by Greg Keyes
She cried for a while, but then she reminded herself that she was a Jaeger, that she had armor, and whatever she felt inside, it was the armor people would see, and they would think she was strong even if she wasn’t.
But it was a bad year, and it only got worse. With Grandfather gone, her grandmother could no longer keep up the rent on their little house, and no more than a week after her Dedulya was in the ground, she and Grandmother were on the train to the capital, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, where a cousin had promised Babulya work. Viktoriya was excited at first, because YS was a big city, the biggest on the island, and the maps told her it was close to the sea. It was also where the corpse of Vodyanoi lay, right at the edge of town. Her enthusiasm dimmed a little when she realized they were still many kilometers from the water, but there was still a lot to see, and in theory a lot to do, if one had money, and quite a lot of people in the city seemed to have money. There were two Christmases, which seemed fun: one in December – celebrated by expatriates from lots of places and many old Korean families – and the unusual one in January.
They moved into a tiny apartment in a gray five-story building crammed with tiny homes. At first it seemed very interesting and modern to Vik, with its small electric kitchen and beds that folded out, but soon it just seemed little, dingy, and boring.
A lot of the people in their building hailed originally from the country, she found, which made things a little more familiar. Her grandfather had once told her Sakhalin had three things of worth – trees, oil, and cheap labor. But now there were a lot of jobs in or near the city as factories grew. At first, most had manufactured Jaeger parts, but now they mostly produced things that went into the Wall. Grandmother’s job was in a chemical plant where they made some sort of stuff used to render concrete super-hard. Grandmother cleaned the bathrooms for the workers and washed the coveralls they stripped out of at the end of the day. She got home late, and didn’t have much energy left for housekeeping. School hadn’t started yet, so she left Vik with a little money every day along with instructions on what to buy with it and how to make dinner.
The market was only a few blocks away, an easy walk. One afternoon a few days before regular Christmas she made her way there, carrying less money than usual, with directions to buy a cabbage, a can of tomatoes, a little rice, beef powder – and if she had enough, some sour cream.
It was during the day, and the streets weren’t too busy. About a block from the store she noticed a guy watching her. She had seen him before. She didn’t like the way he looked at her, but she didn’t know why, exactly. He had gray stubble, but his hair was black. He wore boots with his pants tucked in, and a fancy shirt with diamond-shaped designs in brown, red, and dark yellow.
“How’s your grandmother?” he asked, as she got close.
She wanted to keep going, but he asked again.
“Your grandmother? Ilyana?”
He knew Grandmother’s name, so he was probably okay.
“She’s fine,” she said. “She’s at work.”
“I see you’re going to market,” he said. “I hope you have enough for some meat.”
“I don’t think I do,” she said. “Anyway, Grandmother told me not to buy any. Too expensive.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But it would be nice, wouldn’t it? If you had a little more money?”
“What do you mean?”
He held out his hand. In it were forty rubles. She stared at it. It was more money than she had ever had in her hand.
“Take it,” he said. “Buy something good for your supper. And if you ever want to know where it came from, come back and see me, okay? Ask around for me. My name is Andrei.”
That afternoon, when her grandmother bit into the golubtsy, her eyebrows went up.
“There’s meat in there,” she said.
“It was cheap,” Vik answered. “They were going to throw it away. It’s just a little.”
Grandmother’s eyes narrowed. “Did you steal it?”
“No, of course not,” she said.
She felt guilty for lying. She hadn’t stolen it, but it hadn’t been cheap, and yet she still had a whole ten rubles in her pocket. She didn’t think she should tell Grandmother about Andrei, even if he did know her name.
“It’s good,” Grandmother said. She looked pleased, and Vik’s misgivings evaporated. She hadn’t hurt anyone, and she had made Babulya happy.
She didn’t see Andrei the next day, but there was a crowd of people gathered in front of the market, which had a video screen in one of its windows. She tried to push through to the front to see what they were watching, and soon found it was video from K-Eye. Another Kaiju, the fourteenth of the year. Its name was Mutavore, and it had plowed through the coastal wall around Sydney, Australia in less than an hour. She watched, entranced, as the monster was finally put down by one of the few remaining Jaegers, Striker Eureka. The crowd cheered.
“I knew the grobanyy wall was pointless,” she heard one man opine. “I say they build more Jaegers. That’s how we kill those things.”
“It doesn’t matter what we do,” someone else said. “There were fourteen of those things this year. Next year it might be twenty. Or sixty. We’re doomed, pure and simple. There’s no way around it. Walls, Jaegers – nothing is gonna stop them.”
“Cherno Alpha will stop them!” somebody yelled. It took her a second to realize it had been her.
“That’s the spirit!” a woman told her. “Don’t listen to this nonsense about doom. As long as Cherno Alpha is out there, we’ll be safe here.”
“Yeah?” a man said. “Tell that to Tomari.”
Vik felt a weird chill when she heard the word. It was a word her grandmother had forbidden her and her grandfather to speak. She knew what it was, of course. It was a town, a place that no longer existed. It had been destroyed by a Kaiju named Raythe, before Cherno Alpha caught up with it.
But it seemed unfair to blame Cherno Alpha for the loss of one town, not when so many had been saved.
She saw Andrei again the next day, pretty much in the same place he’d been before. She didn’t think he had noticed her, so she ducked behind a building, wondering if she should go a different, longer way.
But she decided that would be cowardly. She was a Jaeger, after all. She didn’t feel things like fear.
To her surprise, he didn’t say anything to her when she went by – he just nodded his head at her and smiled.
She went into the store, just behind a woman with two children – an older boy, and a girl about her age. They were all dressed well. The girl, she noticed, had very nice shoes – not drab little flats with plastic soles, but shiny red shoes with little heels. She tried to ignore the kids, but they were loud, and kept asking their mother for things. If Vik had ever acted like that with Grandmother, she would have regretted it, but to her surprise, the mother actually bought both of them pastries at the bakery counter.
She found what she was looking for: a potato, two carrots and two turnips.
But she had to pass the pastry counter on the way to check out. She had stopped there before, on her first day in the store. She had stared at the beautiful treats, salivated, and written the whole business off as pointless because they were so expensive.
But with the extra rubles in her pocket, everything suddenly looked different. With what she had she could get three pastillas – or four mochis, a cupcake, or a piece of almond and pistachio paklava.
The lady behind the counter asked her if she wanted anything and somehow, moments later, she walked out the shop with the paklava wrapped in brown paper.
It was so good she almost cried.
She was still licking her sticky fingers when she saw Andrei again. Once again he smiled and nodded.
But this time, she stopped.
“So how do I get it?” she asked. “The money?”
He smiled. “I knew you were a smart girl,” he said. “Go on home, now, and make dinner for your grandmother. You aren’t in school, are you?”
>
“It’s out for the winter,” she said. “And Grandmother hasn’t registered me yet. They said I might have to wait months for a spot.”
“Good. So come back in the morning, after your grandmother goes to work, okay? Meet me right here, and we’ll see.”
She waited a moment, hoping he might give her more money, but he laughed and shook his head.
“No,” he said. “From now on, you earn it.”
That night, she dreamed that her grandmother caught her under the covers, eating paklava. She tried to hide it, but Babulya shook her finger at her.
“Tomari!” she said, accusingly. “Tomari!”
A shadow fell on them, and she heard people screaming. In the darkness, she thought she saw a woman’s face, but she didn’t know who it was.
She woke up, gasping, but it didn’t take long to calm down. And the next morning she went to meet Andrei.
He led her down the street to where an old van was parked. It was so beaten up and worn-out-looking she wondered if it even ran. He banged on the door, and after a minute, a girl stuck her head out. She was older, maybe eleven or twelve. Her black hair was something of a mess. She looked sleepy. Some movement and chattering in the van told Vik there were at least three or four others in there.
“Yeah?” the girl said.
“This is – what’s your name?”
“Vik,” she said. She thought it was funny he knew Grandmother’s name but not hers.
“Vik?” he grunted. “Okay, Vik. This is Eun. Eun, take Vik to the dig.”
“Yeah. Got it, boss,” Eun said. “You wait there,” she told Vik.
Eun emerged a few moments later, wrapped in a tattered coat. She led her through the streets of the town, to the east, where Vik never ventured, to where the houses grew fewer, and the trees were stunted or did not grow at all. Her sense of dread grew stronger with each step, and she became increasingly certain where they were going.
She was starting to wonder if it was over the hill ahead, but then she realized it was the hill.
She stopped then. Eun went a few more steps before she realized she was no longer following.
“What’s the matter?” she asked. “You know it’s dead, right?”
“It’s a Kaiju,” Vik said. “Why are we going to the Kaiju?”
Eun rolled her eyes. “You know what’s in a Kaiju?” she said. “You know what they’re made of?”
“What?” Vik asked.
“Money,” Eun said. “Rubles. Everything we pull out of there, someone will pay for it. It’s like going into a mine, but the whole thing is made of diamonds. And you, you’re little. You can crawl up into the bones and guts, places where the grown-ups can’t.”
“I’m not crawling around inside of a Kaiju,” Vik said.
“It’s not that bad, you’ll see. We wear special clothes, so we don’t get sick. Andrei and the overseers, they take care of us.”
“I’m not going inside a dead Kaiju,” Vik insisted.
“Fine,” Eun said. “I don’t care one way or the other. But you can walk back by yourself. I’ve got a quota to make, and you’re wasting my day.”
13
2018
SEA OF OKHOTSK
RUSSIA
CHERNO ALPHA
ONCE AGAIN, RAYTHE PROVED FRUSTRATING, breaking the usual Kaiju pattern – instead of attacking the populous cities of Hokkaido, it again deviated northward, to the sparsely settled island of Sakhalin. Once home mostly to the aboriginal Ainu and Nivkh people, in the twentieth century it had gone back and forth between Russia and Japan until after the Second World War, when it became and remained Soviet territory until the collapse of the USSR; then it became simply Russian. Raythe missed or ignored the capital city on the far southern tip of the island and rampaged across a thinly populated area, obliterating a small town before the Jumphawks even managed to get Cherno in the air again.
Raythe took back to the water and churned up the Strait of Tartary, the narrow gap between Sakhalin and the mainland, breaking the sea ice that had formed in the narrowest spots, but doing little or no harm to the villages and towns along the coast. Once again, it was heading almost single-mindedly north.
“It’s looking for something,” Aleksis said. “What is it looking for? Like I said before, there’s nothing up here.”
A moment later, an update from LOCCENT control came in.
“Subject has just entered the Sea of Okhotsk, and is now bearing to the northeast.”
“Toward Kamchatka?” Aleksis said. “That’s where we were. What is it with this runaround?”
“Maybe it’s blind,” Sasha said. “Or it’s following some other sense than sight. Maybe it smells something. The way it’s going, it reminds me of a hunting dog my cousin had.”
“Listen,” Scriabin said. “We think it’s heading for the Okhotsk oil fields.”
Sakhalin didn’t have a lot, as far as modern industrialized economies were concerned. At one time it had been an important center for the whaling industry, but by and large most inhabitants of the island had gotten by fishing and cutting timber. Geologists knew about the offshore oil pretty early on, but it wasn’t until the first decades of the twenty-first century that they’d had the technology to drill in the deep, freezing waters. Now there were seven large platforms around the north end of Sakhalin. Aleksis had even been to one of them a year ago, as part of a PPDC publicity campaign.
“Give us a map,” Sasha said.
They already had one, of course, on their display, but now the deep-sea rigs appeared, and their support structures on the coast.
“That must be it,” Sasha said. “But why oil?”
A line traced itself, an arc between the western part of the sea and the oil platforms.
“That’s your Miracle Mile, Cherno,” a new voice – not Scriabin – told them. Sasha recognized it as belonging to Marshal Pentecost, just recently promoted to his new post at the Hong Kong Shatterdome. She trusted Pentecost; unlike their last presiding Marshal, he had actually fought in a Jaeger, and acquitted himself well.
She – they – did not want to disappoint him.
“Affirmative, Marshal,” she said. “We will hold the Mile.”
This time we will hold it.
The Miracle Mile was the line in the sand, the border that Kaiju could not be allowed to cross. It varied, depending on when the monsters were sighted, where they seemed to be going, and the depth of the ocean. Usually, it meant not allowing them to make landfall. This time it was more complicated.
So far, more often than not, the Kaiju had crossed that line.
Not today.
The Jumphawks dropped Cherno Alpha well west off the Miracle Mile, not too far from where the oil slick began, and there they waited.
It began to sleet, and visibility dropped to nothing, if all you were using were human senses. Fortunately, Cherno Alpha had more than that; it had eyes in the sky, radar, sonar, and some relatively new technologies that could sense the strange, otherworldly energy emitted by the Kaiju themselves. Cherno adjusted its position as the readings grew nearer.
To Sasha’s finely tuned sense of him, Aleksis was becoming steadily more excited. He was a big man, a strong one, and accustomed to the fear his appearance generated in weaker persons. He drew emotional power from that fear, and although he did not say it, he was confident – determined – that Raythe would fear him. Fear Cherno Alpha.
After all the waiting, it happened very quickly. The sea level suddenly rose before them, water mounding up like a rapidly rising wave, but then the water couldn’t keep up, and began sheeting off – and Raythe emerged. He had been swimming along the bottom, as some of them did. But now he was lifted up on his hind legs, to his full height, which was right about head level with Cherno.
What it really looked like, they still didn’t know. All Kaiju were different, though they tended to have parts that resembled creatures natural to the Earth. All Cherno could make out in the dark and the sleet was somethin
g huge and vaguely humanoid in shape.
But she did see its eyes. Blue, like lightning burning through ice.
Unreasonably long arms swiped at them from the darkness, but Cherno stepped into the blow, blocking the attack with its massive right arm. Then they punched with the left.
Without feedback from tactile senses, it would be difficult if not impossible for a man to walk successfully, much less brawl. Pilots needed feedback that would allow their minds to comprehend what was happening to their “body” – so they felt Raythe’s arm crash against the side of Cherno’s massive cylindrical head. It might have been a random choice for the monster, but analysis of earlier Kaiju battles suggested that they – like most earthly animals – had a sense that the head was a sensitive area, a vulnerable spot.
Not so in the case of Cherno: her “head” was the most massively armored part of the Jaeger, and also a tremendous power core, half again the capacity of any other Jaeger on the planet. And unlike other Jaegers, there was no room in the head for pilots. Sasha and Aleksis steered from the middle, with their Conn-Pod housed in Cherno’s chest.
They felt their return blow land, and it was like punching a basalt cliff padded with six meters of rubber; Raythe made a sound that was almost too low to hear, a bone-shuddering roar that hummed through Cherno and their bones. Two sets of claws grasped Cherno Alpha around the head, and again they charged forward, throwing another punch.
That was a mistake. The Kaiju’s rear legs suddenly exploded from the water and hit them right in their line of sight; if Cherno had had a solar plexus, all of the wind would have been knocked out of her.
As it was, Aleksis cried out at the pain of feedback, and the sound of tons of metal flexing under the force of the blow was terrible to hear. The lights flickered, briefly; Raythe now had both feet against their chest and his claws wrapped around their power source.
“It’s trying to pull our head off,” Sasha said.
Aleksis didn’t say anything, but she felt what he wanted to do.
They grabbed Raythe’s head, and as they pulled it into the beams of their floods, she finally got a look at it. Its wide-set eyes were sunken in an immense, tri-lobed skull armored in overlapping plates and spikes that extended into a beak something like that of a snapping turtle, and its surprisingly long neck squirmed with fleshy tendrils. Almost instantly the head snapped back, out of their grasp, its neck sinking back into its body so the head lay between its heavily plated and spiked shoulders.