“Meet me in the lab right away. Marshal wants to see us. And lose the robe.”
“Check,” Jake said, rolling his eyes for Amara’s benefit. “No robe.”
Already she was feeling better. She wasn’t going to be afraid. She wasn’t going to let that stop her. This was her chance.
“I want to try again,” she said.
Jake’s voice was surprisingly gentle. “That’s enough for one night,” he said.
“I thought you were going to help me,” Amara said. She almost took a shot at him about wearing his dad’s hat and saluting like a little boy soldier, but with an effort she stopped herself. As much as she hated to admit it, this wasn’t a time to resort to her typical social strategy of acerbic bravado. So instead she went for a flippant remark that she hoped would tell Jake how much this meant to her. “I didn’t even figure out what Sarah’s favorite candy bar is.”
“It’s an Almond Joy,” he said.
“That’s not helping, that’s cheating, you dick!”
On his way out the door, Jake couldn’t help but smile.
When he was gone, Amara sat looking at the Drift rig again. Already she felt wrung out, but she wasn’t going to give up now. After all, she’d already relived the worst moment of her life, and with Jake Pentecost right there in her head. What could the Drift do to her now?
She swiped at the holo terminal and Sarah the brain slid back into position. Amara shook her hair back and put the practice helmet back on. “Okay, Sarah,” she said. “What else do you like besides candy…?”
She stabbed a final command and initiated the Drift again.
13
EDITORIAL: I HATE IT WHEN I’M RIGHT
The dead are still being counted in Sydney, thanks to a still-unidentified rogue Jaeger attacking the Pan Pacific Defense Corps for reasons nobody seems to be able to figure out. Don’t believe the Kaiju nuts who claimed the attack. Even if they could build a Jaeger, why would they attack when another Jaeger was there to fight back? Terrorists don’t like an even fight. They would have sent that Jaeger out to massacre innocent people, or maybe gone after the Council at one of its meetings when Gipsy Avenger wasn’t there to fight back. Right? It doesn’t make any sense.
The real problem here is that the PPDC doesn’t know where this Jaeger came from. You saw what happened. That thing kicked Gipsy Avenger’s ass, and if it had wanted to, it could have put her down and then done whatever it wanted with the rest of Sydney. So why didn’t it? What does that tell you?
I know what it tells me. Someone out there has tech that equals anything the PPDC can put into the field, and we don’t know who they are.
That ought to scare you a lot more than a bunch of Kaiju nuts trying to claim something they obviously didn’t do.
Jake asked Lambert what was up as they headed for the K-Science wing of the Shatterdome, but Nate didn’t want to get into it. “Better you see for yourself,” he said. “I’m going to let Gottlieb tell you.”
When they got to the lab, Gottlieb was squinting at a holo screen that showed a fragmented swirl of color and numbers. Marshal Quan was there observing. He looked up and nodded as Jake and Lambert came in. Jake looked at the screen, unsure why Gottlieb would have wanted him to see it.
“What is it?” he asked.
“A message,” Quan said. “From Mako.”
This hit Jake hard, bringing back that last image he had of her, palm pressed against the chopper window as it slid away from Gipsy Avenger… He blinked and tried to keep his attention on the here and now.
“She was trying to send it from her copter right before she—” Gottlieb caught himself. He looked at Jake, unsure how to go on, then cleared his throat and stuck to the facts. “It’s a data packet. High density.”
“Obsidian Fury was jamming comms,” Lambert said. “How’d her signal get through?”
“It didn’t,” Quan answered. “At least not intact.”
“So it’s gone,” Jake said. What was he doing here then?
Gottlieb was still squinting, but now he was also running another program in parallel with the fractal swirl of data. “‘Gone’ is relative in the digital realm,” he said as he tweaked the program he had up on the parallel screen. “By running a modified fractal algorithm, I might be able to reconstruct a few megabytes…”
Code unspooled on the screen. Gottlieb muttered to himself. Jake got restless, standing there watching a scientist wrestle with data while he wondered if there was going to be a last note from his sister… or not. He wished they’d figured out if they could salvage anything before they brought him here. Now that he knew the message existed, if Gottlieb couldn’t unscramble it Jake would spend the rest of his life wondering what it said.
“There,” Gottlieb said.
The image on the main holo screen coalesced and resolved. There was still static, but… “Is that… is that a Kaiju?” Jake wondered aloud.
It sure looked like one. Sketchy and unfamiliar, but definitely a Kaiju head. Gottlieb worked his terminal, running pattern recognition software on the image, sorting through known Kaiju. “No match against the database.”
“Maybe it’s a symbol?” Lambert suggested. “Something connected to the Kaiju cults?”
Now Gottlieb ran a search on all symbols, icons, and patterns related to the branch of Kaiju worshippers. “No match,” Gottlieb said again.
“Keep looking,” Marshal Quan ordered. “Whatever this is, it was important to her. I want to know why.”
He left, presumably to brief PPDC intel on the existence of the drawing to see if that could help pin down the origin of the rogue Jaeger they were calling Obsidian Fury. Lambert was still looking at the drawing. “You don’t stop fighting till the enemy’s down,” he said. Then, glancing over at Jake, he added, “If you’re really a soldier.”
With that, he followed Quan out. Jake couldn’t take his eyes off the holo screen. This
