Some of those visions came from the time he and Hermann had Drifted with the Kaiju brain. No point in denying it. Newt knew Hermann felt that experience more keenly than he did, but Hermann had never gotten out of the PPDC bubble, and he didn’t have Newt’s ability to leave things behind. Those had been good times, Newt thought, him and Hermann trying to save the world from the dumpy K-Science labs back when the survival of the human race depended on a couple of misfit Rangers piloting a Jaeger that was already obsolete when it took the field against Otachi, let alone Scunner and Raiju.
Names to conjure with. Newt carried them all in his head. He carried a lot in his head, not all of it good. That was what still tied him to Hermann after they had Drifted with that Kaiju brain back during the war…
Newt was still thinking of this when he walked into his lab and saw Shao Liwen. What was she doing in his lab?
At the moment, digging around in the fiber-optic guts of a Drone Jaeger data core. She hadn’t noticed him yet.
Newt sidestepped toward one of the techs working on neural network stability in the Drones. He couldn’t remember her name… Dai-something… Daiyu, that was it. He leaned in close, startling her, and asked, “How long has she been here?”
She stared up at him. Newt realized she didn’t speak English. Mandarin was the lingua franca of Shao Industries. “Time? When?” he asked in Mandarin, nodding over at Shao.
“Almost an hour,” she said.
Newt crossed the lab toward Shao, cursing a blue streak under his breath the whole time. She was tinkering with the data core’s interface, with Burke standing near her in a Drone telemetry suit complete with a VR helmet rig that would let him operate the Drone via its data core. It was kind of like Drifting, only without the messy complications of interacting with another human mind.
“Hey, boss,” he said, forcing himself to smile. “Sorry, thought you were still in Sydney.”
She didn’t return his greeting. “The Council has approved Drone deployment in an emergency session,” she said, getting right to the point, as usual.
Obsidian Fury’s missile barrage had apparently killed a number of the PPDC Council members, leaving the rest of the group short of a quorum. Instead of naming new members, they had declared a temporary suspension of the quorum rules and approved the Drone initiative before the fires in the Council Building had even been extinguished.
“Wow,” Newt said. “That’s—that’s great.”
Burke was giving him a funny look. “Thought you’d be a little more enthusiastic, Doc,” he said. Newt knew Burke was one of the members of Shao’s inner circle who didn’t trust him.
“No, I am,” he said. “It’s just, you know. Why they’re approving now. Because of the attack.”
“I was there,” Shao snapped at him. “I know what happened.” She went on in Mandarin. “And it wouldn’t have, if our Drones had been in the field. Now everyone sees that.”
“Yeah,” Newt agreed. Something about her tone of voice made him unsure of himself. “I guess they do.”
“Which means the attack was positive, all things considered.”
Ah, there it was. Shao the business tycoon, the Drone evangelist, looking at the day’s destruction and finding it good for business. “If you look at it sideways and squint, then yeah,” he said, “I guess.”
Shao was still dividing her attention between Newt and the data readouts from the core. She disconnected Burke from it and said, “There’s a point five micro delay in the uplink to the data cores.”
“I know. I’m working on boosting the connection—”
“Any other irregularities I should know about?”
“No. All systems double thumbs.” He gave her two thumbs up.
“Push your data to my server. I want to run a diagnostic. The Council expects full deployment in forty-eight hours.” Switching back to English so Burke and the other non-Chinese there could see her ordering Newt around, she added, “Get it done.”
Then with Burke at her side, she swept out of the lab. Newt called after her.
“Sure! No problem! I’m on it like a…” For some reason, words failed him. “…like a guy that’s really, really on it.” Words never failed him! He felt unsettled by this: He was slipping gears once in a while, but also doing some of the best, most amazing work he’d ever done.
Even so, getting the Drones online, tested, and deployed in forty-eight hours was a tall order. The tech crew appeared stunned by Shao’s ultimatum. “What?” Daiyu looked aghast. “No way we’ll be ready!”
“Way? Way? Yes, way,” Newt said. He had to make this happen or he would be out of a job, and the consequences of that… “Know what? You’re fired,” he said, trying to put a little fear of God into the techs to get them moving. Then he immediately reconsidered. He needed Daiyu. She was too smart to fire right then. “No, get this done, then you’re fired. Or promoted. We’ll see how it goes. But probably fired. Go! Shoo!”
The techs scattered to their workstations. Holo screens blinked into existence all over the lab as they feverishly ran testing simulations and revised code. Newt strolled among them, letting them know he was watching, and then he came to the large observation window that looked out over the factory floor. Row after row of Drone Jaegers stood on the floor, with automated machinery making final adjustments to their external components. Other factory robots were fitting each Drone with data cores. Could they be done in forty-eight hours? Despite his promise to Shao, Newt wasn’t sure.
He took another look at the techs, wondering if he’d taken the right tack. He wasn’t ordinarily a high-pressure, threatening kind of guy. He preferred to glad-hand, make people feel good, impress them with his savvy and make them feel like he was the kind of boss who deserved their best effort. But he was under a lot
