Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization Mass Market Paperback (2 page)

Yancy muttered something incomprehensible. At least he was out of bed and moving. Raleigh was already at the door, bouncing on the balls of his feet while Yancy finished stretching and pried his eyes open.

“Fifth notch on the belt,” Raleigh said, scanning the first batch of information on the kaiju as it streamed out of LOCCENT Command.

Yancy stretched and looked around for his clothes.

“Don’t get cocky,” he said.

Three minutes later they were in the suiting area.

The drivesuit was a finicky and multi-layered piece of equipment. The first layer, the circuity suit, was like a wetsuit threaded with a mesh of synaptic processors. The pattern of processor relays looked like circuitry on the outside of the suit, gleaming gold against its smooth black polymer material. These artificial synapses transmitted commands to the Jaeger’s motor systems as fast as the pilot’s brain could generate them, with lag times close to zero. The synaptic processor array also transmitted pain signals to the pilots when their Jaeger was damaged. This had proven to be the best way to minimize reaction times, and Raleigh knew from experience that when you felt a kaiju’s teeth bite into your arm, you moved faster than if you were just watching everything on a screen.

The second layer was a sealed polycarbonate shell with full life support and magnetic interfaces at spine, feet, and all major limb joints. It relayed neural signals both incoming and outgoing. This armored outer layer included a Drift recorder that automatically preserved sensory impressions. It was white and shiny and also bulletproof—though they hadn’t yet seen a kaiju that shot bullets.

The outer armored layer of the drivesuit also kept pilots locked into the Conn-Pod’s Pilot Motion Rig, a command platform with geared locks for the Rangers’ boots, cabled extensors that attached to each suit gauntlet, and a full-spectrum neural transference plate, called the feedback cradle, that locked from the Motion Rig to the spine of each Ranger’s suit. At the front of the motion rig stood a command console, but most of a Ranger’s commands were issued either by voice or through interaction with the holographic heads-up display projected into the space in front of the pilots’ faces. Raleigh and Yancy were already wearing the close-fitting cranial sleeves Rangers called “thinking caps,” which put their brain functions directly into the loop when they synced everything together for the Drift.

Once they were suited up, with a plasma display outside the suiting area tracking Knifehead’s progress in real time, Yancy and Raleigh stepped into the Conn-Pod. The tech crew followed them, affixing the feedback cradle to the backs of their suits and cabling them into the interface drivers that transmitted their nerve impulses into Gipsy Danger itself.

Back in the Stone Age, in 2015, the first rough Jaeger prototype had used a single pilot. This hadn’t lasted long. The neural overload traumatized or killed several volunteers before the first full prototype rolled out on Kodiak Island with a Conn-Pod built for two. When the Pons mechanism was perfected and the Drift made possible, the Jaeger Project became a reality. All of the Jaegers since then had been designed from the ground up with two Ranger pilots in mind—except for Crimson Typhoon, a Chinese Jaeger, which Raleigh had heard was piloted by a crew of identical triplets. One of these days maybe he’d serve with them. It was something he’d like to see.

They stood on adjacent platforms, arms and legs spread. Control assemblies extended from the floor of the Conn-Pod, cybernetically mated with each suit, and spawned the holographic HUD above the command console.

The tech crew checked each link to make sure it was solid and then they withdrew, the door sliding shut behind them.

Raleigh and Yancy ran their pre-deployment suit checks and pre-Drift link analysis. Everything looked right.

“Morning, boys,” Tendo Choi said through the comm.

“Tendo, my man!” Raleigh called out.

Yancy sent the all-clear from his suit.

“How’d your date with Alison go last night, Mr. Choi?”

“Oh, she loved me,” Tendo replied. “Her boyfriend, not so much.”

“Engage drop, Mr. Choi.” Stacker Pentecost’s voice cut off their banter.

All business, that Pentecost
, Raleigh thought.

“Engaging drop, sir,” Tendo responded.

Raleigh and Yancy looked at each other.

“Release for drop,” Yancy said.

Simultaneously they each hit buttons on the command console.

With a booming metallic snap the gantry holding the Conn-Pod and its cranial frame in place let go. The unit dropped down a vertical shaft, channeled by rails on either side. Raleigh’s stomach jumped and for a moment his vision blurred, just like it did every time. Then the Conn-Pod lurched and slowed, easing into place on the cervical assembly that locked Gipsy Danger’s head into place.

Bolts and hooks connected and automated gears engaged, uniting the head and body of the Jaeger into a two-hundred-eighty-eight-foot humanoid fighting machine the likes of which had never been seen outside of movies and comics... until the Jaeger project, born out of necessity, had brought those comic-book dreams to life.

“We are locked,” Yancy said, and moments later Gipsy Danger’s nuclear-powered central turbine roared to full power as Tendo released command-and-control to the Becket brothers.

Situated on the edge of Kodiak Island, the Jaeger Launch Bay groaned as the bay doors opened and a sliding platform extended out over the water, carrying Gipsy Danger on a gantry out into a violent winter storm. Effective visual range was measured in tens of yards, but Raleigh and Yancy were also looking through sensory arrays that ranged from infrared to ultraviolet, radar to sonar, synthesized into a full-spectrum view of the North Pacific. They needed the whole spectrum to track kaiju.

At a signal from Tendo, the gantry unlocked and the Jaeger dropped into the water with the force of a small meteor impact.

“Rangers, this is Marshal Stacker Pentecost,” came their commander’s voice. He was formal as ever at this moment. No shortcuts for Pentecost. “Prepare for neural handshake.”

Inside Gipsy Danger one of the displays spawned a holographic representation of two brains, and the thousands of links between them and Gipsy Danger’s motor assemblies. Back in LOCCENT, Tendo Choi and Pentecost were looking at the same thing. Raleigh never stopped being amazed that this was possible, and that he was about to experience it again.

“Starting in four... three...” Tendo Choi counted down.

At “one,” Yancy turned his head and shot Raleigh a wink.

Then they exploded into Drift Space.

***

They were kids, with their little sister Jazmine, playing monkey-in-the-middle

A balloon popped

Mom took a long drag on a cigarette and coughed and coughed.
Cancer
, they thought, and maybe so did she but she never stopped

Mom was dead and it was maybe the last time they saw Jazmine, at the grave, Raleigh couldn’t stop humming one of Mom’s favorite Brel songs from when they were little kids and Jazmine told him to shut up

They had to get back to Jaeger training

Seesawing back through time as their minds overlapped and intermingled:
Margit, and Munich, how it ached to love a girl for the first time, twelve didn’t seem so long ago she kissed him

Dad you don’t have to go

He and Yancy were sneaking through an empty factory in Budapest. It was Yancy’s eleventh birthday and they were dressed as superheroes, armed with a flashlight and a cigarette lighter from Mom’s purse

No, we’re not going to college, we’re joining the Rangers

The last rush of time and space and feeling, stray thoughts caught up in the first tempest of the Drift:
Ice cream hockey the sweep of the lighthouse beam at Pemaquid the first time we all were on a plane and the candy didn’t help my ears pop hey Moe! Nyuck nyuck nyuck you know what I don’t like is spiders

Trickle of blood coming from his nose but the guy deserved it, you can’t just pick on people

Can’t pick every fight either

Dad you don’t have to go

Nyuck nyuck nyuck

Alaska. 2020. The present asserted itself again.
Time to save the world

Again

***

Reality coalesced from the welter of the Drift, and Raleigh heard Tendo Choi, like an anchor to the real world.

“Neural handshake strong and holding,” he said, as the graphic of two brains converged into one. The links from the overlapped brain image to Gipsy Danger’s control and motor systems lit up.

Raleigh and Yancy were part of it now, and part of each other.

“Right hemisphere ready,” Yancy said.

Raleigh always let him go first, but the tradeoff was that he got to give the all-clear.

“Left hemisphere linked and ready,” he said. “Gipsy Danger ready to deploy.”

They each raised one arm, and Gipsy Danger did the same, confirming the hundred-percent link between the gargantuan Jaeger and the twinned human minds controlling it.

“Gentlemen,” Pentecost said, “your orders are to hold the Miracle Mile off Anchorage. Copy?”

The Miracle Mile was the last-ditch perimeter, so named because if a kaiju got through the ten-mile cordon, it was usually a miracle if a Jaeger could keep it from coming ashore.

“Copy that,” Yancy said. Then he hesitated as their heads-up display showed a new signal. “Sir,” he went on. “There’s still a civilian vessel in the Gulf—”

Pentecost cut him off.

“You’re protecting a city of two million people. You will not risk those lives for a boat that holds ten. Am I clear?”

He was clear, but something else was also clear: if Gipsy Danger engaged the kaiju anywhere near that boat, the waves generated by the clash would tear it to pieces. Raleigh hadn’t joined the Jaeger program to create collateral damage. He’d joined up to prevent it.

Raleigh looked at Yancy, who was already looking at him. Raleigh turned off the comm.

“You know what I’m thinking?” Raleigh said.

“I’m in your brain,” Yancy said.

They grinned at each other.

“Let’s go fishing,” Raleigh said.

Simultaneously they hit the switches that engaged Gipsy Danger’s motor controls. The Jaeger roared to life, spouting a column of fire into the stormy night. Its warning horn cut through the storm and the Jaeger strode forward away from the LOCCENT bay doors, a phalanx of helicopters peeling away from it and returning to base as it disappeared into the snow and spray and the steam of its passage.

SEVEN MILES OFF ANCHORAGE, GIPSY DANGER’S
scanners picked up the conversation on the bridge of the fishing vessel identified as
Saltchuck.
The captain and his first mate, it sounded like, worried about the storm and which way they could run the fastest to shelter.

“We won’t even make it past the shallows,” the first mate was saying.

“What about that island?” the captain asked. “It’s three miles—”

Then he caught himself. Raleigh could almost hear him thinking:
There’s no island on the chart there.

“It’s two miles, sir,” the mate said. A moment later, in a voice grown tight with awe and fear, he said, “One.”

On Gipsy Danger’s primary heads-up, Raleigh and Yancy saw
Saltchuck
, and closing swiftly, inexorably, on it they saw, the size of a landmass, the kaiju bogey.

“Good thing we can’t hear Pentecost right about now,” Yancy said.

Knifehead rose from the ocean off
Saltchuck
’s port side, standing a hundred feet and more out of the water. Four arms ended in webbed claws, each big enough to crush
Saltchuck
like a beer can. Its head was a blade, with one edge narrowing from its upper jaw to a point and the other defining the top of its skull. Active sonar outlined the rest of its body under the water, revealing it to be a biped with a powerful tail. Like a dinosaur, kind of, only an order of magnitude larger than any dinosaur that ever lived.

Do not confuse them with any terrestrial life forms,
Raleigh remembered some egghead saying in a briefing.
They are built on a template of silicon, not carbon. Whatever is on the other side of the Breach, it is a stranger place than we can imagine.