Pacific Rim Uprising--Official Movie Novelization

Fury but had to outsmart it… and then their discovery of what was inside the rogue Jaeger’s Conn-Pod. Quan had taken one look at the brain and gone stiff, the expression on his face almost religious in its revulsion. And it wasn’t just the smell, either, although the Kaiju brain by then was beginning to stink like nothing Jake had ever smelled before. They got it back under the tarp, as much to contain the stench as to hide the brain, and followed the forklift into one of the big testing rooms at the edge of the K-Science wing. Gottlieb had been warned they were coming in hot with something important, and he was there waiting for them. “Whatever was in that facility, Obsidian Fury didn’t want us getting a look,” Jake said as he saw Gottlieb approach. “Guessing it has something to do with this.”

He swept back the tarp covering the forklift’s cargo, revealing the decaying remains of the Kaiju brain from inside Obsidian Fury. The brain had suffered in transit, and they hadn’t been real delicate when they took it out of Obsidian Fury’s head, so in a lot of ways it looked worse than when Jake had first seen it in the blizzard up at Severnaya Zemlya. It was also rotting quickly, as Kaiju flesh and organs did, and the minute Jake lifted the tarp, a wave of odor rolled out from underneath, a miasma that made Jake’s eyes water even though he had been smelling it for more or less the last twelve hours.

The first thing Gottlieb did was try to stop himself from vomiting. He gagged visibly, turned away, hunched over… and then just barely held himself together. When he turned back around, the picture of composure again, Lambert said, “No pilots. Just this—whatever it is.”

“I want to know everything about it,” Quan ordered. “Inside and out.”

The look on Gottlieb’s face made Jake uneasy. It was part disgust and part relish, or even a weird kind of intellectual lust. Jake knew Gottlieb had Drifted with a Kaiju brain once. That was part of PPDC lore, along with Raleigh Becket bringing Gipsy Danger in on his own after his brother Yancy was killed, and Stacker Pentecost facing down Onibaba solo after his partner went down. But Jake had heard Gottlieb didn’t like it, and the experience had hardened him against the Kaiju, given him a visceral hatred of them he hadn’t felt before being in direct touch with their minds.

Gottlieb never talked about it, so nobody really knew the truth but him, and maybe Newt Geiszler. Right now, Gottlieb looked like a man who knew he was going to have to suffer, and also knew that the prize would be sufficient reward.

“I’m going to need a chainsaw,” Gottlieb said.

* * *

And he put it to good use, cutting away parts of the damaged exterior layers of the brain to see the intact tissue beneath. It was messy, stinking work, and by the time Gottlieb was done his industrial rubber coverall and gloves were covered in splatters of toxic goo. He set down the chainsaw he’d used to get at the inner parts of the brain and peered at the organ while Jake, Quan, and Lambert watched. Gottlieb got instruments from a nearby table and took samples before the tissue reacted too much to the ambient atmosphere. Then he stood up and said, “It’s definitely Kaiju. A secondary brain. Used to control the hindquarters.”

“Like the dinosaurs?” Lambert asked. He’d heard stories that the dinosaurs were engineered by the Kaiju’s creators, known as the Precursors. It was rumored that Newt Geiszler and Gottlieb had learned this from Drifting with a Kaiju brain, back in the darkest days of the Kaiju War. No PPDC official had ever confirmed that, or the other rumor that Raleigh Becket had learned the truth during his cataclysmic visit to the Anteverse itself. If the dinosaur story was true, the resemblance made sense, and the comparison was a natural one.

“Actually that’s a persistent myth,” Gottlieb said, immediately sidetracked by his scientist’s instinct to make sure everyone had their facts straight. “Sauropods did have a sacro-lumbar expansion once thought to—”

Jake didn’t care about the details of sauropod or Kaiju anatomy. There were more pressing questions. “How’d it get into our world?” he asked.

“Hasn’t been a Breach in ten years,” Quan added. “Sensors would have picked it up.”

“I don’t think there was a Breach,” Gottlieb said. He was back at a lab table, squinting at the tissue sample and passing various instruments over it. The readings appeared on a holo screen, but they didn’t match the baseline readings from the PPDC’s database of known Kaiju specimens. “Kaiju flesh has a distinct radioactive half-life signature, particular to the Anteverse. This specimen doesn’t.”

Jake looked from Gottlieb to Lambert, wondering if Lambert was thinking the same thing he was. They’d both had the thought in the Drift, in the first shocked moments after they’d seen the inside of Obsidian Fury’s head. “You saying it came from our universe?” Lambert asked.

“The genetic fingerprints indicate distinctly terrestrial modification techniques.” Gottlieb watched a screen as a genetic analysis scrolled by. To Jake it looked like a column of random numbers next to a representation of a DNA molecule like any other DNA molecule, but that’s why he was in the Rangers instead of K-Science. Gottlieb was fluent in whatever data language was being displayed, and he nodded at the screen. “Probably engineered from Kaiju tissue left over from the war.”

Marshal Quan hadn’t been there in Siberia, so he was just now getting his head around the idea. “Precursors didn’t do this,” he said, as if convincing himself. “Humans did.”

“How’d a bunch of crazy Kaiju worshippers do all that?” Jake wondered. It didn’t seem possible.

Gottlieb agreed. “Doubtful they could have. Only a dozen or so biotech companies in the world could even take a run at it.”

“We need to narrow that list down,” Quan said. “Fast.”

Gottlieb didn’t need to be told twice. Every