came back. “There’s only one thruster pod with enough fuel remaining to reach the troposphere. Sending location.”
When the location popped up on the tactical HUD, Jake sagged in the Drift cradle. It was too far away, back near the site of their initial engagement with the Kaiju. “It’s too far away,” Amara said. The grim realization set in. “We’re not gonna make it.”
35
A NEW VOICE CAME OVER THE COMM. “GIPSY Avenger.” It was Shao Liwen. “Systems are online!”
Jake had no idea what she was talking about.
“Sending help!” she added.
What kind of help? Jake wondered. They had no Jaegers left.
“I’ve located the thruster pod,” Liwen explained. “Stand by!”
* * *
The cargo doors of a modified heavy-lift Shao V-Dragon opened as it banked over the apocalyptic ruin of Tokyo. Out into the void rolled Scrapper, dropping through the air and opening up just as it crashed through the roof of a damaged restaurant and landed heavily, collapsing the floor. Quickly it looked around and headed out into the street, closing in on the location of the thruster pod where it had been jettisoned at the beginning of the fight. The air was thick with hanging dust and the smoke from a thousand fires burning in the wreckage. Scrapper moved unerringly through it, climbing piles of rubble and kicking aside small obstacles.
In the Moyulan Shatterdome machine shop, Shao Liwen stood in a redesigned set of Conn-Pod rings, retrofitted from the remote Drone control suites so she could operate Scrapper from afar. She trotted forward and bent over, picking up a holographic thruster pod. Then she turned around and ran into the Drift cradle, propelling Scrapper through the ruins on a path that led to
ward the looming, stranded bulk of Gipsy Avenger in the distance. Newt Geiszler had used her factories, her inventions, her expertise, to execute his plan. What happened in her company’s name was her responsibility, and Shao was going to do everything in her power to atone for that failure. She’d had the idea to mobilize Scrapper early in the day, and had kept at it even after it seemed like the field Jaegers weren’t going to need any help. Now she was glad she hadn’t quit, because Scrapper was no longer just an afterthought. Now the little homemade Jaeger—with some improvements Shao had made—was mission critical.
“Scrapper!” Amara beamed as she saw her creation appear from the smoke on Gipsy Avenger’s HUD.
She got a direct visual through Gipsy’s broken face shield, and her smile got even wider. Shao Liwen had worked on Scrapper! Shao Liwen! She’d always been one of Amara’s idols, and to think that Shao had deemed Scrapper worthy of her attention…
Amara got a grip on her pride. “Okay, we got a rocket,” she said. But she was also running calculations about their thrust and potential altitude, and her face got grim. “Thrust is too strong. We won’t be able to hold onto it.”
“I upgraded Scrapper’s weapons!” Shao answered. “I can weld it to your hand.”
“Nice,” Amara said. She could appreciate a good field hack, and Shao was still the best.
Scrapper approached and dropped the thruster pod. Gipsy Avenger bent low to pick it up. Jake oriented it so Gipsy could hold it out at an angle with the exhaust nozzle pointed behind them. Scrapper climbed up onto Gipsy’s arm as plasma blasters with Shao Industries logos unfolded from its shoulders. The blasters fired, melting the thruster pod’s clamp assembly onto Gipsy Avenger’s hand. While Shao worked, Amara watched, admiring Shao Liwen all over again. “We’ll only get one shot at this,” she said.
Jake was also watching, and itching to get going. The Mega-Kaiju was too close to the summit. They didn’t have time to make sure everything was perfect. “Then we better make it count.”
The words were just leaving his mouth when the heat from Scrapper’s blasters ignited the thruster pod.
Gipsy Avenger wasn’t braced for the sudden thrust. She surged forward, blasting horizontally along the ground, scraping up a wave of cars and pavement, careening off buildings. “Ignition! We have ignition!” Shao exulted back in the machine shop, but Jake and Amara were completely out of control.
Outside, Scrapper’s foot hung up on one of Gipsy Avenger’s stabilizer fins. “I’m stuck!” Shao said as she struggled to get Scrapper free.
“Stay there!” Jake answered. “You’re an extra ton we can drop on that thing!”
Slowly Jake and Amara got control over the thruster pod, aiming it so the exhaust was pointed at a shallow angle toward the ground. Gipsy Avenger angled upward, shooting into the sky. They wrestled against the power of the thrust, pushing the angle a little steeper and shooting higher into the sky. They burst through a layer of high clouds over the city. Every alarm in the Conn-Pod seemed to be going off, as the vibrations from the thrust and the atmospheric friction tore pieces away from the heavily damaged Jaeger. “Hull integrity under strain. Approaching hazardous altitude,” the AI warned. “Temperatures dropping rapidly.”
“Yeah, we get it,” Amara snapped.
Another warning blared in front of them. The thruster pod, shaking in the makeshift housing of Gipsy Avenger’s fist, was threatening to disintegrate. “She’s coming apart!” Amara shouted.
Jake watched their altitude. Gottlieb had already done the math for their downward trajectory. If they could just make a few more miles… “Almost there!” he called back.
Without their drivesuits’ life-support systems, they would long since have passed out from lack of oxygen. And even those would soon run low; they were only designed for emergency use, and among the other systems damaged in the fight with Raijin and the Mega-Kaiju were the linkages to Gipsy Avenger’s full life-support systems. Jake was suddenly grateful this had not occurred to him before, or he would have been terrified that his suit had a leak that would kill him up here where there was no air. Through the Drift he could tell Amara had no such misgivings; her mind was alive with the thrill of the moment, and as Jake felt that, some of the thrill and wonder transferred to him.
The sky was black around them, and full of stars. Below, they could see the vast urban sprawl of the Tokyo-Osaka megaplex laid out, and to the east the green and white cone of Mount Fuji. It was a beautiful sight, and looking down at it Jake felt a fierce love for all of Planet Earth and its people. He would do anything for them, up to and including sacrificing his life if need be. There was no sound, and for a long moment there was no gravity as Gipsy Avenger reached the apex of her trajectory. Jake had a fleeting memory of a similar weightless moment in Scrapper, right after he’d met Amara. Then they were pounded back into their cradles as Gipsy Avenger turned over and began to fall. “We’re locked on target,” Amara said, tracking their path on the HUD.
“Get out of there!” Gottlieb called over the comm. “Eject.”
On the HUD, another alarm flashed. They were no longer locked on the target zone at the edge of Mount Fuji’s crater. “We’re drifting off course.”
There had been so many alarms going off that Jake didn’t notice the target warning right away, but now it had all of his attention. The projection of their return trajectory was going to miss Mount Fuji by miles. That first burn, straight ahead instead of up at an angle, had altered the distance they had traveled when they finally did get oriented in the right direction. Now they had to find a way to course-correct or Gipsy Avenger was just going to put a big crater in a town square somewhere north of Fuji… while the Mega-Kaiju took its final swan dive into the caldera. Amara was already thinking hard about a solution, considering and discarding possibilities faster than Jake could grasp them.
“Use the plasma cannon!” she announced, and started pecking commands out on her holo terminal. The tactical HUD showed the correction, and the correct angle of the plasma burn. Eight seconds would do the trick.
There was only one problem. The cannon wasn’t built for continuous fire because it had a tendency to overheat and melt down its housing… and Gipsy Avenger’s arm. But it was long past time to worry about that.
Amara brought up the source code of the plasma cannon’s fire control software. Jake marveled at this. He wouldn’t have had any idea where to find that code, let alone access it—yet here was fifteen-year-old Amara, hacking a Jaeger she’d never been in before while it fell out of the sky towards its certain destruction and her probable death.
If she noticed his admiration, she didn’t react. “Disengaging safety protocols,” Jake said. He found the failsafe and disabled it. They nodded at each other and thrust their left hands straight down. Gipsy Avenger’s left arm deployed its plasma cannon. They shifted their posture slightly to match the simulation in the tactical HUD, and then they fired the cannon.
Normally it fired single bursts, with a minimum interval of a half-second, but Amara’s quick hack had removed that limitation. Instead of bolts of plasma energy, the cannon poured out a continuous stream. The countdown on the HUD was at 7… 6…
Gipsy Avenger shuddered, plummeting down at near-terminal velocity as the plasma cannon shifted their trajectory to aim them back at the Mega-Kaiju. Gipsy’s arm began to glow as the plasma cannon overloaded. Pieces of overheated armor broke off and spun away behind them. New alarms shrieked in the Conn-Pod, and the system AI repeated a warning: “Warning. Exceeding structural limits. Exceeding structural limits.”
None of this would do any good if Gipsy Avenger shivered to pieces on her way back down, Jake thought. But they didn’t have any other solution. Amara was counting down the burn, matching the numbers on the HUD. “Four seconds… three… two…”
The plasma cannon burned out. Weakened by the heat and the incredible stresses of the flight, pieces of Gipsy’s forearm shattered and fell away. Eyeballing their path, it looked like they
were headed straight for the rim of Mount Fuji’s caldera. On the HUD, the Mega-Kaiju was squarely in the middle of the targeting reticle. Amara confirmed this on the holo display of their downward trajectory, recalculating their path based on the adjustment from the plasma cannon. “Target locked!”
“Jake! Amara!” Gottlieb was watching their path and velocity from the War Room, and he saw they didn’t have much time. “You need to eject!”
They hit the thicker part of the upper atmosphere and Gipsy Avenger started to glow from the friction of re-entry. The rest of Gipsy’s face shield burned away in a swirl of superheated plasma, along with more pieces of her destroyed left arm.
It was time to bail out. “Disconnect!” Jake could barely scream over the raging wind and the sounds of Gipsy Avenger threatening to break apart as they plunged toward Earth. Amara reached for the buckles holding her into her Drift cradle, then froze. What if the wind howling in the Conn-Pod sucked her out through the gaping hole in the front of Gipsy’s head?
Jake reached out a hand, leaning across toward her. “It’s okay! I got you!”
She swallowed, tensed… and touched the command that unlocked her from the Drift cradle. It opened and disconnected from her drivesuit. The wind rocked her, nearly pulling her loose before she got a grip on the frame of the cradle. Slowly she worked her way toward Jake, but she couldn’t get close enough to him without letting go. Realizing this, Amara watched Jake, gauging the distance. She would have to jump. Again. Jake saw the terror in her eyes, and knew it went all the way back to when she was a child on the pier at Santa Monica. Her life must have seemed like a long series of jumps with no guarantees that anyone would be there to catch her on the other side.
He held his hand out, beckoning. They had to launch the escape pod or it would still be moving too fast for them to survive its impact with the surface. The altitude counter on the HUD counted down with sickening speed.
Amara crouched and jumped. The wind dragged her toward the hole in the front of Gipsy’s head and she stretched out toward Jake, desperate and terrified. He lunged forward in his own cradle, feeling the straps dig into his shoulders… and he caught her hand as her legs swung around toward the hole. Straining with the effort, he pulled her close. As soon as she got within arm’s reach, she clung to him, trembling with the terror of a brush with death.