Whoever had put this thing together was a seriously gifted tinker… and now, it occurred to Jake, he was in the presence of a truly great score. The plasma capacitor he’d been after was plugged into a hatch in the mini-Jaeger’s ankle, but Jake was already thinking bigger. People were always trying to build Jaegers to make some kind of personal statement, but not too many people could actually do it. This thief had pulled it off, and by the look of it there wasn’t a big gang involved. They wouldn’t have let something this valuable sit around without security. But whoever had built it, well, they must not have understood how the real world worked, because there it was. Who did Jake know with enough assets and ego to pay for a functioning personal Jaeger…?
He felt movement in the room. Behind him. Instinctively Jake skipped to the side and turned toward the person coming at him. He saw a length of pipe swinging toward his head and caught it. The assailant was wiry but small. Jake wrenched the pipe loose and in the same motion slammed the thief down to the floor. He’d learned a long time ago that when a fight started, you didn’t let it end until you were sure the other guy wasn’t going to get up again, so he raised the pipe—and then froze in mid-swing.
The figure on the floor was wearing dirty jeans and a hoodie. Impact with the floor had pushed the hoodie back far enough for Jake to see that the thief was a young teenager, and also a girl.
“What—how old are you?” he asked, still holding the pipe.
She sat up and pulled the hood the rest of the way off. Dark hair, a face that in other times would have led the homecoming parade—but those eyes, they were all grown up. Tough and smart and angry.
“Old enough to kick your ass,” she said, and started to get up. Jake planted the pipe in her shoulder and nudged her back to the floor.
“Let’s take a minute,” he said. Cocking his head back toward the mini-Jaeger, he asked, “You build this thing yourself?”
“What do you think?” she snapped.
“I think I could sell your little toy for a whole lot of money.”
“Scrapper’s not a toy,” the girl said. “And she’s not for sale.”
Scrapper, Jake thought. Good name. Evocative of both attitude and origin. You had to admire the resolve, but this was business. “The man holding the pipe says she is, so—”
Sirens sounded from outside the warehouse. The girl looked toward the main hangar doors at the far end of the room. “You led them here!?”
“What?” Jake was offended at being called out by a little runt squatting in the Santa Monica slum. “Nobody follows me! It must have been you.”
He glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the sirens and the girl seized her chance. She kicked the pipe out of his hands and rolled to her feet, scrambling away across the floor toward the mini-Jaeger.
“Hey!” Jake started to go after her, but he was almost certain that would end up with him arrested in the back of a PPDC van. She kicked the capacitor hatch closed and scrambled up Scrapper’s leg to the Conn-Pod in its torso. She powered it up as she got settled in a gyroscopic cradle.
“Yes! It works!”
Wait, Jake thought. Is this the first time she’s used this thing?
The sirens were closer, and there were a lot of them. Jake took another look at Scrapper’s Conn-Pod. There was room for two, and if it worked, it worked…
He headed for the mini-Jaeger and hauled himself up just as she had, diving in next to her just as she slammed Scrapper’s chest plate shut. “Hey!” she shouted. “Get out!”
Jake turned around in the tight compartment. “Where’s the other one?”
“The other what?” Busy powering up various subroutines, the girl wasn’t looking at him.
“The other cradle! Jaegers need two pilots!”
“Scrapper’s small enough to run on a single neural load,” she said proudly.
“Then move over and let me pilot!”
“Screw that!” Then she punched a final command, and Scrapper’s power gauges surged to max readings. The little Jaeger charged forward, smashing through the warehouse wall. Sheet metal and broken glass scattered over the pavement in a parking lot full of PPDC security vehicles. Scrapper kicked them aside, sending PPDC personnel scattering.
“Woohoo!” she cheered, like she was having the time of her life. “Told you she’s not a toy!”
“You’re gonna get us killed. Now come on…” Jake started trying to uncouple her from the gyroscope so he could take her place in the cradle. She couldn’t have known this, but he knew his way around a Conn-Pod.
“Stop it.”
“I can
