FC: Herc! Filip Chen, PacAsia Radio. Have you heard about the new Drone proposal from Shao Industries?
HH: Couldn’t avoid it if I wanted to, could I?
FC: What’s your opinion?
HH: On Drones in Jaegers? Dumbest thing I ever heard.
FC: Even after your son died in a Jaeger, it doesn’t seem like a good idea?
HH: My son died in a Jaeger, yeah. And if there hadn’t been Rangers in that Jaeger, and in Gipsy Danger, we’d all be dead. You think a Drone pilot could decide to blow a Jaeger’s reactor and find the manual override? Get out of here.
FC: Still, you have to admit—
HH: I said get the BLEEEEEEP out of here. And don’t ever talk to me about my son again.
* * *
Deep in the bowels of the Shatterdome was a barracks housing new cadets, a group of eight selected from thousands of eager applicants. They were all in their teens, the men with regulation cropped hair and the women carefully observing PPDC regulations about styles that kept the eyes clear. When they were in a group, it was easy to tell what the PPDC looked for in cadets. Wherever they came from—this group of eight represented six home countries—they were all athletic and lean, alert and intelligent. Most importantly, they were driven. Even in their off-hours, most of them were occupied with some kind of training. Meilin and Viktoriya wore practice Drift helmet rigs, trying to sync themselves together so they would work a holographic Jaeger arm and put it through its combat paces. But they were having trouble making it do anything. It twitched and flailed around. “You’re out of sync,” Meilin said.
Vik swore in Russian. Switching to English, she said, “Helmet’s acting up.” She took it off and the holo Jaeger arm disappeared. Both of them started tinkering with the helmet. Blonde and muscular, Vik towered over Meilin, who bent close to a circuit panel, frowning under severe black bangs as she sought the reason the Drift connection was getting interrupted. Ranger training wasn’t just about combat. A Ranger had to know every detail of how their equipment worked, because sometimes battlefield repairs and workarounds made the difference between life and death… and not just for the Rangers, either.
They all knew the story of how Raleigh Becket had sealed the Breach. With Gipsy Danger’s systems failing, sinking deeper into the hellscape of the Precursor dimension on the other side of the Breach, he had to know how to set the manual reactor override and then get back to his escape pod. That knowledge came from obsessive attention to detail.
The ability to pull it off, though, that came from sheer willpower under circumstances none of the cadets could imagine. But they believed in themselves, and they were going to do everything they could to live up to the example of their idols. Becket, Pentecost, Hansen… they had set the bar, and the cadets wanted to wear the title of Ranger just as they had.
As the Jaeger arm blinked out, two other cadets—Renata and Suresh—were sparring in the space between the bunks just beyond it. Renata caught Suresh square in the mouth with a punch at practice speed, and Suresh skipped backward, covering his mouth. “Come on!” he complained. Suresh was the nervous one of the group, with a soulful face that easily softened into a pout. “Not in the face, Renata!”
“Sorry, my bad,” she said, mimicking his expression—and then she popped him in the face again. He came back at her, and they traded blows in a flurry, bumping into a bunk where another pair of cadets, Tahima and Ilya, were playing cards.
“I see your hour of rec time and raise two shower chits,” Tahima said. Ilya considered.
On the upper bunk, Jinhai was doing sit-ups off the edge while Ryoichi sat on his legs, reading a comic about Jaegers. “Fold, Ilya,” Jinhai said when he was at full extension, with his head upside down near Ilya’s. “You need all the showers you can get.”
“I have a musk,” Ilya corrected him. “What you smell is a musk.”
Amara absorbed these impressions all at once as she entered the room with Jake and Ranger Lambert. Ryoichi was the first cadet to notice them. “Ranger on deck!” he called out, stuffing his comic under the pillow.
All of the cadets scrambled into line and snapped to attention. Lambert took a moment to watch and inspect them. Then he said, “Cadets. This is Amara Namani. She’ll be joining you in sim training, bright and early.”
They all looked her up and down, displaying a variety of reactions. Naturally they were all competitive. Ranger slots were few and precious. Another cadet meant one more person who wasn’t going to make it when the final promotions were announced. Vik in particular didn’t make any effort to hide her disdain.
“And this is Ranger Pentecost,” Lambert added, nodding at Jake.
That got a much different response. The name Pentecost crackled in the room, and they looked at Jake like he had stepped out of a history book. He tried not to show how much it irritated him. “He’ll be helping me instruct you until I find a new copilot to replace Ranger Burke.” Lambert turned to Jake. “Anything you want to add?”
Jake looked at all the eager young faces staring at him, waiting for him to say something profound. But he didn’t have anything profound to say. “Don’t do what I did,” perhaps. Or maybe “Do what I did, get out while you have a chance.” Or even “Let me tell you the real story about Stacker Pentecost and what it was like to be his son.”
But all he said was, “Not really.”
Lambert glowered at him. Jake knew why. In a situation like this, you were supposed to be rah-rah, and Jake wasn’t doing that. To Lambert, that was something close to sacrilege. But that was Nate’s problem, not
