Once Gottlieb was working, he ignored them. Quan observed him for a while, then turned to Jake and Lambert. “Good work,” he said. “Mako would be proud.” To Jake he added, “So would your father.”
Jake appreciated the sentiment, but he wasn’t so sure. Stacker Pentecost had never given any sign that anything Jake did had made him proud.
* * *
From one of the human-sized access doors at the side of the Jaeger bay doors, each taller than any building left standing in Los Angeles, Amara looked out across the tarmac at the broken hulk of Obsidian Fury. The rogue Jaeger’s remains lay on the tarmac surrounded by Shatterdome security details, with J-Tech crews swarming over it in the first phases of analysis and investigation. The revelation about Obsidian Fury’s Kaiju brain had swept through the Shatterdome like wildfire, sparking a thousand rumors about whether or not there were other Kaiju out there. Had a Breach reopened, somehow undetected by PPDC satellites and geological sensors? Or had they missed other Kaiju during the war? Or had someone in a gene lab managed to create a Kaiju? Because Marshal Quan wasn’t talking—at least not to cadets—any story seemed possible.
She’d been with a group of other cadets watching as Gipsy Avenger returned. The marks of the battle with Obsidian Fury scarred Gipsy’s armor, and Amara was especially chilled to see the damage to Gipsy’s head. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to try and keep your cool while those plasma saws were chewing away at the Conn-Pod plating. The more she learned about Jake, the more she—well, not quite admired him. She wouldn’t go that far. But she did have some respect for him, at least compared to how she felt when he was holding a broken pipe over her head back in the squat in Santa Monica.
Lambert, too. He made such a point of being a humorless, overbearing tight-ass to the cadets that it was easy to forget how good he was at piloting a Jaeger. He and Jake had taken down Obsidian Fury, after barely escaping with their lives the last time the Jaegers clashed. Put together with the inspiring speech he’d dropped on the cadets a couple of nights ago, and Amara was starting to think Lambert was more of a human being than she’d suspected.
It seemed like Jake had felt the same way after that speech, and now the results of their newfound spirit of cooperation were there for anyone to see. Obsidian Fury’s torso was wrenched open, the black armor plating peeled back to expose the structural systems beneath. Its power core, crumpled and streaked with its lenses shattered, lay next to the main body of the Jaeger. The chain-sword wound gaped in its leg. Like its torso, Obsidian Fury’s head lay open to the sky. A specialist J-Tech detail was working inside, beginning its analysis of exactly how Obsidian Fury’s creator had learned to integrate the biological systems of a Kaiju brain with the complex electronics guiding a Jaeger.
They’d all seen the brain go by, on a pallet held up by a forklift. A crew had covered it on the forklift, but before that, they dug the brain out of Obsidian Fury’s head and laid it on a tarp. Several of the J-Tech team puked on the tarmac, and Jules yelled at them to keep it away from the tarp so they didn’t contaminate the samples K-Science would be taking. The cadets couldn’t believe what they were seeing. “That hunk of Kaiju was part of a Jaeger?” Suresh couldn’t believe it.
“Really thought it was going to be ballerinas,” Jinhai commented. If Vik had been around, she might have punched him.
They’d been bantering like that ever since, hanging around the perimeter of the investigation area and hoping that someone would ask them to do something. It hadn’t happened yet, but Amara at least wasn’t giving up. The idea of a Jaeger that fused Kaiju biology and human tech… it horrified her and fascinated her both, but mostly fascinated. Immediately she intuited that the direct brain interface accounted for the speed of Obsidian Fury’s reactions. Even the best Drift cradles had a slight delay as the Rangers’ brain signals were processed and transmitted to the Jaeger’s control systems. Could a human brain be wired directly? Probably. But what would it do to the pilot?
The other question she had was purely technical. Even without considering the quicker responses due to the direct brain–Jaeger interface, Obsidian Fury was nimbler and quicker than any other existing Jaeger. There were tech innovations there in its ruined body, and Amara really wanted to know what they were. She had to know. Staying there looking at it, she felt a physical itch in her fingers, so powerful was her need to get into that Jaeger and see how it worked.
“We gotta get a look inside,” she said.
“Inside?” Suresh echoed.
“That thing’s part Kaiju. Come on, guys.” She turned to the group. “When are we ever going to get a chance to see something like this again?”
“Never,” Suresh said. “Never would be good.”
“Stay here if you want. But I’m going.” Amara looked back over the tarmac. She’d spent the last several years figuring
