Over Lambert’s shoulder, Amara saw Jake drifting in from the hall. He’d probably heard the scrap just like Lambert had, and come to see what was going on.
Lambert kept talking, his voice tight with emotion that he was trying hard to control. “She said whoever you are, wherever you come from, the minute you enter this program, you’re part of a family. And the people beside you are your brothers, and sisters.” He had noticed Jake by now, and Amara thought this part of the speech was directed at Jake as much as at the cadets. “No matter what they do… no matter how stupid they act… you forgive. And you move on. Because that’s what family does. Start believing that out here and you’ll start believing it in a Jaeger.”
Amara was normally immune to inspirational speeches, but this one resonated. Family. She didn’t have one anymore. Everyone in the room, cadet or Ranger, had lost someone. That loss bound them together into a new kind of family, even if some of the other members were assholes sometimes. She caught Vik’s eye and saw Vik was understanding the same thing. Sheepish at the way they’d goaded each other, they exchanged a nod. And by the doorway, Amara could see Jake Pentecost thinking along the same lines. She didn’t know exactly what had happened between them, but she knew Jake had kicked out, and she knew he and Lambert had been partners. Hearing Lambert’s speech and seeing Jake’s reaction, Amara started to put two and two together. Lambert was forgiving him. He was walking the walk, doing himself what he demanded of the cadets.
Amara had spent her whole life trying not to feel anything, but she’d never been around a group like this. In that moment she would have died for all of them. This was her family now.
Jules, the J-Tech beauty that both Jake and Lambert were after, stuck her head into the room. “Hey.” When Jake and Lambert turned toward her, she said, “Marshal’s looking for you guys. Says Gottlieb found something.”
* * *
Back in the K-Science lab, Jake stood with Lambert and Quan as Gottlieb swiped away a number of programs he’d had running and exposed Mako’s Kaiju-head drawing. “It isn’t something,” he said, “It’s somewhere.”
He worked a holo screen, moving Mako’s drawing over a section of a satellite map. The outline of the head matched the topography perfectly. Jake drew in a breath. She had been sending a message. Staring death in the face, Mako had kept the presence of mind to make sure that this knowledge wouldn’t die with her. “Severnaya Zemlya,” Gottlieb said. “Off Siberia’s Taymyr Peninsula.”
Next to the overlay of the drawing and the map, a larger-scale map appeared, showing the whole peninsula and the scattering of islands reaching north from it into the Arctic Ocean.
“What’s there?” Quan asked.
“Nothing anymore,” Gottlieb said. He zoomed the map in, focusing on the area under the eye of Mako’s drawing. “A facility roughly in this location was used to manufacture Jaeger power cores early in the war. But it was decommissioned years ago.”
“Why would Mako be trying to tell us about an abandoned factory in the middle of nowhere?” Lambert wondered. He was eyeing Jake as he said it, and Jake could read between the lines easily enough. He was making Jake an offer. Challenging him. If they really wanted to find out what Mako had been trying to tell them…
Jake turned to Marshal Quan. “Sir, permission to take Gipsy Avenger and see what the hell’s out there.”
Quan considered, but not for long.
16
PPDC FACILITIES DIVISION
SEVERNAYA MANUFACTURING FACILITY
CONSTRUCTED: June 2019
PRODUCTION: Power cores and plasma capacitors, Mark II and Mark III Jaegers; cabling and conduit insulation; reactor housings
STAFFING: 267
DECOMMISSIONED: December 2022
REASON FOR DECOMMISSIONING: Remoteness of location offered protection from Kaiju attacks but caused difficulties in shipping. Personnel suffered from low morale and resultant low productivity as a result of isolation. Shipments were vulnerable to theft due to multiple transfer points en route to Shatterdome locations. Errors in siting survey resulted in nearby glaciers causing shifts in subterranean areas of the manufacturing floor.
METHOD OF DISPOSAL: Attempts to sell or lease the facility to PPDC industrial and manufacturing partners were unsuccessful. Personnel reassigned to Anchorage and Vladivostok, December 2022. Critical machinery removed February 2023, facility abandoned March 2023. No current monitoring or plans for reuse.
From Moyulan to the Taymyr Peninsula was a long trip via Jumphawks. Gipsy Avenger, with Jake and Lambert holding their Drift, arrived thirty-six hours after Gottlieb’s revelation, dropping from the Jumphawks down through a blizzard to the frozen ground of Siberia. The PPDC had built a number of factories in places like this, far from the Pacific Ocean and therefore less likely to be lost in Kaiju attacks. But this one had been mothballed during the war, according to the records Gottlieb had retrieved. Newer power core technologies pioneered in China and Washington state had relocated much of the manufacturing to those places, and the Severnaya facility had been completely abandoned for more than a decade.
They got visual contact on the factory from a distance of a few hundred yards, right at the limit of visibility given the weather. It had been built into the side of a mountain, and since its abandonment a glacier had overspread part of the complex. Cascading ice had almost obscured it, and what they could see looked dilapidated and partially collapsed.
Lambert had Gipsy doing full-spectrum tactical scans of the complex, and he wasn’t finding anything. “No life signs. Looks like Gottlieb was right. Place is abandoned.”
The scanner chirped and Jake saw a signal of some kind on the readout in front
