“Shao?” Amara echoed. “Like, Shao Liwen?” Again Jake remembered her squat, with its mini-shrine to Shao. This was a perfect place for Amara, he thought. There was nowhere else in the world where she would have a better chance to show her stuff.
“What they tell me,” Lambert said, like it was no big deal.
But to Amara, it was a very big deal. “Oh my God. Shao Liwen!” She spun to Jake. “You know who that is?! PhD at seventeen, gazillionaire way before she was as old as you are—”
“Yeah,” Jake said. “I’ve heard of her, thanks.”
“Half the tech in Scrapper came from old Shao parts.” Amara gazed up at the Jaegers surrounding them. “Can’t believe I’m gonna get to meet her.”
“You’re not,” Lambert said, glancing over at her.
“What?” Amara looked stricken. “Why?”
“Why do you think? You’re a cadet.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Get used to it around here,” Jake commented. Ranger training was a lot of things, but fair wasn’t one of them.
Amara snorted and turned back to the Jaegers. Jake could see what this meant to her. For a girl who grew up idolizing Rangers and the Jaegers they piloted, being in a Shatterdome was a dream come true. He wished he could still feel that.
“So which one’s yours?” she asked Lambert.
“Gipsy,” Lambert said. He pointed up.
“You pilot Gipsy Avenger?!” Amara was looking at Lambert in a whole new way now. Gipsy Danger, the Jaeger Avenger was built from, was a legend. Gipsy had sealed the Breach, surviving the Kaiju’s final onslaught even though it was one of the older Jaegers still in the field. It had been Raleigh Becket’s ride—and Mako Mori’s. It was a name to conjure with.
“He used to,” said a woman pulling up in a J-Tech Scrambler, a small vehicle designed for hauling heavy loads. “Until his copilot got a better offer in the private sector.” She climbed off the Scrambler and introduced herself. “Hi. Jules Reyes. J-Tech.”
“Amara. Cadet.”
“Jake. Uh, Ranger, I guess.” He looked her over. Dark hair and eyes, no-nonsense attitude to go with looks that would turn heads in the street. Jake was a sucker for the combination of competence and beauty. Jules Reyes radiated both.
She eyed him right back. “Heard a lot about you, Pentecost. You know you still hold the record.”
That piqued Amara’s interest. “What record?”
“Told you to stop talking to me,” Jake said. It was rude, and he knew it. He saw Lambert tighten up at the tone of his voice, but Jake didn’t care. The last thing he wanted to do was rehash all the old stories from the last time he’d been in a Shatterdome.
Jules took it all in and then went on like she hadn’t seen anything. “How’d they lure you back? Couldn’t have been the pay.”
“Long story,” Jake said. “If you’d like to hear it sometime…”
“She wouldn’t,” Lambert interrupted. He handed Jules the part he’d been holding. “This what you were looking for?”
“Yeah.” She grinned and loaded it onto the Scrambler. “Outstanding.”
Lambert was grinning back. Jake could see the spark between them. That explained why Lambert had been so quick to cut him off.
“I’ll swing by after I’m done with these two and give you a hand,” Lambert said.
Near one of the doors that led into the J-Tech wing of the Shatterdome, a series of clattering bangs echoed through the huge space. Jake turned to see a scientist—lab coat, glasses, awkward demeanor—stumbling away from a bunch of stacked canisters he had just knocked over. They bounced around on the floor near another Scrambler. The driver was shouting at him in Mandarin. Jake recognized the scientist: Hermann Gottlieb, one of the pair who had unlocked the secret of the Kaiju’s creators, known as the Precursors. Another legend in the history of the PPDC.
Right now he was stuttering and embarrassed at the mess he’d made, and also struggling to understand what the tech was saying. Gottlieb didn’t know much Mandarin, which was a bit of a handicap at the Moyulan Shatterdome. He minimized it by spending most of his time in the lab.
“Yo. Gottlieb. You okay?” Lambert called.
“Oh,” Gottlieb said, noticing them. “Yes.” To the tech he added a quick apology in the same language. He knew at least that much.
Cheerfully he held up a handful of what appeared to be partially burned papers. Smoke still curled from them. “Almost had it!” He blew the singed bits off the papers and disappeared, reading the notes as he went.
“He’s weird,” Amara commented.
Jules was also watching him go. “You have no idea,” she said. As she climbed back into her Scrambler, she added, “Welcome to the Moyulan Shatterdome, Cadet. Ranger.”
Jake watched her drive off. Lambert watched him watching. “Eyes front, Pentecost,” he said. A warning. Then he started walking again, Jake and Amara right behind him.
“What record was she talking about?” Amara asked. Jake ignored her. “Come on,” she pressed. “We were in jail together!”
Jake sighed. He wasn’t going to get out of telling the story. “Part of the final exam, back when I was a cadet,” he said as they went. “You had to hold a Drift in one of the old MarkThrees for over twenty minutes.”
“How long did you last?”
“Little over four hours.”
He could see that impressed her. It should have. A four-hour Drift was a big deal. “Who was your copilot?” she asked.
Jake glanced over at Lambert. This was the part of the story he didn’t want to tell. Apparently Lambert wasn’t interested in airing it out either. “Keep up, Cadet!” he called over his shoulder. “Time to meet the rest of the family.”
5
GREETINGS, EVERYONE. THIS IS RANIA CHIHOOLY with PacAsia Radio. You’ve no doubt heard that Shao Industries is angling to replace Ranger-piloted Jaegers with a fleet of Drones, and as part of that developing story we got curious what some former Rangers might think about this initiative. Our field correspondent Filip Chen caught up with Herc Hansen, former Ranger and briefly Marshal in the PPDC, who left the
