Pacific Rim Uprising--Official Movie Novelization

half-destroyed slum, full of people picking through the ruins to survive. The old pedestrian mall was now an open-air market, and farther south, the towering bones of the Kaiju Insurrector lay on the beach where it had fallen, after destroying much of the Santa Monica Pier. Scavengers and black-market entrepreneurs had stripped the body of everything from its blood to the parasites wriggling in the gaps under its armor plating. All of it was valuable, and most of it was lethal if the scavenger crews didn’t take adequate precautions. You could get dissolved by Kaiju blood, infected by Kaiju germs, suffocated when the decaying tissue trapped you inside their corpses. They decayed incredibly fast once exposed to the foreign atmosphere of Earth. And that was if other scavengers didn’t jump you before you could get your goods to market. Jake had steered clear of the trade in Kaiju parts, by and large. The sight of their monumental skeletons dotting the coasts filled him with sadness for what the Kaiju had done to the world, and behind it a more distant sadness about his father. Jake missed the world he’d been born into. He wanted it back.

Well, sometimes, anyway. Then there were the mornings when he got up and there was a sea breeze as the light of dawn crept along the tops of the bluffs falling toward the Pacific, and he’d just pulled off a score that was going to set him up for months… then this world didn’t seem so bad. If he was smart and a little bit lucky, he’d have one of those days tomorrow, after he got the capacitor back and moved it. Already he was deciding he wouldn’t sell it to Sonny. At this point it wouldn’t stop the man from trying to kill him again, so Jake figured he might as well get something out of the capacitor.

As dawn broke, Jake followed the tracker through the decaying ruins of Santa Monica, passing buildings tagged with the symbols of various Kaiju cults. Kaiju worshippers clustered in ruins like this one, to be closer to the bones of their gods. He passed beggars, and people trying to sell worthless junk so they wouldn’t be thought of as beggars. Ignoring them all, Jake followed the tracker’s signal. The plasma capacitor was somewhere on the other side of the pier.

He had to climb the rubble of buildings destroyed years ago by Insurrector before he got a good look at where the thief had gone. There, on the other side of the pier, the PPDC had built a shipyard for support vessels and barges big enough to transport damaged or incomplete Jaegers. Now the whole thing was decommissioned and abandoned, had been for years. There were dry docks, hangars, huge old warehouses, all of them filled with squatters and lowlifes… including the thief who had his plasma capacitor.

That capacitor had already caused Jake a lot of trouble. So he and the thief would have to reach an understanding.

Actually, it would be better if he and the thief never met. If Jake was lucky, the thief was tired from the trip, and Jake could get into the shipyard, find the capacitor, and get back out without them ever knowing he was there.

He started the long scramble down the bones and rubble, aiming for a warehouse at the water edge of the shipyard. The tracker said the capacitor was somewhere inside.

* * *

He worked his way along the edge of the warehouse until the tracker said he was as close as he was going to get. Then Jake pried open the closest window, wincing at the creaking sound. He swung through and dropped into a room that maybe used to be an office or a break room. Now it was clear someone was squatting there. A dirty mattress in the corner, surrounded by food wrappers and other personal trash, told him that much. The rest of the floor was covered with bits of machinery and tools.

Jake scanned the walls and knew he was in the right place. Whoever was living here had a serious obsession with Kaiju and Jaegers. The walls were plastered with magazine pages, newspapers, printouts from online stories—all of it a chronicle of the Kaiju War from the very beginning, the opening of the Breach. A blurry photo of one of the old Mark II Jaegers was taped up next to it. Someone had written “HOW BIG?!!!” in silver Sharpie. The rest of that part of the wall was a gallery of shots of Jaegers and Kaiju, with other notes.

Then the wall’s focus shifted to Shao Liwen, a one-time computer prodigy who now ran a multi-billion-dollar company, Shao Industries. She had been a pioneer in several different aspects of Jaeger design, and the most recent headline suggested she still was. SHAO INDUSTRIES: THE FUTURE OF JAEGER TECH?

Jake wouldn’t know. He’d been out of touch with that world for a long time.

Scanning down the wall, he stopped when he saw a faded Time magazine cover portrait of Raleigh Becket. The only words were Raleigh’s name and his dates: 1998–2026.

Seeing that hit Jake hard. Raleigh had been one of his idols when he was a kid and Raleigh was the young loose cannon. And he had served under Jake’s father. Then he had been the hero of the Battle of the Breach, surviving the mission that had taken Stacker Pentecost. Jake had a lot of complicated feelings about then that he’d spent the last ten years ignoring, so he wasn’t going to start now. He moved on, toward the door at the far end of the room. So far he hadn’t heard a sound other than his own quiet footsteps.

On the other side of the door was the main floor of the warehouse, acres of concrete with a roof maybe fifty feet high. And in the middle of that expanse stood a homemade Jaeger. Not full-sized, but its head was close to the ceiling. For a moment Jake just stood,