by Alex Irvine
Next was Bracer Phoenix, an experimental Mark VI with a three-Ranger Conn-Pod designed so that one of the pilots could drop down into the secondary control room and handle Bracer’s devastating railgun. It was mounted on a track encircling Bracer’s midsection, with a fire rate of hundreds of rounds per minute. Each shell was the size of a truck. Another of Bracer’s innovations was a twin knee joint, segmented to flex both forward and backward. This advance enabled the Jaeger to hold her balance and keep moving even while the railgun was firing, as the extra joint in each leg gave it more recoil absorption, without sacrificing much in the way of strength or stability. Bracer had just been an idea on a drawing board when Jake left the PPDC. A three-Ranger crew was considered extravagant during the Kaiju War, when Rangers were at a premium, but now in the postwar era the PPDC was freer to develop different piloting protocols.
Finally Jake’s eye fell on Gipsy Avenger, the Mark VI successor to Gipsy Danger. Jake could see the family resemblance in the shape of the head and the detailing of the exterior armor, not to mention the blue-accented color scheme. He had once been assigned to Gipsy Avenger, and seeing her again churned up a lot of feelings that he would rather have left alone under their layers of time and deliberate forgetting. Gipsy was a good ride, strong and quick. She had a forearm-mounted chain sword on the left side, and her right arm contained the apparatus for the experimental Gravity Sling, a weapon Jake had barely started training on when… well, he didn’t want to think about that right now. He might be back in a Shatterdome, but that didn’t mean he had to dredge up everything in his past. Seeing Nate Lambert so soon after the uncomfortable reunion with Mako had shaken him. Lambert scorned him and Mako pitied him. Jake felt worse about Mako’s pity than Nate’s scorn. But where Nate had made it clear he didn’t want Jake around, Mako was giving him a second chance. Jake knew how generous that was even though it was a chance he never would have asked for and wasn’t sure he even wanted.
Still, he was here, and the alternative was jail, so he was going to see which way the wind was blowing and then get the hell out as soon as the chance presented itself.
They were about halfway across the Jaeger bay, weaving to avoid J-Tech crews crisscrossing the deck in Scramblers or on foot. Amara fell behind, lost in her astonishment. Jake remembered feeling the same way about Jaegers. Now he was more cynical. Sooner or later, he figured she would be too. All signs in the Shatterdome were in both Mandarin and English, and most of the techs spoke Mandarin, too. The PPDC had been an international effort from its inception, since the Kaiju had known no national boundaries. Now it retained its international character because no nation on Earth could handle the costs alone while they tried to rebuild from the widespread devastation of the Kaiju War.
“Simtraining starts at 0600,” Lambert said, snapping Amara out of her reverie. “You’re late, you miss the day. Fall behind, you’re on a transport back to wherever they found you.”
Amara finally found her voice. “That’s Titan Redeemer! And Bracer Phoenix, she’s a three-man rig! And Guardian Bravo! And—and Saber Athena! I love Saber Athena! She’s the fastest Jaeger in the fleet!” Now Jake understood the posters plastering the walls of her squat back in Santa Monica. She adored Jaegers the way other kids worshipped musicians or YouTube stars.
Jake, for his part, was curious why the whole Shatterdome seemed to be on alert. “What’s all the hustle for?” he asked Nate.
“Been ordered to put on a show. Shao and her team are coming in tomorrow.”
“Shao?” Amara echoed. “Like, Shao Liwen?” Again Jake remembered her squat, with its mini-shrine to Shao. This was a perfect place for Amara, he thought. There was nowhere else in the world where she would have a better chance to show her stuff.
“What they tell me,” Lambert said, like it was no big deal.
But to Amara, it was a very big deal. “Oh my God. Shao Liwen!” She spun to Jake. “You know who that is?! PhD at seventeen, gazillionaire way before she was as old as you are—”
“Yeah,” Jake said. “I’ve heard of her, thanks.”
“Half the tech in Scrapper came from old Shao parts.” Amara gazed up at the Jaegers surrounding them. “Can’t believe I’m gonna get to meet her.”
“You’re not,” Lambert said, glancing over at her.
“What?” Amara looked stricken. “Why?”
“Why do you think? You’re a cadet.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Get used to it around here,” Jake commented. Ranger training was a lot of things, but fair wasn’t one of them.
Amara snorted and turned back to the Jaegers. Jake could see what this meant to her. For a girl who grew up idolizing Rangers and the Jaegers they piloted, being in a Shatterdome was a dream come true. He wished he could still feel that.
“So which one’s yours?” she asked Lambert.
“Gipsy,” Lambert said. He pointed up.
“You pilot Gipsy Avenger?!” Amara was looking at Lambert in a whole new way now. Gipsy Danger, the Jaeger Avenger was built from, was a legend. Gipsy had sealed the Breach, surviving the Kaiju’s final onslaught even though it was one of the older Jaegers still in the field. It had been Raleigh Becket’s ride—and Mako Mori’s. It was a name to conjure with.
“He used to,” said a woman pulling up in a J-Tech Scrambler, a small vehicle designed for hauling heavy loads. “Until his copilot got a better offer in the private sector.” She climbed off the Scrambler and introduced herself. “Hi. Jules Reyes. J-Tech.”
“Amara. Cadet.”
“Jake. Uh, Ranger, I guess.” He looked her over. Dark hair and eyes, no-nonsense attitude to go with looks that would turn heads in the street. Jake was a sucker for the combination of competence and beauty. Jules Reyes radiated both.
She eyed him right back. “Heard a lot about you, Pentecost. You know you still hold the record.”
That piqued Amara’s interest. “What record?”
“Told you to stop talking to me,” Jake said. It was rude, and he knew it. He saw Lambert tighten up at the tone of his voice, but Jake didn’t care. The last thing he wanted to do was rehash all the old stories from the last time he’d been in a Shatterdome.
Jules took it all in and then went on like she hadn’t seen anything. “How’d they lure you back? Couldn’t have been the pay.”
“Long story,” Jake said. “If you’d like to hear it sometime…”
“She wouldn’t,” Lambert interrupted. He handed Jules the part he’d been holding. “This what you were looking for?”
“Yeah.” She grinned and loaded it onto the Scrambler. “Outstanding.”
Lambert was grinning back. Jake could see the spark between them. That explained why Lambert had been so quick to cut him off.
“I’ll swing by after I’m done with these two and give you a hand,” Lambert said.
Near one of the doors that led into the J-Tech wing of the Shatterdome, a series of clattering bangs echoed through the huge space. Jake turned to see a scientist—lab coat, glasses, awkward demeanor—stumbling away from a bunch of stacked canisters he had just knocked over. They bounced around on the floor near another Scrambler. The driver was shouting at him in Mandarin. Jake recognized the scientist: Hermann Gottlieb, one of the pair who had unlocked the secret of the Kaiju’s creators, known as the Precursors. Another legend in the history of the PPDC.
Right now he was stuttering and embarrassed at the mess he’d made, and also struggling to understand what the tech was saying. Gottlieb didn’t know much Mandarin, which was a bit of a handicap at the Moyulan Shatterdome. He minimized it by spending most of his time in the lab.
“Yo. Gottlieb. You okay?” Lambert called.
“Oh,” Gottlieb said, noticing them. “Yes.” To the tech he added a quick apology in the same language. He knew at least that much.
Cheerfully he held up a handful of what appeared to be partially burned papers. Smoke still curled from them. “Almost had it!” He blew the singed bits of
f the papers and disappeared, reading the notes as he went.
“He’s weird,” Amara commented.
Jules was also watching him go. “You have no idea,” she said. As she climbed back into her Scrambler, she added, “Welcome to the Moyulan Shatterdome, Cadet. Ranger.”
Jake watched her drive off. Lambert watched him watching. “Eyes front, Pentecost,” he said. A warning. Then he started walking again, Jake and Amara right behind him.
“What record was she talking about?” Amara asked. Jake ignored her. “Come on,” she pressed. “We were in jail together!”
Jake sighed. He wasn’t going to get out of telling the story. “Part of the final exam, back when I was a cadet,” he said as they went. “You had to hold a Drift in one of the old MarkThrees for over twenty minutes.”
“How long did you last?”
“Little over four hours.”
He could see that impressed her. It should have. A four-hour Drift was a big deal. “Who was your copilot?” she asked.
Jake glanced over at Lambert. This was the part of the story he didn’t want to tell. Apparently Lambert wasn’t interested in airing it out either. “Keep up, Cadet!” he called over his shoulder. “Time to meet the rest of the family.”
5
GREETINGS, EVERYONE. THIS IS RANIA CHIHOOLY with PacAsia Radio. You’ve no doubt heard that Shao Industries is angling to replace Ranger-piloted Jaegers with a fleet of Drones, and as part of that developing story we got curious what some former Rangers might think about this initiative. Our field correspondent Filip Chen caught up with Herc Hansen, former Ranger and briefly Marshal in the PPDC, who left the service after the closing of the Breach and the death of his son Chuck aboard Striker Eureka. Let’s go to the audio.
FC: Herc! Filip Chen, PacAsia Radio. Have you heard about the new Drone proposal from Shao Industries?
HH: Couldn’t avoid it if I wanted to, could I?
FC: What’s your opinion?
HH: On Drones in Jaegers? Dumbest thing I ever heard.
FC: Even after your son died in a Jaeger, it doesn’t seem like a good idea?
HH: My son died in a Jaeger, yeah. And if there hadn’t been Rangers in that Jaeger, and in Gipsy Danger, we’d all be dead. You think a Drone pilot could decide to blow a Jaeger’s reactor and find the manual override? Get out of here.
FC: Still, you have to admit—
HH: I said get the BLEEEEEEP out of here. And don’t ever talk to me about my son again.
* * *
Deep in the bowels of the Shatterdome was a barracks housing new cadets, a group of eight selected from thousands of eager applicants. They were all in their teens, the men with regulation cropped hair and the women carefully observing PPDC regulations about styles that kept the eyes clear. When they were in a group, it was easy to tell what the PPDC looked for in cadets. Wherever they came from—this group of eight represented six home countries—they were all athletic and lean, alert and intelligent. Most importantly, they were driven. Even in their off-hours, most of them were occupied with some kind of training. Meilin and Viktoriya wore practice Drift helmet rigs, trying to sync themselves together so they would work a holographic Jaeger arm and put it through its combat paces. But they were having trouble making it do anything. It twitched and flailed around. “You’re out of sync,” Meilin said.
Vik swore in Russian. Switching to English, she said, “Helmet’s acting up.” She took it off and the holo Jaeger arm disappeared. Both of them started tinkering with the helmet. Blonde and muscular, Vik towered over Meilin, who bent close to a circuit panel, frowning under severe black bangs as she sought the reason the Drift connection was getting interrupted. Ranger training wasn’t just about combat. A Ranger had to know every detail of how their equipment worked, because sometimes battlefield repairs and workarounds made the difference between life and death… and not just for the Rangers, either.
They all knew the story of how Raleigh Becket had sealed the Breach. With Gipsy Danger’s systems failing, sinking deeper into the hellscape of the Precursor dimension on the other side of the Breach, he had to know how to set the manual reactor override and then get back to his escape pod. That knowledge came from obsessive attention to detail.
The ability to pull it off, though, that came from sheer willpower under circumstances none of the cadets could imagine. But they believed in themselves, and they were going to do everything they could to live up to the example of their idols. Becket, Pentecost, Hansen… they had set the bar, and the cadets wanted to wear the title of Ranger just as they had.
As the Jaeger arm blinked out, two other cadets—Renata and Suresh—were sparring in the space between the bunks just beyond it. Renata caught Suresh square in the mouth with a punch at practice speed, and Suresh skipped backward, covering his mouth. “Come on!” he complained. Suresh was the nervous one of the group, with a soulful face that easily softened into a pout. “Not in the face, Renata!”
“Sorry, my bad,” she said, mimicking his expression—and then she popped him in the face again. He came back at her, and they traded blows in a flurry, bumping into a bunk where another pair of cadets, Tahima and Ilya, were playing cards.
“I see your hour of rec time and raise two shower chits,” Tahima said. Ilya considered.
On the upper bunk, Jinhai was doing sit-ups off the edge while Ryoichi sat on his legs, reading a comic about Jaegers. “Fold, Ilya,” Jinhai said when he was at full extension, with his head upside down near Ilya’s. “You need all the showers you can get.”
“I have a musk,” Ilya corrected him. “What you smell is a musk.”
Amara absorbed these impressions all at once as she entered the room with Jake and Ranger Lambert. Ryoichi was the first cadet to notice them. “Ranger on deck!” he called out, stuffing his comic under the pillow.
All of the cadets scrambled into line and snapped to attention. Lambert took a moment to watch and inspect them. Then he said, “Cadets. This is Amara Namani. She’ll be joining you in sim training, bright and early.”
They all looked her up and down, displaying a variety of reactions. Naturally they were all competitive. Ranger slots were few and precious. Another cadet meant one more person who wasn’t going to make it when the final promotions were announced. Vik in particular didn’t make any effort to hide her disdain.
“And this is Ranger Pentecost,” Lambert added, nodding at Jake.
That got a much different response. The name Pentecost crackled in the room, and they looked at Jake like he had stepped out of a history book. He tried not to show how much it irritated him. “He’ll be helping me instruct you until I find a new copilot to replace Ranger Burke.” Lambert turned to Jake. “Anything you want to add?”
Jake looked at all the eager young faces staring at him, waiting for him to say something profound. But he didn’t have anything profound to say. “Don’t do what I did,” perhaps. Or maybe “Do what I did, get out while you have a chance.” Or even “Let me tell you the real story about Stacker Pentecost and what it was like to be his son.”
But all he said was, “Not really.”
Lambert glowered at him. Jake knew why. In a situation like this, you were supposed to be rah-rah, and Jake wasn’t doing that. To Lambert, that was something close to sacrilege. But that was Nate’s problem, not Jake’s.
“Malikova!” Lambert snapped. “Get Namani squared away and prepped for training.”
She didn’t look happy. “Yes, sir.”
“As you were,” Lambert said with a final nod. He turned to go. Jake followed, looking over the cadets one last time. He didn’t want to be here, and he didn’t care if it showed on his face. He would do the job because it was keeping him out of jail, but Jake would be damned if he was going to join in with all the cheerleading about Rangers saving the world. The Breach was closed. They were all just marking time.
* * *
When the door closed and Amara was alone with her new—colleagues? Was that the right word?—
the first of them to speak was Ryoichi. “Pentecost! We’re gonna be trained by a Pentecost!”
“So?” Vik was apparently determined not to be impressed by anything. “Not like he was the one who died helping close the Breach.”
She went back to troubleshooting her practice helmet. Once she had the visor off and the contact points exposed, she started tracing each of them to the bundle where the cranial contacts transmitted brain signals to the Drift cradle. They looked all right on visual inspection, but something was obviously wrong, so she started touching each one with a small circuit tester. Amara walked up to her and stood awkwardly, waiting for Vik to look up. When she didn’t, Amara said, “Uh… hey, so where do I…”
Vik still didn’t look up. She hadn’t found a bad contact, so now she was opening up the housing on the bundle to see if there was a frayed or crossed wire there. “Heard you built your own little Jaeger.”
“Yeah,” Amara said, brightening. “Uh, Scrapper.” She was paying attention to what Vik was doing, and it got her thinking about how she’d figured out how to construct a helmet interface. “I operated her, too. With this solo rig I—”
She was pointing at something in the bundle of wires when Vik stood and interrupted her. “You want to put junk together, be a mechanic. Moyulan is for pilots.” Without another word, Vik moved off toward the far end of the barracks.
