18
JaegerWatch—BREAKING NEWS
Your friends at JaegerWatch have some interesting tidbits from our eyes inside the Moyulan Shatterdome. You may have heard of the rogue Jaeger attack in Sydney? Where Gipsy Avenger got more than she bargained for from a mysterious assailant since given the code name Obsidian Fury?
Well, we have it on good authority that Gipsy got revenge. The details are sketchy, but our Moyulan source claims that Obsidian Fury was brought in last night, just after Gipsy went out on an emergency deployment. It’s not hard to put those pieces together—though from what we understand nobody’s going to be putting Obsidian Fury together again. Gipsy took the rogue down hard, and in a highly permanent way.
High five to the Rangers piloting Gipsy Avenger. You might have gone down once, but you answered the bell the second time around and… well… avenged. Mako Mori and all the others dead in Sydney can rest a little easier.
Yours,
The Spirit of Gipsy Danger
They took some convincing, but eventually the other cadets went along with her plan. Amara pointed out that the Shatterdome security personnel were stationed at specific intervals, and changed shift at specific times. They were like any other on-base security detail, doing their jobs but not really convinced there was an actual threat justifying their presence. So it ended up being pretty easy to point out three or four spots were a determined group of teenagers could slip through the security perimeter and gain entry to Obsidian Fury via one of the several holes Gipsy Avenger had thoughtfully created in Obsidian Fury’s armor.
The one they ended up choosing was down in the leg. It was the closest to ground level. The security details were clustered around the ladders and gantries that led up to higher entry points in Obsidian Fury’s head and torso. Single file, they climbed in through the comma-shaped gouge made when Gipsy Avenger had stuck the sword in and then dragged it back out. Only when they were well inside the Jaeger, working their way down a corridor inside its thigh, did they turn on flashlights. Amara looked up, played the beam of her flashlight across the ceiling.
In a regular Jaeger, the ceiling of a hall like this would have been lined with heavy conduits and bundles of smaller cables, each tagged and color-coded so technicians could quickly isolate problems and make repairs. But Obsidian Fury was different. There were wires and cables, sure. But wound through all of them were filaments of Kaiju tissue. She looked up and down the hallway, and found a hatch.
She opened it and peered into the larger space beyond. It was like being inside a body instead of a machine. Long striated sinews and nerve bundles mingled with hydraulic piston assemblies and energy conduits. The sight overwhelmed her, just the scale of it and the oppressive sensation that there was something still living here…
Amara dropped back down into the corridor. “It’s fused all the way through the system,” she said, running the beam of her flashlight as far along the ceiling as they could see. “Like muscle tissue.”
“That’s how it was able to move like it did,” Jinhai observed. “Cool.” He wasn’t talking about ballerinas anymore, instead admiring this fantastic interweaving of organic tissue and machine. Obsidian Fury was practically a cyborg. A Kaiju cyborg. What a thought.
Suresh did not share their enthusiasm. “Yeah, cool,” he said, in a tone of voice that conveyed the opposite. “Working with boobs is sounding better and better.”
An odd bundle of cables caught Amara’s attention. Had she seen something like them before? “Shine your light over here,” she said, and put down her own light so she could get her hands on them.
Jinhai kept his light steady while she tried to wrestle one of the cables loose. “Oh, great, yeah,” Suresh said. “Let’s go yanking on the guts of the weird-ass Kaiju kill-bot.”
“Sack up or shut up,” Meilin said. She didn’t say much, but when she did she made her words count.
“Is there a third option?” Suresh was still watching Amara, and getting more nervous by the moment. “I’d really like a third option.”
Amara had to brace herself against a heavy bracket and pull with all her strength, jerking the cable back and forth, but eventually she got it loose from a juncture and was able to snap the other end free from where it was spliced into the bundle. She started looking more closely at the cross-section of the cable, peeling back its outer insulating layer to expose the winding around the inner core. She’d seen this before, when she was acquiring cables to build Scrapper’s power systems…
Jinhai leaned in close, trying to figure out what had Amara so preoccupied. “What is it?”
She was about to tell him when fat drops of blue Kaiju blood suddenly dripped from the ceiling. They missed Amara by sheer luck, but Jinhai wasn’t so lucky. Several splattered on his arm, dissolving the sleeve of his coat and searing the flesh underneath. Jinhai bit down on a scream and dropped to the floor, rolling around in agony.
“Jinhai!” Amara dropped the cable and started pulling his jacket off, trying to get him free before more of the blood ate through the insulated fabric.
“I told you not to yank on those!” Suresh shouted.
Amara looked up and saw where the blood was coming from. While she’d been jerking at the cables, a bracket holding several of them together had scraped against a Kaiju blood vessel running among the tissue that lined the ceiling. Eventually the vessel had burst, and now Kaiju blood was dissolving the cables and dripping down from them to the floor. It hissed and smoked on the steel grating.
She felt so bad about what she’d done to Jinhai—accident or no accident—that she completely forgot about how much trouble they
