Once they were inside the yard, Jake got out a beat-up old plasma tracker. It detected the energy signatures of plasma components even through a Jaeger’s heavy shielding. Indispensable equipment for the ambitious salvage expert. As he was turning it on, Sonny started to walk ahead. Jake caught him and pulled him back behind the mangled remains of a Mark II Jaeger. When he was a little kid, he’d known them all by sight and talked about them the way kids of a previous generation had known all the details about their favorite Pokémon or baseball players. Just as Jake yanked Sonny back, a searchlight swept over the spot where he’d just been. The PPDC patrolled the yard, but their timing never varied. Jake had done his research.
Sonny glared at him, but he could hardly be mad that Jake had just saved the operation and kept them all out of jail. Jake led them around the first scrapped Jaeger, keeping an eye on the plasma tracker. It emitted a soft ping as they neared another Jaeger. This one wasn’t quite as messed up as the first, but it was missing one arm and its head was shattered. Jake recognized it, of course: Romeo Blue, the only tripedal Jaeger ever put into service. Three Kaiju kills, all in partnership with Gipsy Danger. Destroyed by Insidia in Panama City, 2020, with the loss of both pilots. Before that, Jake remembered seeing the parade after Romeo Blue had killed the Kaiju Takubus back in the early years after the opening of the Breach. It was huge, lumbering, slow, but seemingly invincible.
Seemingly. To a little kid whose father was already a hero after Tokyo. But now Jake was all grown up.
“This one,” he said.
Sonny and his men followed Jake through a hatch and into the Jaeger’s immense interior. Other than Jake, none of them had ever been inside a Jaeger before, and they eyed the surroundings with awed expressions.
“You sure it’s here?” Sonny asked.
Jake found the access door he was looking for. On the other side of it would be Romeo Blue’s plasma chamber, where the Jaeger’s power core and associated hardware would have been collected and shielded. The door was jammed shut, but the control panel next to it would have an override. Jake got his fingers into the seam at the edge of the panel and wrenched it open.
“Power cores are stripped before Jaegers get decommissioned,” he said as he felt around inside the panel. “But sometimes they miss the tertiary plasma capacitors. Hell of a score on the black market, if this one’s still holding a charge.”
“You’d better hope so,” Sonny said.
Something about his tone of voice made Jake look back over his shoulder. Sonny was holding a gun. “Okay,” Jake said. “Let’s not get all excited.”
“Just playing the odds,” Sonny said. “You cheated Barada in Juarez, skipped out on Azimi in Hong Kong—”
“They had it coming,” Jake said. Who wouldn’t take the chance to cheat Tony Azimi? That guy was a scumbag.
“And stole from me in my own backyard,” Sonny added.
That was a little harder to paper over. Jake had in fact pulled a job in Sonny’s territory without telling Sonny about it or cutting him in. From Sonny’s perspective, that was a problem. From Jake’s perspective, it had been a chance to make a quick score and maybe establish his bona fides as someone who knew where to find the good stuff in the ruins of Southern California. Sonny must have at least partially bought into that, because he was giving Jake a chance to make good by displaying those bona fides. “And now I’m stealing for you,” Jake said. “Circle of life. We good?”
“You deliver, and yeah, we’re good.” Sonny’s expression didn’t change. Jake tried to gauge whether or not he was telling the truth. It didn’t really matter at the moment.
His fingers found the emergency release lever behind the control panel. Jake grinned and pulled the release. A heavy thunk sounded from the door as its bolts disengaged. It opened with a low grinding noise. The Jaeger wasn’t powered anymore, but the backup battery systems on the old Mark I models held their power for a long time.
Jake stood and noticed that Sonny hadn’t put the gun away. Not a good sign. But he put his best face on it, keeping up his grin and gesturing through the open door. “Let’s get rich,” he said.
He went into the chamber first. These old Jaegers had big plasma chambers because PPDC techs hadn’t been able to optimize the plasma density before they had to get the Jaegers into service. The space was the size of several rooms in his mansion. Cables and conduits ran along the walls, converging on a central spot where the plasma capacitor was located.
Or should have been.
Jake stopped in the middle of the room, unable to believe the bad luck. The capacitor shunt cables were still sparking, which meant that someone had gotten there within the last few minutes. Any longer and the residual energy would have all bled out already. “No, no, it says it’s here,” Jake said. He glanced down at his tracker, which still said the capacitor was right there in front of him.
He turned toward Sonny. “It should be right here—”
Sonny smashed him across the
