by Greg Keyes
As it turned out, Raythe was still right in front of them, just below the water. Where metal and fire had failed, the lightning in Cherno’s fists had succeeded. They would later be told that Raythe had three brains, and they had fried every one of them.
37
2035
PHILIPPINE SEA
PHILIPPINES
GIPSY AVENGER
GIPSY AVENGER HUGGED THE COASTLINE; XIANG was right – the shelf dropped off very quickly once you went east of the coast. The Philippine Trench wasn’t as deep as the Marianas Trench where the Breach had been located, but it was the third-deepest point on the planet, which was still very freaking deep. Gipsy was certainly built to survive down there – for a short time, anyway – but they didn’t want to make a dive like that for no reason.
But there wasn’t much in between the coast and the deeps, just a narrow strip, teeming with people.
To a Jaeger, people weren’t much bigger than bugs, and although he was in theory running toward what could well be a fight for the survival of the human race, he didn’t want to crush anyone on the way. Not the sunbathers, or the fishermen in shallow waters, the cast-netters on the rocks, the surfers trying to find a decent wave, the kayakers teaching their kids to paddle. Each was a person with parents, friends, desires – all of which could be literally crushed flat by a single misstep. Most people had the sense to get out of the way when a three-hundred-foot titan was wading toward them, but some of them might not have the time, or ability.
It was a relief when they drew nearer the island, where the spit of coast they were following played out, and they were moving through open if shallow sea.
“LOCCENT control,” Lambert said. “I’ve got an island in sight. Confirm?”
“Confirmed,” Xiang said.
Things had not improved with Burke; their neural handshake was tenuous, at best. Any moment he feared it would sputter out, and then they would turn into a very large offshore statue.
Probably because of the wobbly handshake, they didn’t notice the missile until it was almost too late. It seemed to come from out of the sun and their radar didn’t pick it up at all. They managed to grab it with the Gravity Sling when it was about fifty meters away, but before they could do anything else, it exploded. The shock rocked Gipsy Avenger back so hard, they had to take a step to keep from falling. The water rippled away from them in every direction, churning surf on the island and sending flocks of birds fleeing from their perches in the jungle.
“Where the hell did that come from?” Burke demanded.
“There’s a ship about six miles offshore,” Xiang said. “We didn’t see it until they launched. It’s got radar transparency – not that good. Technology is almost twenty years out of date.”
“But effective,” Lambert said. “You didn’t see it.”
“We weren’t looking for it. But we’ve got it now on satellite visual,” Xiang replied.
“We’ve seen it now, too,” Burke said, zooming in on it. It sat high out of the water, several stories tall at least.
“That’s a lot bigger than the other one.”
“It’s an old container ship,” Xiang replied.
“They’re out of range of our plasma cannon,” Burke said. “And it’s out over the trench, so we can’t just run out and get it. It would be nice to have some air support.”
“It’s on its way,” Xiang said. “Just hang in there.”
“Incoming,” Burke yelled.
Another missile. They caught this one a little sooner, but it also detonated, leaving them disoriented as another rocket came right behind it.
Gipsy lunged out of the way, striking with its left hand to try and deflect the third rocket.
The feedback from the blast translated as pain all along Lambert’s left side. The magnetic field suspending them wavered, so when Gipsy toppled, he and Burke got a lot more shaken up than they should have.
They broke their fall with the right arm, sending miniature tsunamis scurrying through the water.
“Air support on-site,” Xiang reported.
“About time,” Lambert said. He saw them now, half a dozen Malay-built Osprey helicopters, moving in fast from the west-north-west. “Have them give us some cover and take out those launchers.”
They were still struggling to get back up when the fourth missile arrived.
Unlike the others, when this one detonated, it was with a brilliant flash, blue tinted, like the one the Akumagami ship had tried unsuccessfully to nail them with.
This attempt went much better for the bad guys.
Lambert felt the shock of overload jolt through him, making a good start of frying his brains, just before the systems shut down to preserve their lives. Lambert and Burke fell out of the Drift and crashed to the floor. Both lay stunned for a moment. Burke managed to get up first. Lambert tasted blood in his mouth.
“Oh, crap,” Burke said. “This ain’t good. All systems are down. That was some kind of pulse weapon.”
“Gipsy is hardened against EMP,” Lambert said.
“Well, then I guess we’re okay, then,” Burke replied. As he spoke, battery power cut in, and communications with LOCCENT came back online. Other than that, though, Gipsy was dead in the water.
“Xiang, give me some good news,” Lambert said.
“Your core isn’t fried,” she said. “We can start reboot immediately.”
“How long is that going to take?”
“Twenty minutes.”
“What about our air support?”
“The pulse got them. They’re all down.”
As he’d been speaking, Burke had pushed by him and opened the hatch to look out.
“We may not have twenty minutes,” Burke said. “Some helicopters just lifted off from the ship.”
“Well, I’m not just going to sit here,” Lambert said.
“Right,” Burke agreed.
In the old days, Jaeger pilots didn’t usually carry small weapons – if the giant weapon you were riding around in failed, a pistol wasn’t going to be much use against the Kaiju that broke it.
However, for the past ten years, Jaegers and their pilots had not been fighting Kaiju, but human opponents, and sometimes a sidearm or assault rifle absolutely came in handy.
They took the rifles out of their stays. Then Burke took another peek out.
“Look like DVs,” Burke said. “Armored.”
“They carry missiles too,” Lambert said. “What if we stick our heads out and they lob one through the hatch? Then we’re well and truly finished. As it is, I doubt anything they’ve got is enough to put a real dent in us.”
“We don’t know that,” Burke said. “They had the pulse weapon, and apparently some kind of bomb made of Kaiju blood. Maybe they got an acid bomb, too.”
“Maybe,” Lambert allowed. “But all they really have to do is delay us until they manage to detonate their big bomb. Then we’re done for anyway.”
Lambert eased the hatch up and looked out. He counted four helicopters. Each pair carried what looked like cables draped between them. He didn’t know what they were up to, but it couldn’t be good. He aimed his rifle at one of the cockpits and squeezed off one round, then another. He couldn’t tell if he had hit, much less did he see any damage. About six seconds later, however, he did notice an exhaust jet appear in the rear of the chopper’s right-hand missile array.
He slammed the hatch and was locking it shut when they heard and felt the explosion. It wasn’t much compared to the larger missiles that had hit them earlier, but if one slipped in and went off in the Conn-Pod, Gipsy’s high-tech armor wouldn’t do them a bit of good.
“They’ve got cables,” he told Burke.
“Four DVs?” he said. “Those are no Jumphawks. It would take twenty of them to lift us.”
“Maybe they plan to tie us down, like Gulliver,” Lambert said.
“I’m not in favor of that,” Burke said. “Not at all. LOCCENT, how long until reboot?”
“Fifteen minutes,” Xiang replied.
“Is Gottlieb there?” Lambert asked.
“I’m here,” they heard the scientist say.
“What else can you tell us about this bomb? Obviously these guys are Akumagami Front. They’re already here – why haven’t they set it off yet?”
“It’s possible it isn’t finished,” Gottlieb replied. “Its active component is most probably a concentrated form of Kaiju blood. I’ve gone through reports, and a good deal of it has been stolen in the last few months, and there seems also to have been an unusually high number of transactions on the black market. They need a certain critical mass to accomplish their aim – my suspicion is that the ship that fired on you is bringing the last of it.”
“And then what?”
“Then I believe they will detonate it as soon as possible. Or, rather, inject it.”
“Inject it?”
“Yes. I’ve just discovered that Kaiju blood seems to interact quite violently with certain rare earth minerals. These occur only in certain places—”
“Like deep water trenches,” Lambert said.
“Yes. But we know from experience that merely bleeding a Kaiju out in such a trench won’t create the result they desire. Water tends to not only dilute the blood but also renders its more volatile catalytic effects inert. Most likely, the island itself is rich in rare earths. If they’ve drilled a shaft down through it – with an oil rig or core sampler or some similar hardware – then they can forcefully inject the clarified blood directly into the magma welling up on the land side of the trench.”
“Followed quickly by a big kaboom?” Burke said.
“Yes,” Gottlieb replied. “A very large kaboom, I should expect. A kaboom heard round the world.”
The Jaeger suddenly shifted hard enough that he and Burke were thrown off their feet.
“Okay, Gulliver,” Burke said. “What now?”
“Hang on,” Lambert replied. “I think this is going to get worse before it gets… even worse.”
“Gipsy,” Xiang said. “We have you moving. Have you recovered?”
Lambert pressed his hands against the Conn-Pod wall and studied what he could see through the optical windows – which wasn’t much.
What’s happening, girl? he asked Gipsy.
But then he understood.
“They’re not trying to lift us,” Lambert said. “They’re dragging us. Hell, they’re going to drop us into the trench.”
“Calm down,” Xiang said. “You’re not moving that fast. You’ll reboot before they get you to the trench.”
“Well, there you go,” Burke said. “No worries at all.”
There was a little pause. Then Xiang’s voice returned, sounding slightly worried.
“There’s something in the water,” Xiang said. “Submerged. Big. Looks like they’re dragging you towards that.”
“Come on, Gipsy, reboot,” Burke said, kicking the bulkhead.
“You still have about seven minutes,” Xiang said. “You’ve stopped moving.”
Lambert knew that already.
“Oddly,” he said, “I don’t have a good feeling about this.”
He heard something then, like popcorn popping about twenty yards away.
“Control?”
“I’ve just detected a number of minor detonations at the object,” Xiang said. “I think – oh no.”
“Oh no? Oh no what?”
But then Gipsy jerked, hard.
“They’ve pushed it over,” Xiang said, her voice rising. “Gipsy is moving again, much faster—”
“They’ve tied us to something,” Burke said. “They’ve tied us to something and shoved it over the cliff.”
38
2035
GALATHEA DEPTH
PHILIPPINE SEA, PHILIPPINES
GIPSY AVENGER
LAMBERT COULD TELL THEY WERE ACCELERATING, but suddenly gravity seemed to have been canceled, or almost so. They weren’t in complete freefall – it reminded him of going down a very steep and very tall waterslide when he was a kid.
Of course, this waterslide was around six miles deep…
“Pressure’s going up,” Burke said, reading the minimal battery-powered instrumentation. “Very bloody quick.”
Gipsy knew it, too, and her metal corpus had already begun to groan in protest. Through the thick optical windows, the light of day was fading fast, as the most ancient and enduring night on Earth enveloped them.
Xiang was still talking to them, but the signal was quickly becoming erratic. Lambert could almost feel the crushing water pressure around him, mounting exponentially with each breath he took, and the air entering his suit was quickly becoming stale and hot.
Xiang said something so scrambled he couldn’t make it out.
“What was that?” he asked.
No answer. He and Burke sat in silence for a moment listening to the pinging of metal approaching its tolerance point. He heard Burke sigh.
“Listen, Nate,” Burke began.
But then suddenly, beautifully, the lights came on, and Gipsy once again hummed with power.
“What?” Lambert.
“Nothing,” Burke said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Quickly, he and Burke returned to their places as the fields came back on and stabilized and the breeze in their helmets from the air scrubbers started cooling things down.
“Initiating emergency pilot-to-pilot protocol,” Lambert said, moving his hands through the holo-instruments.
He looked over at Burke as the Drift began to kick in.
“A hundred percent, Burke,” he said. “I need that from you, and not just for me. For everyone.”
Burke nodded. “You’ll get it,” he said. “But you won’t like it.”
“Fair enough,” Lambert replied.
Then they were in the Drift, and Burke’s mental wall was down, and Lambert knew what he’d been hiding – and no, he didn’t like it at all.
But this wasn’t the time for that.
Instruments confirmed what he’d sensed earlier – they weren’t falling into the trench so much as sliding down the now very steep slope of it. It was not, after all, a canyon with vertical sides, but as they approached the bottom it came closer and closer to that. Regardless, they were moving downhill pretty fast, and doing long, slow bounces as they went, so they weren’t always in contact with the trench wall.
“We’re at eighteen thousand feet already,” Burke said. “Three miles. More than halfway down.”
“Chain Sword,” Lambert said.
The gigantic, segmented blade deployed and locked in place. In the floodlights, he could now see what they were attached to – half of a ship, a big one, probably one of many nautical casualties of the several Kaiju attacks in the area. Their end of the cable was tied around Gipsy’s neck, so they were being pulled down head first.
They grabbed the cable, and with a single slash from their Chain Sword, severed it.
But, of course they were still going down. In fact, detaching the ship had the effect of bouncing them clear from the side, which here, two thirds of the way down, really did approach vertical. The wall of the trench was close, but not close enough to reach, and Gipsy was not a very good swimmer. They might impact it again before the bottom or they might not.
“Try the Gravity Sling,” Burke said. “We might be able to pull a little closer.”
Lambert nodded and deployed it, then sent the invisible gravitic field at the wall of the trench.
It latched on for a second, but it hadn’t been built to lift something with as much mass as Gipsy; the connection broke, and somewhere deep in the Jaeger, machinery complained.
Swearing under his breath, he sent it out again, and again it caught – and this time it was enough, pulling them close enough so they could jam the Chain Sword into the rocky wall. The impact nearly jolted them out of their magnetic harnesses; the sword was half buried in the stone, but they were still sliding, cutting a long gash in t
he stone as they gradually slowed. They grappled for hand and foot holds and slid another half a mile before they finally stopped.
“Power core at sixty percent,” Lambert said. “Oxygen supply – a couple of hours at best.”
“Then let’s get the hell out of here,” Burke said.
39
2024
YELLOW SEA
CHINA
SHAOLIN ROGUE
SHAOLIN ROGUE’S FREE FALL CAME TO A painfully abrupt end; gravity returned, twisting Minghau cruelly in his harness. At first, he thought it was their impact in the sea, but then he realized – to both his relief and dismay – that they were once again rising.
“It has us again,” Suyin said.
Indeed, Huo Da was now gripping them with all its limbs, and once again they were climbing cloudward with dizzying speed.
Shanghai was coming up fast, and once above it Huo Da went into a flat dive straight toward the towers of the business district. Shaolin Rogue writhed desperately in its grip, trying to shake loose, but it was a lost cause.
“The power core,” Suyin gasped. “We can overload it.”
“We can’t,” he said. “We’ll wipe out half the city.”
Everything seemed to slow down. The World Financial Center, a slender, elegant tower whose top had an aperture like the eye of a needle, loomed just ahead of them.
And Huo Da let them go.
Ming-hau and Suyin reached for one another – not physically, but in the Drift, the memories of their lives together flowing around them, leaves in a stream.
The impact against the building felt distant – the light, then the darkness in the Conn-Pod as everything came apart, whirled as if in a centrifuge – but they were together, in the Drift, growing stronger rather than weaker, giving everything to each other as the end came.
* * *
Pain returned. Ming-hau was lying on his side, blood pouring into his eyes. Through the shattered Conn-Pod, he saw rubble, smoke, a city in flames. Huo Da appeared once more, small with distance; it flew low over a building and tore the top of it off.
