PACIFIC RIM UPRISING ASCENSION

by Greg Keyes

  “Okay,” Tendo said. “We’re about ready to set you down. The depth here is about two hundred feet, but it gets twice that if we go much further. Huo Da’s path hasn’t deviated. It’ll be under you in fifteen minutes. We’re going to go ahead and initiate pilot-to-pilot protocol, if that’s okay with you guys.”

  “We’re ready,” Suyin said.

  The first time he and Suyin had drifted, they had already been in love, were already married, already had a son.

  But it had still changed everything. Suyin called it their “second wedding”. Some experienced the meeting of minds almost violently, he had heard, as one or both personalities either pushed back against the other or latched on to bad memories. But with Suyin, it was always gentle – like a voice in another room coming toward you, like waking to her beside him in the morning. And once the neural handshake was engaged, it was difficult to tell his thoughts from hers. But that also didn’t matter, or bother him in the least. It was how he wished it was all the time. He was better in every way when they shared their minds. He felt his fear and trepidation flow away. They were Shaolin Rogue, and they would win this battle.

  Once they were ready, the Jumphawks lowered them toward the water. They watched flying fish skip away from them, gliding from swell to swell. Farther away, they saw the smooth gray backs of dolphins.

  It was good to see, but at the same time, Ming-hau’s heart sank. Shallow water marine life had suffered terribly from Kaiju incursions and the toxic blood spills resulting when Jaegers killed them. The Yellow Sea had endured damage from human-caused pollution for years, but had so far been spared the far greater insult of a dead Kaiju.

  That was about to change, and he and Suyin would be to blame, in a way. But there was no help for it, unless they could kill the beast without somehow bleeding it out.

  He put it out of their minds. They would kill it however they could. Shanghai was counting on them.

  When their feet hit the bottom, only their head and the upper reaches of their shoulders remained above the waves.

  “Sonar enhancement on,” Suyin said. “There it is.”

  Huo Da was coming, and they were almost directly in its path. In fact, it seemed to be veering a bit toward them, and speeding up.

  They dropped into a crouch, submerging the Conn-Pod. Instantly they were in a different world, a wonderland forest of olive-green kelp teeming with flickering silver life. It was beautiful, but also cut their optical visibility to nearly zero. Hopefully that worked both ways, and they could surprise the Kaiju. They could still see it approaching as an image compiled from sonar and LOCCENT telemetry.

  Ming-hau heard something, a long, rising note, then a deep, falling one.

  “Whale song,” Suyin murmured, awestruck. “I never thought I would hear—”

  Suddenly the Kaiju blip on the sonar became a full silhouette, complete with scale.

  “It’s big,” Suyin said. “I hadn’t imagined—”

  “We’re bigger,” Ming-hau reminded her.

  And then, after all the waiting, the kelp forest parted before them, and a thing from nightmares appeared. And it was – as Suyin observed – big. Even travelling horizontally, like a worm, it was more than half their height, and what they saw at first were its four huge, hemispherical eyes and a cluster of colossal, armored, multi-jointed forelegs, maybe eight of them, maybe more. Two of the limbs were so long that he thought at first they were horns or very thick antennae, but then he saw they were flexible, already reaching around them like tentacles, probably to pull them toward the smaller, scythe-like legs below its eyes.

  Shaolin Rogue pivoted, deflecting one of the reaching arms, so that Huo Da just missed them, then pounded one great fist into the top of the Kaiju’s skull. Now they could see, in the aquamarine light, the rest of its body – as Tendo predicted, Huo Da was long, lozenge-shaped, covered in overlapping plates of scale or chitin. They could also now see – to their dismay – its tail, which was whipping toward them through the kelp fronds, much like the tail of a scorpion.

  They weren’t fast enough to avoid it; a spike forty feet long speared into their midsection and sent tremors all through the Jaeger. It didn’t cut through their armor completely, but it did stick there, holding them in place while Huo Da’s body flexed around, reaching again with its long, tentacle-like arms.

  Rogue grabbed the tail with both hands and ripped it out of their midsection, then turned to face the monster head on.

  11

  2035

  MOYULAN SHATTERDOME

  CHINA

  MAKO SAVED VIKTORIYA MALIKOVA FOR LAST. THE young woman answered her first few questions matter-offactly, but became more guarded when the subject turned to her childhood.

  “I didn’t know my parents,” she said, when asked about them. “I was raised by my grandmother and grandfather.”

  The longest pause came when she was asked what inspired her to try out for the Academy.

  “Cherno Alpha,” she finally said. “Sasha and Aleksis Kaidanovsky.”

  “I see,” Mako said.

  “You… knew them, didn’t you, Secretary General.”

  “I did indeed,” she said. “I have never known braver, more capable pilots.”

  “Yes,” Malikova said. “They were my heroes.”

  When the interview was over, Mako had an uneasy feeling about the girl. Like the psych evaluation, her interview suggested that Malikova had deep – very deep – wounds. And she was hiding something, something big.

  In many ways, Viktoriya Malikova reminded Mako of herself.

  That might not be good.

  * * *

  As she expected, Mako found Dr. Gottlieb in his lab, busily scrawling on his chalkboards. Some people found it odd that he used such antiquated equipment: even if you felt the need to write things out long hand, there were plenty of touch-screen or holographic displays that would allow for that. Mako thought she understood, though. One thing you learned in the Drift was how much everything was mediated by memory, by personal history. She suspected that if she drifted with Gottlieb there would be a solid foundation of memory connecting his thought process to the tactile sensation of the chalk in his hand, the squeak of it on the board, the smell of the dust – it was the thread on which the beads of his mathematical thinking were connected from childhood until the present day.

  Or perhaps he was just peculiar.

  He hadn’t noticed her yet.

  “Dr. Gottlieb.”

  He continued scrawling as if he hadn’t heard her, but then, belatedly, her voice seemed to register. He looked up, surprised.

  “Secretary General,” he said. He looked a little flustered. “We – don’t we have a meeting at eleven hundred?”

  “We did,” Mako said. “That was half an hour ago.”

  “Oh dear,” he said, casting about. “I’m dreadfully sorry. I fear time quite got away from me.”

  She regarded the equations on the board.

  “Does this have anything to do with Chronos Berserker?”

  “No,” he said. “This is, well – I’m very concerned. I was going to bring it up at our meeting.”

  “Very well,” she said. “Tell me about it now.”

  “A colleague of mine brought me a set of data derived from deep scans of the ocean floor,” he said. “It’s quite puzzling, but there is a definite pattern – and a very worrying one.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, without going into detail, what I see is a pattern similar to what little we know about the months leading up to the opening of the Breach.”

  “You believe the Breach is going to reopen? But K-Watch monitors it quite closely.”

  “Yes, the location of the former Breach in the Marianas Trench is under watch, of course. But the fact is that the conditions that formed the Breach could occur at any number of locations around what we know as the ‘Ring of Fire’.” He waved at a map on the wall, where a red line began east of Australia, bent toward China through the Phi
lippines, up the eastern coast of Asia, around the top of the Pacific from Siberia to Alaska and then down the coastline of the Americas.

  “More like a horseshoe than a ring, isn’t it?” he mused. “But here’s the point. This line represents most of the volcanic and seismic activity on the planet. There is an enormous amount of energy concentrated in these areas, and especially in the deeper parts. The Marianas Trench is the deepest, but I believe it’s possible for a breach to open in other locations. The Kuril Trench, for instance, or the Java, or the Aleutian. I mean, if you were the Precursors, would you open a breach in the same spot as the one we collapsed?”

  “I suppose not,” she said. “Is this real? Do you think this is imminent?”

  He took a moment; his eyes became slightly unfocused, and then he closed them before opening them again and going on.

  “You have to understand,” he said. “I – I was connected to them. When Dr. Geiszler and I drifted with that Kaiju brain. The Precursors – they are implacable in a way no human being could ever be. Their desire for our universe is more… more like an elemental force than a… a motivation. They cannot be dissuaded; they will not be deterred. We frustrated them once, briefly, but what I saw – what I felt – is that they believe the time is now. Not in another ten million years, not in another million, but now. They will be back, and when they do return, I fear the rules might be entirely different. Everything we’ve done might not be enough.”

  He stopped; he seemed to be trying to get hold of himself.

  “But it’s not just my – ah, feelings,” he said. “Based on this data, yes, I think it is a strong possibility that we could face another breach in the next two to four months. But I need more information to be certain.”

  “Of what sort?”

  “If we convince K-Watch to allocate some resources to a few key spots, I should be able to test the validity of this theory,” he said.

  “That shouldn’t be a problem,” Mako said. “Not considering what’s at stake if you’re right. We certainly don’t want to be caught flat-footed again.”

  “Thank you,” said Gottlieb. “I hope that I’m wrong, of course. I would rather be wrong. It’s just that I’m so rarely incorrect…”

  “I’ll talk to Command this afternoon. In the meantime, is there anything you can tell me about the sabotage of Chronos Berserker?”

  “Not much,” he said. “It really isn’t my field; I’ve just been collating the information from Tech and Forensics. But I did scan the pen drive that contained the program with some equipment they don’t have. And there is one thing. It’s very, very faint, but I found the slightest trace of Kaiju blood on it. Almost undetectable, but it suggests that whoever had this got it from someone proximate to supplies of the stuff.”

  “The black market,” she said.

  “Or the Akumagami Front,” Gottlieb said. “They use Kaiju blood in some of their rituals. I know it doesn’t really tell us anything we didn’t already suspect, but it does help confirm those suspicions.”

  She nodded. “Thank you, Doctor,” she said. “I’ll let you know what K-Watch says as soon as I hear from them.”

  She went back to her office and made her call to Command. It took a little wrangling; although it was implicit in everything the PPDC did that one day the Kaiju would be back, nobody really wanted to think about it, and far too many in the upper ranks of Command had become altogether too comfortable with things as they were.

  But she had pull, and Gottlieb had credibility, so she got what she wanted. Maybe not as much of it as Gottlieb would prefer, but it was better than nothing.

  After that was off her plate, she turned her attention back to the problem of sabotage. She contacted Lambert. He wasn’t all that happy with what she had to say, but after she made her argument, he agreed.

  Two to four months. If Gottlieb was right, perhaps they needed to accelerate the training program.

  * * *

  Jinhai woke from troubled dreams and reluctantly rolled out of his bunk. He saw Renata and Suresh were already up. Ilya was stirring.

  Vik wasn’t there at all. Which was suspicious.

  In fact, the barracks had become a very uncomfortable place. No one seemed to want to talk to anyone.

  “Where’s Vik?” he asked.

  “She went for a run,” Renata said. “I’m about to join her. I think we could all use a run.”

  Ah. They wanted to talk. Away from possible eavesdroppers.

  “I’m in,” Jinhai said. “Just give me a few.”

  The sun was just a promise in the east, and off in the distance he heard the weird bubbling wail of a nightjar, while early-rising fish-eagles cut profiles against the gray sky.

  Vik was still warming up, waiting for them, so they all started jogging together, across the multi-acre deployment zone and airfield the Jaeger bays opened on to.

  “We have to talk about this,” Renata said, a few minutes in.

  “What’s to talk about?” Suresh said. “They think one of us carried out the sabotage. I think maybe they’re right.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Meilin said. “I know I didn’t do it, and I don’t believe any of you did, either.”

  “It must be an awfully pretty world you live in,” Vik said.

  This time the Chinese girl didn’t shy away from Vik. “Why would one of us do something like that?” she demanded.

  “No one is what they seem,” Vik said. “Everyone has secrets. Anyone is capable of almost anything, under the right circumstances.”

  “Sounds like you know all about that,” Jinhai said.

  “I didn’t do it, if that’s what you’re getting at,” Vik said. “But you’re right to be suspicious of me. Just like I’m suspicious of you. Must be hard, being the son of heroes, right? So much to live up to. Maybe you decided to make a name for yourself in your own way. Really show them you’re your own man.”

  “Come on, Vik,” Tahima said. “Lay off Jinhai.”

  “No,” Jinhai said. “She’s right. It could be me. It could be any of us.”

  “Maybe,” Renata said. “Maybe one of us is the bad guy, or maybe somebody found it convenient to frame us. We don’t even know why they think one of us is responsible. For all we know, they’re questioning everyone in the Shatterdome.”

  “We were all in the Conn-Pod, two at a time,” Meilin pointed out. “We each had the opportunity. Did anyone see the other do anything?”

  “Ryoichi held up his arms and said, ‘I’m a Jaeger,’ in a fake German accent,” Suresh said. “I might or might not have farted.”

  “You did,” Ryoichi said.

  “This isn’t a joking matter,” Tahima said. “A guy died.”

  “What could any of us have done in the Conn-Pod anyway?” Renata asked. “Whatever. I’m with Meilin. I don’t know any of you that well, but I don’t think any of us worked our asses off just to get here and put a bug in a training Jaeger. If I was here to do sabotage, I would wait until I could do it really big, wouldn’t I?”

  “You would think,” Vik said. “That would make much more sense.”

  “Guys,” Ryoichi said. Everyone turned their heads in surprise. The Japanese cadet was usually quiet.

  “It could be one of us,” he said, “and we wouldn’t even know it. My dad works for Interpol. He said some guys in the underworld figured out how to use Pons technology to, like, make people zombies – no, not zombies, not the right word. Put commands in them they don’t know about, and then they forget them.”

  “Are you serious?” Renata asked.

  “Dad doesn’t joke about things like that,” Ryoichi said. “Or anything, really. But if any of you has any funny thoughts, gaps in your memory when you don’t know what happened…” he trailed off.

  “…you might be a zombie,” Suresh finished.

  “More with the jokes,” Tahima grumbled.

  “You mean like, every night when I’m asleep?” Jinhai scoffed. “Come on.”

  But as they c
ontinued to run, he began to feel the doubt creep in.

  No, shake that off, Jinhai. It probably wasn’t true anyway. Just because Ryoichi said it didn’t make it real.

  “Anyway,” Renata said, breaking the uncomfortable silence. “All we can do is keep our eyes and ears open. But we can’t let this tear us apart. You heard Secretary General Mori – to do that we have to work together.”

  12

  2024

  SAKHALIN ISLAND

  RUSSIA

  VIK

  2024 WAS A BAD YEAR. THE KAIJU HAD BEEN coming since way before Viktoriya was born – since 2013 – but at first they came maybe one, two, three a year. There were three the year she was born, she’d been told. But Vodyanoi was the second Kaiju of 2024, and they just kept coming – Insurrector in Los Angeles, Bonesquid in Papua New Guinea (she liked saying “Papua” – it was a funny name for a place), Biantal in Taipei – by the middle of December, thirteen Kaiju had emerged from the deep water of the Marianas Trench. All had been killed, but six Jaegers were also destroyed.

  Thankfully, Cherno Alpha was not among the dead. But there weren’t many Jaegers left. Instead, everyone was talking about the Wall.

  Like the old men at the bar, most people on Sakhalin didn’t think much of the Wall. Japan had been building walls for years, and now they were putting them up in America and Australia and other places. But no one was going to build one for a little Russian island in the Sea of Okhotsk. If one got built at all, it was most likely going to be along the coast of mainland Russia, which would leave them outside with the Kaiju.

  So her grandfather grumbled, anyway, until – five days after the Kaiju called Vermin was slaughtered by Vulcan Specter in Colombia – he died in a logging accident. Her grandmother wouldn’t tell her the details, but Viktoriya had been to a few funerals, and usually the dead were laid out at home, so people could come and say goodbye. But that didn’t happen with her grandfather. She simply never saw him again. Babulya wouldn’t say why, but Vik heard one of the neighbors say Grandfather was too messed-up to lay him out.