Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization Mass Market Paperback (27 page)

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.”

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.

This would not be one of them, thankfully.

The creature squealed, snapping its fanged mouth and rolling blind eyes in every direction, a newborn nightmare twice the size of a bull elephant. The crew scattered. The baby demolished Chau’s assembled recovery equipment and some of the slower crew members along with it. Newt, mesmerized, still maintained enough of a survival instinct to take a few steps back. Clearly this creature was premature, unformed. It gasped and rattled, scraping claws across the pavement and leaving a trail of amniotic fluid as it tried to drag itself away from the corpse of its parent.

Newt noticed as he scrambled away that its umbilical cord was wrapped around its torso and neck. Reaching the limits of the cord’s length, the newborn Otachi lost its momentum and sagged to the pavement, emitting a long wheeze. Its claws still scrabbled at the concrete and its tail flicked around on the street as if it already might have the first glimmerings of a secondary nervous system operating it independently. A surge of fluid, the fetal version of Otachi’s corrosive bile, flooded out of its mouth, smoking and sizzling on the ground. The tail dropped and the newborn kaiju grew quiet.

After a long pause, Newt and Chau approached it.

“Gone,” Chau said. Newt could see him calculating how much a fetal kaiju would bring him on some black market or other. He was also getting his swagger back after running for his life a few seconds before. “Umbilical cord wrapped around its neck. Lungs weren’t fully formed. Could only live outside the womb for a minute or two.” Full of his own particular showboating sense of grandeur, he flicked open the butterfly knife he’d used to pick Newt’s nose and buried it in the dead kaiju’s forehead. “Ugly little bastard.”

Newt relaxed a little. He took a step away from its head, wanting to get a look at the rest of it before decay set in.
Hey,
he thought.
A brain. It has a brain I can use. Maybe even two!

He looked back to tell Chau this as Chau shouted an order in Chinese to one of the recovery crew. Then he reached out to work the knife loose from the dead baby kaiju’s head. It spasmed, rearing up and lurching forward to bite down on Hannibal Chau’s upper half. It reared up again, umbilical cord still tangled around it, flipping Chau around in the manner of a bird flipping a fish head-down, the easier to swallow.

Chau screamed, but only for a second, as Baby Otachi caught him, bit down again, and gulped, devouring Hannibal Chau whole.

Then it turned and charged toward Newt, who ran for his life.

He heard its hungry squealing behind him, felt the impacts of its forelimb claws on the ground. It shouldered cars out of the way and was gaining on Newt, whose only thought was
I was wrong, I mean I was right but I was so
wrong.
I never wanted this, all I wanted to do was study them, must reconsider, oh shit how could there have been so much slack left in that umbilical cord. Please die please die please die...

Newt slowed and turned to see that the kaiju had collapsed again. Its tail twitched and fell. Its mouth was open a little, and Newt thought he could see Hannibal Chau’s body outlined against the inside of its belly. He let out a long breath. The baby Otachi wheezed and died, its last nervous impulses shaking out through its legs, which scraped weakly at the ground before going limp. Fluid leaked from its mouth and burned into the street near the only remaining artifact of Hannibal Chau’s existence: a single shoe, flung off Chau’s foot as he pinwheeled in the air above baby Otachi’s open jaws. Its gold-plated upper gleamed through the hanging dust in the air.

Report,
Newt thought, taking out the same recorder he’d used before his first kaiju Drift.

“Twenty-three hundred hours,” he said. “Hong Kong attack. Unscientific aside: Hermann, I have reassessed my desires to see a live kaiju, for I’ve experienced the unforeseen side effect of filling my pants.” It was an exaggeration, but Newt thought he would let Hermann wrestle with the conundrum of whether to take him seriously.

A searchlight shone down toward him as he heard the beat of a Sikorsky’s rotors. He looked up and smiled. Pentecost had found him.

And he had found a brain.