Contents
Cover
Also Available from Titan Books
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
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About the Author
Available now from Titan Books
Also available from Titan Books:
Pacific Rim Uprising: Ascension
The Official Movie Prequel
FROM DIRECTOR
STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT
NOVELIZATION BY
ALEX IRVINE
TITAN BOOKS
Pacific Rim Uprising: The Official Movie Novelization
Print edition ISBN: 9781785657689
E-book edition ISBN: 9781785657696
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First edition: March 2018
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
© 2018 Legendary
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TO HARUO NAKAJIMA, THE MAN IN THE
GODZILLA SUIT
1
EDITORIAL: THANKS, PPDC, AND SO LONG
Look, the Breach has been closed for ten years. If the Kaiju were coming back, they would already have done it. You think they’re not spoiling for a chance to get back at us after we dropped a nuke straight through the Breach into their… world? Dimension? Whatever. It’s not going to happen. We’ve got a Pan Pacific Defense Corps that stands guard against a threat that doesn’t exist. There are how many Shatterdomes? How many Jaegers? How many Rangers and support staff? How much does all that cost?
Shouldn’t we be spending that money to rebuild everything that was destroyed during the war? When I fly into Los Angeles now, all I can see from Long Beach all the way up to Santa Monica is ruins. Ten years later! Europe was rebuilt sooner than that after World War II! Why, you ask?
Because everybody knew the war was over. They put their money into rebuilding. They didn’t waste it on more armies, more bases. No. They got on with their lives.
We’re not doing that. We’re still staring out at the Pacific Ocean thinking it’s full of monsters, and it’s not.
It’s time to move on. It’s time to demobilize the Pan Pacific Defense Corps. Mothball the Jaegers, shutter the Shatterdomes, and get on with the twenty-first century.
The Pan Pacific Defense Corps scrapyard in Santa Monica, California spread over hundreds of acres that had once been prime beachfront. During the course of the Kaiju War, much of Santa Monica had been destroyed, and fallen Jaegers from up and down the West Coast now lay behind barbed wire. Around the scrapyard, what had once been one of the Los Angeles area’s most beautiful cities was now a ruin. Those who could get out were long since gone, and only the desperate remained.
Jake Pentecost wasn’t exactly desperate, but he was in a bit of a bind. He’d gotten on the wrong side of one of the local crime bosses, by the name of Sonny, and now he had to buy his way out of the problem by finding Sonny some high-quality salvage that Sonny could move on the local black market. Ordinarily Jake would have steered clear of burgling a PPDC facility—the penalties were pretty stiff—but he knew the area around this Jaeger graveyard well enough to figure he could skip out before any trouble arose.
Even so, it was risky, and Jake wouldn’t have been here if Sonny hadn’t made it clear that the alternative involved lots of pain and maybe death. Well, definitely death.
He led Sonny and Sonny’s goons up to a part of the electrified fence surrounding the yard and pointed to the spot they should cut through. The goons were quick about it—this clearly wasn’t the first time they’d cut a fence—and a minute later Jake stepped through a nice big hole right next to a NO TRESPASSING sign that also bore the logo of the PPDC. Seeing it gave Jake a little spike of regret. He’d been a Jaeger pilot once.
But that was the past. He couldn’t do anything about it, just like he couldn’t do anything about all the other bullshit that came along with being the son of Stacker Pentecost. When your father died saving the world, there was no way to live up to that. Jake had long since quit trying. He’d turned himself into a pretty good… well, some people would call him a thief. He thought of himself as more of a salvage expert.
It was a good life if it didn’t get you killed. In this world you had to hustle. The coastal cities, most of them, were still relief zones, filled with people just trying to get by—rubbing up against Kaiju-worshipping cults that went around bemoaning the closure of the Breach like it was the Crucifixion. Then you had your homegrown gangsters doing what gangsters always did—only now they had another sideline in cobbling together homegrown junk Jaegers from salvaged parts. Anyone with money had moved inland, getting away from the chaos and the possibility that another Breach would open up and the Kaiju War would start all over again. But their fear was his opportunity, because they left behind empty mansions like the one Jake squatted in up in Malibu. He also had a little bit of experience
