by Alex Irvine
All civilian populations and non-essential PPDC staff must be evacuated from the areas near the Drone attacks.
Jumphawks, V-Dragons, and other PPDC aircraft currently deployed should not return to their home Shatterdomes. Activate existing protocols for redirecting PPDC aircraft in emergency situations, per landing agreements at other regional facilities.
Until further notice, no Shao Industries contractors are to be permitted in any Shatterdome facility without personal clearance from that Shatterdome’s Marshal or acting Marshal.
No PPDC personnel are to comment publicly on these events under any circumstances. PPDC Council outreach staff in Sydney will coordinate public response and dissemination of information. It is particularly emphasized that PPDC personnel should not answer questions regarding Kaiju tissue or Kaiju components in Drone Jaegers.
Newt hurried through the halls of Shao Industries, on his way to Shao’s offices. She needed a personal update on what was happening, and she really needed to hear it from him. That was urgent in a way that Newt felt without really understanding why he felt it so keenly. He was still in shock from what he’d seen in the lab. Every single Drone Jaeger had first gone offline and then surged back to active status under independent control. The feedback through the remote Drift cradles had killed almost all of the pilots in the Remote Conn Lab. It was a horrific sight. The ones who survived had devastating brain injuries. Most of them lay twitching in their cradles, muttering gibberish or just moaning without words. Newt had ordered the tech crew to try to re-establish control over the Drones, broadcasting automatic emergency shutdown codes, but they had all been ignored.
In short, Newt had just overseen the deployment of dozens of hostile Jaegers that were in the process of destroying PPDC installations all over the world. Not to mention the havoc they were causing in the cities where Drone demonstrations had been planned as public-relations events. It was an unthinkable situation. How was it even possible? Who could have done it? There were reports from the field about strange organic protrusions on some of the rogue Drones, but Newt didn’t know how that could be possible. It was just nuts. People under battlefield stress saw funny things, that was all. Just like with that rogue Jaeger, the one the PPDC was calling Obsidian Fury. Couldn’t be that fast, right? That much faster than all the other Jaegers? Unless someone really different had created it…?
He was having thoughts like that pretty often the more stressed he got, and to keep his thoughts from going in directions he didn’t want them to go, Newt had been talking to himself a lot lately. Anyway, it made him feel better and he wasn’t self-conscious about it even though he knew some people thought talking to yourself meant you were crazy, but that was their problem. So at the moment he was rushing down the hall and talking a blue streak to himself as he went, convincing himself that everything would be all right once he got the situation figured out and knew what action to take. “Okay, okay, you got this, it’s cool. You cool? Yeah, I’m cool. I’m super cool…”
A lab tech, Qingsheng, called to Newt as he passed by. “Dr. Geiszler! Shao’s looking for you.”
“I know, I know! I’m heading up!” Newt almost started running, but he thought if he did, he might panic. The old unstable feeling in his mind was back, and it was all he could do to keep himself under control. Those were his Drones. He had designed their systems, he had overseen their manufacturing, he had helped write the training protocols for the remote Drift cradles. How had he missed someone sabotaging the whole thing by—
As he came around a corner, he almost ran smack into Hermann Gottlieb, who grabbed Newt by the arm and pulled him aside. “Hermann? How did you get in here?” He’d thought Kang had the building locked down to all outsiders.
“I do have PPDC credentials,” Gottlieb said, a little huffy at the perceived slight despite the panicked circumstances. “And besides, everyone here seems a bit preoccupied with the killer Drones your boss just set off.”
“It’s not her fault!” Newt said instinctively. But how did he know that? Why did he feel so certain about it? A plausible alternative occurred to him and he ran with it. “The Kaiju worshippers! Maybe they found a way to hack—”
“This has nothing to do with Kaiju worshippers!” Gottlieb was almost shouting. When he saw he had Newt’s attention, he glanced around them. Seeing no one else nearby, he went on in a lower voice. “We found evidence linking Obsidian Fury to Shao Industries.”
Newt couldn’t believe it. Shao, mounting a terrorist attack on the PPDC right when she was about to need the organization to approve her Drone program? That was… a little too on the nose as a false-flag conspiracy theory, wasn’t it? Although maybe that made it perfect, Newt thought. Nobody would believe how pat it was, so it would be easier to get away with it. Design a rogue Jaeger, threaten other Jaegers, demonstrate how they need some help, blow up part of the Council Building to make sure your point gets across… Was Shao capable of that? Newt really found that hard to believe. There had to be some soulless corporate tycoons who weren’t also mass murderers.
Didn’t there?
And how would she have designed and built a rogue Jaeger without Newt knowing about it? He’d been working with all the Drone program pilots. He saw all of the quarterly manufacturing reports, especially from the fully automated plants that now made up nearly forty percent of Shao Industries’ production capacity. Wouldn’t he have noticed the diversion of enough resources to make a Jaeger?
Not if the company was also concurrently making a hundred Drones…
Even so, it was a lot to take in all at once. Maybe it was Shao, but he had a little voice in his head telling him there was probably more to it than met the eye.
“This Shao Industries?” he asked, just to be sure. China was a big place. Maybe there was another company doing business under the same name. Maybe Hermann hadn’t done all of his research yet.
“No, the Shao Industries that makes knickerbocker glories,” Gottlieb said. Newt was thrown off by the joke—Hermann rarely made them—and also confused because he had no idea what a knickerbocker glory was. Gottlieb kept going before he could ask. “Yes, this one. I came to see if you would help corroborate from the inside, but now that Liwen has shown her hand with these Drones—”
No, Newt thought. Shao had spent years building up the Drone army. Her career, her reputation, her company, all of it was wrapped up in this project. It defied logic that she would do it all just to sabotage it. And Newt still couldn’t believe Shao had anything to do with the rogue Jaeger. Whatever evidence the PPDC thought they had, there must be another explanation. “Why would she build Drones to go bananas and attack? It doesn’t make any sense. And what the hell’s a knickerbocker glory?”
“She used you,” Gottlieb hissed as they hustled down the corridor toward a bank of elevators. Gottlieb moved fast even with his cane. That all by itself told Newt how pressing he thought the situation was. “Lured you with money and a fancy title. And while you were basking in the glow, she took your research and twisted it.”
Newt chewed his lip, a nervous habit he’d acquired in the last year or so. “You really believe that?”
“It’s not your fault. She’s been playing all of us. Help me stop her, Newton. Help me save the world, like old times.”
“Well, you were technically helping me last time,” Newt pointed out.
Gottlieb rolled his eyes. “Fine. Help me help you save the world. What do you say?”
Newt wanted to say yes. It was obvious he should say yes, if what Gottlieb said was true. But he couldn’t quite make himself do it. He felt almost like something inside him was preventing his mouth from forming the words. His mind spun, trying to get around this internal block, see what it was. “I say…” He looked up at a movement behind Gottlieb. “Don’t shoot!”
Newt raised his hands and stepped back as Chief Kang and a group of his officers rushed toward them down the hall, guns drawn. Gottlieb was looking at him, the thought plain on his face: Now
do you believe me?
I guess I do, Newt thought. But it’s too late.
* * *
Amara rushed into the Jaeger bay along with Shatterdome techs and field crew who had survived the Drones’ initial attack. The rest of the cadets were inside, looking around impotently for something they could do to help. They saw Amara and clustered around her. “What’s happening?” Jinhai asked. More explosions boomed from the tarmac. The Drones had worked their way through the landing strips, and were now concentrating on the hydraulic lifts and the huge collections of materiel staged out on the tarmac. The few Jumphawks and V-Dragons that had gotten away made attack runs, but their light weaponry couldn’t do much against the Drones’ armor. The braver pilots swung close enough to try to get a shot at the Drones’ heads or the power cores set deep inside their torsos, but so far none of them had managed to score a damaging hit and many of them had died in the attempt.
Ryoichi could see outside. “Are those Jaegers?”
“Drones, from Shao Industries!” Amara said. They hustled along the deck, keeping to the side so they were out of the way of Jaegers coming out of their storage docks.
“What are they doing?” Tahima looked out onto the tarmac. Like Ryoichi, he seemed utterly unable to process what he was seeing.
“I don’t know!” Amara said. “They just went crazy!” She couldn’t get the carnage out of her head. Amara had seen people die before—you couldn’t go long in the Santa Monica slums without seeing death—but on this scale, and so violent…
Jake and Lambert jogged past, in full drivesuits, weaving around some of the debris from Valor Omega on their way to Gipsy Avenger. “Clear the deck!” Lambert ordered the cadets.
At the same time Jake shouted, “Get to your quarters!”
The Drone Jaegers loomed in the Jaeger bay doors. They weren’t inside the bay, but they were close enough to see the deploying Jaegers. Plasma missiles screamed over Amara’s head as Titan Redeemer stepped out of her dock. The missile volley blew the dock and gantry apart, also taking out the catwalks on that part of the bay’s upper levels. At first Amara thought that was all the damage they had done, but as Titan Redeemer leaned into her second step, Amara realized that some of the swirling smoke was coming from her leg. One of the missiles had hit the knee joint, crippling it. As the Jaeger put her immense weight on that leg, the joint gave out. Before Titan Redeemer could compensate, she overbalanced and began to fall. “Go, go!” Lambert shouted. He and Jake shoved the cadets away, seeing that Titan was falling straight in their direction—but Lambert couldn’t both push them and get himself out of the way. As Titan loomed closer, halfway through her long fall, Lambert set his feet. Amara saw he wasn’t going to get clear in time. There was no way.
But none of them had seen Jules, running at full speed from under a nearby catwalk. She barreled into Lambert and tackled him out from under Titan Redeemer just as the toppled Jaeger slammed into the bay floor. A moment later, the Morning Star Hand smashed down, embedding itself into the steel plate of the Jaeger bay dock. The shock of the impact knocked the cadets off balance, and Jules landed on top of Lambert in an accidental embrace.
“Hey,” she said after a beat.
“Hey,” he said back.
Jake was incredulous. “Seriously? Now?”
Lambert disentangled himself, still feeling the electricity between him and Jules. He held the look as long as he could, but their comms lit up with warnings. The Drones were taking out unprepared Jaegers all over the world.
It was time to fight back.
24
JaegerWatch:
THOUGHTS ON KAIJU
Everybody’s got theories about these Kaiju rumors, and they’re all wrong. Know how I know? Because by definition you can’t know anything about aliens unless you happen to believe they think and feel as we do.
The thing you have to remember about the Kaiju, and I know this sounds stupid, but it’s simple: They’re aliens. That means you don’t know how they think, what they want, what they feel or what makes them sad or even if they can be sad or if they can see the color blue or what philosophy they might have about the relative abundance of elements in the universe.
They’re alien. ALIEN. Then we have to consider the Precursors, whatever they are. They live in another dimension, or a distant planet, and it’s so different there that the particles that came back clinging to Raleigh Becket’s drivesuit don’t even have names. There are PPDC scientists who will spend the rest of their careers just figuring out what they are.
So don’t tell me—this goes for both the Kaiju zealots and K-Science—don’t tell me you know what the Kaiju want. Because you don’t.
Because you can’t.
Because you’re human.
Unless you aren’t, and that would be a whole other problem.
Newt and Gottlieb stood together in the elevator, boxed in by Kang’s officers. Kang himself stood close to Newt. The elevator was headed down, presumably to the street level where Newt and Gottlieb would be handed over to the police on some charge Shao would trump up to make them look responsible for the Drones going haywire. Newt could see it all now. What a story Shao would tell, a tragic tale of two scientists who had once saved the world, but were corrupted and driven insane by the fact that they’d Drifted together with a Kaiju brain. Shao would pledge to make amends, putting the entire weight of her company behind the effort to counter the Drones and rebuild in the wake of their destruction. And as a result, Newt and Gottlieb would rot in jail forever while Shao’s schemes went on…
They had to do something. Newt had an idea. He caught Gottlieb’s eye and then looked down at Gottlieb’s cane. Hermann didn’t understand what Newt was suggesting. Newt tried again, adding a little dip of the chin this time to make sure Gottlieb knew he was indicating the cane. Then all he could do was hope Hermann put the rest of it together. It was time for desperate measures.
He saw understanding dawn in Hermann’s eyes, and also fear… but then determination. Hermann coughed loudly, bending over with the simulated spasm—and then came up violently swinging his cane. It smashed across the face of the nearest security officer, breaking his nose with a splatter of blood.
Newt was already moving, too, grabbing Chief Kang’s arm as Kang went for his gun.
Hermann flailed like a man possessed, his cane doing serious damage in the confined space of the elevator. Newt wrestled with Kang for possession of the gun. In the fight, the gun went off, the bullets punching holes in the floor but missing all the combatants. Kang had combat training, but Newt had the primitive advantages of surprise and desperation. He wrenched the gun out of Kang’s hand and hit him in the face with the butt. Kang staggered, and Newt hit him again. This time Kang went down. Newt looked up and saw that while he had been subduing Kang, Hermann had taken care of the other officers. Amazing, he thought. Who would have believed prim, brainy Hermann Gottlieb capable of that?
He stabbed at the elevator’s control panel and it stopped at the next floor. He and Hermann stepped out, leaving the elevator full of unconscious security guards. Newt dabbed at his lip, split in the scrap. Gottlieb had a bloody nose. But both of them were exhilarated by what they’d done. It was like something out of an action movie, but they’d pulled it off. “Thank you, Newton! I’d hug you if I didn’t have a rule about public displays of affection—oh to hell with it!”
Gottlieb hugged Newt, surprising him. He was also surprised that it didn’t bother him. He had a lot of affection for Hermann, and despite the awful circumstances, he was glad that they’d been brought back together.
“You’re welcome, Hermann,” Newt said. “Now if you’re done groping me, we need to take care of those Drones.”
* * *
They burst back into Newt’s lab, where Daiyu and the rest of the techs were still trying to get control over the Drones. That wasn’t going to be possible for them, but Newt had an idea. “Out!” he shouted, brandishing Kang’s gun. Then he added in Mandarin, “Go! Now!
Or shoot! Shoot!”
The lab erupted in pandemonium as the techs ran for the door, past Newt and Gottlieb. Daiyu was one of the last to exit. As she passed, she said, “I always knew you’d go nuts.”
“You’re fired,” Newt snapped back.
Then he and Hermann had the lab to themselves. “What do we do?” Hermann asked. “How do we stop this?”
“Back door!” Newt proclaimed. He set the gun down and rushed to a terminal, tapping commands in faster than Gottlieb could follow.
“To what?” Gottlieb asked. “The lab?”
A holo screen appeared above the terminal console, showing the entirety of the Pacific Rim. The location of each Drone was a bright red dot. Many of them were grouped together, and those that weren’t moved closer to each other, forming other groups. “To the Drone subroutine,” Newt said. “I slipped one in just in case I wanted to get in there and poke around down the road.”
“Sneaky bastard,” Gottlieb said, but in an admiring way.
“I know, right?” Newt cracked a smile, but then he had to concentrate.
The subroutine’s initiation command field opened up and Newt carefully entered the code. He’d written in a failsafe so the subroutine would lock itself down if someone tried to enter the wrong code, and there was no time to wait for the lock to expire. So after he’d typed the command, he reread it several times to make sure it was correct:
LV426
It was right. He punched ENTER.
Gottlieb was watching the screen, expecting the Drones to deactivate or return to the remote Drift protocol. Instead a command-line message appeared.
COMMAND LIMA VICTOR 426 CONFIRMED
INITIATING BREACH PROTOCOL
Gottlieb read the message over twice, eyes widening in horror. “What did you just do?”
“What I’ve been planning for the last ten years,” Newt said. “Ending the world.”
He looked up from the terminal to Gottlieb, who saw something dark and malicious behind Newt’s eyes. The enormity of what he was realizing in that moment stopped Gottlieb dead in his tracks. He looked at Newt with horror, Newt’s words replaying themselves in his mind—what I’ve been planning for the last ten years—and all at once Gottlieb realized that yes, Obsidian Fury had used Shao Industries parts, but not because Shao Liwen had created it. And yes, the Drones had gone rogue, but not because Shao Liwen had done it.
