by Alex Irvine
“We gotta get a look inside,” she said.
“Inside?” Suresh echoed.
“That thing’s part Kaiju. Come on, guys.” She turned to the group. “When are we ever going to get a chance to see something like this again?”
“Never,” Suresh said. “Never would be good.”
“Stay here if you want. But I’m going.” Amara looked back over the tarmac. She’d spent the last several years figuring out how to liberate bits of machinery from other people who wanted to keep them. She could get past Shatterdome security in her sleep. And she was going to.
18
JaegerWatch—BREAKING NEWS
Your friends at JaegerWatch have some interesting tidbits from our eyes inside the Moyulan Shatterdome. You may have heard of the rogue Jaeger attack in Sydney? Where Gipsy Avenger got more than she bargained for from a mysterious assailant since given the code name Obsidian Fury?
Well, we have it on good authority that Gipsy got revenge. The details are sketchy, but our Moyulan source claims that Obsidian Fury was brought in last night, just after Gipsy went out on an emergency deployment. It’s not hard to put those pieces together—though from what we understand nobody’s going to be putting Obsidian Fury together again. Gipsy took the rogue down hard, and in a highly permanent way.
High five to the Rangers piloting Gipsy Avenger. You might have gone down once, but you answered the bell the second time around and… well… avenged. Mako Mori and all the others dead in Sydney can rest a little easier.
Yours,
The Spirit of Gipsy Danger
They took some convincing, but eventually the other cadets went along with her plan. Amara pointed out that the Shatterdome security personnel were stationed at specific intervals, and changed shift at specific times. They were like any other on-base security detail, doing their jobs but not really convinced there was an actual threat justifying their presence. So it ended up being pretty easy to point out three or four spots were a determined group of teenagers could slip through the security perimeter and gain entry to Obsidian Fury via one of the several holes Gipsy Avenger had thoughtfully created in Obsidian Fury’s armor.
The one they ended up choosing was down in the leg. It was the closest to ground level. The security details were clustered around the ladders and gantries that led up to higher entry points in Obsidian Fury’s head and torso. Single file, they climbed in through the comma-shaped gouge made when Gipsy Avenger had stuck the sword in and then dragged it back out. Only when they were well inside the Jaeger, working their way down a corridor inside its thigh, did they turn on flashlights. Amara looked up, played the beam of her flashlight across the ceiling.
In a regular Jaeger, the ceiling of a hall like this would have been lined with heavy conduits and bundles of smaller cables, each tagged and color-coded so technicians could quickly isolate problems and make repairs. But Obsidian Fury was different. There were wires and cables, sure. But wound through all of them were filaments of Kaiju tissue. She looked up and down the hallway, and found a hatch.
She opened it and peered into the larger space beyond. It was like being inside a body instead of a machine. Long striated sinews and nerve bundles mingled with hydraulic piston assemblies and energy conduits. The sight overwhelmed her, just the scale of it and the oppressive sensation that there was something still living here…
Amara dropped back down into the corridor. “It’s fused all the way through the system,” she said, running the beam of her flashlight as far along the ceiling as they could see. “Like muscle tissue.”
“That’s how it was able to move like it did,” Jinhai observed. “Cool.” He wasn’t talking about ballerinas anymore, instead admiring this fantastic interweaving of organic tissue and machine. Obsidian Fury was practically a cyborg. A Kaiju cyborg. What a thought.
Suresh did not share their enthusiasm. “Yeah, cool,” he said, in a tone of voice that conveyed the opposite. “Working with boobs is sounding better and better.”
An odd bundle of cables caught Amara’s attention. Had she seen something like them before? “Shine your light over here,” she said, and put down her own light so she could get her hands on them.
Jinhai kept his light steady while she tried to wrestle one of the cables loose. “Oh, great, yeah,” Suresh said. “Let’s go yanking on the guts of the weird-ass Kaiju kill-bot.”
“Sack up or shut up,” Meilin said. She didn’t say much, but when she did she made her words count.
“Is there a third option?” Suresh was still watching Amara, and getting more nervous by the moment. “I’d really like a third option.”
Amara had to brace herself against a heavy bracket and pull with all her strength, jerking the cable back and forth, but eventually she got it loose from a juncture and was able to snap the other end free from where it was spliced into the bundle. She started looking more closely at the cross-section of the cable, peeling back its outer insulating layer to expose the winding around the inner core. She’d seen this before, when she was acquiring cables to build Scrapper’s power systems…
Jinhai leaned in close, trying to figure out what had Amara so preoccupied. “What is it?”
She was about to tell him when fat drops of blue Kaiju blood suddenly dripped from the ceiling. They missed Amara by sheer luck, but Jinhai wasn’t so lucky. Several splattered on his arm, dissolving the sleeve of his coat and searing the flesh underneath. Jinhai bit down on a scream and dropped to the floor, rolling around in agony.
“Jinhai!” Amara dropped the cable and started pulling his jacket off, trying to get him free before more of the blood ate through the insulated fabric.
“I told you not to yank on those!” Suresh shouted.
Amara looked up and saw where the blood was coming from. While she’d been jerking at the cables, a bracket holding several of them together had scraped against a Kaiju blood vessel running among the tissue that lined the ceiling. Eventually the vessel had burst, and now Kaiju blood was dissolving the cables and dripping down from them to the floor. It hissed and smoked on the steel grating.
She felt so bad about what she’d done to Jinhai—accident or no accident—that she completely forgot about how much trouble they were going to be in. “Go get help! Go!”
“Oh, man, we are so screwed,” Suresh said. He and Meilin ran back the way they’d come, weaving around droplets of Kaiju blood that spattered down from other parts of the ceiling as the vessel continued to drain. Meilin was shouting for a medic as they ran, and Amara heard confused shouts from the Shatterdome security outside.
She had Jinhai’s jacket off, but his arm was badly burned and the Kaiju blood was still bubbling at the edges of the wound. He gripped Amara’s arm painfully tight, teeth clenched to keep himself from screaming. She sat with him, taking the pain, trying to comfort him until the medics arrived.
Then, she knew, the real consequences would start to unfold. They were all in deep shit, but Amara had the feeling she was in the deepest of all. But whatever happened to her, she had to make sure Jake and Marshal Quan heard what she’d found.
19
IN AFTERMATH OF ROGUE JAEGER ATTACK, DRONE PROGRAM MOVES AHEAD
FROM WIRE SERVICE REPORTS
The origin of the rogue Jaeger known as Obsidian Fury is still a mystery, but its attack on the Pan Pacific Defense Corps Council meeting in Sydney two days ago appears to have given extra momentum to Shao Industries’ proposed replacement of human-piloted Jaegers with Drones. Meeting in an emergency session, with quorum rules waived due to the number of Councilors killed in the Sydney attack, the Council gave final approval to the Drone deployment. Individual members cited the need to protect Shatterdomes against potential future rogue Jaegers, as well as the need to have a single central control facility so no existing Jaeger could be hijacked and turned against the PPDC or civilians.
Fiery opposition came from the two retired Rangers on the Council, both of whom argued forcefully that Drone Jaegers would not b
e able to react in a battlefield situation with the same speed and intuition a human pilot could demonstrate. Their arguments failed to carry the day, however, and the final count found only their two votes in the nay column.
Shao Industries spokesman Joseph Burke, himself a former Ranger, expressed gratitude for the decision. “We think the Council has acted wisely,” he said, “and we look forward to getting the Drone Jaegers in the field so they can prevent anything like this terrible attack from ever happening again.”
Shatterdome security put Amara straight into a holding cell while the medics were still working on Jinhai. The room’s only furniture was a small table and two chairs. She sat down and waited for over an hour, feeling more and more guilty and anxious as she watched people go by. Most of them didn’t look at her. Those who did were either disgusted or pitying. News of her offense had traveled fast.
She saw Jake in the hall outside the holding cell, pacing back and forth. A few minutes later, Marshal Quan appeared. He and Jake started talking and the conversation quickly grew animated. Then really heated. Jake was furious about something, and Quan—if Amara was reading this body language right—was demanding that Jake follow orders. Eventually Quan made one last point and then stalked back down the hall the way he’d come. Jake stood watching him go. He rubbed his face and Amara realized it must be pretty late at night by now. She’d lost track of time. For Jake, it must have seemed even later. He probably hadn’t slept since before Gipsy Avenger’s feet had made contact with the snow outside the old factory on the Taymyr Peninsula.
He opened the door and came inside. “Is Jinhai okay?” she asked. That was the most important thing. She knew she was in for some punishment, and she could take it. She’d earned it. But if Jinhai’s injuries made him unfit for Ranger duty, Amara knew she would never forgive herself.
“There’s going to be some scarring, but yeah. He’ll live.” Amara let out a long sigh, feeling at least that worry leave her. “Marshal’s put him on probation,” Jake went on. “Meilin and Suresh too. They blink wrong, all of ’em are out.”
“It wasn’t their fault,” Amara said. “I talked them into it.” Before they got into the part of the conversation where Jake told her how stupid she was, Amara wanted to make sure he heard about what she’d found inside Obsidian Fury. “Jake, there’s something—”
He held up a hand. “Amara, I tried to talk to the Marshal.” After a brief pause, he added, “I’m sorry. You’re dismissed from the program.”
This hurt more than Amara had thought it would. In the past few days, she had just started to see the possibility of a life beyond squatting in the ruins of Santa Monica, dodging gang psychopaths and stealing to meet her needs. She’d found a family, just like Lambert had talked about… and now she’d blown it. Because she had to push the boundaries, had to act like the rules didn’t apply to her. “Doesn’t matter,” she said, trying to stay impassive. “I never belonged here anyway.”
Jake crossed the room and sat on the other chair. “I said the same thing, long time ago. But I didn’t want to be here. Not like you.”
Amara knew what he was doing. She appreciated it, but at the same time she wished they would just get everything over with. If she was kicked out, she was kicked out. She would go, and try not to ever look back. “Then why’d you sign up?”
“We were at war,” he said. “My dad was leading the charge. I thought… I dunno. Maybe I’d see more of him. Get assigned to his squadron. Maybe even Drift with him. But this weird thing happened. Turns out I was damn good at it.” He smiled at the memory of this discovery, but the smile didn’t last. He went on with his story, and for once, Amara didn’t interrupt him with a sarcastic remark. “Then one night Nate—Ranger Lambert—and I get into it. Over something stupid, I don’t even remember what. So I climbed into an old Mark IV to show him I didn’t need him or anybody else to be a great pilot.”
“Wow. That was stupid.” Amara had already heard the story of Jake holding a Drift for hours, but this was something else entirely. This was nuts, almost impossible, something only a few people had ever managed to do. And Jake had done it just to prove a point after an argument? That was… she didn’t know what it was. Crazy, ballsy, reckless, maybe even admirable all at once.
Jake shook his head. Again a little smile appeared and disappeared. “Yeah. Took two steps and blacked out from the strain.” His voice started to shake with emotion as he kept talking. “First thing I saw when I woke up in the infirmary was my dad. He told me I was out of the program. I begged him to ask them to let me stay. That I’d try harder, be a better soldier. He said there was no one to ask. The decision was his. Said I didn’t deserve to be in a Jaeger. He said—he said a lot of other things. And so did I. Soon as I could stand up, I left and never looked back.”
Jake wasn’t looking at her, and Amara had the feeling that he wasn’t entirely talking to her by then, either. They had Drifted together, so she had an intimate sense of how he viewed his father. But this was deep, buried underneath the top layer of memories that was all she and Jake had shared thus far.
“A year later, he was gone,” Jake said. “I never got the chance to prove him wrong. More importantly, I never got the chance to prove it to myself.” Now he was looking at her again, and talking to her directly—but she still had the feeling he was articulating a conversation he was having with himself just as much as he was trying to give her a last bit of guidance before she went back out into the world beyond the Shatterdome. “Because I was angry. And hurt. Don’t let what other people think define who you are, Amara. You won’t like where that takes you.” He stood and moved toward the door, but paused before leaving. “And keep your head up, and you might just be as good-looking as me in this type of situation.” She rolled her eyes. “Seriously, this face is set up well,” he added with a grin. “Beauty is a burden. You’ll be all right.”
He had a hand on the door. Amara tried to process it all. What was she supposed to do with all this? Go to Marshal Quan and beg for her cadet position, like Jake had? Or just go forth in the world and realize she’d learned a hard lesson? Or was Jake hinting that there was another way for her to save herself and stay here, with all these new people she had just begun to care about?
She was so preoccupied with sorting through all those conflicting thoughts that she almost forgot about what she’d meant to tell him right at the beginning. But now he was walking toward the door and she would never have another chance.
“Shao Industries,” she blurted out. “That’s what I was trying to tell you. Obsidian Fury has tech in it made by Shao Industries.”
He stopped and turned slowly around. “Jules and her team scanned every centimeter of that Jaeger. Didn’t find any serial numbers or identifying markers.” The implied question: How had Amara found something on her little jaunt that a trained J-Tech team had missed?
“Insulating metamaterials wound counter-clockwise in the shunt cabling,” she said. “Shao’s the only company winds them that way.”
She was confident, and her confidence cut at least part of the way through Jake’s initial skepticism. “Amara, are you sure?”
She had him. “Yeah. Stole a ton of it to make Scrapper,” Amara said, a little of her normal bravado returning. Then, almost offhand, she added, “Thought it might be important.”
She saw Jake thinking. Saw him working through the logical consequences of this find. There were three potential reasons for Obsidian Fury to have Shao Industries tech. One was simple theft, or reuse of materials originally built into a legitimate Shao product. The other two…
“Don’t go anywhere,” he told her, and shut the door behind him.
20
“SHAO INDUSTRIES?” GOTTLIEB SOUNDED skeptical. “They don’t even have a bio research division.”
“That we know of,” Jake said.
“Cabling could have been stolen, just like in Amara’s Jaeger,” Lambert pointed out. “We need more than that to link Obsidian Fury to Shao.”
“What about Newt? He’d have access to internal records, shipping manifests…”
“Go see him,” Jake suggested. “Keep it low profile.”
Gottlieb’s face lit up. “A mission,” he said, delighted. “I have a secret mission!”
* * *
At first Quan was just as skeptical as Gottlieb, but he didn’t dismiss the idea out of hand. He was too professional a soldier for that. He might have just argued with Jake over Amara’s fate in the cadet program, and he might have had just about enough of Jake Pentecost’s continual tendency to bend the rules and shoot off his mouth… but if anything about Amara Namani’s accusation could be confirmed, that was potential evidence in the investigation of the death of Secretary General Mako Mori. Not to mention hundreds, if not thousands, of other people in downtown Sydney. The final casualty counts were still coming in as rescue teams dug through the rubble of the area between the waterfront and the Council Building.
Before Quan could make any decisions, he had to work through the implications. Most importantly, he had to decide how the cadet’s discovery affected the inquiry into Mako’s death. “You think Mako was the real target in the Sydney attack?”
That was where Jake had begun his argument. “The data packet she sent led to that facility in Severnaya,” he said, expecting Quan to put the rest of the pieces together himself.
Lambert was more direct. “She must have found out what was happening there.”
“If the PPDC knew Liwen was experimenting with Kaiju bioweapons…” Jake paused, and Lambert picked up where he’d left off. It was something long-time Ranger partners tended to do, after dozens of Drifts together. The fact that Lambert and Pentecost were already doing it suggested they had a stronger than average Drift connection.
