by Greg Keyes
Jinhai and Vik acknowledged that they did, and not much later the Shatterdome came in sight.
34
2035
MOYULAN SHATTERDOME
CHINA
GOTTLIEB PARSED THROUGH NEWTON’S OLD data, wondering exactly what Morales had been looking for. Something to do with the bomb, obviously. From what little they knew of it, Kaiju blood seemed to be somehow involved, so he concentrated on the chemical analysis of the blood itself.
The problem, though, was that Kaiju blood didn’t explode. It was noxious, poisonous, corrosive, ridiculously complex, but not explosive – at least not when subjected to the usual sorts of things that caused explosions: heat, electricity, violent acceleration, combustion, and so on.
Perhaps it was meant to make something else explode, then. To act as a catalyst?
He started a new search, this time on the effects of Kaiju blood. There was plenty of data on that; Kaiju blood had darkened the waters or flowed on land after the majority of battles with Jaegers. Chemical plants, oil refineries, liquefied natural gas – all had been exposed to Kaiju blood at one time or another. The blood could bring other things into contact that initiated explosions – by corroding through their containers, for instance – but no such event logged suggested direct contact between Kaiju blood and another chemical was the culprit. He was about to change tack again when he noticed something Newton had flagged, about a microchip plant in Shanghai that had exploded after the battle with Huo Da. It hadn’t taken a direct hit from the Kaiju, and in fact hadn’t exploded until the next day.
Newton had put a note there, too.
Huo Da rained blood.
That was true – Huo Da had flown, and it had been blown apart in the sky. Shanghai’s financial district had been rendered so toxic as to be uninhabitable.
Was there something at the plant that reacted to Huo Da’s blood?
He got up and went to one of the bins Geiszler had thrown spare junk into, rooting around until he found a board with microchips and dug one out with pliers. He placed it in a clear suppression canister, locked down the lid. Then he went to the refrigeration unit to retrieve some Kaiju blood.
Back in the lab, he got a drop of the blue liquid in a pipette and introduced it to a small opening on the lid of the containment chamber. He stepped back as it trickled down the tube, toward the microchip.
He was thinking that Newton would be proud of him for doing something so foolishly spontaneous.
The blood dripped onto the chip, and for a moment just sat there.
The next moment, everything went white. Gottlieb shook his head, trying to clear the ringing from his ears, blinking at the spots obscuring his vision.
By the time he had recovered, Security had already arrived.
“Dr. Gottlieb!” one of them shouted. “Are you okay?”
His voice sounded small, far away, but Gottlieb nodded.
The containment chamber was built of a synthetic polymer similar to what Kaiju plating was made of. It was rated to withstand the force of more than a hundred pounds of TNT. It was now spiderwebbed with cracks, and the titanium alloy lid had been blown completely off.
“That’s rather bad,” he said.
He was about to report the news to Marshal Quan when something occurred to him; for an instant, he almost dismissed it because it seemed random. Then he realized his brain must have dredged it up on purpose. He rushed to his terminal and began pulling up the imagery K-Watch had sent him, the little blue spot in the Philippine Trench.
35
2035
PHILIPPINE SEA
PHILIPPINES
LAMBERT LAY ON TOP OF GIPSY, EYES CLOSED, feeling the sun, teetering on the edge of a nap, thinking about Jules. He knew it didn’t make any sense – a few glimpses of her at a distance, two conversations, the smell of lavender and grease and ozone. There were a lot of women in the world – hell, there were quite a few in the Moyulan Shatterdome. So what was so special about this girl?
“What’s so special about her is that you’re even asking the question,” Burke said.
He looked over at Burke, lying on the other side of the hatch in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, dark glasses covering his eyes.
“Huh?” he said.
“You heard me,” Burke said.
“But I wasn’t talking out loud,” Lambert said. “I was just thinking.”
“We’re Drift partners, buddy,” Burke said.
“But we’re not drifting now.”
Burke lifted his hands. “Then how did I know what you were thinking?”
Lambert just stared at him.
“Why aren’t you in your battle armor?” he asked.
“Let’s try something,” Burke said. “Let’s see if you can tell me what I’m thinking.”
“Burke, I asked you a question. You should be in your armor. We might have to hook in at any second.”
Burke sat up and sighed.
“Wrong,” he said. He took off his glasses, and a blue glow spilled out. Lambert saw Burke’s eye sockets were filled with cold, azure fire.
“I’m thinking it is time for you to die.”
* * *
Lambert sat up, gasping. He was still on top of Gipsy. Burke lay on the other side of the hatch, in his body armor. He, too, was in the process of sitting up.
A persistent buzzing drew his attention. His comm.
“Yeah,” he said.
It was Xiang.
“Gipsy,” she said.
“Yep,” Lambert replied. “We’re here.”
“I’ve got some coordinates for you.”
He glanced over at Burke, who nodded.
“You’ve found the bomb?” Lambert asked her.
“I’ll let you talk to Dr. Gottlieb,” she said.
Gottlieb broke in almost immediately. “Hello, Ranger,” he said. “Taking into account the general heading of the Akumagami ship and data from K-Watch, I believe I have located the general position of the bomb, yes. Within a range of perhaps two kilometers.”
“That’s not very exact,” Lambert replied.
“The radiation signature is being masked,” Gottlieb replied. “The bomb itself is probably not particularly large. K-Watch is working on it now. I’m sure by the time you get there we’ll have a fix on it.”
“Let’s have it then,” Lambert said. “We can at least get started.”
“It’s on an island, southeast of your location. Very small, not inhabited year-round. You have the coordinates now.”
“Got ’em,” Burke said.
“Okay,” Lambert said. “We’ll head that way and hope for the best.”
“Watch yourself,” Xiang said. “You’ll be going quite near the Galathea Depth. If you fall into that, it could take you a while to climb back out.”
“Not to mention the likelihood of more of these Akumagami rogues being in the neighborhood,” Gottlieb added.
“We’ll stay safe,” Burke said.
36
2018
SEA OF OKHOTSK
RUSSIA
CHERNO ALPHA
CHERNO ALPHA WAS TOP HEAVY – IT HAD BEEN designed that way. It was built to stand its ground, to bruise toe-to-toe with Kaiju.
It was not built for speed.
And yet speed was what they were urging it to now, pushing its energy refinery and engines to the maximum.
The sea where they had first encountered Raythe had been only up to their knees, but Raythe was moving to deeper water, and soon they were almost waist deep. Off to the south, a ragged shoreline marked the northern verge of Sakhalin Island.
They were fast approaching the designated Miracle Mile.
And Raythe was gaining on them.
“Guys?” Scriabin again. “If you move off toward the shoreline, the shelf gets really shallow and then extends north. If you go that way, you might be able to cut it off.”
“Got it,” Sasha replied.
They churned slightly south.
Scriab
in was right, of course, and soon they were barely ankle deep. They went to maximum speed and then pushed past it.
“If you burn her out, you won’t get there at all,” Scriabin warned.
“We won’t burn out,” Sasha said. “Have the oil platforms been evacuated?”
“No,” the LOCCENT director replied. “There wasn’t time. There’s a fishing fleet standing by to get them, but we’ve warned them out of the water until this is over.”
“One way or another, you mean,” Sasha said.
Marshal Pentecost broke onto the line.
“There’s only one way, Cherno. One way. You win.”
“Don’t worry,” Sasha said. “If we don’t we won’t be around to get demoted, you can be sure of that.”
The sun came up, a bright orange jewel emerging on the gray horizon. The frozen sea gleamed coral, yellow, orange, the ice sheets and floes becoming almost painfully bright as the Earth’s star climbed into an azure vault striated by high, thin clouds touched gold on their bellies.
They could see where Raythe was now, as it broke ice in a long trail, traveling almost parallel to them. But they could see the nearest oil platform as well. It looked bizarrely like a treehouse, balanced as it was on a colossal central pylon. Aleksis’s memories flashed as he recalled his visit there. Bad fish soup and good vodka, laughter and stories told after the meal. The platform was the size of a small city, with hundreds of personnel on board. He remembered cafeterias, game rooms, a bar. It wasn’t Vladivostok or Hong Kong, but a lot of people would die if they failed. And more such platforms stood not far away. Plus the damage from all those deep-water wells vomiting up their oil into the ocean for who knows how long…
Although playing off of Aleksis’s memories, most of these thoughts were Sasha’s; Aleksis was driving them forward, one huge foot in front of the other, focused on only one thing.
Raythe.
“Deeper water coming up,” Scriabin informed them. “Now or never.”
No one had believed Cherno Alpha could go this fast, but she was starting to pay the price. They were drawing too much energy, and even their tremendous capacity was starting to diminish. If they had to use their incinerator turbines or Tesla Fists, they ran the risk of dropping below recommended power levels.
“So, we’ll thrash it to death,” Aleksis said, out loud.
They crossed Raythe’s wake a few meters behind it.
Cherno Alpha dove into Raythe’s trail of broken ice.
Or more accurately, fell forward and kicked against the seabed when they were at about a forty-five-degree angle.
They hit the water and went beneath it, and suddenly they couldn’t see anything. They cast about blindly…
And caught something.
They both roared in triumph.
Raythe thrashed like a sturgeon on a hook, but it was messing with the wrong fisherman. Cherno was heavy.
Of course, they had a problem, too. Cherno was meant to be a boxer, not an acrobat. She had pendular hip joints, making her enormously strong while standing, but once down, it was difficult to get back up. If the Kaiju chose to keep pulling forward, they might be able to hold on, might even be able to climb up Raythe’s back as it wore out, until they could reach something vital to punch the hell out of.
But right now, they were mostly an anchor, preventing it from reaching the oil rig.
But that was better than letting it get there.
Alarms were going off.
“The hull breach, from earlier,” Sasha said. “It’s not big, but water is getting in. I think I can seal off that section, but it could swamp one of our capacitors.”
“Do it,” Aleksis said.
The din died down. The lights dimmed and came back up.
“Tchort!” Sasha said.
About then, Raythe decided that it had had enough. It suddenly stopped trying to pull away and turned back, once again showing how weirdly flexible it was by bending almost double to reach them.
“Let go! Grab its chest!”
It wasn’t even clear which one of them had had the thought, but they acted on it immediately. Raythe towered to its full height, thus pulling them back up to their feet.
And once planted, Cherno let loose with a haymaker, hitting just under the Kaiju’s upraised arm.
It fell back into the water, but took almost no time to regain its balance and come back at them. Their back was to the rising sun, and Raythe stood completely revealed in the rays of dawn.
“Bozhe moi,” Sasha said. “I wish it was still dark.”
In the dark, Raythe had been a menacing presence, fearful because it was largely unknown.
In the light, it was just ugly.
They caught it by an arm, put a shoulder into its bulbous belly, lifted it from the water, and then slammed it into the ice, through the roiling sea, to the continental shelf below. It twisted and surged up immediately, but they caught it with a blow to the chest. It staggered back, then rose to its full height.
“The sun,” Sasha said. “I think it’s having trouble seeing.”
They charged and head-butted it, carried it once more into the sea floor, pummeling as they went.
The monster twisted so their next blow hit its armored shoulder, and then came back up, grappling them, trying to pull them once more beneath the surface. They pounded its torso mercilessly, but whatever lay beneath the thick hide wasn’t giving, not at all.
They struggled back to their feet, but once again the monster was climbing onto their head, seemingly obsessed with decapitating them.
“Aleksis…” Sasha began. She knew he wanted to pummel it to death, and so did she, but it was time to end this.
“Yes,” he said. “Whatever.”
They fired the incinerator turbines.
They looked like huge cannons, one mounted on each shoulder, and in a way, they were, but they didn’t shoot shell – they fired Hell. As they switched them on, two fluids surged from hidden reservoirs, mixed, and became something like napalm, or what napalm might dream of being, a clinging gel that burned hotter than jet fuel.
Both jets hit Raythe in the face.
The Kaiju staggered back, clawing at its scalded visage, and then ducked beneath the frigid water. The fire continued burning, white-hot beneath the waves. Cherno reached down, hauled the monster up by a leg and an arm, and began trying to pull it apart.
But Raythe twisted again, slamming its burning head into Cherno. Some of the gel stuck, and now, they too were ablaze. They hurled Raythe away.
When it got back up, it shook like a dog – gobbets of flame flew everywhere, hissing into the sea.
“I don’t think that hurt it,” Sasha said.
Raythe charged. Cherno charged.
They came together with a crash that crews on platforms sixty miles away later said they heard.
They grappled with the upright Kaiju, neither budging or giving ground, but that couldn’t last. Half of their sensors went down, and the lights dropped to emergency levels. What was worse, Sasha felt their connection in the Drift finally starting to unravel – they had joined fifteen hours ago, and that was pushing it, even for them.
Raythe’s armored head lashed out, savaging their energy refinery. At the moment, the damage was mostly on the surface, but it was clear that in a few more moments the razor-sharp beak would cut through their plating.
“This is it,” Sasha said. “Last stand.”
Aleksis was visibly straining in his harness; his face was red, and she felt the anguish, the bloodlust, how he wanted to tear the thing apart, see its blue guts spill into the sea.
But that wasn’t going to happen. Any moment, Cherno would fail, Raythe would push them into the Arctic waters and move on to ravage the oil platforms and more. Perhaps another Jaeger would stop it.
Or.
“What do we have to lose?” Sasha asked.
He reluctantly agreed. He wasn’t that far gone.
“Rerouting all power to Tesla Fists,” Sasha
reported.
“That will leave Cherno without power,” Scriabin objected. “It could take up to fifteen minutes before you have enough capacity to move.”
Sasha ignored him.
“Deploying Tesla Fists,” she said, calmly.
With a double cry, they yanked their arm free of Raythe’s embrace.
Raythe tried to withdraw its head, but this time it was too slow. Cherno’s mighty fists crashed into either side of it and held it like a vise.
Then the Tesla cells discharged, arcing 415 kW of electricity through Raythe’s three-lobed skull.
The lights went out, then came back up on battery. All of their displays were down, and they fell out of the Drift with a savagery they had never felt before.
Sasha gasped and pushed the helmet from her head. From seemingly everywhere came the deep creaking of metal complaining, cables settling. The air felt stuffy and was sharp with ozone, suggesting electrical overloads somewhere inside of the Jaeger.
Aleksis was the first to totally unhook from the Pinocchio rig. He went to the manual hatch and threw it open, looking as if he was ready to carry on the fight with his bare human hands.
The stench was unbelievable, and the cold hit them like a hammer. Cherno was frozen upright, its limbs locked rigid when the power went out.
They couldn’t see the Kaiju anywhere.
“Piss,” Aleksis swore. He looked around, wild, on the verge of snapping. He howled into the frigid air.
Sasha took his arm. “Aleksis,” she said. “We either killed it or we didn’t. There’s nothing to do now.”
Not much later they first heard, then saw a helicopter. It wasn’t a Jumphawk, but a much smaller craft with the logo of the oil company on it. When the pilot and passengers saw them standing in the opening of the Jaeger’s chest, they went wild. They seemed to be happy. Then they stuck out their arms, thumbs up.