Pacific Rim Uprising

by Becky Matheson

  But suddenly, plasma missiles screamed over Jake and slammed into the command center. Quan and everyone inside were annihilated. Jake, Jules, and Nate dove behind Titan Redeemer as the building crashed down.

  In the lab, Gottlieb eyed the breaches on Newt’s holo screen in complete horror.

  “Why? Why would you do this?” he asked.

  “He wouldn’t. Or maybe he would. Maybe he hates all of you. For laughing at him. For treating him like an insignificant little joke of a man.” The words came out of Newt’s mouth, but the message seemed to be from someone else.

  Then a shock of recognition slammed Gottlieb.

  “You . . .” he said.

  Behind Newt’s eyes, Gottlieb glimpsed the insect-like alien nightmares that were controlling Newt.

  “Precursors,” said Gottlieb.

  Newt twitched. The malevolence in his eyes was replaced by fear as he struggled to break free of the mental hold.

  “Help me, Hermann. They’re in my head . . .” said Newt.

  “Fight them, Newton! Fight them—” said Gottlieb. He remembered how awful—how powerful—the Kaiju’s mental control had been when he and Newt drifted with the Kaiju during the war. Newt must have never broken completely free from it.

  Newt spasmed. The Precursors clamped down. He backhanded Gottlieb, sending him crashing against a lab table.

  “He isn’t strong enough. None of you are,” said the Precursors.

  The sound of a bullet being chambered split the air. Newt whirled. Shao had slipped into the lab—and she had the gun Newt had set down leveled right at him. Newt chuckled, unfazed.

  “Hey, boss. Finally figured it out, huh? What was it? The diagnostics?”

  “My numbers weren’t aligning with yours. How did you do it without me knowing?” asked Shao.

  “Thirty-eight percent of your company is fully automated. Wasn’t that difficult to reallocate a little here and there over the years without being detected.” Then Newt switched to perfect Mandarin: “Especially since you always thought you were the smartest one in the room.”

  “In about half a second, I’m going to be,” said Shao.

  She squeezed the trigger and BLAM! Gottlieb knocked her hand up with his cane, causing the shot to go wide.

  Newt tossed Gottlieb into Shao and ran. They went down in a tumble. Shao whipped the gun up but Gottlieb grabbed her arm.

  “Stop! It isn’t him! It’s the Precursors! They must have infected his mind when we drifted with a Kaiju brain during the—”

  “Shut up. And don’t ever touch me again,” said Shao. She stabbed an intercom on Newt’s holo terminal. “Security, find and detain Dr. Geiszler. If he tries to resist, do whatever you need to do to stop him.”

  Explosions rocked the bay outside the Moyulan Shatterdome. Amara, Jinhai, Vik, Ryoichi, Suresh, Ilya, and Renata rushed to join Jake, Jules, and Nate. They all took cover behind Titan Redeemer.

  “We told you to get to quarters!” said Jake.

  “Corridor’s blocked!” said Amara.

  “Where’s Tahima and Meilin?” asked Nate.

  “I don’t know!” said Amara.

  “What do we do?” asked Renata.

  “Stay here. We’re going to try to get to Gipsy,” said Jake.

  Explosions rocked the bay between them and Gipsy. Jake shared a look with Nate. Chances of making it weren’t on their side.

  “You ready for this?” asked Jake.

  “No. You?” said Nate.

  “Nope. On three. One, two—”

  They tensed to run into the inferno of destruction when suddenly Gottlieb’s voice came over the comm: “—ello? Anyone there?”

  “Gottlieb?” said Jake.

  Shao worked Newt’s holo screen. Her fingers flew as Gottlieb spoke into a comm at a nearby terminal.

  “Jake, thank goodness! I’ve been trying to reach the command center—” said Gottlieb.

  “It’s gone! We’re under attack! You have to force Shao to shut down the drones!”

  “It isn’t her,” said Gottlieb. “It was Newt. Precursors infected him and got into his head.”

  “Gottlieb, it’s me,” said Nate. “Can you make him disable the drones?”

  “No. He—he got away. It was my fault. I—” started Gottlieb. But then the holo screen suddenly shifted. Data blocks smashed aside.

  “I’ve penetrated the subroutine. Initiating shutdown protocol,” said Shao.

  The Kaiju drones stormed into Jaeger Bay, blasting everything in sight. Jake shouted into his comm. “Shut ’em down!”

  “Stand by,” said Gottlieb.

  Shao’s fingers flashed across the holo screen. The shutdown protocol was unresponsive! The smashed data blocks started reforming.

  “It’s trying to lock you out,” said Gottlieb.

  Shao had an idea. “Feedback loop.”

  Her fingers flew, racing against the closing data blocks.

  “Brilliant! If you modify that algorithm—” said Gottlieb.

  “Gottlieb,” said Nate.

  “Stand by,” he responded.

  “Gottlieb, shut ’em down now or we’re all gonna die!” said Jake. A shadow fell over him. He whipped his eyes up to see a Kaiju drone leveling its weapons to obliterate the group.

  SCREECH! The Kaiju drone staggered as it got hit by Shao’s feedback loop. Inside the drone, the Kaiju brain violently vibrated. Then it exploded!

  The Kaiju drone keeled over, and so did its counterparts across the bay. Every one of them collapsed, their particle beams flaring out. On the holo screen, breaches winked out, one after another.

  “Yes!” shouted Gottlieb. “Jake! Shao disabled the drones! The breaches are closed—”

  All of a sudden, three blinking circles appeared on the holo screen along with the words: KAIJU DETECTED.

  “Oh no,” said Gottlieb.

  Jake rose. Jaeger Bay was smoldering around him. “Oh no, what? Gottlieb?”

  “Three Kaiju have gotten through. South Korea, Russian coast, East China Sea. Two Cat IVs and a Cat V.”

  Everyone registered the severity of this.

  “Copy that,” said Jake. “Get back to the ’dome. We’re gonna need all the help we can get.”

  At Shao Industries, Gottlieb eyed the blinking circles that indicated the Kaiju. They were already on the move!

  Jules hustled through the devastation at Jaeger Bay. Techs assessed damage while medics tended to the wounded, including Meilin. Jake and Nate helped Amara, Jinhai, and Vik lift the hunk of concrete that was pinning down Tahima. Jules rushed over.

  “Medic!” screamed Jules.

  A medic dashed to Tahima’s side.

  Nate looked at Jules. “What do you got?”

  “Reports are still coming in, but drones took out Jaegers and Shatterdomes across the Rim,” said Jules.

  “How many Jaegers we have here?” asked Jake.

  “Operational? Gipsy Avenger. Barely.”

  “That’s it?” asked Nate.

  “Have to get more up and running or it’s gonna be a short fight,” said Jake.

  “Even if we can, all our other pilots are—” said Jules.

  “One disaster at a time. Let’s focus on those Jaegers,” said Nate.

  Jake looked at Amara. “Think you can help with the repairs?”

  “Me? Thought I was kicked out,” she said.

  “I’m kicking you back in. Nobody has more experience turning junk into Jaegers,” said Jake. Then he looked at Nate. “You good with that?”

  Nate eyed Amara and grinned in support. He knew how valuable she was to the corps. “Outstanding,” said Nate.

  Amara felt a rush of strength from the rangers’ support. Then Jinhai interrupted. “We got incoming!” he said, pointing at the tarmac.

  The group rushed to the tarmac to see a small army of high-tech aircrafts land. The Shao Industries logo was written across them. A beaming Gottlieb leapt out with Shao Liwen right behind him. Chief Kang and his men followed. The
y were all battered and bruised from their run-in with Newt.

  “I brought some help!” said Gottlieb.

  An army of Shao Industries technicians and equipment poured out from the V-Dragons. Jake grinned, relieved to see backup. The group headed to the war room.

  There, they gathered around a holo screen, tracking the destructive path of the three Kaiju.

  “Hakuja. Shrikethorn. And the big fellow, Raijin. I took the liberty of assigning designations,” said Gottlieb.

  “Yeah, great names. Sound like real jerks,” said Jake.

  “Shrikethorn and Raijin are moving away from the cities, toward the ocean,” said Nate.

  “Maybe they’re trying to link up with Hakuja in the East China Sea,” said Shao.

  “Newt would know what they’re up to, if we could get it out of him,” said Jake.

  “Have to find him first,” said Nate.

  Shao’s eyes darkened at the mention of the man who betrayed her—and all of humanity.

  “He escaped in a Shao V-Dragon,” she said. “My men are trying to track him, but he disabled the transponder.”

  “Then that’s off the table. Any Jaegers closer to those Kaiju than us?” asked Jake.

  “What was left from the Chin-do and Sakhalinsk ’domes tried to intercept. Emphasis on tried,” said Gottlieb.

  “There’s gotta be something there. Something in the East China Sea,” said Nate.

  Jake tensed as he realized what was happening. “Maybe that’s not where they’re headed. Pull up a map of Kaiju movement from the war,” he said to Gottlieb.

  “You know something we don’t?” asked Nate.

  “You said you have to understand your enemy’s objective to know you’ve beaten them,” said Jake. A map displaying Kaiju incursions from the war appeared. “What if the Kaiju weren’t blindly attacking our cities during the war?” Jake worked the screen, extrapolating where the Kaiju would have gone if they hadn’t been stopped. “What if we were just in their way?”

  The extrapolation lines intersected at a single point!

  “Mount Fuji, Japan,” said Nate.

  Gottlieb extrapolated the lines for the three Kaiju out there: Hakuja, Shrikethorn, and Raijin. Their paths also intersected at the same coordinates.

  “Mount Fuji. But why?” asked Shao.

  Gottlieb stiffened in horror, suddenly understanding. “Rare earth elements. Mount Fuji is a volcano rich in rare earth elements. Kaiju blood reacts violently with them. It’s the basis of my thruster fuel experiments.”

  “That sounds bad. That’s bad, right?” asked Nate.

  “Very. Mount Fuji is active. A geological pressure point,” said Shao.

  Gottlieb worked the holo screen. “Based on the blood to mass ratio of the Kaiju . . . the reaction would cause a cascade event, igniting the Ring of Fire around the Pacific Rim.”

  Graphics showed all the volcanoes compromising the Pacific Rim’s Ring of Fire erupting in succession. A massive cloud spread over the entire earth.

  “Billions of tons of toxic gas and ash will spew into the atmosphere, wiping out all life,” said Gottlieb, swallowing hard.

  “And finish terraforming Earth for the Precursors,” said Shao.

  “This doesn’t make any sense. Why not just open a breach right over Fuji and drop the Kaiju in?” asked Nate.

  “Or send one so big nothing could stop it?” asked Jake.

  “From the data we recovered from Dr. Geiszler’s files, the Precursors can only penetrate dimensional ‘soft spots’ between universes. Every location the drones chose corresponded to one of these,” said Shao.

  “And a Category V is theoretically the largest Kaiju they could send through, since the energy it takes to widen a breach exponentially quadruples—” said Gottlieb.

  “Yeah, science is our friend, we get it,” said Jake.

  “We can’t let them reach Mount Fuji,” said Nate.

  “I’ll check with Jules, see where we are with the Jaeger repairs,” said Jake.

  “Even if you had a hundred, there’s no way to intercept in time. The drones destroyed your Jumphawks, and my V-Dragons aren’t built to carry that kind of load,” said Shao.

  “What about your thruster pods?” Nate asked Gottlieb.

  “They’re not ready,” said Gottlieb.

  “Can they be?” asked Shao.

  “In theory, maybe, with your help,” said Gottlieb.

  “What does that mean, in theory?” asked Jake.

  Gottlieb straightened with determination. “Today it means yes.”

  A huge carrier truck hauled a gigantic container of Kaiju blood from a bay across from where the Jaegers were housed. Gottlieb oversaw the transfer.

  Jules directed an enormous crane as it lifted Titan Redeemer’s mace arm into the air to be used as parts to repair damaged Jaegers.

  Inside Bracer Phoenix’s head, Amara and Jinhai wrestled to get Bracer’s inner “ear” mechanism back in place. It almost tumbled, but Vik rushed in and helped them secure it. Jinhai worked an impact wrench to bolt the piece in place as Amara exited through the conn-pod hatch and out onto the catwalk. She paused to tell Suresh and Ilya what to do with a stack of machine parts. They hoisted a heavy piece, carrying it to Bracer Phoenix.

  Renata and Ryoichi were suspended by repelling harnesses as they welded a plate closed on Saber’s chest. Every one of the cadets was working hard!

  A small army of J-Techs and Shao techs were also suspended near them, repairing the damaged Jaeger. Renata paused to wipe sweat from her eyes and made the mistake of looking down. They were a long, long way off the ground.

  Jake and Nate helped Shao techs load a hunk of salvaged machinery onto a scrambler. Jake thumped the side, giving them the signal to drive off. He nodded to Shao as she passed. She absently returned the nod, her fingers flying across a data pad.

  Shao spotted Gottlieb entering from the tarmac and excitedly joined him to show him her calculations. Gottlieb scanned the data pad, his eyes brightening with the light of discovery.

  Shao worked the holo display, trying to get Gottlieb’s fuel equation to balance. She failed, then tried again. It locked into place!

  She threw an excited look to Gottlieb who worked at the main vid screen. He rushed over, confirming the equation at a terminal near Shao. His crazy idea was going to work! Probably. Maybe . . .

  Jules updated Jake and Nate as they hustled toward Gipsy.

  “Saber Athena, Guardian Bravo, and Bracer Phoenix are good to go,” she said.

  “Not a lot to work with,” said Jake.

  “Shao’s team kit-bashed some Fury tech into Gipsy that might help,” said Jules.

  “Prep everything we’ve got for deployment,” said Nate.

  “Don’t get yourself hurt, okay?” Jules said to Nate. She kissed him on the cheek.

  Then she turned to Jake. “You either,” she said. She also kissed him on the cheek, and then headed off down the corridor. Jake and Nate both watched her go.

  “Well that’s confusing,” said Jake.

  Nate frowned in agreement. “Let’s stay on point,” he said. “We only have four Jaegers. Against two Category IVs and a fiver.”

  “Better than just Gipsy,” said Jake.

  “Still need pilots,” said Nate.

  “We have them,” said Jake.

  Nate realized whom Jake was referring to and exhaled in concern. Were the cadets ready for this?

  Amara, Jinhai, Vik, Suresh, Ilya, Renata, and Ryoichi lined up in their cadet drivesuits, helmets in hand. Jake and Nate were now in their ranger drivesuits, too. Jake nodded to the nervous cadets, reassuring them and himself.

  “If my dad were here, he’d probably give a big speech, make you all feel invincible,” said Jake. “But I’m not my father. I’m not . . . I’m not a hero like he was. Like Raleigh Becket and Mako Mori. But they didn’t start out that way. They started as cadets, just like you. We remember them as giants because they stood tall. Because they stood together. It doe
sn’t matter how many tries it took to get here. Or who your parents are. Or where you came from. Or who believed in you and who didn’t. You’re part of a family now.”

  Jake glanced to Nate, remembering his own speech to the cadets in the sim room.

  “This is our time. This is our chance to make a difference,” said Jake. “Mount up and let’s get it done.”

  The cadets straightened with pride and determination.

  Inside Bracer Phoenix, Amara, Jinhai, and Vik climbed into their drift cradles. Amara and Jinhai were up front with Vik in the back.

  “Initiating neural handshake . . .” said Amara.

  The three reacted as their minds opened to each other. Jinhai grinned at the readout on his display. “Neural handshake strong and steady,” he said.

  “So. How’s it feel to be in a real Jaeger?” Vik asked Amara.

  “Bigger’s . . . not bad,” said Amara.

  Then all three of them grinned.

  Inside Gipsy Avenger, Nate and Jake were in their drift cradles, finishing their predeployment check.

  Nate addressed the squad over the comm. “All Jaegers, sound off, go-no-go for launch.”

  “Suresh and Ilya—” said Nate.

  “Guardian Bravo. Go,” they responded.

  “Renata and Ryoichi—” said Nate.

  “Saber Athena. Go,” they responded.

  “Amara, Jinhai, and Vik,” said Nate.

  “Bracer Phoenix. Let’s go already,” said Amara.

  “Copy that. Command, we are go for launch,” said Jake.

  Gipsy and the other three Jaegers stood on their launch pads. Gottlieb eyed them from the main holo screen, where he was overseeing the launch with his new thruster pods. Jules hustled in past war room techs that were working the support terminals, and she took a position across from Gottlieb.

  “Roger, Gipsy Avenger. Ignition in ten seconds,” said Gottlieb. Then he started to count down.

  “9 . . . 8 . . .”

  The cadets were apprehensive but eager.

  “7 . . . 6 . . . 5 . . . 4 . . .”

  Jake and Nate tensed as the countdown lowered.

  “3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . . ignition!”