by Alex Irvine
“That’s not all we’ve figured out,” Hermann said.
Jules had seen Newt appear and left her terminal to stand next to Hermann. “We know what you’re trying to do.”
“It’s not him,” Gottlieb objected. “It’s those things in his head.”
Newt shrugged. “Everybody has things in their head. Mine are just a lot more fun.”
“I’ve been in your mind, too, Newton,” Gottlieb reminded him. He had to appeal to the connection between them, the history they had shared, the awful danger of the Kaiju Drift they had survived together. That was the only way they might be able to bring him back. “You’re stronger than they know. You can fight them. You can stop them from doing this.”
Just as it had the last time, this appeal seemed to give Newt—the real Newt—a momentary burst of strength. He twitched, trying to break free of the Precursor control. “I… I couldn’t stop Drifting with the Kaiju brain. I tried, but she made me feel so… alive. They’re in my mind. They’re controlling me. I’m sorry, Hermann—”
“You can fight them!” Gottlieb cried. “You can stop them from doing this.”
For a moment Newt froze, and when he could move again, Gottlieb could tell the moment had passed. The Precursors were in control again. “Nice try,” Newt sneered. “You don’t even know what this is. How all the pieces fit together. Want me to show you? Want to see what else I was whipping up in Siberia? Yes? No? How about yes.”
He raised one finger in a flourish and stabbed it down onto his data pad, holding eye contact through the camera the whole time. “This is gonna be so cool,” he said. “I mean, not for you guys. For you it’s gonna suck. Sorry. But not really.”
The screen went blank.
A PPDC combat operations tech near Gottlieb straightened and tensed as her screen lit up with multiple new bogeys. “We got movement! Multiple hostiles! Three kilometers, southeast!” She swiped the tactical view over to the main holo screen at the center of the War Room. A cluster of red dots had sprung to life near the group of Jaegers.
Gottlieb immediately got on the comm. “Command to Strike Team. Are you reading this?”
He heard Jake first. “Where’d they come from?”
Gottlieb didn’t have a read on the location—or, for that matter, what all the bogeys were. Before he could say anything, he heard Shao over the internal Shatterdome comm from down in the machine shop.
“That’s one of my automated factories,” she said.
Gottlieb remembered Newt telling her that he had commandeered production at her automated facilities. He had managed to build an entire Jaeger with nobody noticing. These bogeys weren’t that big, but there were… He tried to count them and lost track. They were too close together. What could they be?
“Newt,” Lambert growled. He tapped at the HUD. “Triangulating his signal…” Now that they had the Kaiju on the ropes, he was already thinking forward to when they could put the traitorous scientist in handcuffs. Or in the ground. That would be fine with him, too.
When the HUD had stored Geiszler’s location, Lambert returned to the main tactical HUD view. “Hostiles are one kilometer and closing.”
Dammit, Jake thought. They were minutes from putting the Kaiju down for good. Bracer’s railgun shells had shattered Hakuja’s armor, the combined attack of Guardian Bravo and Saber Athena had Shrikethorn down, and Raijin was still trapped under the last building Gipsy Avenger had dropped on it.
But they had to meet this new threat, at least for long enough to figure out what it was. “All Jaegers, disengage from Kaiju and brace for contact!” he called over the comm.
The four Jaegers stepped back from the battered Kaiju and turned just as the new threat appeared.
Swarming around the corner from the direction of Shao’s factory came a tidal wave of tentacled cyborg monstrosities the size of small trucks. They flooded the street and surged up and over the collapsed remains of all the buildings Gipsy Avenger had thrown down with the Gravity Sling. They looked like Kaiju, with fanged mouths and multiple glowing eyes surrounded by a fan of cranial spikes. Ridges of bone-like protrusions ran down their backs, flattening into smaller spikes that stuck out laterally from their tails. But at the same time they were obviously mechanical, with metallic alloys formed to resemble the organic features of a true Kaiju. They moved in leaps and bounds, springing and scuttling by the hundred toward the waiting Jaegers. The chittering, buzzing noises they made merged into a sonic assault like a million cicadas, maddening in its intensity even though the Jaegers’ sensors did all they could to filter and deaden the cacophony.
Jake watched the HUD as it tried to target them and failed. There were too many, moving too fast. One of them, or even a dozen, probably couldn’t have done much damage to a Jaeger before the Jaeger got a grip on them and just crushed them in her fists—but this many? How could they fight this many?
“Any ideas, Gottlieb?” he asked.
Gottlieb was silent. Everyone in the War Room was stunned. This wasn’t a threat Jaegers were designed to address. Down in the machine shop, Shao Liwen looked on in horror, realizing just how completely she had been deceived. Newt Geiszler had turned her genius against her. He had made Shao Industries into the engine of humanity’s end.
Bracer Phoenix opened up with the railgun, raking the swarm without making an appreciable difference in its numbers. They didn’t even try to avoid the barrage. “Hold your fire, Bracer,” Jake ordered. With more confidence than he felt, he explained. “We’re going to need that railgun loaded when we take care of these little ones and get back to the real fight.”
But this was the real fight, at least right now. The swarm poured toward them, the sound growing even louder, and the Jaegers braced for it.
* * *
From the rooftop, Newt watched. The Ripper swarm was a thing of beauty. He had made them all by himself. Well, okay, he’d had a little help in the form of design suggestions from the Precursors, but his hands had typed the code. It made him proud to look at them. The Jaeger pilots must have been completely terrified. Newt wanted to let them stay in that head space for as long as possible, but it was time for the real show to begin. All good things must come to an end, he told himself. Like the human race.
He touched a blinking button on his data pad.
* * *
When the robots were within a hundred yards of the Jaegers, they dropped into fighting crouches… and then their heads turned as the swarm abruptly changed course. Instead of stampeding into the waiting Jaegers, they veered off to the side, around the block… toward the wounded Kaiju, lying near each other between the pit Hakuja had dug and the toppled tower pinning Raijin.
The swarm poured over the Kaiju, and within seconds the Kaiju had disappeared under the hundreds—maybe thousands—of silvery bodies. They roared in agony, rearing up and then falling back into the churning mass. “What are they doing?” Ilya wondered aloud. “Are they on our side?”
Amara echoed the question. The Jaegers stood back and watched, completely mystified by what they were seeing and hearing.
“Dude,” Suresh said. “That is so nasty.”
In the War Room, Gottlieb and Jules stood together as the three big Kaiju bogeys were blotted out by the horde of smaller red dots. The surveillance display started to behave erratically. One of the big bogeys seemed to blink out, but a moment later it was back as several smaller ones—but not as small as the individual members of the swarm. Then it was one single bogey again. Larger than before. The others began to coalesce as well, a galaxy of tiny red dots adding themselves to the three large ones, reconfiguring them…
Gottlieb had a terrible realization. “I don’t think so,” he said slowly, answering Ilya’s question.
On the street, Jake watched the activity in and around the pit subside. Smoke and dust rose into the air. It looked like the army of smaller Kaiju robots had completely consumed the larger Kaiju. No sign of them remained.
But on the HUD, there was one immens
e bogey.
They felt the ground beneath them shake and saw a motion in the pit. Something began to rise.
At first they thought it was one of the Kaiju, with the smaller creatures hanging on it the way remoras hung on a shark. Then it kept rising and the watching pilots saw that its head was no longer just Raijin’s head, or Hakuja’s, or Shrikethorn’s. It was bigger than any of them. Bigger, Jake realized with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, than all three of them put together. It kept rising, standing up out of the pit, and Jake realized that Newt Geiszler had saved the best part of his plan for last.
He had waited until the Kaiju were already wounded, perhaps dying, and then pulled off the ultimate Dr. Frankenstein trick, remaking all three Kaiju into one gargantuan monster. Its head was as big as any of the Jaegers, and when it reached its full height it was as tall as any of the buildings remaining in that part of Tokyo. The smaller robotic creatures were gone, folded into its mass. Some of them were still visible as attachments to its tail and the edges of its armored carapace. Others were completely gone, chewed to pieces and remade.
Stunned, they watched it emerge from the pit, pieces of itself still knitting themselves into place. The last to come together was its jaw, still pointed like Raijin’s but bearing two-hundred-foot spikes like Shrikethorn’s. The blue glow of Kaiju energy emanated from its throat and glittered in thousands of points on its back and limbs, where the smaller bots had stitched themselves together into a flexible plated exoskeleton.
As its shadow fell over the Jaegers, Lambert said, “Well, he’s pretty big.”
* * *
On the rooftop, Newt felt a surge of pride. Until he’d seen it happen, he hadn’t been one hundred percent sure the plan would work. But now he knew he never should have doubted himself. He’d run the numbers, he’d reworked the design a hundred times over ten years. The Rippers had been created for one purpose, and they had served that purpose perfectly.
He wondered what Hermann was thinking now. Who was the real genius? This was K-Science, baby, the real deal. The greatest accomplishment of a human mind… and the last. Newt knew he was destroying the human race, and even knew he should feel guilty about it. But the Precursors had shut him off from that part of himself. All he could feel was exaltation at his creation, and at the power he had brought into this world.
Across the devastated battlefield, Mega-Kaiju roared. The ripple of sound shattered windows for miles and lifted destroyed cars from the few remaining clear areas on the streets. It stepped up out of the pit and lumbered toward the Jaegers, gathering speed. As it went, its tail twitched, each flick destroying anything in its path.
“This is the way the world ends,” Newt said with cold satisfaction. “Not with a whimper. But with a bang. A very, very big bang.”
* * *
In Gipsy Avenger’s Conn-Pod, Jake gave the only order he could. “All Jaegers, advance and fire everything you’ve got!”
Gipsy led the way, barraging the Mega-Kaiju with rockets and using the Gravity Sling to batter it with rubble. The other three Jaegers advanced in a flanking formation, unloading with plasma cannons and particle beams. Missiles exploded harmlessly or deflected off the plating, which absorbed the energies of the cannons as well. The Mega-Kaiju rocked back on its haunches and pounded a fist into the ground with a tectonic boom. The shockwave rolled down the devastated street, throwing all four Jaegers into the air. In four Conn-Pods, alarms sounded and pilots flailed for balance as they found themselves suddenly weightless. The Jaegers mimicked the motion, their gyroscopic equilibrium destabilized by the shock and their Conn-Pods’ maglev fields malfunctioning in the absence of directional gravity. All of them landed in an awkward heap, except for Guardian Bravo, who managed to keep her feet.
Seeing the other three Jaegers needed a moment to recover, Suresh and Ilya took the lead. Guardian Bravo charged forward, readying the Arc Whip and peppering the Mega-Kaiju with cannonfire. “Guardian, wait!” Jake shouted over the comm. They had to stick together, fight as one, or against a monster this big they wouldn’t have a chance.
“We got this!” Ilya shouted back.
He locked in on the Mega-Kaiju’s head, looking for a target. “Go for the eyes,” Suresh suggested.
Ilya swiveled the targeting reticle over the immensity of the Mega-Kaiju’s head. “Which ones?” He counted more than a dozen.
“All of ’em!” Suresh saw the Mega-Kaiju rearing back for another earthquake punch, but this time they anticipated the move. By the time the Mega-Kaiju’s fists were slamming into the ground, Guardian Bravo was airborne, kicking off a building parkour-style and slashing the Arc Whip toward the Mega-Kaiju’s eyes. Suresh raised his voice in a battle cry as the whip snapped toward its target.
But Guardian Bravo was not the only combatant who was learning to anticipate the enemy’s next move. The Mega-Kaiju got one hand up and caught the Arc Whip, as energy crackled around its fist. Guardian Bravo was still in the air, but now the Mega-Kaiju was in control. It swung the Jaeger around like a rag doll, smashing her back and forth across the street into buildings. When there were no more standing within its reach, the Mega-Kaiju flung Guardian Bravo away, using the Arc Whip for extra momentum. The damaged Jaeger pinwheeled away across the city, smashing off a distant office tower and plowing into the lower floors of another. The second building collapsed on Guardian Bravo as she came to rest.
All four Jaegers were down. Newt Geiszler watched in delight. “Yes!” he shouted, raising his arms in triumph. “That’s what I’m talking about!” His creation had put them down in seconds, and now it thundered forward, toward the outskirts of the city and the ultimate target beyond. It was a beautiful day, Newt thought. Clear skies, the white peak of Mount Fuji vivid against the blue sky.
But this would be the last blue sky Planet Earth ever saw.
33
JAKE AND LAMBERT STRUGGLED TO STABILIZE Gipsy Avenger, which had taken more damage from the shockwave and the secondary impact than in the whole fight with the three Kaiju. Sparks showered in the Conn-Pod as overloaded circuitry shorted out. There was a plasma leak somewhere near Gipsy’s power core, not critical yet but nothing they could ignore either. Lambert swiped and punched commands as fast as he could, patching systems and rerouting the links between the Conn-Pod and Gipsy Avenger’s weapons control systems. They were going to be all right, but they were a long way from one hundred percent.
Jake was more worried about Ilya and Suresh. “Guardian Bravo, sit-rep!” he barked over the comm. “You guys okay?”
There was nothing but static on the comm.
“Ilya,” Jake said, more urgently. “Suresh. Report.”
Ilya heard Jake’s voice and started to come to his senses. He could feel blood dripping off the side of his head. Some of it was getting in his eyes. He blinked and fumbled to activate the comm. “Guardian’s down. I’m pinned in the Conn-Pod. Suresh…”
He was looking around the Conn-Pod for Suresh, trying to wipe the blood out of his eyes and get them refocused from the crash landing. Pain lanced through his hands as he touched his own face, and he looked down to see that some of his fingers were broken. Lowering his head, he also saw Suresh, and the crumpled wreckage of the Conn-Pod around him. Girders from the building that had collapsed on them were punched through Guardian Bravo’s cranial armor, and…
He tried to breathe, keep control, react like a Ranger would. “Suresh… Suresh didn’t make it, sir.”
Jake and Lambert heard this and it hit them hard. The death of any Ranger was a tragedy, but the battle-tested veterans knew what they were getting into. The kids, though… they had never counted on a Kaiju war. They had trusted the PPDC and their senior Rangers to train them, guide them, protect them. But the war had found Suresh instead.
“Copy, Guardian,” Jake said slowly.
“We’ll send help soon as we can.” Lambert had Gipsy Avenger’s balance problems back under control. The Jaeger pushed herself up and stood.
&n
bsp; “Bracer Phoenix, report,” Jake said.
Amara’s voice was loud and clear. “We’re a little banged up, but still in the fight.”
“Us too,” Renata chimed in from Saber Athena. She sounded more optimistic than she was. Ryoichi was preoccupied responding to system warnings and actually getting them vertical again. Saber Athena should have been able to land upright after that shock. The fact that she had fallen said she’d taken more damage from Hakuja than either Renata or Ryoichi had expected.
She realized she hadn’t given her call sign. “Saber, I mean. Saber Athena, sir.”
Jake let out a long breath. Okay. They still had three Jaegers. Things could be a lot worse. He started punching in coordinates from the holo map of the area around Mount Fuji. “Bracer, Saber, prepare to intercept at the following coordinates.”
“Haul ass and don’t be late,” Lambert added. Once a cadet trainer, always a cadet trainer.
“Copy,” Amara said. “Bracer Phoenix, hauling ass.”
Gipsy Avenger took off, building speed as she chased the Mega-Kaiju toward the lower slopes of Mount Fuji. Bracer Phoenix and Saber Athena were close behind. Trapped in the damaged Conn-Pod of Guardian Bravo, Ilya could not stand the idea of piloting the only Jaeger that couldn’t make it to the final confrontation. He struggled to shoulder the neural load of Guardian Bravo himself, forcing the Jaeger to break free of the debris trapping her. “Sir,” he said, voice high and tight. “I’m going to try to pilot Guardian myself.”
“Negative,” Lambert responded. “Stand down, Cadet.”
They had all heard the stories about what happened when a single pilot tried to take on the entire neural load of a Jaeger. Some Rangers could handle it for a little while, but the long-term physiological and neural consequences could be crippling. Lambert wasn’t going to bend on this. He already felt personally responsible for losing Suresh today, and the fight wasn’t over yet. He wasn’t going to put another cadet in danger, especially when Guardian Bravo would be operating at diminished combat capacity with only one pilot to handle its operations.
