by Greg Keyes
Now he was gone. Had he known he was going to die? Had he carved her Cherno Alpha to protect her after he was dead?
She finally drifted off to sleep, but a commotion woke her. At first she was afraid it was Grandmother, but although she was awake, too, the noise was coming from outside – sirens were wailing. She looked at the clock and saw it was a little after three o’clock. Christmas morning.
“They’re here,” Grandmother said. “They’ve come.”
By the time they went outside of their apartment, everyone in the building was awake. They went down the hall to the little common room, with its vid screen; it was packed.
“That’s in Hong Kong,” Mr. Azhakov grumbled. “Why sound the alarms here?” He was an older man, and seemed like a tall tree the wind had spent years bending.
“Because there are two of them!” Ms. Hong shot back. “That’s never happened before. If there are two, there might be a dozen. They could be everywhere.”
The Kaiju were named Otachi and Leatherback. It was nighttime in Hong Kong, just like it was here, and the K-Eye images were blurred and hard to follow. Otachi looked something like a horned frog, with a bulging phosphorescent blue throat sac. Leatherback wasn’t anywhere to be seen.
Two Jaegers were on the scene, and everyone cheered when they saw one of them was Cherno Alpha. She also recognized Crimson Typhoon, a Chinese Jaeger with three arms, piloted by identical triplets: the Wei brothers.
Once there had been Shatterdomes everywhere, with Jaegers guarding their home territory. But the Vladivostok Shatterdome had been closed when she was three, and Cherno Alpha moved to Hong Kong. Other closures had followed, and now Hong Kong was the only Shatterdome in the world.
And two Kaiju were attacking Hong Kong.
They were after the Jaegers, after Cherno Alpha.
She thought it herself, but she heard plenty of people saying it as well.
She watched in disbelief as Crimson Typhoon was torn apart, only minutes into the fight. But then Cherno Alpha was there, and she knew things would go differently.
Except they didn’t. Otachi’s throat sac suddenly swelled huge, and it spit blue liquid all over Cherno. The image fluttered for a moment. Then the reporter said that another Jaeger, Striker Eureka, was on the way, and when the view cleared up, Vik saw it, running through the waves toward Cherno, which was still fighting, despite the fact that the blue stuff was burning through it. It was going to be okay.
And then something burst from the water, a thing like a giant gorilla with scales, and everything got really confusing. She thought she saw Cherno Alpha decapitated, torn in half, but she knew that couldn’t be true. It was dark, so much was happening, it couldn’t be what she saw.
Her parents couldn’t be dead. It wasn’t possible. Cherno Alpha never lost. They were supposed to come back for her one day…
Where there had been cheering before, now everything became very quiet, and Vik suddenly couldn’t watch anymore. She went back to her bed. When she woke in the morning, it would all be sorted out. Everything would be fine. It was Christmas, after all.
Gipsy Danger won the fight, but the news the next day was that there were no survivors from Cherno Alpha or Crimson Typhoon.
Vik sleepwalked through the next few days. Grandmother went to work, like always. Vik went to the market. They heard from the school and were informed that there was no room for her until spring, but she hardly cared.
She wasn’t alone. Everyone seemed to feel not that the world was coming to an end, but that it had already ended. That nothing mattered anymore.
That night, there were fires burning in the park she could see from her house. Kaiju worshippers, her grandmother said, praying for the end of the world. Vik had heard of Kaiju worshippers, but had never seen one, at least as far as she knew. This looked like a lot of people.
But she didn’t care about that either.
That night Babulya got very drunk, and very angry. She shouted at things that weren’t there. Vik took her carving of Cherno Alpha and a blanket down to the common room. She wasn’t alone – several others were there, watching the video stream, although nothing was really happening. A few more were curled up with blankets on the floor. She did the same.
Grandfather was gone. Cherno Alpha was gone. All of her protectors were gone.
She woke to a babble of voices, and at first didn’t know where she was. Then she remembered. The room was full now, and everyone was cheering.
She came groggily to her feet.
With all the commotion, it took her a while to understand what was happening.
The Jaegers had won. Somehow the two remaining Jaegers – Gipsy Danger and Striker Eureka – had sealed the breach in the ocean the monsters swam up from. The world was saved, although both Jaegers were destroyed.
Vik almost didn’t care, partly because she didn’t believe it. Whatever had happened, the Kaiju would be back. They would always be back. And there were no Jaegers left to stop them.
But there would be. They would build more. And when they did, she was going to be in one, just like she’d told Eun.
But that meant she had to train, and she had to learn. And that meant money.
All of her protectors were dead. Fine. She would be her own protector.
The next day, she found the van where Eun lived and knocked on the door. A different girl answered, but when she asked for her, Eun came out.
“I’m ready to work now,” she said.
Because Jaegers fought, and they either won or lost, they lived or died. They didn’t feel fear, or pain, or loss, or shame. They did what they needed to win, whether that meant beating a Kaiju to death with an iceberg or digging around in the guts of one.
She would do what she needed to do.
* * *
Vik had seen dead things before, and she had seen the things that ate dead things. Ravens, maggots, feral dogs.
But nothing had been eating the Kaiju. No carrion birds circled above, no worms were in evidence – only people in funny yellow suits that covered even their heads, although she could see their faces through clear plastic plates. There was a terrible smell, but it was not like rotting meat. More like chemical sewage with a sort of fishy odor thrown in. The Kaiju was so big, she wasn’t sure whether she was looking at its belly or its back, and the hundreds of holes that had been hacked through its blue-black scales didn’t help at all. She thought it was probably best to try not to think about what it was; just to pretend she was going into a cave to collect stones.
Eun found her one of the yellow suits. Before she could put in on, Andrei arrived.
“Most of the good stuff was harvested right away,” Andrei explained. “The living tissue, the liquid blood. The stuff that really pays. Some guys came from Hong Kong to do that, with all kinds of fancy gear. Pumped it full of carbon dioxide, and all of that. When they were done, they sold me the contract for what was left. I’m telling you this, kid, because these guys from Hong Kong – they aren’t to be screwed around with, ever. I work for them, so I am also not to be screwed with. Whatever comes out of there, it comes to me. It doesn’t go in your pockets. It comes from your bag, to my hands. Work hard, don’t steal, follow the rules, and you’ll be okay. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” Vik said.
“Great. Come on, I’ll introduce you to your crew.”
* * *
The central cavity of the corpse had been hollowed out, forming a cavern large enough to hold a village. Light came through the various holes cut through the outer hide, but strings of LEDs provided most of the illumination when they got deeper in.
Her “crew” consisted of Aleks, a boy of about fifteen, a girl her own age named Kora, and Ji Su, who was maybe ten. Ji Su had a long scar on her face. Vik couldn’t help looking at it.
Ji Su noticed.
“Kaiju blood,” she said. “Hong Kong got most of it before it spoiled, but what was left dried out. It forms crystals – it’s one of the things we loo
k for. But if water hits it, it can get gloopy. Some idiot thought it would be a good idea to drill a hole in from the top of Vodyanoi. That was in midwinter. It snowed. In the spring all that snow thawed out and worked its way down. A big glob of it dripped on me.”
“I’m sorry,” Vik said. “It burned through your mask?”
“I wasn’t wearing it,” Ji Su said. “Sometimes we have to get up in some spaces so small, masks get in the way.”
“What kinds of places?”
“Don’t worry. You’ll see.”
Soon after that they left the gutted central cavity and began climbing through what turned out to be an empty blood vessel. It was big enough that they could walk in it without stooping, but smaller vessels branched off at regular intervals.
“Most of these have been pretty well cleaned out,” Aleks said. “We have to go further in every time.”
He wasn’t kidding. She wasn’t sure how much time had passed. The only light now came from the lamps on their masks, and the air felt heavy, like syrup sucking in and out of her lungs. The suits had filters, but no independent air supply.
At last they reached a place where the wall of the blood vessel had been cut away, revealing a network of what looked something like honeycomb, or the inside of a sponge.
“These are the marrow nacelles,” Aleks said. “They’re connected by little tubes, most of them. The ones you see have been hollowed out; you’ll have to crawl back in there to find any marrow.”
Vik didn’t like that idea much at all. But she was a Jaeger, wasn’t she?
“What does the marrow look like?”
“Blue-grey. Fills the nacelles completely. The bone is really, really hard. We take those out with explosives, but that messes up the marrow. So we get that out first. It’s softer than the bone, but you’ll still have to use your multitool. Got it?”
“Yeah,” Vik said. “At least I think so.”
“I don’t like novichoks,” Aleks said. “They’re slow, and they whine a lot, and they never make quota. We need to make quota. You got that?”
“Got it,” Vik said.
And with no further comment, she climbed up into the nearest nacelle.
The connecting tubes were tight, all right, and she had to crawl though about ten of them until she came upon one still filled with marrow. Fighting a growing claustrophobia, she began hacking at the stuff with the tool. It might be softer than the bone, but it was still hard, and after half an hour she’d only managed to dig a hole a little bigger than her head. Digging in the confined space was awkward at first, but soon became painful, and by the time she heard the faint sound of Aleks calling a halt, her whole body was sore.
She scrapped what marrow she had into her bag zipped it, and started back out. The nacelle she was working in wasn’t big enough to turn around in, so she had to back out, blind, which was so claustrophobic it nearly put her into a panic, but she pushed it down to where she kept every other hellish thing in her life.
Aleks looked in her bag. To her surprise, he didn’t seem angry.
“You’ll have to do better,” he said.
“Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow?” he snorted. “It’s only noon.”
He and the other three started unpacking lunch from plastic boxes.
“I didn’t know to bring food,” she said.
“That’s too bad,” Aleks said. But after he’d eaten a little more than half of his rice, he handed her the lunchbox.
“Here,” he said. “I need you strong. But bring a lunch tomorrow.”
“Thank you,” she said.
She ate in silence for a little while, realizing just how hungry she was. Then it hit her.
“We’re having a picnic inside of a Kaiju,” she said.
Kora laughed. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s what I thought the first time, too.”
* * *
The first few weeks were the hardest, but by her second month in it became routine. Her body adjusted to the torturous positions; her mind found places to go. She saved her money, so when a position at the school opened she could afford to go, and worked when she could. As her nest egg grew, she thought about other kinds of training. Jaegers fought; she would need to learn to fight. Karate, boxing, maybe some kind of sword. Digging her way through the Kaiju corpse was horrible work, but she wasn’t doing it for nothing, wasn’t doing it just to survive, but to move on.
It was the least she could do for her parents, for their memory.
But as the pain and fear of the work faded, she began having the dream. It was almost always the same; a darkness, rising up to blot out the sky, a cloud with a face, and then she was alone, deep in the Dig. Someone was calling her name – not Vik, but her full name, Viktoriya. She was afraid; she remembered what her grandmother had told her about hiding her name from the Kaiju. Yet someone knew her name, someone she did not know. So she followed the voice, deeper and deeper, farther from the light, until she saw a faint, pulsing blue glow ahead. She could see it was coming from inside of the wall, within of the dried tissue of the Kaiju. She bent to look more closely.
Eyes opened, staring at her. A woman’s face appeared.
And then, each time, she awoke shouting, tears pouring down her face.
21
2035
MOYULAN SHATTERDOME
CHINA
JINHAI WAS NOT EXACTLY LOOKING FORWARD to Pons training, not after how the first one had gone. But he’d spent the night steeling himself for it between fitful moments of sleep, and by morning he had begun to see it as an opportunity. He felt in his bones that the unanswered questions about his Drift with Vik were important – he needed the answers to them, even if he couldn’t quite say why.
But when they arrived and got their assignments, he was paired with Ryoichi, not Vik.
He knew that – given the circumstances – he should be relieved. Instead he found himself disappointed.
This time, when the tech started the Drift, he wasn’t sure anything was happening at all; he glanced up at the meter and saw it was just barely over the red line.
“Concentrate,” Burke said. “Both of you.”
After a moment it started, but not like it had with Vik; Ryoichi’s memories were more controlled, less chaotic, but at the same time to Jinhai they seemed far more ephemeral. Ryoichi was a little boy, being bullied by some bigger kids because of a small speech impediment; he was ten, and his grandmother died, one he loved so deeply that he didn’t speak a word for almost a month; gathering in the Kaiju refuge in Sapporo, watching as Tailspitter wreaked havoc; the smell of sake on his father when he came home drunk one night…
The needle on the dial dipped up and down, always at the lowest end of Drift strength, until at last, it stabilized at a minimal level.
“Now,” he heard Burke say. “Just try to be. Let the memories flow past.”
Jinhai took a deep breath, let it out slowly.
It was working. His memories mingled with Ryoichi’s – not violently, although perhaps a little indifferently. The meter rose toward the middle, and stayed there.
He understood a lot about Ryoichi, now. But one thing stood out clearer than anything else.
The other boy didn’t trust him. It was hard to blame him, especially after being in Ryoichi’s head. He had problems with trust that ran far deeper than Jinhai’s own. Add to that recent events, the consensus forming among all of the other cadets… Ryoichi looked at him apologetically when they unhooked.
“It’s okay,” Jinhai said. “I get it.”
* * *
“They all think we’re guilty,” Vik told him, that afternoon, after mess. They were outside, on the dock, watching the billow of crimson clouds fade beyond the low mountains of the coast.
“Yeah,” Jinhai said. “How was it inside of Renata’s head?”
“Crazier than you would think,” she replied. “Lots of drama. Daddy issues.”
Jinhai laughed. “Ryoichi too, with the daddy issues anyway.” He paus
ed. “We’re probably not supposed to be talking about this.”
“You can be sure they’re talking about us,” Vik said. “They’re also withholding things.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your missing pen drive. You were right. They found it in the Conn-Pod. They figure it was used to upload the code that made Chronos Berserker go ballistic.”
“That’s dumb,” Jinhai said. “That’s a completely rookie mistake. I mean, we are rookies, I guess…”
“But it isn’t a mistake you would make. Is it?”
“No,” he said. “Leave an incriminating pen drive right after uploading a murder-virus? Hell no.”
“Okay,” she said. “I believe you.”
“Believe what?”
“That you didn’t do it.”
“You mean you just now came to that conclusion?”
She shrugged. “I thought you might be leading me along, for some reason. I haven’t had the best of luck with people. In my experience, most of them want to use you for something or other. Maybe you’ve been the one trying to lay the blame on me all along. Someone is trying to frame me.”
“Frame us,” Jinhai corrected.
“Don’t go on and on about it,” she said. “I just told you I believe you. That’s not what’s important right now. After we left the Conn-Pod, some techs went in right behind us, didn’t they?”
“Yes.”
“And none of them noticed anything wrong, or found a misplaced pen drive?”
“Apparently not. Of course, one of the techs could have put it there.”
“Sure. But it would have had to be more than one of them – it would have to be all of them, or the others would have known. How many people do you think are in on it? One or two I can imagine – but the whole team?”
“Maybe one of them came back later.”
“Anyone could have come back later,” Vik said. “But they suspect us, cadets. Why? You lived in a Shatterdome, do you know?”