Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization Mass Market Paperback (32 page)

Raiju came in for the kill on Gipsy Danger, and at the last moment Raleigh and Mako raised the arm they had left, whipping out the Chain Sword and hoping against hope that the tensioning mechanisms would still work.

The crocodilian Raiju weighed nearly three thousand tons, and was moving at close to sixty miles an hour. The tip of its muzzle hit the blade of the sword just as the tensioners had racked it into full utility with a spill and crackle of overflowing energy. Raiju’s momentum carried it forward, its body dividing in half with incredible smoothness around the blade of the sword.

Your father’s daughter was a hell of a swordmaker,
Raleigh thought to Mako. Her pride flashed back at him, colored by grim determination to see the mission through.

Bisected almost perfectly lengthwise, Raiju fell apart, the two halves’ cross-sections glowing with the plasma energies of the Chain Sword and the organic illumination of Raiju’s vital fluids boiling out into the oceanic depths.

Sensei,
Mako thought.

Raleigh was right there with her. They needed to get to Striker before the other two kaiju tore it apart and the whole mission went up in smoke. Gipsy Danger limped across the seafloor, with Raleigh and Mako doing everything they could to mitigate the damage inflicted by the kaiju. Gipsy was ambulatory—barely—and combat-ready—barely, with one plasma cannon possibly still functional and the Chain Sword a definite maybe after abyssal pressure and corrosive salt had already started to chew away at the sword housing and inner works.

They were ready to fight, but Gipsy Danger wasn’t fast, and for Striker Eureka, time was running out. The kaiju tore at Striker Eureka and pounded her, Slattern seemingly toying with the Jaeger and allowing the smaller Scunner to do most of the damage.

“Defenses down!” Chuck shouted. The sounds of kaiju blows boomed through Gipsy Danger’s Conn-Pod from Striker’s feed.

“Hull is compromised,” Pentecost said, more calmly. “LOCCENT, we cannot deliver the payload.”

“Hold on!” Raleigh called out. “We can still get to you!”

He was crying, but they were Mako’s tears.

“Listen to him!” she cried. “We are coming for you!”

“No,” Pentecost said. “Listen to me—”

The feed cut out as Scunner landed a monstrous blow to the back of Striker Eureka’s head. Then it came back.

“—Raleigh,” Pentecost said. “You know what you have to do.”

And Raleigh did. He flashed, though the Drift, back into the memories all Rangers carried in common with any Ranger who had ever Drifted. He remembered himself saying,
Gipsy’s analog. Nuclear.

Mako realized it too.

Gipsy Danger ground to a halt and started backing away from Striker Eureka and the kaiju.

“I hear you,” Raleigh said. “Heading for the Breach.”

“What the hell are they doing?” Newt said, two thousand miles away.

Herc answered what Raleigh would have.

“Finishing the mission.”

“Cannons not responding! Arms offline!” Chuck shouted over the alarms going off in Striker Eureka’s Conn-Pod. “We can’t do anything!”

Pentecost spoke calmly, but his commanding tone cut through. Everyone in the Shatterdome heard it. As did Raleigh. Most importantly, as did Mako.

“We can clear a path for the lady,” he said.

“Marshal,” Mako said.
“Sensei.
No...”

Pentecost looked directly up at Gipsy Danger through his Conn-Pod feed.

“Mako. You can finish this. I’ll always be here. You can always find me in the Drift.”

A tearing blow from Scunner burst Striker Eureka’s Conn-Pod open. Water flooded in and circuits started to go dark. Both kaiju stood over the fallen Jaeger, tag-teaming it, tearing and hammering it into pieces. The video from Striker Eureka went out, leaving only the sound of Chuck’s voice.

“My father always said: if you have the shot, take it. It’s been a pleasure serving with you, sir.”

Silence from LOCCENT.

A moment later, Stacker Pentecost detonated the nuclear payload.

IN THE LOCCENT, STRIKER EUREKA’S READOUTS
went dark.

Through one of the Super Sikorskys’ belly cameras, they watched a dome of water rise from the ocean, pushing the fog back as the blast wave from the nuclear payload breached the surface. Pieces of kaiju were visible in the churning base of the mushroom cloud that broke through the mist before the Sikorsky peeled away in evasive maneuvers.

Tendo Choi looked at Herc Hansen, who knelt beside his dog, head down, mechanically scratching Max’s ears.
All of us are mourning,
Tendo thought.
But only Herc is mourning the loss of a child.

***

On the seafloor, Gipsy Danger got back to her feet. A huge scalloped gap in the face of the cliff was the only sign of the explosion. Radiation readings ticked higher than normal, but Raleigh ignored them. It wouldn’t matter, where they were going. With the one arm Gipsy Danger had left, they picked up half of Raiju and started dragging the corpse toward the cliff. Gipsy Danger wasn’t moving too well with the damage to her leg. It wouldn’t be long before seafloor pressures put the leg out of commission entirely. After that, the clock would really be ticking, because having sustained this kind of damage, Gipsy Danger was looking catastrophic collapse right in the face.

They had to get moving and make sure they could take care of business before business took care of them.

“Dropping into the Breach,” he said.

Gipsy Danger jumped off the cliff. They sank, seeing the radiance of the Breach below them. Maybe the scientists were right. Maybe they wouldn’t be able to get all the way in. But maybe the scientists were wrong. There was only one way to find out, and if they didn’t find out, the kaiju would just keep coming. Raleigh and Mako didn’t speak as Gipsy Danger sank toward a ledge in the cliff, just above the Breach. That would be as good a spot as any to start the reactor-overload sequence.

It was something he’d learned way back during his first training on Gipsy Danger, when nuking the kaiju was still part of the standard response protocol. Way down in one corner of the HUD console were toggles to activate the self-destruct response and trigger the escape-pod mechanism. Raleigh had hoped he would never have to use either one, but life was like that.

He could feel Mako, stunned and withdrawn. She operated Gipsy Danger mechanically, without feeling. It was easy to stop feeling when all you could control was the way you were going to die.

An alarm went off in the Conn-Pod. Raleigh and Mako looked at each other, then at the heads-up.

It showed a bogey, closing fast. But nothing had come out of the Breach.

No,
Raleigh thought.

They turned in mid-fall, looking up and along the wall of the cliff, which receded away into darkness above them. Swimming toward them like a mountain-sized missile, disfigured and burned and missing an arm, was the giant kaiju. They just had time to see it before it plowed into them.

The impact threw both of them to the floor of the Conn-Pod and smashed Gipsy Danger down onto the ledge Raleigh had been aiming for.

Raleigh had a whole series of thoughts all at once.
How did it live through that? Are we going to make it long enough to trigger the overload? What if we—?

Wait a minute,
he thought.
If Newt and Gottlieb were right, this is our chance. Maybe a better chance than trying to sneak through with half a dead kaiju.

The kaiju clawed at Gipsy Danger. Mako and Raleigh answered it blow for blow, but they couldn’t hurt it. It was too big, too frenzied—just too much. A secondary series of alarms went off as part of Gipsy Danger’s armor collapsed and fell away with a section of her interior, crumpling in the abyssal pressure and dropping toward the Breach. The kaiju tore at the exposed area, and an explosion of bubbles burst from the wound in Gipsy Danger’s side.

Combined with the missing arm and the crippled leg, the damage was the beginning of the end for the old Jaeger. Raleigh just hoped they could stave off the end long enough to do this last, crucial, job. All they had to do was make it long enough to get through the Breach and start the reactor overload sequence. Piece of cake.

“We are losing power,” Mako said robotically. “We—”

She cut off as another alarm pinged and the heads-up flashed a warning.

“Mako’s oxygen line is cut!” Tendo warned them.

Raleigh looked over at her. Already she was starting to fade. The kaiju tore at Gipsy Danger’s head...

...And the cockpit tore open and Yancy was jerked away, screaming in Raleigh’s head as Raleigh screamed back through the howling storm—

No.

This was the moment. This was the only moment. Raleigh took three quick deep breaths and then snapped his own oxygen line loose, feeding it to Mako. She was gone, barely breathing, succumbing quickly to the combination of oxygen deprivation and the overload from the damage Gipsy Danger had suffered.

All of that happened in the space between two clawing punches from Slattern. With both arms Raleigh reached out, and Gipsy Danger reached out. Mako drove the Chain Sword into its side, just behind its front arms, and held on even as oxygen deprivation and Gipsy Danger’s collapsing control systems overwhelmed her. At the same time Raleigh and Mako leaned back, using their rear thrusters to tip themselves and the kaiju off the shelf and down onto the ledge in deepest reaches of the trench.

Mako was fading and Raleigh grabbed onto Slattern with Gipsy Danger’s other arm, holding on while he triggered the first stage of the overload protocol and opened the central heat vent, located right about where a human’s navel would be.

A column of energy exploded out of Gipsy Danger and tore through the weakened kaiju’s torso. Raleigh leaned, pulling with all of Gipsy Danger’s remaining strength... and toppled off the ledge with the kaiju held close, impaled on the Chain Sword and burning from the last of Gipsy Danger’s overload exhaust. It was still alive, still fighting, but Raleigh knew when a kaiju was mortally wounded.

But Mako, grasping the Chain Sword buried in the kaiju’s body, couldn’t hold on much longer.

There was only one thing to do. Raleigh had done it before. So had Stacker Pentecost.

He activated the Crisis Command Matrix, which transferred Jaeger operations to a single Ranger.

WARNING, it flashed. NEURAL DAMAGE MAY OCCUR.

No shit
, Raleigh thought.

He hit the button.

The Jaeger overwhelmed him and he screamed as his brain lit up, shorted out, got lost and found itself again all at once. It was too much. Even if he’d done it before, it was too much. Everything, right down to drawing breath, suddenly required focused and conscious effort. The Jaeger’s control systems co-opted all brain function except the higher processes needed to think. That meant Raleigh now had to actively think about making his heart beat, his lungs draw breath... which was fine. He wouldn’t be doing either for much longer.

Raleigh shut the vent. He would need that heat and pressure real soon. The self-destruct protocol was through its first stage. Embracing the kaiju, with the half of Raiju still twisting lazily downward through the water above them, Gipsy Danger fell into the Breach.

***

In the LOCCENT, Newt shouted, “It worked! They’re in!”

The feed from Gipsy Danger stuttered and broke up, then reformed. Unearthly sounds came from the monitor, sonic artifacts of the torsion of the universe’s fundamental forces in the throat of the Breach. Then the visual feed cut out. For a moment longer, they could hear bits of sound: “...vis... Breach... nish... verri...”

“They’re in the Breach now,” Tendo Choi said. “There’s nothing we can do.”

All eyes were on the big holoscreen, where a graphic had spawned based on Gottlieb’s first rendering of the structure of the Breach and the critical point where an explosion might destroy it. The bogey representing Gipsy Danger entered the critical zone.

“They’re out of time,” Newt said. “They have to self-destruct
now.”

***

Inside Gipsy Danger, Raleigh kept one arm wrapped around the corpse of the giant kaiju. It had died sometime during the passage back through the Breach. He wasn’t sure when. Time didn’t seem to be working right. Around him, the Conn-Pod groaned under pressures no human designer had ever imagined. He looked at his oxygen feed. His suit’s resources were used up. Did the HUD say 7%? It was hard to be sure. He was getting foggy.

Before him hung a holographic dial labeled SELF-DESTRUCT PROTOCOL. It had spawned automatically when Raleigh had triggered the first overload, which was designed to bring the reactor’s fuel rods to maximum temperature. Then all you had to do was close the vent... done... and turn that dial all the way up.

Not done. Net yet.

Raleigh took Mako’s hand.

“It’s all right now,” he said. Her eyes opened. He thought she might live, given the chance. Pan-Pac Defense doctors were the best around.

“I can finish this,” Raleigh said. “All I have to do is fall. Anyone can fall. You have to live. There’s a better world ahead. For you.”