Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization (14 page)

“Okay, then,” Raleigh said. “So am I piloting this thing by myself, or...?”

“Look behind you,” Tendo said.

Raleigh turned his head as his co-pilot stepped up onto the platform next to him. It wasn’t one of the five hapless rookies he’d toyed with in the Kwoon, no sir.

It was Mako.

Raleigh couldn’t believe it. For once, the brass had gotten a decision right and gone with the gut connection rather than whatever data a computer spit out. He broke into a big grin.

“Are you going to say anything?” she asked. She looked happy, nervous, and serious all at once.

“No point,” Raleigh said. The control arm carrying Mako’s helmet descended and he continued the conversation over the mic channel as her suit and helmet mated and powered up together. “In five minutes you’ll be inside my head. We’re gonna know more about each other than we care to, trust me.”

From the LOCCENT command mezzanine, Pentecost was looking down with Tendo. Raleigh heard the Marshal’s voice.

“Engage the drop, Mr. Choi.”

“Engaging drop,” Tendo acknowledged.

Around them, the massive machinery responsible for getting the Conn-Pod from the prep deck to its position on Gipsy Danger’s neck roared to life. The forty-foot-tall Jaeger head jerked and rumbled.

“Should I warn you about the Drift?” Raleigh asked.

“No, I’ve done dozens of runs in the AI,” she said.

Right,
Raleigh thought. Fifty-one for fifty-one, and that wouldn’t count practice Drifts without combat runs. She’d had the training, and she’d done her homework, and now she thought she knew everything.

“That’s a simulation,” he said. “This is the real thing. Much more intense. Your entire life rushing through your brain in a matter of nanoseconds. Every secret, every memory.”

“I can handle my memories,” Mako said.

“Okay,” Raleigh said. “But can you handle mine?”

She turned her head and he saw her through the faceplate, registering what he meant. But she didn’t have time to respond, because somewhere up on the command mezzanine Tendo Choi hit a button.

The Conn-Pod and its cranial chassis slammed down a vertical shaft, guided by both steel rails and a magnetic-repulsion systems that kept vibration to a minimum— minimum in this case meaning slightly less turbulence than skydiving. Mako yelped in surprise and lost her balance, grabbing onto Raleigh’s arm to stabilize herself.

He’d had his eyes closed, as he often did during the drop to the launch bay. Feeling her touch, he looked over at her, and saw her pull back immediately.

Yeah,
he thought.
That doesn’t happen in the simulations, either.

With a whine, the Conn-Pod unit decelerated and lowered onto the neck of the Jaeger itself. Clangs and booms echoed through the Conn-Pod as the automated connectors activated and locked Gipsy Danger’s head to her shoulders.

There was a pause. All sounds died away.

Then Gipsy Danger came online.

“Okay, Gipsy,” came Tendo’s voice. A moment later the holofeed from Tendo’s workstation spawned and the pilots could see his face and a rectangular section of the command center around him. “Lining up nicely. Get ready.”

Raleigh could see Pentecost and Herc in the feed as well. The heads-up display inside the helmet read perfect.

“You did some nice work on the old girl, Mako,” he said.

“Mr. Choi was the leader of the project,” she said.

“Modesty is good,” Raleigh said. “But take your credit. You can’t always count on other people to offer it.”

He was going to add a comment about Pentecost, just to keep things loose because everyone was obviously pretty high-strung about the test. But before he had the chance, the far door of the command mezzanine banged open and Hermann Gottlieb ran in looking like he’d seen a ghost.

“Marshal, I need to talk to you!”

“Now?” Herc asked.

Pentecost watched Gottlieb approach and turned his attention back to the readouts on the bank of monitors displaying Gipsy Danger’s status.

“I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how crucial a moment this is,” he said.

Gottlieb leaned in close and said something that Raleigh couldn’t quite catch. He thought he heard the words
garbage
and
kaiju...
and maybe
Drift.
Whatever Gottlieb had said, it sure got Pentecost’s attention. Almost immediately he said, “Herc, you’re in command. Tendo, proceed without me.”

“Yes, sir,” Tendo said.

Pentecost left with Gottlieb, walking fast. The door had barely closed behind them when Chuck came through it and lingered by the far wall.

“Rangers, three minutes to neural bridge calibration,” Tendo said.

Herc leaned into the center of the feed view, closer to Tendo.

“All we are looking for today is a neural handshake and some baby steps. No pressure,” he said.

Behind him, Chuck smirked.

“We should sell tickets to this. It’s gonna be a barrel of laughs.”

Raleigh and Mako exchanged a glance. No neural handshake was needed for each to know what the other was thinking about Chuck at that moment.

***

Newt was just barely starting to feel human again. The intensity of the Drift was not something he had been prepared for, and it had left its mark both on his mind and body. Afterimages of the heaving organic seas, the ranks of birthing chambers, the skewed sensory spectrum of the kaiju’s consciousness... all of that made it a little difficult to focus. Especially with Pentecost stomping into the lab and shouting at him. And to top it all off, he was having a little trouble seeing out of his left eye. He’d glanced in a mirror and the eye was thoroughly bloodshot. More blood was coming out of his nose. A visit to the medic was in Newt’s future.

But in Newt’s present were Pentecost and Gottlieb.

“As usual, I was right,” Newt said, needling his colleague as a way of establishing normalcy. “Hermann, not so much.”

Hermann turned away to get something from the fridge. Pentecost continued to glare at Newt.

“Specifics,” he said, biting off each syllable. “I need to know specifics.”

“Okay,” Newt said. He took a breath. “So it was only a fragment of brain. All I got was a series of images. Impressions, like when you blink your eyes over and over again.” He blinked fast, demonstrating. “All you see are, like, frames. It was like that, but... emotional.”

Pentecost had not blinked once. His gaze bored into Newt.

“Sorry, okay,” Newt continued. “What I mean is, I don’t feel like they’re just following some animalistic urge, hunting and gathering. They’ve been manufactured. Every cell holds the collective memory for the species.”

“They’re breeding?” Pentecost asked.

“Not as simple—no. I mean, they can breed, yes. They have penises and such—but I think...”

He paused as another afterimage washed over him. Not a kaiju. Something else, watching over them. Angular, bony, malevolent... the flashback passed over and through Newt and he felt the terrified shock of it seeing him all over again.

“I think they have a boss,” he said. “I think they’re attacking under orders. I think we thought were fighting monsters, but we’re fighting organic weapons. Silicate-based organic automata. They were created, designed and built, just for this war.”

“That’s impossible,” Hermann said.

“Hey, you know what, maybe
you
Drift with a cold cut, tell me what
you
see,” Newt snapped. It was just like Hermann to say no to everything. Newt hated that about him.

Pentecost leaned forward and slammed his fist down on the desk right in front of Newt.

“Enough!” he shouted. He pointed at Gottlieb. “You shut up!” Then he turned back to Newt, who was blinking nervously. “You talk!”

“These beings, they’re colonists,” Newt said. “Overtaking worlds, consuming them, moving on to the next...” He knew it was true, but he had to take a moment to organize his thoughts, make sense of everything he’d seen. “They’ve been here before, a trial run. The dinosaurs.”

Then
bam,
Drift flashback:
Breach in Pangaea, on the edge of a shallow sea, brighter brighter brighter the trees around it begin to die the water around it begins to ripple an animal comes through hulking and plated, head low and sniffing

“But the atmosphere wasn’t conducive, so they waited. What, a hundred million years? That’s nothing to them. Now, with ozone depletion, carbon monoxide, polluted waters... hell, we terraformed it for them!”

Testing, send the probe ten centimeters long segmented arthropod brain tissue threaded down the length of its exoskeleton create a small bubble as a test for where the gate must be placed later

Yes

Success

Life forms on the target planet have taken the predicted course temperature and atmospheric compositions approach ideal ranges

Prepare second generation

Deploy

“The kaiju... the reason I found identical DNA in two separate samples is because they’re grown. Fabricated, assembled. Made of spare parts.”

Bioslurry spawning pool shapes growing and changing within sacs clustered in ranks that reached to the horizon of bone and dying flesh the planet is dying around them unless they can clear a path

“They are living weapons, Marshal. The first wave was just the hounds, categories one to four. Their sole purpose was to clean out the vermin. Us. Aiming for our populated areas... the next wave is the exterminators—”

In Newt’s head, a vision of something gigantic formed, with kaiju swimming around it like speedboats around an aircraft carrier. It was so fragmentary it wasn’t even a sensory impression, more like a synaptic ghost of something that his brain had traced over from another being’s brain. That might have been called a sensory impression when it originated, but...

“—They will finish the job. Then the new tenants will take possession.”

And again, the other creatures. The creators of the kaiju. Newt couldn’t get a clear image of them, but he could feel that the kaiju feared them.
God
, he thought.

It saw him it recognized him

There’s something out there that scares the kaiju, and they’re coming for us. He wished he could remember the term that had floated through his head during the Drift. Could he recover it from the drive he’d set up to capture the Drift? How had that worked? He looked around for Hermann, who was sulking over on his side of the lab.

“Hermann, quit feeling sorry for yourself just because I was right and I’m Pentecost’s new favorite,” he said. “Did you get a chance to look at the Drift recording?”

“I was otherwise occupied with saving your life, Dr. Geiszler,” Hermann said.

“For God’s sake, Hermann.”

“Dr. Geiszler, what is it you need?” Pentecost asked.

“I tried to make a recording of sensory impressions from the Drift,” Newt said. He stuttered as the language centers of his brain were momentarily shorted out by a Drift flashback.

Time after time after time they came up from the spawning pool they burst from the sac they made the trip up toward the Breach it looked out over their great city like a promise that soon they would leave their dying world for another

And kill that one too

Stegosaurus dimetrodon plesiosaur mosasaur gorgosaurus

We named them but they were something else before

Now we have made the pathway clear

Now we have created the world they only dreamed of before

They knew we would

“Dr. Geiszler.” Pentecost’s voice.

Newt’s eyes focused again. “Hermann,” he said. “Stegosaurus. They’ve done this before...”

“You mentioned that,” Hermann said. “Your kaiju Drift recording is fragmentary. Practically useless. Perhaps an image here and there that might help Kaiju Science progress.”

Coming from Hermann, that probably meant the recording was in pretty good shape and Newt could learn a lot from it as soon as he got the chance to sit down and sift through the data.

“I need you to do this again,” Pentecost said. “I need more.”

Oh, sure,
Newt thought.
Let me just run right out and do that again
.

“I can’t,” he said. “Unless you happen to have a fresh kaiju brain lying around.” He laughed at his own joke.

But Stacker Pentecost wasn’t laughing.

“Wait,” Newt said. “Do you?”