“Wow. That was stupid.” Amara had already heard the story of Jake holding a Drift for hours, but this was something else entirely. This was nuts, almost impossible, something only a few people had ever managed to do. And Jake had done it just to prove a point after an argument? That was… she didn’t know what it was. Crazy, ballsy, reckless, maybe even admirable all at once.
Jake shook his head. Again a little smile appeared and disappeared. “Yeah. Took two steps and blacked out from the strain.” His voice started to shake with emotion as he kept talking. “First thing I saw when I woke up in the infirmary was my dad. He told me I was out of the program. I begged him to ask them to let me stay. That I’d try harder, be a better soldier. He said there was no one to ask. The decision was his. Said I didn’t deserve to be in a Jaeger. He said—he said a lot of other things. And so did I. Soon as I could stand up, I left and never looked back.”
Jake wasn’t looking at her, and Amara had the feeling that he wasn’t entirely talking to her by then, either. They had Drifted together, so she had an intimate sense of how he viewed his father. But this was deep, buried underneath the top layer of memories that was all she and Jake had shared thus far.
“A year later, he was gone,” Jake said. “I never got the chance to prove him wrong. More importantly, I never got the chance to prove it to myself.” Now he was looking at her again, and talking to her directly—but she still had the feeling he was articulating a conversation he was having with himself just as much as he was trying to give her a last bit of guidance before she went back out into the world beyond the Shatterdome. “Because I was angry. And hurt. Don’t let what other people think define who you are, Amara. You won’t like where that takes you.” He stood and moved toward the door, but paused before leaving. “And keep your head up, and you might just be as good-looking as me in this type of situation.” She rolled her eyes. “Seriously, this face is set up well,” he added with a grin. “Beauty is a burden. You’ll be all right.”
He had a hand on the door. Amara tried to process it all. What was she supposed to do with all this? Go to Marshal Quan and beg for her cadet position, like Jake had? Or just go forth in the world and realize she’d learned a hard lesson? Or was Jake hinting that there was another way for her to save herself and stay here, with all these new people she had just begun to care about?
She was so preoccupied with sorting through all those conflicting thoughts that she almost forgot about what she’d meant to tell him right at the beginning. But now he was walking toward the door and she would never have another chance.
“Shao Industries,” she blurted out. “That’s what I was trying to tell you. Obsidian Fury has tech in it made by Shao Industries.”
He stopped and turned slowly around. “Jules and her team scanned every centimeter of that Jaeger. Didn’t find any serial numbers or identifying markers.” The implied question: How had Amara found something on her little jaunt that a trained J-Tech team had missed?
“Insulating metamaterials wound counter-clockwise in the shunt cabling,” she said. “Shao’s the only company winds them that way.”
She was confident, and her confidence cut at least part of the way through Jake’s initial skepticism. “Amara, are you sure?”
She had him. “Yeah. Stole a ton of it to make Scrapper,” Amara said, a little of her normal bravado returning. Then, almost offhand, she added, “Thought it might be important.”
She saw Jake thinking. Saw him working through the logical consequences of this find. There were three potential reasons for Obsidian Fury to have Shao Industries tech. One was simple theft, or reuse of materials originally built into a legitimate Shao product. The other two…
“Don’t go anywhere,” he told her, and shut the door behind him.
20
“SHAO INDUSTRIES?” GOTTLIEB SOUNDED skeptical. “They don’t even have a bio research division.”
“That we know of,” Jake said.
“Cabling could have been stolen, just like in Amara’s Jaeger,” Lambert pointed out. “We need more than that to link Obsidian Fury to Shao.”
“What about Newt? He’d have access to internal records, shipping manifests…”
“Go see him,” Jake suggested. “Keep it low profile.”
Gottlieb’s face lit up. “A mission,” he said, delighted. “I have a secret mission!”
* * *
At first Quan was just as skeptical as Gottlieb, but he didn’t dismiss the idea out of hand. He was too professional a soldier for that. He might have just argued with Jake over Amara’s fate in the cadet program, and he might have had just about enough of Jake Pentecost’s continual tendency to bend the rules and shoot off his mouth… but if anything about Amara Namani’s accusation could be confirmed, that was potential evidence in the investigation of the death of Secretary General Mako Mori. Not to mention hundreds, if not thousands, of other people in downtown Sydney. The final casualty counts were still coming in as rescue teams dug through the rubble of the area between the waterfront and the Council Building.
Before Quan could make any decisions, he had to work through the implications. Most importantly, he had to decide how the cadet’s discovery affected the inquiry into Mako’s death. “You think Mako was the real target in the Sydney attack?”
That was where Jake had begun his argument. “The data packet she sent led to that facility in Severnaya,” he said, expecting Quan to put the rest of the pieces together himself.
Lambert was
