Pacific Rim

by Alex Irvine

  But they were also a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately kind of crowd, and to them, Raleigh could see, his failure this morning had pretty much erased whatever standing he’d earned in the early years of the Kaiju War. Nobody greeted him. The kitchen staff put food on his plate silently. He walked along the tables and the people who didn’t turn their backs on him just stared, daring him to sit near them.

  So this is how it’s going to be, he thought. Okay. I work better with a chip on my shoulder, and you guys are all carving me a nice big one.

  Looking around, he saw Mako, also carrying a tray and being subjected to the collective shunning. Even Gipsy Danger’s maintenance team huddled at a table avoiding eye contact with her and Raleigh.

  He walked up to her.

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  It was technically against the rules to take trays out of the mess hall, but at this point it didn’t seem like had much to lose. They headed for Gipsy Danger’s repair area and sat on the gantry, eating in silence. Technicians went about their business on the Jaeger, finishing the run of tests Pentecost had ordered and getting the Jaeger fully fit for battle.

  And, Raleigh thought, ready for whoever was going to be Gipsy Danger’s next pilot team. Pentecost hadn’t grounded him, but Raleigh didn’t think any of the other candidates would be nearly as good as Mako in the field. Pentecost knew very well how he felt and might install a new pairing, just to avoid the problem of Raleigh corrupting the neural handshake with resentment and distraction.

  “I am ashamed about today,” Mako said eventually, looking at Gipsy Danger.

  “So am I,” Raleigh said. He pointed down at the technicians. “They’re trying to figure out what went wrong, but nothing did. You had one of the strongest machine-pilot handshakes I’ve ever seen.”

  He was still feeling it, the post-Drift hangover. He could smell the dust of Tokyo stinging in young Mako’s nose. He could hear the sound of Onibaba’s pincers dragging across the pavement. In a non-sensory kind of way, if that was possible, he also remembered the way Gipsy Danger had responded to Mako. Like they knew each other... which, given how long Mako had worked on the Mark III Restoration Project, wasn’t too much of a stretch. Raleigh thought again of the stories he’d heard in the Academy, of Jaegers moving in tune with their Rangers even after the neural handshake had broken. He thought of how he and Yancy had always felt the post-Drift hangover, and how he was feeling it now.

  Mako must have been feeling it too. She looked emptied out, shocked by the persistence of Raleigh’s loss in her mind. Could she feel Yancy too, an echo of him, because she had Drifted with Raleigh? How far did it go?

  “I didn’t anticipate it being as intense as it was,” Mako said. “I lost control.”

  Raleigh wanted to bring her out of the guilt. She wouldn’t be any good as a Ranger if she didn’t have the ability to move past mistakes. So he picked up the topic and ran with it, letting her know that he understood, that he was on her side.

  “Soko de wa tatte o mita. Kodomo ni. Sonna ni sabishikatta. Kaiju ga zenbu o totta,” Raleigh said. I saw you standing there as a child. So alone. The kaiju took it all from you.

  She opened up a little. “It was a Sunday. We went to the park. My father bought me those shoes. My mother combed my hair. Then the attack started. We were separated by the crowd... and in a minute I lost them.”

  She looked down at her tray. Raleigh saw her again reliving that day, and he relived it right with her. He’d been there with her, in the Drift. It wasn’t like any Drift he’d ever felt. Broken, yes, but also more intense. Lots of Drifts were staccato series of images at first, until the two brains figured out how to approach each other and get into the overlapping neural-handshake posture. With Mako, his Drift had been more like a movie where he was both a spectator and a character. He’d carried a red shoe with broken laces, he’d heard the cough of lungs heavy with cancer—he wondered if Mako had felt his own experiences so intensely. He didn’t think so—one of the reasons she had broken the Drift was that she had been too far inside her own past. If she’d been closely in touch with Raleigh’s past the way he was with hers, both of them could have re-centered and gone on.

  “I never saw them again,” Mako said.

  “When Yancy... was taken,” Raleigh said, “We were still connected. I felt his fear, his helplessness... his pain. And then he was gone.”

  Mako nodded and touched her heart.

  “I felt it,” she said. “I know. But now it is time for you to forgive yourself.”

  “We lived in each other’s minds for so long, the hardest part to deal with was the silence,” he said. “To let someone in—to really connect—you have to trust them. And today... today the Drift was strong.”

  “It was strong,” Mako agreed.

  They watched a crane moving a piece of Gipsy Danger’s hull. Techs crawled into the open space and the flare of a welding torch lit up the Jaeger from within.

  “Her heart,” Mako said. “Have you ever seen it?”

  The old nuclear vortex turbine lifted away from the reactor housing. The reactor itself was a proprietary design, brainchild of an engineer who left Westinghouse when they wouldn’t let him use his lab to explore portable nuclear miniaturization tech. He’d landed with one of the contractors the PPDC brought in at its founding, and his small reactors powered many of the first three generations of Jaegers. They’d also killed a couple of Rangers over time. Raleigh could see where Gipsy Danger’s reactor had new shielding in three places: the inside of the reactor compartment, the outside of the reactor housing itself, and the internal cylinder of the vortex turbine.

  “Not in a long time,” Raleigh said.

  Mako watched him remember. He could almost feel her wishing for the Drift again so she could experience the memory too.

  “You named her, right?” she asked.

  Raleigh nodded.

  “My father was a swordmaker,” she continued. “He made each one by hand. He said when a warrior names his weapon, they share a bond.”

  “Makes sense,” Raleigh said. “I missed her. She was a part of me.”

  “Before we messed up—” Mako said. She hesitated, and then asked, “Did we have a good connection?”

  Raleigh too hesitated. “As strong as I’ve ever seen,” he said, and it was true, although it felt disrespectful to Yancy to say it. Maybe that was part of what Mako had meant by forgiving himself.

  Gipsy Danger shifted and creaked. Raleigh had a superstitious moment of curiosity, wondering if she could hear her two pilots so close.

  “I’m sorry I said you were dangerous,” Mako said.

  “Unpredictable,” Raleigh said. “But I like dangerous better.” Something from their Drift floated through his mind and he smiled. “When we were Drifting, I heard a song...”

  Mako smiled back at him. She untangled earphones from her pocket and handed him one.

  “Shibuya Pop,” she said. “Kind of corny, kind of sweet. You want to hear?”

  He nodded and put the earbud in. She played the song, and they listened together, letting the music wash over and connect them. It was bouncy synthpop with a little bit of jazz to it. Music to make you feel good. Listening to music together was maybe one of the best connections you can find outside the Drift, Raleigh thought.

  But he was also thinking that if the world didn’t end in the next week or so, he and Mako would Drift together again. Whatever had happened that morning, Pentecost wasn’t fool enough to ignore the connection Raleigh and Mako had discovered.

  “We gave them an excuse to dismiss us,” he said. “But we won’t do it again.”

  “If we get a chance,” she said. “A lot of people here think I’m just Sensei’s favorite.”

  “Sensei, huh?”

  Mako looked a little embarrassed.

  “It’s been my nickname for him. More of an honorific than a nickname. He... after my parents were gone, he took care of me. Guided me. I am here because of him.” She looked
at him, a challenge in her eyes. “But I deserve everything I have gotten. He does not play favorites.”

  “Hey, you don’t need to tell me,” Raleigh said. “If anything, it’s the other way around.”

  “First we must convince him,” Mako said. “Then the rest of them will know.”

  ***

  Tendo Choi had spent hours putting the command console terminals back together. There was a lot of redundancy in the systems, but some of them hadn’t handled the rogue routines spawned from the Becket-Mori Drift failure very well. Others had suffered some damage when he’d yanked out their cables, desperate to stop Gipsy Danger from firing her cannons and obliterating the Shatterdome. With a tech crew pulled from Crimson Typhoon, the most battle-ready of all the Jaegers they had, Tendo had managed to get the console up and running again, and just about the minute he fired it up and ran through its first diagnostics to make sure he hadn’t missed anything, the Breach alarm went off.

  There’s a mistake, he thought. What did I do wrong?

  He looked at the alarm display. Kept looking, waiting for something in the data to tell him the console was misinterpreting the feed from the remote sensors. They had surface and deep-sea sensors focused on the Breach at all times, and every single one of them was telling Tendo Choi the same thing.

  He toggled the broad-spectrum visual. The Breach was a ragged tear in the seafloor, seen in the visual-light spectrum only by the intense multi-spectrum radiation that bled out of it during a kaiju transit. That energy in turn created heat, and the opening of the Breach during a transit also bled superdense and superhot plasma through from... wherever the kaiju came from. The result was that the perfect blackness of the deep seafloor suddenly became a storm of light and bubbles created by the intense heat even at the killing pressures of the bottom of the sea.

  It was a hell of a spectacle, but usually Tendo Choi didn’t watch because he got a better sense of the enemy from the nonvisual instruments. In this case, he went visual because he didn’t trust the instruments... and what he saw confirmed for him that there was not, in fact, an error in the console system.

  There were, in fact, two kaiju coming out of the Breach.

  Uh oh, Tendo thought. Gottlieb was right.

  He pinged Pentecost via video link. The Marshal answered despite being shirtless and in the middle of some kind of automated body scan. Tendo caught the end of a computer voice saying, “...decay since last month, six percent.”

  Pentecost’s torso and left arm were streaked with scars. Everyone who knew anything about the history of the Jaegers knew where he had gotten them. Onibaba. And a number of the people working for Pentecost—among them Tendo Choi—had a suspicion that he had other, less visible, ailments as well. Tendo had seen his nosebleeds, noted the times when Pentecost’s energy seemed to flag. He’d put that together with Pentecost’s service in Coyote Tango, and the anti-radiation meds they gave Mako and Raleigh. Marshal Stacker Pentecost was sick, and he wasn’t getting any better.

  But if he wasn’t going to tell anyone, then it wasn’t Tendo’s place to discuss it, so he kept his concerns to himself.

  “Mr. Choi?” Pentecost said.

  “Movement in the Breach, sir,” Tendo said. “Earlier than we thought.”

  “How strong is the signature?”

  “Signatures, sir,” Tendo said. “I’m getting two readings. And they’re headed for Hong Kong.”

  “Sound the alarm.”

  20

  ONCE HE'D DECIDED NOT TO KILL NEWT, HANNIBAL Chau took him up a series of staircases and out onto a balcony overlooking the Boneslum. Under the lowering sky, it was an eerie scene, and one that jazzed Newt to the core of his being. Imagine the scale of a creature, that when it died they had to reconstruct the city it had tried to destroy around its bones. There was a little poetic justice in it, too. The Kowloon Boneslum was a testament to the will of humanity to survive, to adapt, to rebuild.

  You could see exactly where the boundaries of the Exclusion Zone were. They formed a sort of teardrop shape, widest around the kaiju skeleton and trailing back southward, where only a narrow part of the Exclusion Zone reached the waterfront. It had been pricey hotel real estate before. Now the whole area had a different feel. Right up to the edge of the XZ, it was Hong Kong business as usual, packing everything as tightly as possible and steeping it in neon. Every square inch of every surface was designed for one purpose: to make money.

  That all stopped at the Boneslum boundary. Inside the XZ, things were built the way Newt imagined they had been before things like building codes and effective local government came along. Streets vanished and reappeared randomly. Buildings rose and leaned against each other, seemingly made of the rubble left in the wake of the kaiju’s passage and the nuclear strikes. The area inside the XZ, except right around the skeleton itself, was like a vision of Hong Kong from a hundred years before, or maybe two hundred. Astonishing, he thought. His mind almost wanted to interpret it as a movie set, because he couldn’t quite believe that such a place still existed literally touching the gleaming steel and neon city that enclosed it.

  Newt wondered what a good geneticist would find in a population that had spent the last ten years in the Boneslum. He was guessing a pretty high mutation rate, along with the occasional outright freak.

  He had the uncomfortable thought that places like the Kowloon Boneslum were humanity’s versions of the spawning pool in the Anteverse. For a moment it looked like that to him, a teeming and turbulent lawless protozoan mass. His vision of the Anteverse superimposed over it, and Newt started to sweat. He tried to blink away the image. It worked, sort of, but Newt thought he might never view urban poverty the same way again.

  Chau’s balcony looked right out over the ribs, with the skull facing toward them. Newt had a strong feeling that something still lived in those bones. Kaiju carried the entire memory of their species in each string of DNA. Who could know what information, what sentience or even will, still survived in those bones?

  “That kaiju made land ten years ago,” Hannibal said. “Its blood burned the pavement for a mile around,— but look.” He pointed to the south, where work lights illuminated a group of trucks and a swarm of workers cutting, transporting, and loading. “We’re still mining the bones.” Hannibal grinned. “I’d say I got the best from Stacker on that deal.”

  Pentecost probably felt the same way, thought Newt. His boss would do anything to keep the Jaegers battle-ready. Again he was struck by the way that humanity just got on with business. You couldn’t memorialize everything. You had to keep living; you had to survive. You did what you had to do. If that meant you rebuilt part of one of the world’s great cities over the radioactive bones of a dead monster from another dimension, well, so be it. Even as Chau’s men carved wealth from those bones, construction crews were welding together I-beams all around them. Kowloon had survived disasters before. It would always rebuild... as long as there was a world left to rebuild in.

  Just this side of the work site was the kaiju’s immense skull. Over the decade since it fell, as the radiation grew less intense and the XZ population more reckless, the locals had made the skull into a temple. Candles, thousands of them, burned in and around it, flickering on the faces of the pilgrims who processed in and out in some kind of ritual.

  “You know, some believe the kaiju are sent from heaven,” Chau said. “They think the gods are displeased with our behavior.”

  That’s because people are superstitious monkeys until they’re taught better, Newt thought. He remembered seeing some kind of documentary on kaiju worshippers, the Church of the Breach and others. Some of the names— Disciples of the Overlords of the Lands Below was one he remembered. There were prayers to the kaiju, people claiming that they were entitled to religious holidays during kaiju attacks, all that kind of bullshit.

  Newt nodded and asked, “And you?”

  Chau laughed. “I believe kaiju bone powder is five hundred bucks a pound. Why are you here? You’re not a
fter powder to keep your girlfriend happy. A guy like you doesn’t have a girlfriend. You’re married to your lab.”

  “Oh, I need access to a kaiju brain,” Newt said. The request was so ridiculous he had decided to just spit it out. “Intact if possible.”

  Chau was already shaking his head.

  “Seriously? No can do. Skull is plated so dense, by the time you drill in—”

  “Yeah, yeah, it’s rotted away. I know. But there’s always the secondary brain,” Newt said.

  That’s what he’d meant from the beginning. The main cranial brain would be too unwieldy to work with. How could you transport and Drift with something the size of a small whale? But the secondary brain...

  “Like dinosaurs had the secondary brain back at the base of their spines, by the pelvis,” Newt continued, remembering when he’d been a little kid and first read that Stegosaurus had a second brain down by its hips. The idea had blown his mind, and maybe, as much as any single other thing, that had set him on the road to where he was today. “They’re—”

  He almost told Chau that he thought the dinosaurs were an earlier, cruder version of the kaiju, but he just barely held himself back. Instead he started talking about different kinds of kaiju tissue and the way their silicon-based anatomy enhanced certain processes of neural activation, which let them move so fast and nimbly despite their immense size.

  “That’s where they’re, um, different from dinosaurs,” he said, just to have some kind of conclusion. He knew he’d reached a point where he was supposed to stop and let Chau talk, but it was really, really hard.

  One thing about the Drift hangover, Newt thought. It makes everything seems weirdly doubled. Secondary brains... spawning pools... controlled mutations...

  Hannibal said, “You really know your kaiju anatomy, don’t you, little guy?” He was thinking about something. “I can get that for you... if I can have legal claim on every fallen kaiju in the Southern Hemisphere.”