by Alex Irvine
Jake grinned, keeping one arm wrapped around her and punching in the escape pod initialization sequence with the other. “Gipsy to Command,” he announced. “We are getting the hell out of here.”
A bright red warning bar appeared on the HUD. The escape pod wasn’t responding. “Warning,” Gipsy Avenger’s AI said. “Escape pod inoperable. Warning…”
Jake looked at the holo indicator counting down the kilometers to impact. It was moving way too fast for them to come up with another plan. His glance shifted to Amara, and he saw she was coming to the same conclusion.
“I’m sorry, smallie,” he said. It was all he could think of.
She mustered a brave smile. “For what? We got to save the world.” After a beat she added, “Your dad would be proud.”
Jake nodded, grateful for the sentiment. Would his dad be proud, now that Jake Pentecost was about to continue the family tradition of sacrificing his life in a last-ditch effort to save the world? He had fought hard today. They’d put two Kaiju down, and were about to take out a third. Maybe Jake was never going to be a great Ranger, but on this day he’d done everything he could.
A loud crackling noise from behind them interrupted the moment. Jake looked over his shoulder, thinking he would see the back of Gipsy Avenger’s head starting to break apart from the re-entry stress. But instead he saw a plasma beam cutting through Gipsy’s armor at the rear of the Conn-Pod. There was already a hole there from the Mega-Kaiju’s tail, and the beam enlarged it. Then a familiar metallic hand pushed through the gap and tore away another section of Gipsy’s head, revealing Scrapper clinging to the outside.
“Gipsy Avenger.” Shao Liwen’s voice rang out over the comm. “You guys need a lift?”
36
ON THE BACK OF GIPSY AVENGER’S HEAD, Scrapper clung tight, rocking in the powerful turbulence of their fall toward Earth. Shao hadn’t been able to communicate while they were coming through the electromagnetic disturbances of the upper atmosphere, and then she couldn’t move Scrapper when they were in the re-entry phase or the stresses would have torn the little Jaeger free. Only now could she act, and she had Scrapper’s plasma torches cutting a ragged hole through the back of Gipsy Avenger’s head. Sweat burned in her eyes and dripped from her chin as she finished the work and reached out. Scrapper tore loose the piece of armor she had cut and let it tumble away. Then Scrapper rubbed a hand around the inside of the hole, trying to cool the edges. Shao leaned Scrapper in close and opened her torso Conn-Pod hatch. Scrapper’s feet were braced on a metal ridge at the base of Gipsy Avenger’s skull, and her hands now dug into the battered armor on either side of the hole, pressing Scrapper as close as it could get.
“Twenty kilometers to impact!” Gottlieb warned over the comm. “Get out of there!”
Inside the Conn-Pod, Jake and Amara judged the situation. They had to get out of the Drift cradle and across the Conn-Pod, through the hole, and into the damping alcoves inside Scrapper’s Conn-Pod—all with hellacious wind ripping through the Conn-Pod from front to back now that there were two holes in Gipsy Avenger’s head. Scrapper was close to the back hole, but there was still plenty of room for them to miss the transfer and go flying off into the sky.
But that was the plan they had, so that was the plan they were going to execute. Jake started the sequence of commands to disengage the Drift cradle from his drivesuit.
He touched the final command and the Drift cradle unfolded and disconnected. The raging wind in the Conn-Pod immediately flung Jake and Amara across toward the hole leading to Scrapper’s Conn-Pod. They hit hard against the wall on either side of the hole and slid down, bloodied and stunned. Neither of them had had time to get their hands up before hitting the wall.
Gottlieb’s voice was high and tense in the comm. “Impact in ten seconds!”
Jake shoved Amara ahead. “Go! Go!”
They scrambled up and dove through the hole, Amara first and Jake right behind her. The cramped Conn-Pod inside Scrapper’s torso didn’t have the updated maglev field or a next-generation Drift cradle, but it did have two alcoves with motion-damping hydraulics. Amara and Jake squeezed into these and braced themselves. Jake couldn’t do math fast enough to figure whether the alcoves would be enough protection when they hit… but then again, if they didn’t do the job, he wouldn’t be around to worry about it. In these last ten seconds, he felt calm. Not fatalist, because he knew they had done everything they could and he no longer held the cynical illusion that nothing he did would ever be good enough. But calm. He had done his job. He had lived up to the standard set by the Rangers who came before him… including his father. That was enough to give him peace.
“Hang on,” he said.
“I am hanging on!”
“Hang tighter!”
* * *
In the skies over Mount Fuji, Gipsy Avenger streaked down, trailing smoke and shedding pieces of herself. Below, the Mega-Kaiju bounded up the last stretch of the snow-covered slope leading to the vast crater at the mountain’s summit. It tipped its head back and roared, the sound echoing out across the sky. When it leaped in and dug through the layers of stone covering the vent below the crater, it would annihilate itself in the upwelling magma and begin the end of the world.
As the echoes of its roar died away, the Mega-Kaiju heard another sound. A screaming in the sky. It looked up.
In the last second before the end of Gipsy Avenger’s long fall back to Earth, Scrapper flung its arms out and jumped. Gipsy Avenger plummeted away below and Scrapper curled into a ball, falling at an angle away from her.
The explosion of Gipsy Avenger’s impact whited out sensors in the Shatterdome War Room and registered on seismometers all over the planet. The fireball rolled down the slopes of Mount Fuji as the snowpack flashed into steam. Clouds gathered over the peak, condensing around the heat of the blast as it rose in a column of fire and dust thousands of feet into the sky. The shock wave caused landslides all across the mountain’s upper slopes, and caved in the steep interior of the crater just over the rim from where the Mega-Kaiju, moments ago, was crouched to spring. A casual observer might have thought the mountain was erupting for the first time since 1707, and in the War Room, Gottlieb understood the visual irony—since such an eruption was exactly what they had just sacrificed their last Jaeger to prevent.
The question was: Had it worked?
And had Jake and Amara survived? There was no signal from Scrapper. Electromagnetic noise from the explosion of Gipsy Avenger and the sudden lightning storm made it impossible to know what was going on. The blast of fire began to fade. Winds swirled around the peak, twisting the column of smoke into a vortex that gradually dispersed as it eddied higher away from the site of the impact. “Jake,” Gottlieb said, “Amara. Status, please.”
The sudden condensation of clouds around the peak brought snow that began to fall over the upper slopes as the site of Gipsy Avenger’s detonation cleared. Jake and Amara kicked at Scrapper’s Conn-Pod hatch. It was damaged from the blast. Scrapper had held its ball form until the blast wave hit, but the shock had shorted out most of the little Jaeger’s systems. It opened up, arms and legs going limp, as it crashed down through the stunted trees at Mount Fuji’s treeline and came to a halt in an open space, with snow and earth plowed up around it.
They got out and saw the snow… but they also saw the Mega-Kaiju, above them, still struggling to get to the rim of the crater.
Part of it, anyway. Everything below the middle of the Mega-Kaiju’s torso was gone, smeared and scattered for hundreds of yards down the slope. Its blood sizzled in the wet earth. Still it tried, digging into the stones near the summit and pulling its mangled body up. It tried to rise, and sagged back down, agonized roars subsiding to groans. One last effort dragged it to the very edge of the long fall into the crater, its claws hooked over the edge… and then it collapsed. Its eyes dimmed and it was silent.
Watching, Jake and Amara realized that against all probability, they had won. Cheers rang over
the comm from the War Room as the Mega-Kaiju’s locator bogey blinked out. They heard other voices joining in, the exultant cadets grouped together on a rooftop near where their Jaegers had fallen.
And on another rooftop, Newt Geiszler stood seething. “All right. Okay. Sure. Plan B, then. Always a Plan B.”
He turned toward the Shao V-Dragon, its engines still warm on the far end of the roof—and walked straight into Nate Lambert’s fist. The crack of the punch was followed a second later by the meatier thud of Newt hitting the ground.
“That’s about enough of that,” Lambert said to the unconscious Newt. He grimaced at the effort of throwing the punch. It felt like he’d torn something loose in his side, but by God, it was worth it.
The minute he’d managed to get out of the escape pod, he’d checked his drivesuit data feed to make sure he still had Newt’s location. He did. It had taken him a while to get to the building, and then he’d had to climb thirty flights of stairs because the power in the building was out, but when he’d come out on the rooftop and found Newt Geiszler standing there watching the remnants of the explosion that had put the final nail in the coffin of his plan… well, that had been a moment to savor.
The only thing better was knocking that sonofabitch on his ass. “Command,” he said into the comm, “this is Lambert. Be advised, I just caught us a Newt.”
In the War Room, Jules closed her eyes as relief flooded through her. Then she heard Jake’s voice.
“Copy that, Nate. Good to hear you’re still with us.”
“You too, brother. Knew you could do it.”
On the mountain, Jake looked over at Amara, who was removing her helmet and turning her face up to the snow. “I had a lot of help,” he said.
“Nice work, Ranger Namani,” Nate said.
Amara closed her eyes, basking in the compliment—Nate Lambert had called her a Ranger! She fluttered her eyelashes as she felt snowflakes land on them. Then she looked over at Jake, amazed. “I’ve never seen snow before.”
“Yeah,” Jake said with a grin. “Almost makes you forget the giant dead monster over there.” He looked upslope at the remains of the Mega-Kaiju, and thought of the other Kaiju, as well as all the multitudes of Kaiju mechs scattered between here and there. He was also thinking of Newt Geiszler and how easy it was to twist genius to evil purposes. Was Newt a bad person? Jake didn’t know. Maybe it was true the Precursors got into his head. Maybe the potential power of harnessing and engineering Kaiju biotechnology was just too much for him to resist. In the end, it didn’t matter. Lambert had tied off that loose end. His mood got more serious as he considered just how close they had all come to dying—and considered too that Suresh hadn’t made it, and neither had all the Rangers originally assigned to the Jaegers that lay destroyed back in Tokyo.
Neither had Mako.
“I feel like you’re about to make another one of your big dumb speeches,” Amara said.
“Dumb?” he shot back. “That speech was inspirational. It literally saved the world.”
“Whatever you say, sensei.”
“What did I tell you about calling me that?” Jake scooped up a snowball and pegged it in her direction. She shrieked with delight as it hit her, and threw one back.
All right, then. He bent and scooped up another, then paused. “Wait,” he said, as her words finally registered. “Did everyone really think it was dumb?”
Amara just laughed and threw another snowball. Jake did too. This time they both connected.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALEX IRVINE’S novel A Scattering of Jades won the Crawford Award for Best New Writer. He also won awards for Best New Novel from Locus magazine and the International Horror Guild and was a finalist for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He is an acclaimed writer of novelizations including Transformers Exodus, Iron Man: Virus, and Pacific Rim, which won the Scribe Award for Best Adapted Novel.
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Ascension
THE OFFICIAL MOVIE PREQUEL
FROM DIRECTOR STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
NOVEL BY GREG KEYES
It’s been ten years since humanity’s war with the monstrous Kaiju ended and the Breach at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean was sealed. The Pan Pacific Defense Corps remains vigilant in anticipation of the Kaiju’s return, expanding and advancing their fleet of massive mechs known as Jaegers and accepting the best and the brightest candidates into the Jaeger Academy Training Program to forge the next generation of heroes. Training is competitive and positions are few. Ou-Yang Jinhai and Viktoriya Malikova grew up in the ashes of the Kaiju War and followed different paths to join the latest batch of cadets at the Moyulan Shatterdome, the most prestigious PPDC training location in the world. Yet not long after their arrival, tragedy strikes as a deadly act of sabotage casts suspicion on the new cadets. Together they must work to clear their name and discover the truth as dark forces conspire against them and new threats surface from both sides of the Breach…
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