“Somebody please kill this guy for me,” Sonny said. His goons drew guns and leveled them at Jake.
“Wait, wait!” Jake gave the tracker a smack. The screen flickered and went dark… then came back on. Now it showed the capacitor on the move.
But not too far away.
“Someone else is in here!” he said, jumping up.
“Someone what?” Sonny seemed to have forgotten about killing him for the moment.
Jake scrambled over cable housings and big emplacements of dead machinery, aiming for an exit door halfway up the far wall. “They have the capacitor!” he said. “Come on! The signal’s close!”
Sonny and the goons came after him. “Jake!” Sonny shouted. “Jake, you sonofa—”
His voice was cut off as Jake pulled the release lever on the door and it slammed shut. Now all Jake had to do was keep track of the capacitor signal and get out of the Jaeger before Sonny’s goons caught up with him. He ran through the maze of maintenance corridors inside Romeo Blue’s torso, ducking into a tunnel lined with heavy power cables. Echoing through the Jaeger’s interior, he could hear Sonny shouting. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to beat them to one of the exits… but then again, maybe he didn’t have to. A plan started to form in his head. Like most of his best plans, it was half-assed and risky.
The cable tunnel split and as Jake shoved some of the cables aside to make the turn, he came face to face with one of Sonny’s goons. The goon was pretty fast, getting his gun up… but Jake was that much faster, laying the guy out with a single punch before he could pull the trigger.
Before the goon had hit the ground, bullets tore into the cables around him. Sonny had found him. He scrambled into the side tunnel, which angled down steeply enough that it was easier to slide to the bottom. When his feet hit level ground again, he was in a shunt room. A dead end. He ran to the far end of it, turning to face the mouth of the tunnel as Sonny and his other men caught up.
“Nice try,” Sonny said with a cruel grin. This time he apparently didn’t want anyone else to shoot Jake, because he raised his own gun.
And that’s when Jake’s plan paid off. He kicked out and his booted foot hit a lever on the floor. It cranked over and a maintenance door sprang open under Sonny and the goons, dropping them into a hold under the floor. They landed hard and Jake kicked the lever again, slamming the door shut.
“Yeah,” Jake said. “We’re good.” Sometimes it paid to know odd details about old Jaegers.
Then he took off running, following the signal on the tracker.
He came out of Romeo Blue’s torso at the shoulder joint, maybe fifty feet off the ground. Below, a figure in a hoodie was sprinting across the open ground toward a motorcycle, a backpack in one hand.
The capacitor was in that backpack. Jake made a jump for a cable hanging down from a crane near Romeo Blue’s head. He caught it and started to let himself down, hand over hand—then the mechanism let go and he was hanging on for dear life. It seized up again after he had dropped about twenty feet, and his momentum jerked him loose. He fell the rest of the way to the roof of a shipping container on the ground, landing flat on his back. The impact knocked the wind out of him, but he rolled off the container and started after the thief again. The motorcycle revved up and the hooded figure skidded off in a spray of gravel. Jake started in pursuit, hoping he could maybe get over the fence and out the access road before the motorcycle went around through the open gate… but he heard engines and froze.
PPDC security vehicles tore past, following the motorcycle. Dammit, Jake thought. That’s what happens when you fire guns in a Jaeger scrapyard. If the thief was caught, he’d never get the capacitor. If the thief got away, though…
He looked down at the tracker. The signal was strong, and it was still moving.
2
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
SHAO ANNOUNCES DRONE INITIATIVE
SHANGHAI, 9 JUNE 2034
Shao Liwen, founder and CEO of Shao Industries, announced today that her company had secured funding from the Pan Pacific Defense Corps to build a fleet of Drone Jaegers based on prototypes created by Shao and demonstrated at a PPDC Council closed session earlier this year. The potential impact on worldwide PPDC budget expenditures is significant, since current deployment models require the upkeep of Shatterdomes in every region of the Pacific Rim. Each Shatterdome must be staffed with Rangers and enormous support crews of technicians and engineers.
Shao envisions a new PPDC, with fewer Shatterdomes and smaller crews. Drone Jaegers would be operated remotely from a single central PPDC facility, eliminating the operational expense of Ranger team stations at every Shatterdome. Further, Drones would not require the installation of expensive Conn-Pods and Drift cradles, reducing the unit cost of each Jaeger by as much as fifteen percent. Another benefit is reduced risk to the lives of Rangers, who suffer a regrettable number of training accidents and Drift-related maladies even apart from the combat dangers risked when they face Kaiju or other threats.
If approved by the PPDC Council, the Drone fleet will be ready for initial deployments and field testing within the next calendar year.
By the time Jake got going after the capacitor thief, the signal was all the way across town, headed south. He followed, going all night until dawn found him in the southern part of Santa Monica, which was even more of a ruin than the area around the Jaeger graveyard.
Before the Kaiju War, he’d heard it was a nice place. But now it was a
