Guardian Bravo, by contrast, was a brilliant red and silver, her graphene Arc Whip retracted while it was at rest. Other than her color scheme, Guardian Bravo was set apart from the rest of the Shatterdome’s complement by the tall vent stacks that stood up from the backs of its shoulders. Jake hadn’t learned much about Guardian Bravo’s design, but he thought he remembered the stacks having something to do with creating a static charge, using internal fans to generate extra power to the Arc Whip. In demonstrations, the whip had proven capable of cutting through a meter of steel, while delivering an electrical charge roughly comparable to an average lightning strike.
Saber Athena, on the other side of the bay, was built much leaner and smaller. She was the PPDC’s most up-to-date effort to design a Jaeger that could potentially match a living creature’s speed and quickness. All of the Mark VI Jaegers were faster on their feet than the previous generations, just due to improvements in neurotransmitting systems in parallel with more sophisticated hydraulic damping that allowed for better lateral movement. Compared to the Mark II or Mark III Jaegers, the Mark VIs all looked like acrobats—but Saber Athena made the rest of them look slow. Her weaponry, twin plasma swords, was designed to work with her quick-strike capability. She didn’t have a ton of firepower, but her pilots were trained to hit a target five times while another one of the Mark VIs was still winding up for a second shot.
Next was Bracer Phoenix, an experimental Mark VI with a three-Ranger Conn-Pod designed so that one of the pilots could drop down into the secondary control room and handle Bracer’s devastating railgun. It was mounted on a track encircling Bracer’s midsection, with a fire rate of hundreds of rounds per minute. Each shell was the size of a truck. Another of Bracer’s innovations was a twin knee joint, segmented to flex both forward and backward. This advance enabled the Jaeger to hold her balance and keep moving even while the railgun was firing, as the extra joint in each leg gave it more recoil absorption, without sacrificing much in the way of strength or stability. Bracer had just been an idea on a drawing board when Jake left the PPDC. A three-Ranger crew was considered extravagant during the Kaiju War, when Rangers were at a premium, but now in the postwar era the PPDC was freer to develop different piloting protocols.
Finally Jake’s eye fell on Gipsy Avenger, the Mark VI successor to Gipsy Danger. Jake could see the family resemblance in the shape of the head and the detailing of the exterior armor, not to mention the blue-accented color scheme. He had once been assigned to Gipsy Avenger, and seeing her again churned up a lot of feelings that he would rather have left alone under their layers of time and deliberate forgetting. Gipsy was a good ride, strong and quick. She had a forearm-mounted chain sword on the left side, and her right arm contained the apparatus for the experimental Gravity Sling, a weapon Jake had barely started training on when… well, he didn’t want to think about that right now. He might be back in a Shatterdome, but that didn’t mean he had to dredge up everything in his past. Seeing Nate Lambert so soon after the uncomfortable reunion with Mako had shaken him. Lambert scorned him and Mako pitied him. Jake felt worse about Mako’s pity than Nate’s scorn. But where Nate had made it clear he didn’t want Jake around, Mako was giving him a second chance. Jake knew how generous that was even though it was a chance he never would have asked for and wasn’t sure he even wanted.
Still, he was here, and the alternative was jail, so he was going to see which way the wind was blowing and then get the hell out as soon as the chance presented itself.
They were about halfway across the Jaeger bay, weaving to avoid J-Tech crews crisscrossing the deck in Scramblers or on foot. Amara fell behind, lost in her astonishment. Jake remembered feeling the same way about Jaegers. Now he was more cynical. Sooner or later, he figured she would be too. All signs in the Shatterdome were in both Mandarin and English, and most of the techs spoke Mandarin, too. The PPDC had been an international effort from its inception, since the Kaiju had known no national boundaries. Now it retained its international character because no nation on Earth could handle the costs alone while they tried to rebuild from the widespread devastation of the Kaiju War.
“Simtraining starts at 0600,” Lambert said, snapping Amara out of her reverie. “You’re late, you miss the day. Fall behind, you’re on a transport back to wherever they found you.”
Amara finally found her voice. “That’s Titan Redeemer! And Bracer Phoenix, she’s a three-man rig! And Guardian Bravo! And—and Saber Athena! I love Saber Athena! She’s the fastest Jaeger in the fleet!” Now Jake understood the posters plastering the walls of her squat back in Santa Monica. She adored Jaegers the way other kids worshipped musicians or YouTube stars.
Jake, for his part, was curious why the whole Shatterdome seemed to be on alert. “What’s all the hustle for?” he asked Nate.
“Been ordered to put on a show.
