by Greg Keyes
“Why is she giving the orders?” Vik asked. She wasn’t broadcasting, so no one else could hear.
“They’re not going to take orders from us,” Jinhai said. “They just aren’t. Anyway, it’s not a bad plan. Like she said, Ceptid is basically a bomb. Hit it with enough ordnance, it’s bound to go off.”
“It’s too simple,” she said. “Whenever we use what we know about the old fights, we get tripped up.”
“Not the fight in Medellin. We did more-or-less what the real Striker Eureka did when she hunted down all of the parasites.”
“That one was just to throw us off.”
Ceptid was about two thirds out of the water now, and was certainly one of the weirder Kaiju. It walked upright on skeletal legs attached to a body that resembled a gigantic pelvis, leaving a trail of rancid blue-green in the water as it approached them.
“Let’s hit it with some missiles,” Jinhai said.
They launched two, watched them streak through the clear air and impact solidly on the Kaiju, blowing a pair of its weird appendages apart and revealing what appeared to be bone beneath. At about the same time, Diablo Intercept began hitting it with Hellbolts, shells full of a napalm-like substance that soon had the Kaiju covered in sheets of flame. Now a gigantic walking torch, Ceptid kept coming, burning chunks of it falling into the sea, but at last it seemed to falter a little...
“It’s working,” Renata said. “It’ll be dead before it reaches shore.”
Vik and Jinhai fired two more missiles, this time targeting its knee joints. They hit fair, and both made satisfying kabooms, digging holes in the bony substance. A few minutes later the Kaiju walked into range of Romeo Blue, which had placed itself squarely in Ceptid’s path and unloaded a steel wind from its Gatling Chest, pocking and eroding the Kaiju like a steel wind.
Almost anything that looked like flesh was stripped from the Kaiju now, and as it approached Romeo Blue, in the shallow water, Ceptid slowed to a stop.
Then the monster began to unzip, its head splitting and unfolding, its chest opening…
And then it ran. Fast. Straight toward Romeo Blue.
“Romeo,” Renata said. “Get the hell out of there, now.”
Tahima and Meilin already had the American Jaeger in motion, but it was the slowest Jaeger Jinhai had ever seen. All Ceptid had to do was veer a little, and there was no way Romeo could escape.
But the Kaiju didn’t veer. It kept running, past the fleeing Jaeger and onto land.
“Crap,” Jinhai said. “Let’s get it.”
They raced through the water, throwing up spray, firing another pair of missiles; bits of the Kaiju flew off, but Jinhai was starting to get the picture. Everything on the outside of the monster was expendable; it gave them the illusion they were damaging it, like when a lizard dropped its tail to distract a predator. But the core of the beast – they hadn’t hurt that at all.
“Puma,” Renata said. “You’re the only one that can catch it.”
“We’re on it,” Jinhai said.
They came up on land, firing the last of their missiles, this time targeting Ceptid’s feet, hoping to upset its footing, make it trip or fall, but it just plowed on. Ahead, the skyline of a city appeared.
But they were getting close. What they would do when they got there, Jinhai wasn’t sure.
Suddenly the Kaiju’s back split open, and a blue-green mist boiled out, engulfing them.
“Oh no,” Jinhai said. “Did it just fart on us?”
Almost immediately, their viewport started going opaque.
“We’re losing all of our outside sensors,” Vik said. “Some kind of acid.”
“Hull integrity?”
“Weaker, but still good. But we’re blind.”
“Crap,” he sighed.
A few moments later the simulation ended. Ceptid had reached the city of Guayaquil and detonated, destroying a quarter of the metropolitan area, killing twenty thousand instantly, dooming another fifteen thousand to slow, agonizing death in the next few days and weeks, and leaving many more scarred, blinded, and crippled by permanent lung disorders.
* * *
They expected a rebuke from Lambert, but when they assembled afterward, he didn’t have anything to say about their performance – he just sent them to the showers. The next day, they ran the same simulation. They tried different tactics, but in the end it worked out the same, except with even higher casualties. Again, Lambert and Burke offered neither criticism nor advice.
In the next week they went through a series of simulated fights, none of them done as a group. The battles were against “real” Kaiju, but the scenarios differed from the historical ones. They started the week in Mark-1 Jaegers, progressed to Mark-2, until finally, by the end of the week, they were in state-of-the-art Mock-Pods – Mark-6s. No more Pinocchio rigs. Jinhai and Vik were piloting November Ajax.
“Oh, hell yeah,” Jinhai said, as the simulation started. “This ought to be good.”
Then he realized the scenery was all too familiar.
“Guys? Are we all here?”
Renata again. Another group drill. The other three Jaegers were all Mark-6s as well – Gipsy Avenger, Titan Redeemer, and Saber Athena.
“It’s Ecuador again!” Suresh exclaimed. “Ceptid!”
“Right,” Renata said. “But we’re not in antiques anymore. And there are four of us. This time we’ll kick its butt.”
“I don’t know,” Vik said, as the Kaiju once again rose from the water. “This doesn’t feel right.”
“No way is it getting past us again,” Tahima said.
But it did. And this time twenty thousand simulated souls went down.
This time, Lambert looked them over and shook his head.
“I’m disappointed,” he said. “Starting next week, we’re going to start washing people out. You’ve got the weekend off. No liberty – you’re not leaving the island. But you get a break. I suggest you take this time to get your minds together.”
“I think we just got our chance,” Jinhai told Vik, once they were alone and out of earshot. “The thing I mentioned earlier? How they messed with Chronos Berserker? Do you still want to check it out?”
“Yeah,” Vik said. “Let’s do it.”
* * *
Jinhai took Saturday morning to explore the coastline alone. There wasn’t a beach, but the rocks were interesting, and tide pools teemed with strange little shrimp, snails, and a few sea urchins.
He was really just trying to get his mind off the stuff he had planned for the afternoon.
Toward midday, he thought it might be interesting to climb up to the highest point of the island for the view, which was pretty spectacular. The Shatterdome itself aside, most of what surrounded Moyulan was forested mountains and rugged coastline; Fuding and its suburbs were mostly hidden by the hills to the west and across the water. He looked off at the nearby islands, which appeared serene, uninhabited, and wondered if it would be possible to just – disappear. Vanish into the forest and live off of mushrooms and bugs or whatever.
Probably not. He had hiked enough to know that – in China at least – civilization was never far away, and even if he could find wilderness deep enough, he would probably starve to death in under a month.
After a while, he noticed Vik climbing up and started back to meet her. It was supposed to appear accidental, if anyone was watching. Like they didn’t have anything planned. But in the moment, it felt hideously obvious and contrived. Not that it mattered, really. As far as the other cadets were concerned, the jury was already in.
“Hi,” Vik said, when they were within earshot.
“Hey,” he replied. “Are you ready to do this?”
She sat down, facing east, beyond the bay and toward the sea.
“Just give me a minute,” she said. “I like the ocean.”
“Oh,” he said. “Yeah, me too.”
She kept to herself for a few minutes, shifting her gaze slowly, as if trying to make certain she co
uld remember it all in detail.
“Did you ever see Shaolin Rogue fight?” she asked. “See your parents fight?”
“Not really,” he said. “Not at the time. I was in Hong Kong, in PPDC family housing at the Shatterdome. I was about six, I guess. Anyway, Huo Da was more up this way, in Shanghai. There was this lady who watched me back then, and – well, nobody even told me it was happening. If they had never come back, if they had died…” he stopped, remembering Vik’s parents had died. “Anyway, it was a long time before they did come back. They were messed up pretty bad. That was their first and last fight. After that they got promoted, and when the Jaeger program really started building again, they were pretty big deals. But they never piloted again.”
“I always wanted to see a fight,” she said. “Even if only at great distance. Especially, I wanted to see Cherno Alpha fight.”
“There are recordings,” he said.
“Yes,” she replied. “Not the same thing.”
She stood up. “Okay. Let’s go.”
They made their way around the northern slope, to the barge docks, where a few low-grade techs were repainting a loader. Beyond was a vast hangar whose doors were currently open. The techs glanced up at them as they approached. One, a red-headed woman who was maybe twice his age, gave them the once-over.
“Cadets in the wild,” she said. “Dahlgren, Ling, take a good look. You don’t usually see them out of their native habitats.” She grinned. “Are you two looking for something?”
“We’re just bushed,” Jinhai said. “I thought rather than walking all the way around to the front, maybe we could go back through the utility corridors.”
“Listen to you,” the woman said. “What do you know about the Mechspace? You could get lost in there.”
“Grew up in the HK dome,” he said. “Spent half of my time in Mechspace.”
“You don’t say. Dome rat, huh?”
“Every dome needs one or two,” he said.
She shrugged. “I guess there’s no harm. Door you’re looking for is back there and to the right.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Jinhai said.
“Just remember us little people when you’re riding up high,” she said. “And be careful – I trust you know better than to get underfoot.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “We’ll watch out.”
They passed through rows of power chugs, tool trains, convoy units, finger lifts, armored six-wheelers and all other manner of support equipment and vehicles. Some looked brand new, others were older and up on racks being worked on. They passed a gigantic head clamp with a crew swarming on it.
“Where is this?” Vik asked.
“Mechspace,” he said. “It’s where everything but Jaegers gets stored or repaired. They require tons of support equipment. That head clamp was probably dinged up when Chronos Berserker went off.”
“All these people are seeing us,” she said.
“Just act like you belong,” he said. “If somebody looks at you, just nod. We’ll be fine.”
“Okay.”
They reached the back of the hangar and the door the red-headed woman had mentioned.
That was one obstacle passed. This next one would be bigger.
The door popped open, revealing a long corridor.
“Come on,” he said.
As the woman suggested, the one corridor quickly became several, and then a warren, allowing access to various parts of the dome’s basic infrastructure. Not the power core, or anything like that, of course – but the units that scrubbed and recycled air in the event of a shatterdown, waste water management, and the various cooling systems that kept the Shatterdome from being unbearably hot due to all the various forms of energy consumed within it.
He was searching for none of that. Moyulan wasn’t laid out exactly like the Hong Kong dome, of course, and his memory of even that was a little unreliable at this point but what they were looking for was so big it really should be hard to miss.
“Ah,” he finally said, as they approached another door. “This is it.”
“Where are we?” Vik asked.
“You’ll see in a minute, I hope,” he said.
The door opened into another hangar, much larger than the first, a cavern bigger even than he remembered at the Hong Kong dome. The main overheads were down, but as they walked along the row lights came up, and Jinhai began to recognize some of the shapes.
“Jaeger parts,” Vik said. “Replacements? Prototypes?”
“Both,” Jinhai said. “Welcome to Spare Parts.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Wow.”
They moved through rows of what seemed like dismembered giants – here a massive forearm assembly, there one of the enormous motors that pulled the cables that acted as tendons inside of the machines.
The ceiling was festooned with cranes and clamps, all fastened to a track system that led off to areas where the ceiling went even further up.
“Parts ride up through the conveyance system to various parts of the bays,” he said. “If Gipsy Avenger needs some new fingers, or whatever, they’re retooled down here and then they go up.”
“What exactly are we looking for?” Vik asked.
“There,” he said, as they reached the back of the room.
“Bozhe moi,” she murmured.
Jinhai had once seen pictures of artifacts from the ancient Olmec culture of Mexico. The Olmecs had had a thing for carving big statues; not of whole people, but just of their heads – massive stone heads. In the near dark, that was what he was now reminded of, except these heads were way bigger than anything the Olmec had ever carved.
“Conn-Pods,” Vik said.
“Yeah,” he said. “I wasn’t sure. In Hong Kong, they didn’t always have spare Con-Pods. But times were kind of tough, then. They were scraping the bottom of the barrel. But the PPDC is pretty flush now, so I took a guess.” He nodded at one of them. “That’s the one we want.”
“Chronos Berserker,” she said.
“Yep.”
“So, what now?” she asked.
“We go inside.”
They climbed up through the side of the head and down the anterior hatch.
It was dark inside; the only power was in a few battery-operated subsystems, so the only light was what came in through the “face” of the Jaeger and a few LEDs on the console.
“I think I get it now,” Vik said. “You think they switched the heads out.”
“Yeah,” Jinhai confirmed. “This is the Conn-Pod we all went into, right here. Meanwhile, the other head was down here, where someone uploaded the Kaiju attack scenario while no one was looking. During the night, they changed the heads – the sabotaged one went up, this one came down.”
“That wouldn’t show up on their surveillance scans? Giant heads moving around?”
“The conveyance system is separate,” he said. “I’m sure it leaves a record someplace when you shift things like that around, but if you’ve ever been in the Shatterdome at night, things are always moving around. A lot of it is automated, and the Con-Pods are way up there. There probably was an actual order to switch out the heads that nobody had bothered to access because no one thought of it. Why would they? They have their suspects. Us.”
“So how do we prove it?”
“Like I said, there should be a record if somebody looks for it.”
“And how do we get the record?” Vik asked.
“You know who we could probably ask?” he said.
She folded her arms.
“Ranger Lambert,” he said. “Marshal Quan. Pretty much anybody who runs this place.”
“And what if they’re in on it?” Vik said. “What if one of them is trying to frame us?”
“We’re not detectives, Vik. It’s time we stopped pretending we are.”
She looked at first like she wanted to hit him, but then she closed her eyes.
“This doesn’t clear us,” she said. “The very fact that we got in here means we could have
done it – moved the Conn-Pod and everything. Someone is trying really hard to make it look like we’re guilty.”
“But we aren’t,” he said. “So we’ll be okay.”
“You have way more faith in people than I do,” she said. “I’m scared, okay?”
He nodded. “Yeah. It’s okay.”
She sidled over and looked forward. At first he didn’t understand, but then he saw she was standing where one of the pilots would stand.
“I’ve dreamed of being in one of these,” she said. “I’ve dreamed about it for so long…” She sighed. “You’re right. We should go to Mori. If she’s involved with this mess, we don’t have a prayer, anyway.”
Something dropped from the hatch above clanged against the deck and bounced, a silver canister about a foot long. He just stared at it in incomprehension, but Vik grabbed him and started pulling him toward the ladder, swearing in Russian.
Jinhai smelled something funny and a little familiar. He took a deep breath and tried to hold it, but since he could smell it already, it was far too late for that. The Conn-Pod suddenly started to shrink, going pitch black as it did so. When it shrank to the size of his head, and smaller, his mind wicked out like a candle flame between wet fingers.
25
2029
SAKHALIN ISLAND
RUSSIA
VIK
PAVEL OUTWEIGHED VIK BY AT LEAST FORTY pounds, so she didn’t block the kick he’d aimed at her head – she ducked it and delivered a sharp, short sweep to the ankle of the only leg he still had on the ground. He yelped as he fell, but he landed well and rolled back up and came back at her again.
This time he kept his feet planted and threw a flurry of punches at her. She retreated, deflecting the blows with her arms, lengthening her steps back until he overcommitted and lost his center of gravity. Then she sidestepped and punched him in the gut. He said something like guh, and bent over, trying to catch his breath.
“Stop!” the sensei shouted.