by Greg Keyes
“Cozy? Idiot. I mean Drift compatible. You didn’t feel it when we were fighting? A connection?”
“I felt the connection of your hand with my face,” he said.
She shrugged. “Maybe I’m wrong. But we’ll see.”
The next day, Renata was called from training for an hour, and then later Ilya. By the end of the day, four of the cadets had vanished and returned, and none of them would talk about where they went or what happened.
The next day, it was his turn.
He ended up in a small office with Mako Mori. He was surprised such an important person had such a small accommodation. She hadn’t done a lot to pretty the place up, either.
“So, how are your parents?” she asked, when he came in.
“They’re, ah, fine, I guess,” he said. “I don’t really see them that much.”
She nodded. She looked at something on a screen he could only see the back of.
And then she began asking questions. They started off simple – where did he go to school, who were his friends when he was little. Tell her about his fencing instructor, what did he remember about first meeting Dustin.
In fact, there were several questions about Dustin, a disproportionate number of them.
There were a lot more questions and by the time the interview was over, he finally realized what this was about.
The sabotage of Chronos Berserker – the death of Braga.
He was a suspect. The other cadets she had called in, they must be suspects too.
Mori dismissed him from the interview, but he hadn’t yet reached the door when she asked him to stop.
“One last question,” she said. “When you arrived here, you were issued a pen drive. May I see it?”
His heart dug a little deeper into his chest.
“Secretary General, I seem to have misplaced it,” he said. “I couldn’t find it the first day of instruction.”
“I see,” she said. “Very well. You may go.”
As he left the office, he wondered what she had asked the other cadets. Maybe she had been asking them all about him.
9
2033
HONG KONG
CHINA
JINHAI
JINHAI WAS ALMOST OUT OF BREATH WHEN HE reached the stairs down to the train. He had never run so fast in his life, and the heavy backpack didn’t help. He figured he had just about two minutes, if even that.
He leapt down the first flight of stairs, landing so hard it hurt his knees. Someone shouted after him in indignation, but he ignored them. He continued down, deeper into the earth – and more importantly, into the field of the superconductors that powered the train. Normally that wouldn’t shut the transponder under his skin down completely, but the station was known for its poorly insulated power node. His pursuer wouldn’t be able to track him as long as he was close to the leaky field.
The train doors were just opening when he arrived. He dashed on, sat long enough to stick the contents of his hand under the seat, then got up as if he was moving to another car. Instead he went to the next door and exited the train.
Then he went to the bathroom and hid in one of the stalls.
Now he would find out how clever he was. He’d made a recording of his transponder’s signal and uploaded it into an old phone. On the train, it should now be transmitting a facsimile of his personal code. An expert with the right equipment would be able to tell the difference – or probably even someone sort of competent with so-so gear – but as it was, he might get away with it.
He waited what he thought was long enough and then waited a little longer.
He poked his head out of the bathroom and had a quick look around. The station was almost empty; he didn’t see the guy who was chasing him.
A few minutes later the train he wanted arrived, going in pretty much the opposite direction as the first. He found a seat, doffing the backpack and letting it rest on the floor, and took out a water bottle and some power bars and began to recover his strength – where he was going, he would need it. This was just starting.
“Is that a sword in your backpack?”
He turned and saw a man maybe ten years older than him, briefcase in his lap.
“Well, sort of,” he said. “It’s a fencing épée.”
“Like in those movies? Zorro?”
“Kind of like that, yeah.”
“It’s got one of those little things on the end, so you can practice, right? But if you unscrew it, it’s sharp.”
He was always surprised by comments like that. How would that work, exactly? If the tip screwed on, that meant the blade was threaded, right? Which meant to stab someone you would have to somehow spin the blade into them. And did anyone think someone would give little kids a sword they could make lethal with a few twists of the wrist?
“No, sir,” he replied. “They make them blunt. On the non-electric ones, they do have a little rubber tip, but that’s just for extra safety. We’re all about safety in fencing. None of our weapons are made sharp.”
“Okay,” the man said. “Thanks. Sounds like fun.”
“Lots of fun,” Jinhai confirmed.
And he hadn’t lied. Épées did come from the factory with blunt points.
But that’s where a file came in handy.
* * *
He was rested, fed, and ready to run when he got off the train, but there was no one there to greet him. So far, so good – his clever plan apparently hadn’t fallen apart on him yet. He remembered the directions he’d been given.
He’d never been to this part of town. It was near the old waterfront, a part of Hong Kong torn up by the Kaiju Otachi and never really rebuilt. Seaside property wasn’t what it used to be, at least not on Pacific-facing coasts. People tended to do their new development inland these days; putting money into a mega tower with a bay view didn’t seem like such a good investment.
That would change, if enough time passed without another Kaiju attack. People were stupid that way.
But right now, this was a good playground for people who didn’t necessarily want their games noticed. Where he was, many of the buildings – parts of them anyway – were still standing, but they were thoroughly abandoned.
A few turned corners and he saw them, waiting for him.
One of them – a girl about his own age – stepped up.
“You showed,” she said. “Tan didn’t think you had it in you. He said you would bail.”
“Tan doesn’t know me nearly as well as he thinks he does,” Jinhai said.
She regarded him skeptically.
“You can still back out,” she said. “With honor. If you put your gear on, you can’t.”
“Watch me as I put my gear on, then,” Jinhai said.
There were maybe fifteen of them, but only the girl was dressed out, so she must be the one he had to fight. It was hard to tell how that was going to be, looking at her. Medium height, broad shoulders, long legs. She just stood there, so he got no sense of how she moved.
He got everything on, finishing with the mask. A shortish guy came over and examined his blade, then wiped it down with a disinfectant towelette.
“It’s good,” the guy said.
“Okay,” the girl said. “Whenever you’re ready.”
Was he ready? He stared at the girl’s blade, at the needle point on it. That could really hurt.
Screw it. He was ready.
He settled into an en guard stance.
“No referee, no quarter,” the short guy said. “Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” Jinhai said.
“Okay, then. Begin when ready.”
Jinhai began bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet, slowly rotating his blade in wide arcs, keeping moving, making it uncertain where the attack would come from.
Twenty seconds into the fight, Jinhai knew he was outmatched. His opponent knew it, too; he could see her mean little grin through her mask. He bounced back, trying to keep away from her until he could figure out what to do;
he nearly tripped. This wasn’t the smooth aluminum piste he was used to fencing on; streets were uneven, here especially, with pits and chunks of concrete to trip him up.
It was only a slight stumble, but it was enough for her. She seemed to fly at him; he tried to parry the point of her épée, but her blade slipped around his. He only avoided impalement by throwing himself to the side; the unsharpened edge of her blade slid along his arm.
She stepped back and waited for him to recover.
“This isn’t sport fencing, Famous,” she said. “You should take it back to your salle, where it’s safe.”
“But I feel so safe here,” he replied. “Like I’ve just been tucked into bed.”
“Well, come get a night-night kiss,” she said.
He decided if he was going to get anywhere, he had to press her, so he went on the attack. She faded, floating on her feet as if her body had no mass. She found his disengage, caught his épée in a bind. He started a receding parry to catch it, but she slipped out of that, and just like that the point of her weapon slid into his shoulder; he felt the impact on his scapula as if she’d hit it with a hammer instead of a few kilograms of sword.
Once his body was sure he had recorded the impact, the pain asserted itself. It went through him almost like electricity, and he dropped down to his knees.
“There we go,” she said. “Goodnight, sweet prince.”
His eyes were watering, but he forced himself to stand again.
“Just a flesh wound,” he said.
It was true, but flesh wounds hurt a hell of a lot more than he had ever imagined they could.
“Stay down, Ou-Yang,” one of the bystanders advised.
Whatever thoughts of yielding he might have been entertaining, that was over now. They knew who he was. Now he had more than his own honor to defend.
He got back on guard, trying to focus.
At least she’d hit the shoulder of his off-weapon hand. That arm wasn’t much use in fencing to begin with.
She attacked, and he saw an opening on the inside of her arm and went for it. That was her plan, of course; she beat away his counter-attack and drove her point into his arm with terrible force. He let his blade drop so it pricked into the top of her thigh.
The pain was instantaneous, this time. He dropped his weapon. His opponent let hers fall, too, but that only made matters worse; the needle-sharp tip had gone in one side of the triceps of his upper arm and out the other, and now it was stuck there. He fell to the ground, trying unsuccessfully not to scream.
His only consolation was that he heard his opponent swearing too.
Someone pulled the sword from his arm, which if anything hurt more than it had going in.
“He’s going to bleed out,” someone said. “I’d say he has five minutes.”
“You’ve got five minutes,” Jinhai said, but now fear was rising through the pain. Was it true? There was so much blood, a ridiculous amount of blood…
“Shut up,” the girl he’d been fighting snapped. “Don’t try to scare him. He did okay. He let me hit him so he could scratch my leg. That’s cool. Dress him up.”
Someone put pressure on the wound, and then started applying a field dressing. He kept his eyes closed; he didn’t like the sight of blood.
When he opened them again, he saw the girl sitting cross-legged on the ground. She had removed her mask and fencing pants and was now in shorts, with a bandage on her thigh.
“You know my name,” he said. “What’s yours?”
“No offense,” she said. “But I don’t need the heat your parents could bring.”
“Okay,” he said. “How about if we just get married, then?”
“You’d marry a girl who can beat you?”
“Only kind I would consider,” he said.
She looked like she was about to reply. Instead she scrambled to her feet. By the way she and everyone else were reacting, he thought he knew what was going on.
“Dustin,” he said. “I was just about to come and find you.”
He turned. It was Dustin, all right.
Dustin wasn’t a big guy, but he was dangerous-looking. Part of that was his muscular build and sharp blue eyes, but the pistol he held against his chest didn’t hurt. It wasn’t pointed at anyone, but with a shift of his wrists, it could be.
“This is not cool,” the girl said.
“It’s okay,” Dustin said. His American accent was unmistakable, but his Mandarin was perfectly clear. “He and I are leaving, and he was never here in the first place, right?”
Most of them nodded. The girl looked defiant.
“Yeah,” she said. “He was never here. And he’d better not even think about being ‘never here’ again.”
“Agreed,” Dustin said. Then to Jinhai, “Come on.”
“Ciao, guys,” Jinhai said, as he unsteadily stood up. “It was fun.”
10
2024
YELLOW SEA
CHINA
SHAOLIN ROGUE
MING-HAU LOOKED DOWN AT HIS SLEEPING SON, hoping the sirens didn’t wake him. At the moment, with eyes closed and the covers drawn up to his chin, Jinhai looked more like his mother than he ever had – the way his eyes were set in his face, the soft curve of his chin. At other times, he could see himself in the boy. It was incredible how much the child could change from one day to another.
You can never step in the same river twice, his own father had been wont to say.
It was true. But one day, there would be no one to step into the river, and for Ming-hau and his wife Suyin, today might be that day. They might never see their son again.
“We told him we would go hiking by the lake tomorrow,” he whispered.
“There will be many days to go to the lake,” Suyin replied. “Let Mei take him to the playground. He will be happy enough. When we return, we will make it up to him.”
“Yes,” he replied, exhaling. But if we don’t return…
Suyin squeezed his hand. She could read his face so well.
“Life will go on for Jinhai,” she said. “There can be no safer place than the Shatterdome. Whatever happens today, our boy will survive. Now come. There is no time to waste.”
But as they made their way to the Jaeger bay, Minghau thought of the lake, and the last time they had taken Jinhai there; how happy the boy had been, how content he himself had felt. It had seemed, in a way, that the day would never end, but that he – that all of them – would stay somehow embedded in it forever.
The Kaiju was a category III, code-named Huo Da. It had emerged from the Breach less than an hour before and seemed to be headed for Shanghai, which meant they had to be airlifted from the Hong Kong Shatterdome via V-50 Jumphawks and carried nearly eight hundred miles across China to meet the beast. In the old days, before all but the Hong Kong Shatterdome was closed, Jaegers from the Nagasaki or Tokyo Shatterdomes would have been deployed to intercept a Kaiju on this heading. But those days, at least for now, were done.
Fortunately, Jumphawks were fast, even carrying a Jaeger, but that still meant some down time, even after checking the systems a dozen times.
Shaolin Rogue was a Mark-3 and she had been in operation for seven years, but this was the first time he and Suyin had piloted her into battle. Or piloted any Jaeger into battle, for that matter – and in this, their first fight, they were slated to take point. When the Wei triplets checked into Crimson Typhoon, some problems had been found in the coolant system. Typhoon, with its more experienced crew, would be around an hour behind them.
They watched China go by below them, reminding themselves what they would soon be defending. They tried to name the moonlit rivers, mountains, and towns they flew over from memory. They played word games. And they kept up to date with what was known about their foe, which wasn’t much.
“From what we can tell, this one looks lower slung than some of ’em,” Tendo Choi, the voice of LOCCENT control informed them. “Stays close to the bottom, basically linear, but we’ve bee
n surprised like that before. The silhouette resembles a flat, segmented arthropod – sort of like a centipede, or a really long trilobite. It looks to have from six to eight major limbs, all bunched toward the front. Big head. It moves in short, fast spurts, so K-Watch thinks it could be propelling itself with some kind of water jet, like a squid. It has a top speed greater than anything we’ve seen yet – in the water, at least. It may be more aquatic in nature than some we’ve seen.”
“Like Shaolin Rogue,” Suyin said. “We should meet it as far out at sea as possible.”
As every Kaiju was different, so was every Jaeger, each with its own strengths and specialized weapons. You never knew what the Kaiju were going to be like, especially now, when they seemed to be adapting to the tactics and technology of their human adversaries. What worked five years ago – or a year ago – might not work now. The engineer in Ming-hau suspected that if this war went on long enough, eventually Jaegers would settle into something like an optimal design; but then again, if the Kaiju evolved to deal with that design and render it obsolete, once again innovation would be important, much as it was in biological evolution.
Shaolin Rogue, more than most Jaegers, had been built to fight underwater. She had a vastly increased oxygen supply, and in fact could extract oxygen from seawater through electrolysis. She also had back-mounted turbines that could drive her horizontally through the water like a submarine or lift her toward the surface if she was upright but totally submerged. Her Meteor Chain worked almost as well below water as above it, and she had a system of liquid ballast and gas cells that could quickly orient her in the depths. She had proven herself once already fighting a battle almost entirely submerged, against the Kaiju named Tentalus.
But in that battle Rogue had had other pilots.
Finally, they reached land’s end, and saw the sun rising from the Yellow Sea, just as they were passing by Shanghai and its enormous port in Hangzhou Bay. He watched the muddy waters of the Qiantang and Yangtze Rivers give way to the clear turquoise of the bays and inlets, the shallow sea, and that in turn darkened to a cobalt blue as they moved farther and farther from land, until the coastline and its millions of inhabitants were only a distant, thin line on the horizon.