Newt looked over the notes, starting to chuckle before he’d gotten past the first page. “Rocket thrusters? There’s no fuel in the world with that kind of boost-to-mass ratio.”
“From this world, no,” Gottlieb said. When Newt looked up, he saw Gottlieb was holding a vial of blue liquid.
“Kaiju blood?” Newt said. He didn’t like seeing it even in a lab setting. The stuff was dangerous…
“Exactly!” Gottlieb cried. “I’ve discovered it’s highly reactive when combined with rare earth elements—cerium, lanthanum, gadolinium—”
“Dude, you can’t be fooling around with this stuff,” Newt said. “You’re going to blow yourself up.” He took another look at the notes. “Look at these! You already did, didn’t you? You done went and blew yourself up.”
“I just need to balance the equation,” Gottlieb went on, completely unconcerned. “No one knows more about Kaiju morphology than you. If you could just take a look—”
“Buddy, it doesn’t matter. Once my boss’s Drones are approved, deployment time’ll be a non-issue. Within a year we’ll have Drones everywhere.”
“So you won’t help me?” Gottlieb was quietly hurt. Proud but also wounded. Newt wavered. He and Gottlieb had been a great team… but now there were other factors involved.
Newt’s watch beeped. He glanced down at it and saw it was time to get to the demonstration of Shao’s new Drone Jaegers. “Sorry,” he said. “Duty calls. Been nice catching up.”
“Newton?” Something in Gottlieb’s tone stopped Newt before he got to the door. He turned and saw Gottlieb looking sad and haunted. “I—I still have nightmares. About what we saw. When we Drifted with that disgusting Kaiju brain.”
“Yeah,” Newt said. He understood. “But sure was a hell of a rush, wasn’t it?” He’d been working apart from Gottlieb since right after the close of the Breach, and pursuing some of his own side projects. That made it easy to forget how close they had once been. They were bound in a way by that shared experience, even though judging from Gottlieb’s mood they had processed it in very different ways.
“No one knows what it felt like. To be in its mind. Except us. You and I. Together.”
Newt felt Gottlieb’s plea for… what? Support of some kind? What appeal was he making? Newt didn’t know how to help him, but he did want to. Gottlieb was kind of a hopeless doofus, but they had saved the world together.
He stood there trying to figure out how to resolve his conflicted feelings, and Liwen’s Security Chief Kang popped into the lab, saving Newt from the old tug of loyalty he didn’t really want to feel anymore. “Dr. Geiszler,” he said in Mandarin. “Time to go.”
* * *
He hustled down the corridor that led out of the K-Science wing toward the War Room, catching up with Shao and the rest of her entourage. “You and Dr. Gottlieb were close, weren’t you? During the war.” She spoke Mandarin, and Newt tried to tell her they’d shared a lab, but apparently his attempt didn’t pass muster.
“English,” she snapped, still in Mandarin. “Your Mandarin makes you sound like an idiot.”
“Um, yes,” Newt said. He didn’t think he sounded like an idiot, but she was the boss and he wasn’t going to cross her—at least not right now. “We shared a lab.”
“He was your friend?”
Newt hesitated over this. He’d never had many friends, had always preferred the company of instruments and diagrams to people… but his past with Hermann… “Yeah,” Newt said. “He was.”
They were at the edge of the Shatterdome’s Jaeger bays, cutting across toward the War Room. Groups of Rangers, cadets, and J-Tech mechanics crisscrossed the floor. Shao seemed to be framing another question about Newt and Hermann, but before she could ask it, one of the teenage cadets saw them and broke away from her group. “Miss Shao?” She was bright-eyed and breathless, starstruck by seeing the great Shao Liwen in person. “I just wanted to say—everything you’ve—I made my own Jaeger, a—a small one, with a lot of parts from Shao Industries—”
Shao looked at Newt. “They let children in here?”
“I think she’s a cadet.”
“I’m going to be a Jaeger pilot, ma’am,” the girl said. Her name tag said NAMANI.
Shao switched to English, something she almost never did. “Congratulations,” she said, and added a smile. She didn’t have a lot of practice smiling, and it didn’t look natural at all. But the cadet didn’t seem to care. She basked in Shao’s attention until Shao added, still in English, “Please move out of the way.”
Crestfallen, the girl stepped aside, and Shao led the group on. Newt threw the girl an apologetic glance, but she wasn’t looking at him. He hustled to keep pace with Shao. “The smile was good, but next time maybe throw in a little chit chat,” he suggested. “Or just the chit—”
In Mandarin again, she asked, “What were you and Dr. Gottlieb talking about?” as though the encounter with the cadet had never happened.
“Nothing. Just some nutty idea he has about thruster pods—”
“I can’t afford a misstep before Secretary General Mori makes her recommendation at the Council Summit,” she said, speaking so fast Newt could barely keep up. “No more contact with Dr. Gottlieb until after the vote.”
An hour ago, Newt would have been glad to avoid contact with Hermann, but seeing him had brought back some fond old memories of the time they’d spent crusading together. Also, Newt didn’t like being told what to do, and Shao’s imperious attitude toward him made him want to defend Hermann all the more. “But he’s harmless—”
She stopped, pivoted to face him, and unleashed a torrent of Mandarin that Newt couldn’t parse. “Uh… could you say that again?” he asked. “About eighty percent slower?”
In English, enunciating slowly and carefully, Shao said, “I said don’t make me question your loyalty.”
“No,” Newt said, trying
