by Alex Irvine
***
Looking out from the Shatterdome, Raleigh watched Cherno Alpha disappear beneath the waters of Hong Kong Bay. Leatherback roared, limbs spread in triumph. Cherno Alpha’s Conn-Pod feed went dark, but Raleigh knew that somewhere out there, two Rangers were drowning. He’d seen their faces through the churning water inside the Jaeger. They had known they were going to die, but they were still fighting.
A moment later, a huge underwater explosion raised a churning dome on the surface, illuminated from below by the fire of Cherno Alpha’s incendiary tanks exploding.
Leatherback dove and disappeared.
“Cherno Alpha is down,” Tendo Choi said without inflection. “Striker, repeat: Cherno Alpha is down. Leatherback has sounded.”
“Got it,” Herc said.
At the same time, Striker Eureka stunned Otachi with a double-fisted blow to the top of its head. The Jaeger lifted Otachi and flung it away, gaining time.
“Engage missiles,” Herc said.
In their Conn-Pod feed, Raleigh watched Chuck spawn a virtual launcher holo.
“On it,” he said. A missile bay ratcheted open on Striker Eureka’s chest, exposing the stubby tips of K-Stunner ramjet missiles.
“Ready salvo one,” Chuck said. “Say good night, Otachi.”
Leatherback surged back to the surface, barely two hundred yards from Striker Eureka, which was angled away from it toward Otachi.
“Warning, Striker Eureka,” Tendo said. “Leatherback on your flank, eight o’clock.”
“Salvo one—” Herc began, but the rest of his order was drowned out by the atmosphere-splitting crackle of an electrical shockwave bursting from Leatherback. It raked across the surface of the ocean, the energy of its passage bulldozing a trench through the water before it hit Striker Eureka. The sound of its impact was almost as loud as Leatherback’s generation of the wave, which surrounded Striker Eureka in a writhing cage of electrical tendrils.
Striker Eureka went dark, its missiles unfired.
“What the hell is this?” Chuck yelled.
Herc unlatched himself from the control platform and went to the port side of the cockpit, looking around to see what had happened. They saw Leatherback come into view, and through the feed Raleigh heard Chuck say, slow and a little awed, “Damn...”
Then the LOCCENT went dark, too. Through the windows Raleigh watched Otachi, under the spotlights of circling Jumphawks, swimming almost casually through the shallows of Hong Kong Bay toward the city.
“It’s some kind of EMP,” Tendo cried. “It jumbled the Jaeger’s electrical circuits!”
“They’re adapting,” Gottlieb said. His voice was part horror and part admiration. “This is not a defense mechanism. It’s a weapon!”
Emergency power kicked in and the LOCCENT came back to life.
“Striker?” Pentecost said.
“Nothing, sir. The Mark Vs are all digital. It’s fried. In fact, all the Jaegers are digital.” Tendo Choi looked like he was on the edge of panic. Two Jaegers down, one bricked by EMP, and still two kaiju running around just offshore from Hong Kong.
“Not all of ’em,” Raleigh said.
Everyone turned to look at him. Some already knew what he was about to say. Some were just hoping he would say something miraculous. Raleigh saw himself registering in their minds again. He was no longer the washout, the Ranger who couldn’t handle his return to duty.
At the moment, he was the only Ranger they had left.
And...
“Gipsy Danger’s analog,” he said. “Nuclear.”
***
Newt watched the kaiju appear over the line of buildings nearest the water. It hauled itself onto dry land, bracing its incredible bulk against a high-rise parking lot as it stood and sniffed the air. It was a quadruped, though with obvious capability to stand on its hind legs. Its head, a blunt arrowhead, sprouted two hooked battering protrusions above the nose. They would protect the eyes, Newt thought, and make it difficult to land a square shot on the kaiju’s face. Its front legs were much longer than the rear, so when it walked on all fours its elbows—also with armored protrusions—stuck up and out to the side.
A three-pronged tail, serrated thorns along its entire length, snapped and waved behind it. When it roared, windshields shattered in nearby cars. It sniffed again, flicked its tail in a curl that uprooted a block of pavement, and began to force its way deeper into the city.
Looking for me, Newt thought. It’s looking for me.
A panicking crowd was sweeping him along the street away from the kaiju, and he was fighting to slow down and get a look back at it. He wondered what ridiculous code name Tendo Choi had come up with. Fang? Wendigo?
Abruptly Newt lost his sense of humor as a kaiju flashback washed over him.
Something moving in the sac when it came before the Precursor it spread its wings
He’d seen this one before. He’d seen it born and watched the Precursors destroy the first iteration and move on to the next. He’d been present, via Drift, at the creation of this monster, and now it was coming for him. Like a baby bird imprinting on the first thing it saw.
The Precursor looked at him and it knew him and as it knew him so did they all
When his vision cleared, he was moving with the crowd, looking over their heads at the chaos of the evacuation scene.
“Hey,” he said, noticing something that he probably should have noticed right off the bat. Along the streets were posted signs reading ANTI-KAIJU SHELTER in English and Chinese, with arrows indicating the way to go.
So that’s why the crowd isn’t running straight away from the monster currently stomping Hong Kong’s waterfront to rubble, thought Newt. He’d heard of the shelters—most Pacific Rim cities that were still standing had some—but because he spent all of his time in the lab, he’d never seen one.
The kaiju had stopped to sniff the air again. It roared, splaying out its claws... and then it looked right at Newt.
His kaiju flashback kicked up again. Colors fell out of order in the spectrum and he was seeing through the kaiju’s senses. A chaos of odors and information absorbed through its skin, exaltation that the masters had sent it, pain from fire and broken skin and bone. Hunger to find...
Him. Me, he thought. They all know me now.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “You can handle this.”
The crowd had swept him right to the threshold of the nearest shelter. He went with the flow down a flight of stairs and through a large vault door. Inside the shelter, hundreds of people were jammed shoulder to shoulder, parents holding small children up off the floor or shielding them against walls. Newt was not a big fan of enclosed spaces, unless there was loud music playing and he could dance. He was a terrible dancer, fully aware of and undaunted by his terribleness.
Also, right now, he reminded himself, he was being pursued by a kaiju. A big one. Like, the biggest one they had yet seen.
More and more people shoved into the shelter. If there was some stated maximum capacity, nobody was paying attention to it. Newt started to wonder whether there was adequate air circulation. It wouldn’t do them any good to survive the kaiju if they just all suffocated instead.
The vault door boomed shut, with a sound similar to what Newt imagined Fortunato might have heard when Monstresor shut the distant basement door. Only bigger, the way that kaiju were bigger than people. So maybe the whole comparison didn’t really hold together, but Newt was thinking of it because one of Poe’s lifelong obsessive fears was of being buried alive—inhumation, he called it—and Newt was feeling right then as if he was coming as close as he ever wanted to the experience of inhumation.
“Ohh, this is so bad,” he moaned, mostly to himself. “It means Hermann was right.”
That was almost like being buried alive, admitting that Hermann was right. Two kaiju. A powerful data point in Hermann’s favor. But still only a data point. If there were four kaiju at once next week, that would be more persuasive...
On
the other hand, if there were four kaiju at once next week, or whatever Hermann’s geometric progression predicted, the world would belong to the kaijus’ masters in a month. Or sooner.
Giant footsteps boomed closer. Their echoes rang in the vaulted space over the refugees’ heads. People screamed, prayed, said random things in Chinese and various other languages. Babies, picking up on the adults’ fear, started to cry. The footsteps grew closer. Mothers covered their children’s mouths out of a strange—but to Newt perfectly understandable—fear that out of all the noises in the shelter, the cry emitting from their particular child would be the one that brought the kaiju down on them.
Gradually things quieted. The refuge shook from the weight of the kaiju, now almost directly above. Newt realized he was talking, because he couldn’t stop himself and because he didn’t figure too many people in the crowd would understand him... especially if he kept his voice down. Which he hadn’t known he was doing, but anyway.
“It stopped,” he whispered. “Right above us. It knows I’m here. It knows I’m here...”
Something touched Newt’s lips and he jumped before realizing that it was a small Chinese girl, shushing him with one tiny finger across his lips.
“It knows we’re all here,” she said in perfect English.
“No, you don’t understand,” Newt said. “It’s looking for me... me!”
Why he said it, he would never know, but the effect on the little girl was immediate. Her eyes got wide and she leaned to the closest adult and whispered. The whispers spread as the kaiju’s footsteps shook dust from the shelter’s ceiling. There was a ping in the middle of the whispers as a rivet popped out of an overhead beam and somehow found its way straight down through the mass of human flesh to the floor. People started to stare at Newt. They started to point at Newt. Newt did not like the attention.
“What?” he asked the girl. “What are you saying?”
“Guaishou yao laowai!” the girl cried out suddenly. The kaiju wants the white guy!
Uh oh, Newt thought. He shouldn’t have said it, okay, sure, but she shouldn’t have taken him seriously, either! How could she take him seriously? Didn’t matter. Her one shout was all it took to tip the apprehension in the crowd over into full-blown panic. People started to scream. They rushed away from Newt...
And at the same time, the kaiju tore the shelter ceiling away.
Debris collapsed down through the ragged hole in the street above. A car teetered on the edge of the hole and fell end over end to smash down along the wall, people scattering around it. The dim emergency lighting inside the shelter gave way to the searchlight beam from a patrolling helicopter, its beam shafting through swirls of dust.
The searchlight beam also silhouetted the hulking upper body of the kaiju. It flung away the concrete and iron ceiling of the shelter like a frisbee twenty yards in diameter, demolishing a row of small office buildings and the street vendors in front of them.
Then it bent its head down toward the hole, and inhaled, deeply. A growling sound louder than thunder came from somewhere inside it.
Newt Geiszler had always wanted to get close to a living kaiju... but now that it was happening, he was starting to reconsider.
PAN-PACIFIC DEFENSE CORPS
COMBAT ASSET DOSSIER—JAEGER
NAME:
Striker Eureka
GENERATION:
Mark V
DATE OF SERVICE:
November 2, 2019
DATE OF TERMINATION:
n/a
RANGER TEAM(S) ASSIGNED:
Hercules Hansen,
Charles Hansen
MISSION HISTORY
Striker Eureka is credited with thirteen kills, either solo or combined: MN-19, Manila, December 16, 2019; HC-20, Ho Chi Minh, May 25, 2020; Ceramander, Hawaii, October 9, 2021; Spinejackal, Melbourne, January 31, 2022; Taurax, Mindanao, July 24, 2022; Insurrector, Los Angeles, July 5, 2024; Bonesquid, Port Moresby, July 30, 2024; Hound, Auckland, August 28, 2024; Rachnid, Brisbane, September 25, 2024; KC-24, Kuching, October 4, 2024; Fiend, Acapulco, October 31, 2024; Kojiyama, Bohai Sea, November 30, 2024; Mutavore, Sydney, December 27, 2024. Recently reassigned Hong Kong Shatterdome in advance of decommissioning of Sydney Shatterdome.
OPERATING SYSTEM
Aribter 12 TAC-CONN
POWER SYSTEM
X16 Supercell chamber
ARMAMENTS
Sting Blade carbon-nanotube-edged weapon, superheated (retractable)
Pulse Gauntlet, adjustable projectile launcher
AKM rocket battery, chest-mounted; K-Stunner ramjet rocket magazines (retractable)
Burst propulsor and gravity capacitor system, combat-class balance enhancement
NOTES
Striker Eureka is designated to carry the nuclear payload on Operation Pitfall (qv).
24
IN HONG KONG BAY, LEATHERBACK WAS POUNDING Striker Eureka to pieces and there was nothing anyone in the Shatterdome could do about it. Inside Striker’s Conn-Pod, Herc and Chuck were on their own. They were just about reduced to fighting with bare hands, and keeping Striker going with flashlight batteries.
“Emergency power erratic,” Herc growled. “I’m only getting a second or two at a time.”
It was enough to keep them upright. Every so often they could even avoid one of Leatherback’s blows, though Striker Eureka couldn’t counterpunch. But sooner or later, Leatherback was going to drive them down under the waters of Hong Kong Bay, and that was going to be a one-way trip.
“We’ve got to bail,” Chuck said.
“No, I’ve nearly got it,” Herc replied. He tried to disentangle himself from the rat’s nest of cables that had fallen across the cockpit platform, at the same time working his boots loose from the clamps that held him and Chuck in the neural-handshake beginning stance. He got one boot free of both the clamp and the cables just as Leatherback spun Striker Eureka around and flung Herc across the Conn-Pod into a support beam.
In his youth, before the monsters showed up to destroy the world, Herc had played Aussie rules football. He still considered it the only real man’s sport on the planet, though he made an occasional allowance for rugby. At seventeen, he’d been legged at midfield, simple play, but he’d gone down a little wrong. The sound his collarbone had made snapping then was exactly the same sound it made now.
Herc cried out and tumbled across the floor as Leatherback attacked Striker Eureka’s head again. Chuck got himself loose and skidded across the floor toward his father.
“Come on,” he said, catching Herc around the waist. “Get up, old man.”
“Don’t call me that!” Herc snarled. As soon as he was on his feet he shook Chuck’s grip loose and held his arm cradled against his gut. With his good arm he jerked open a steel door set into the Conn-Pod wall.
Inside were two flare guns whose projectiles were said to be visible through a driving rainstorm at a distance of five kilometers. Herc had no idea whether or not that was true. They were huge flare guns, though.
“Son, we’re not going anywhere,” he said. “But we are the only thing standing between that ugly bastard and a city of ten million people. So, we’ve got a choice here. Sit and wait... or do something really stupid.”
Through Striker Eureka’s cracked and leaking windows, the light of the Shatterdome searchlights swept over the Hansens.
“You know me,” Chuck said. “I’m always up for something stupid.”
It took them less than a minute to get up the maintenance stairs that led from the Conn-Pod to the closest emergency hatch. Chuck cranked the door’s hatch mechanism, unbolting it with a whoosh of escaping pressurized air, and they stepped out onto the crown of Striker Eureka’s head.
Leatherback was taking a brief break from the hard work of battering Striker Eureka into scrap. It saw the two humans appear. It cocked its head and looked at them with what Herc could have sworn was curiosity.
; “Hey!” he shouted. “You dented my ride, you mealy-mouthed motherf—!”
Chuck fired before Herc could get his whole line.
Damn that boy, Herc thought in a flash. Always jumping the gun.
Then he fired too, a split second after Chuck, and the two enormous flares burrowed into one of Leatherback’s eyes.
The kaiju roared in agony and surprise, ducking away and thrashing its head in the water to quench the flares burning inside its eyeball. The waves nearly tipped Striker Eureka over, but the Jaeger was designed to keep its balance in a combination of hurricane, tsunami, earthquake, and kaiju attack all at once. It did not go down.
Herc looked at Chuck. He couldn’t decide whether to be proud of Chuck’s bravery, irritated that Chuck had jumped ahead of him, or disappointed the way all fathers were disappointed when their sons were too much like they had been at the same age.
But he never got to say anything, because Leatherback was recovering, and now they were going to die.
“Might as well swim for it,” Herc said. Bad joke, even if he hadn’t had a broken collarbone, but it was the only joke he had.
“Nah, bring it back over here,” Chuck said. “I’m not done yet.”
Herc couldn’t help it. He laughed.
***
Over the noise of the storm, and the sound of Leatherback’s building rage, they heard the Jumphawks. Out of the dark angry sky hove the immense figure of a Jaeger...
But there weren’t any Jaegers left, except...
“I’ll be goddamned,” Herc breathed. “Stacker’s going all in.”
The Jumphawks let Gipsy Danger go. Its feet hit the surf, the Jaeger’s lights went on, and it was standing eye-to-eye with Leatherback.
Gipsy assumed a fighting stance.
