“What the hell is that?” Tendo Choi asked.
“Ask Mako,” Raleigh replied.
“Are you really going to—”
Tendo never got to finish his question. Mako pivoted on the command platform, and their perfect Drift drew Raleigh into the motion as well. He could feel the weight of the sword in his hand, balanced and deadly.
“Kamei no tame ni!”
Mako cried out.
For my family’s honor!
They let go of the kaiju, shoving away for a few meters of critical space.
The sword was so thin and moved so fast that all Raleigh saw was a line of reflected sunlight passing diagonally down through Otachi’s body. The kaiju’s wings curled, one of them coming loose and fluttering away. A long moment later, Otachi’s upper torso divided cleanly in two, the halves peeling apart and beginning their long tumble back to Earth.
Seven,
Raleigh thought.
Two
, Mako answered.
“What do you call that thing?” Raleigh asked. She shrugged. The words “Chain Sword” floated into Raleigh’s head. Plain but descriptive.
Okay,
he thought.
Chain Sword.
Then the last of their upward momentum dissipated. They were weightless for long enough that Tendo Choi could say, “Beautiful.”
In the background of the feed from LOCCENT, they heard Pentecost ordering recovery teams and choppers to scramble.
“Hawks launch! All crews to the roof!”
Gipsy Danger began to fall.
The math was pretty clear. They were a little over fifty-thousand feet. Call it fifteen-thousand meters. Given that distance and the good old formula of nine-point-eight meters per second, plus some fiddling because of atmospheric resistance, they would hit the ground in approximately one hundred seventy-seven seconds. A hair under three minutes.
At which point they would be moving right about two-hundred miles per hour. Maybe a little less if they decided to take the fall spread-eagled to maximize resistance. Both of them immediately adopted that stance, stabilizing Gipsy Danger in a horizontal descent posture. Below them, they could see the storm churning from Hong Kong well out toward the Philippines. It was a huge system.
One sixty-five. The pieces of Otachi fell with them, tumbling, trailing clouds of vaporizing blood.
“Gipsy. Listen to me.” They both looked at Pentecost, who had come up close to Tendo in the LOCCENT feed. “I’ve done this before.”
You have?
Raleigh thought. He could sense the same question in Mako’s mind, along with some irritation, like she should have known this already.
One fifty. Otachi’s body parts were no longer visible.
“Loosen every shock absorber,” Pentecost instructed. Raleigh put the command through, maximizing the amount of give in each of Gipsy Danger’s hundreds of hydraulic shock-management assemblies.
“Done,” he said when the readouts showed full loosening of every assembly that had survived Otachi’s attacks.
One thirty. Raleigh and Mako stood spread-eagled again, slowing their fall as much as they could. They hit the top of the storm system and the Jaeger started to buck and shudder. The heads-up displaying time to impact read 1:29. Eighty-nine seconds.
“Use the gyroscope to balance,” Pentecost said. “Ball up and hold on. I’m sorry. It’s going to hurt.”
Use the gyroscope,
Raleigh thought.
Duh.
Gipsy Danger had a number of balance systems, but it wasn’t designed for operating in the air. Raleigh swiped through a series of quick commands engaging the gyroscopes to keep them steady in midair. That took almost a full minute. Then he and Mako crouched together on the command platform, and Gipsy Danger tucked into a ball.
The next twenty seconds were the longest of Raleigh’s life. Their passage through the lower reaches of the storm raised a freight-train roar, and neither of them dared to look up at the holodisplays, much less out the Conn-Pod’s windows. Raleigh heard someone counting down and thought it was him. Then he realized it was Tendo.
Jesus, Tendo,
he thought.
Shut up, already.
***
From the LOCCENT, Gipsy Danger’s impact looked like a meteor strike. It hit Hong Kong Stadium, collapsing one entire side and the nearest corner. Debris rained down for hundreds of meters in every direction, and a mushrooming cloud of dust and smoke rose from the site into the rainy night.
The Conn-Pod feed from Gipsy Danger was dark.
“Tendo,” snapped Pentecost. “Get that feed live.”
Tendo tried everything he knew, but the feed stayed dark.
“Jumphawks,” Pentecost said. “What can you see?”
Jumphawk searchlights stabbed into the cloud of dust.
“Not a damn thing, sir,” one of the pilots radioed back. “Too much dust. No visible motion.”
“Gipsy Danger, report,” Pentecost said over the open command frequency. “Mr. Becket. Ms. Mori.”
Nothing. The dust around the stadium started to clear thanks to the rain and swirling winds. Camera feeds from the circling Jumphawks picked out one immense mechanical leg.
“Come in closer,” Pentecost said. “Blow some of that dust away.”
The Jumphawks edged nearer to the impact site, the beat of their rotors clearing away the spreading column of dust. There was Gipsy Danger...
Standing up!
Cheers exploded in the LOCCENT. Even the notoriously taciturn Jumphawk pilots whooped before peeling away from Gipsy Danger as the Jaeger’s operating lights came on again and the Conn-Pod feed lit up over Tendo Choi’s workstation.
“Report,” Pentecost ordered.
Raleigh looked at Mako.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” she said. Around them, the interior of the Conn-Pod was a wreck. But it didn’t seem to bother either of them. Mako, in fact, looked like she’d never been happier or more alive than at that moment.
“That... felt... good,” she said.
Pentecost closed his eyes and allowed himself a three-count to be proud of her. Proud of both of them. Happy at their survival, gratified that Hong Kong was still standing.
Then he opened his eyes again and turned to Tendo Choi.
“I want the two remaining Jaegers back to one hundred percent functionality within eight hours,” he said. “Sooner.”
The worldwide market in kaiju parts is certainly a multibillion-dollar industry. Practitioners of traditional medicines have made unsupportable claims about the powers of kaiju organs to cure various afflictions. Among the remedies sold on the black market are the following:
Black-market applications, particularly Headchangers, are of course the most notorious uses of kaiju anatomical remains. However, a number of legitimate medical and scientific advances have also resulted from the study of kaiju anatomy and structure. Not least of these are the achievements of Kaiju Science, which routinely purchases kaiju parts as they become available. These kaiju tissues and cells, combined with Kaiju Science analysis of Anteverse energies and kaiju, have led to the development of more powerful anti-kaiju weapons systems for newer-generation Jaegers. Examples include the burrowing mechanism in the K-Stunner warhead and the adjusted plasma densities in the new generation of gauntlet-mounted I-22 energy weapons. Should funding for the Jaeger project be restored at some future date, these advances would likely accelerate. In the absence of new sources of funding, Jaeger command is advised to consider licensing Kaiju Science technological advances to responsible parties.
Newt watched Gipsy Danger fall out of the sky, tracked by searchlights. He felt the impact of its landing like a small earthquake, and then he saw Gipsy Danger stand up again. Incredible. Incredible!
Seconds later, the pieces of Otachi came tumbling down to their own crashing impacts in different parts of Hong Kong.
Now’s my chance,
Newt thought. He ran back toward the corner of Fong and Tull, through the wake of destruction left by Otachi and Gipsy Danger. Emergency crews, sirens... bodies in the streets. Newt saw it, and knew it would bother him later, but right then he had one thing on his mind.
He caught Hannibal Chau coming out of his pharmacy with his crew of goons behind him.
“Okay, go for the wings first, the Germans go crazy for those things,” Chau was saying. Then he saw Newt and stopped.
Newt imagined what he must look like. Bloodied, covered in dust and grime, glasses broken, clothes torn and filthy. He’d seen a lot in the past couple of hours. He’d learned a lot from the kaiju-Drift hangover. And now was the time to put it into action.
“We made a deal,” he said to Hannibal Chau. “You owe me a brain.”
***
Chau didn’t like it, but he couldn’t back out... or maybe he could have and just chose not to. Newt didn’t care. What he cared about was a kaiju brain, and he was going to get one. This one, formerly belonging to the Category IV known as Otachi.
He was watching city sanitation trucks hose away blue kaiju fluids before they could completely melt the pavement around where this half of Otachi had landed. On the partial corpse, which included Otachi’s lower body and one of its forelimbs, work crews operating heavy equipment peeled back layers of flesh. Different layers and pieces were worth different amounts to different markets, but Hannibal Chau saw money in every molecule of dead kaiju. Acid smoke rose around collecting crews in hazmat suits as they plucked off skin parasites and put them in jars.
Chau himself was walking the perimeter of the work site, issuing directions and maintaining order. Newt had to hustle to keep up with him.
“I still can’t believe what you did to me,” Newt complained. “I could’ve been eaten.” His voice sounded funny because he’d stuffed tissue in his nose to stop it bleeding.
“That was the plan,” Chau said. “Fortunately for you it didn’t become necessary.”
Newt tried to snort, but it didn’t work because of the tissue. All it did was pressurize his head.
“Lesson learned,” he said. They paused near a large opening in the corpse, with hoses leading into it. “What’s taking so long?” he demanded. He needed the brain, he needed to get back to work, and this delay was killing him. They’d been here for nearly an hour already.
Chau paused to consult a portable monitor showing a team of interior scouts who wore old-fashioned diving suits that looked like they’d been stolen from a museum.
“We pump the cavity full of CO2, like any laparoscopic surgery,” Chau said.
Newt knew this part. “That delays the acidic reaction, yeah.”
“Allows for harvesting. But my boys need oxygen pumped.” Chau pointed at some of the hoses. “They move slow.” Still looking at the monitor, he spoke into a radio. “Boys, what’s going on in there?”
“We’ve reached the upper pelvic area,” one of the scouts answered. Moving to the twenty-fifth vertebra...”
On the camera feed, Newt could see the scouts shining flashlights through the labyrinth of viscera and connective tissue. The gigantic vertebrae towered over them.
“Secondary brain,” the scout said.
Newt’s pulse quickened.
About time,
he thought.
Then the scout said, “It’s damaged.”
“What?” Newt looked at the feed. He could see the secondary brain, nestled at the juncture of the spine and the immense arch of the kaiju’s pelvis. It was clearly burned and pieces of it had been torn away. Newt was crestfallen. He
needed
that brain.
“Wait,” the scout said.
“Wait? What does he mean, wait?” Newt peered into the feed and saw the scout’s flashlight trained on a membranous wall near the damaged secondary brain. Something was moving behind the membrane.
At the same time, he heard rhythmic noise over the radio in Hannibal Chau’s hand.
Thump... thump... thump...
“Can you hear that?” the scout asked. “A
heartbeat.”
He sounded more curious than frightened, which was exactly how Newt felt. Otachi couldn’t still be alive, but there was clearly movement in the membrane, amid a tangle of organs.
“Oh my God,” Newt said. “It can’t be.”
“What?” Chau asked.
“It’s
pregnant
,” Newt breathed.
Maybe it was the light. Maybe it was unexpected sounds, or the trauma of impact, or the blind imperative that drove any living thing to survive at all costs. Whatever the reason, at that moment the unborn Otachi tore out of its birthing sac in a flood of kaiju amniotic fluid that swirled around the fleeing scouts. The radio connection dissolved into static and the video cut out.
Seconds later the newborn kaiju thrashed through the opening in Otachi’s abdomen and flopped out onto the street.
Seeing it was enough to make Newt rethink everything he thought he knew about kaiju procreation... and Precursor strategy. He’d known they had reproductive organs, and assumed that they could breed, but if a pregnant kaiju had been sent, and gone into combat first before trying to deliver its child...
Newt wouldn’t have thought it possible for the news from the Anteverse to get worse, but he had a feeling it just had.
They wouldn’t have to build every individual. All they had to do was hit on the right model and get two of them through the Breach to start breeding. If Hermann was right—a long shot, but always possible—that could start happening any time now. If four kaiju came through, and two of them could breed with each other, the other two could keep the Jaegers busy long enough that before anyone could do anything about it, the coastlines of Planet Earth would all be under siege at once by native-born kaiju.