by Greg Keyes
Without pause, Cherno pushed both arms up and spread them out, breaking the monster’s grip on her head and then, grabbing one of Raythe’s lanky, sinewy arms and a leg, twisted it over and slammed it into the sea.
Cherno stepped back, floods stabbing about. The beast was nowhere in sight.
Instinct – largely Aleksis’s instinct – had them turning just as the Kaiju came at their back. Claws raked their head, but Cherno stepped in with the counter-punch, and this time Raythe fell back, its nearly subsonic roar shaking their bones. Cherno had no intention of letting it get back up; she lifted one massive leg and stomped down on the supine, half-submerged Raythe with a satisfying thud.
“Foot spikes,” Aleksis snapped.
The Jaeger tremored as the earth-piercing spikes in each foot explosively fired; they had been designed to anchor Cherno Alpha in one place, to make an immovable object of the great machine.
It half-worked. The foot in the sea bottom was suddenly tightly anchored; but the spike intended to punch through Raythe’s gut and pin it to the seabed failed to pierce the monster’s hide. Still, for the moment, Raythe couldn’t go anywhere, so Cherno bent and began to deliver crushing double-fisted blows to its exposed torso and shoulders. But the Kaiju’s head was still withdrawn between its shoulders, and it was hard to get a solid punch there, and the monster’s arms kept battering up at them, trying to get purchase once more, as all the while it squirmed like a snake – almost all of its joints seemed to bend more than one way.
Then it struck at them, very much like a snake, the neck rocketing the Kaiju’s head toward them. The neck was even longer than when they had first seen it; the beaked head hit them like the point of a spear, just between their chest and head. An alarm shrieked.
“Hull breach,” Sasha reported.
Cherno lunged for the neck, but the Kaiju pulled in as fast as it came out, and as they leaned forward, Raythe managed to get its legs up again and kicked.
Cherno hurled up and back, but because one foot was firmly anchored to the sea floor, they also spun, off balance, and came down on one knee.
Before they could do anything, Raythe was on their back, all of its limbs wrapped around them, quite literally trying to tear them in half. Servos whined, and half the systems indicators started warning that they were fast moving into a red zone.
“No,” Aleksis roared. “No!”
He was almost overbalanced, Sasha knew. If he lost it, they lost it, they ran the risk of Cherno becoming a mindless berserker. She tried to calm him, but there was only so much she could do, especially as she was starting to feel something akin to panic herself. It was on their back!
They released the deep-earth spike, reached back, grabbed Raythe by one arm, torqued their gargantuan hips, and sent the Kaiju flying.
“I thought you didn’t like judo,” Sasha said.
“Not judo,” he said. “Wrestling.”
“Whatever works.”
They shifted, watching their feed: Raythe was once again out of sight.
“Guys,” Scriabin said. It was startling – Sasha had almost forgotten that anyone was listening. It felt like they were very alone, and any possible help very far away.
“What?”
“It’s gone around you. Toward the oil platforms.”
14
2035
MOYULAN SHATTERDOME
CHINA
AS IT TURNED OUT, IT WOULD BE NEITHER KWOON nor Kaiju education. After their run, they got quick showers and suited up.
This morning it was Burke instead of Lambert.
“Good morning, fresh meat,” he said. “You’ll be happy to know we’ve got something new for you today. We’re going to start Pons training.”
Suresh raised his hand, Vik rolled her eyes, and Renata stifled a giggle.
“Yes, Khurana?”
“Ranger, I thought we weren’t to start Pons training until the second trimester.”
“That’s the usual progression, cadet,” Burke said. “But K-Science has developed a theory that early acclimation to Pons technology can make your later training go more smoothly. Guess who gets to be the lab rats in their little experiment?”
He looked around and chuckled. “The looks on your faces. Listen, if you’re worried about washing out in the first trimester, don’t be – that still won’t happen until the second trimester, however well or poorly you do. It’s true that Drift compatibility can’t be taught – you have it or you don’t – but some cadets freeze up or freak out even if they are compatible. We’re hoping this early exposure will prevent that. If it works out, we might initiate Pons training in the first trimester as standard practice.”
The first three hours were all talk. A science instructor named Singh went over the technical aspects of Pons – how it was developed, how it worked. What Jinhai found interesting about that was that at a certain level, they didn’t know exactly why it worked, or why some people could do it and some couldn’t. Only that it did work.
Then Burke gave them a run-down of what to expect.
“You can’t imagine what it’s like to be in someone else’s head until it actually happens,” he told them. “To suddenly have memories that feel like your own, but aren’t. It’s not always pleasant. In fact, it usually isn’t pleasant. The nastiest memories often come up first, the darkest secrets, the things you never imagined could be in another person. And they’re seeing that same stuff about you. It can be hard. But it can also be amazing.”
Jinhai got it then. They weren’t doing Pons training in the first trimester because anyone thought it would make things go more smoothly later. They were doing it so the PPDC could see inside of their heads, maybe find out which one of them had a big, awful secret.
He remembered what Ryoichi had said about implanted commands and memories.
He looked at the other cadets, wondering how many of them had caught on. Did anyone else look worried?
All of them did, of course, and he was sure he did as well. That was normal.
They left the classroom and went down the corridor until they reached a door labeled DRIFT TRAINING – CADET LEVEL 1.
On their first day tour, they had seen the Mock-Pods, the battle simulators where cadets practiced fighting Kaiju. But this room they hadn’t seen before. It was divided into several cylindrical booths, each with a set a pair of headgear connected by wires and cables depending from the ceiling.
They passed through this room to a second room with a big table in it.
“This is the waiting room,” Burke said. “This whole process can be embarrassing enough without everyone watching, so we’ll go two at a time. I’ll be in there, and a technician, and that’s it. The J-Techs have paired you up by how compatible you seem to be in the Kwoon based on Ranger Lambert’s observations, so let’s see.” He looked at his chart.
“Ou-Yang and Malikova,” he said. “You’re the lucky winners of device number one.”
Of course.
When they reached the booth, the tech Burke had been expecting wasn’t around, so he told them to wait while he hunted him up.
“Left or right?” Jinhai asked.
“Right is dominant,” Vik said. Then she smirked. “I told you, didn’t I?”
“What, that we’re compatible? I still doubt it. I know what compatible looks like, and we’re not it.”
“You mean your parents,” she said.
Again, she surprised him. How had she gotten to that so quickly? It wasn’t that Vik didn’t have empathy, he realized; she was pretty quick to figure out what the other person was feeling. She just didn’t have any sympathy in her.
He nodded, reluctantly. “Yes. They are so, so compatible there doesn’t seem like that much room left for me.”
He was shocked, even as he said it. He wasn’t sure he had ever admitted it to anyone exactly like that. Why Vik, of all people?
He braced for the retort.
Instead, he thought she looked almost sympathetic, shooting down the ve
ry theory that had just formulated.
“I, ah – well, we’re about to be reading each other’s minds, right.”
“True,” Vik said. “You know, my parents…”
“What?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. Never mind. You’re just lucky you know your parents. I would like to have known mine.”
It floored him for a moment.
“Vik,” he said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“Well, you would have found out in a few minutes anyway,” she said.
“What happened to them?”
She shrugged. “Kaiju.”
“Oh. I am lucky, I guess. I remember when my folks were fighting. I was just a kid, but I was so scared they wouldn’t come back to me. Then they did, but it wasn’t the same. It was…”
“They came back,” Vik snapped. “You should be grateful. You have no idea.”
She was mad at him again, right when it seemed like they might actually be able to get through a normal conversation.
That’s how things stood when Burke returned, a female tech in tow.
“Honestly, I don’t know where Jan got off to,” she said. She checked the machine. “He set everything up, though,” she said. “There’s that, at least.” She glanced at a small screen connected to the device, and then at them. “Malikova and Ou-Yang, right? So I won’t have to calibrate the thing.”
She pulled the caps down onto their heads and fastened them under their chins. Holo controls sprang into being, which the tech began to manipulate.
“I think I saw this in an old movie,” Jinhai said. “You’re not going to make us switch bodies, are you? With hilarious but predictable results?”
“No, we do that later, but we switch you with a chicken,” Burke said. “Which is even more hilarious and predictable. Okay. Close your eyes, and take deep, slow breaths. The calmer you are, the easier this will be.”
Jinhai shut his eyes and did his best to follow Burke’s advice, but his heart felt like it was doing the climax of the Rite of Spring, the part where a young girl is sacrificed to the Earth by forcing her to dance to death – all heavy rhythm and dissonance.
“Initializing neural contact,” he heard the tech say.
There was an instant where he felt like he was turning inside out, and then:
Sitting on a log freezing thinking about the sea mother and father dancing together, with them Cherno Alpha beat it to death with an iceberg, the awful rush behind her, the skin of her legs blistering watching the Firebird with his parents Huo Da, man on the television saying oh my God it has wings Grandfather’s things do we have to leave them here taste of pastry something hard, and dark, something he couldn’t see through but terrible, a woman with eyes tattooed on her face calling Kaiju angels a shape rising up in the dusk, blocking the whole sky, a woman’s face, someone calling her name from deep in the heart of the dead Kaiju . . .
It came for them, but they couldn’t see, couldn’t look at it. They were running, but not with their own legs. People were screaming. Jinhai looked over and saw a baby with blue eyes, carried in the arms of someone he couldn’t see. Something screamed so loud it made the earth shake, and suddenly the screams stopped in his throat, and he felt his heart go strange, and something was pulling, pulling him out of his skin as something bigger than the sky blotted out the sun…
He was suddenly alone again, and his lungs and throat were working again, because he and Vik were both hollering like lost souls.
He ran out of breath, coughed. Burke had his hand on his shoulder. “Easy,” he said. “Easy, Ou-Yang. It’s not real. None of it’s real.”
But Jinhai knew that wasn’t true. It was real, or had been. And despite the horror of it, there was something – something he needed to know, that he had almost understood – but it had all ended too quickly.
“Hang on,” the tech said. “I want to take your vital signs.”
She did more than that. She scanned their eyes with something, and then she turned the Pons machine back on.
“You’re not drifting again,” she explained. “Just want to have a quick look at your brain function.”
“There’s not much to look at in my case,” Jinhai nervously quipped.
After about fifteen minutes of poking and prodding, the tech finally turned to Burke.
“They’re okay,” she said. “Physically, anyway.”
Burke looked relieved.
“You two go back to the barracks,” he said. “That’s enough for you today.”
They went back in silence and each took to their own bunk.
“Vik,” he said, after a moment.
“No,” she said.
But he felt he should persist.
“What the hell happened to you? That place, those caves or whatever, the weird smell . . .”
“Shut up,” Vik said. Then she suddenly sobbed. “Just please. No.”
Reluctantly, he nodded and lay back down.
“It wasn’t like I thought it would be,” he murmured, more to himself than to her.
He closed his eyes, but he kept seeing the images. The old woman talking about Kaiju like they were something wonderful. The big, dark place inside of Vik he hadn’t been able to enter at all.
Was it her? Had she sabotaged Chronos Berserker and killed Braga?
He had been inside her head, and he still didn’t know.
* * *
“Was this also sabotage?” Mako asked.
“It’s not like they were in Mock-Pods,” Burke said. “You can’t program a scenario into a simple Pons device.”
“And the subsequent Drifts by the other cadets?”
“We used a different machine for each pair, just in case,” Burke said. “The rest drifted about as expected; some well, some not at all, some weakly. But none of them reacted like Jinhai and Vik.”
“What do you think happened?” Mako asked.
“If you ask me,” Burke said, “we’re overthinking this. It was just a bad Drift. It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last. They both have some serious issues and they got hung up on each other’s memories. You can see it in the recording. It’s nothing like what happened with Chronos Berserker.”
“What there is of the recording,” Mako said. “Much of it is garbled. But yes, they have issues – Malikova in particular has not had an easy life. And although the two are certainly Drift compatible, they are also antagonistic toward one another, which can have unpleasant side effects. But there is something else I observed in the recording, even as imperfect as it is. They are each hiding something. From each other, maybe from themselves. Certainly from us.”
“You think one of them is guilty?” Burke asked.
She shrugged. “They are certainly the two most likely suspects,” Mako said. “And even in so imperfect a recording, there was one other thing I noticed.”
“What?” Lambert asked.
“The smell of Kaiju blood,” she replied.
* * *
As Lambert left the meeting with Burke and Mori, something was bothering him, but he didn’t pin it down until an hour later, when he remembered something Burke said – about the tech who was supposed to be handling the Pons training never showing up. He went back through the logs and found the name – Jan Sokk. He had been at Moyulan Shatterdome for a little over a year – had just returned from leave a couple of days before. Lambert tried to call him, but it went straight to message. After that, he went looking for the man’s supervisor, Julia Reyes.
When he saw her, he realized he had noticed her before, working on Gipsy, moving on the giant mech like a high steel worker – as if she’d had the normal human fear of heights surgically removed. She also had the damnedest eyes, even at a distance, but up close they threatened to render him mute. She smelt of lavender, and grease.
“Jan?” she said, when he managed to get the question out. “I haven’t seen him today. Did you check the log to see if he called in sick?”
“He didn’t,”
Lambert said. “He set up a Pons trainer this morning, circa 0300. He was on an early shift – supposed to work until 1200.”
“That sounds right. That means he’s off now. Did you check his room?”
“No.”
“Come on,” she said. “I’ll walk you there. Maybe one of his bunkmates has seen him.”
“Okay,” he said. “That’s nice of you.”
“Sure is,” she said. “I hope you remember – one of these days I might need a favor from a Ranger.”
She smiled, and he suddenly found himself wondering if she was just being friendly or if she was actually flirting with him. Because it felt a little like the latter.
“I guess you weren’t born in the Shatterdome,” he said, after a few steps.
“No, actually I was,” she said. “Parthenogenesis, they call it. I just grew out of the side of a Jaeger.”
“Umm okay,” he said.
“But if you’re asking where I’m from, I was born in Puerto Rico, but my parents transplanted to Acapulco when I was little. And they did volunteer as techs in the Panama City dome. Puma Real was my dad’s baby. Well, other baby. Fourth. I’ve got a brother and two sisters. But you’re a California boy, right?”
“I – how did you know that?”
She shrugged, and came to a sudden stop.
“What?” he said.
“We’re here. Jan’s quarters.”
He realized he wasn’t fully aware of covering the last fifty yards or so. They were standing in front of a door.
Jules pressed the buzzer.
“Who is it?” someone asked.
“It’s Jules, Benny. Are you decent?”
“As decent as I get. Come on in.”
There were four bunks in the room; only one was occupied, presumably by someone named Benny. He was a young guy, with tattoos of circuitry on his forearms. It looked like Jules’ knock had probably awakened him.
