She nodded without speaking so they wouldn’t hear the tremor she knew would be in her voice.
They led her to the barracks, where the rest of the cadets stood watching as security emptied Amara’s locker. They were competent and professional, even folding her clothes as they stowed them in her duffel bag. In a way this made Amara angrier than she otherwise would have been. If they’d been careless or deliberately destructive, at least she could have gotten angry about that, but no, they were treating her exactly by the book. She would miss that. Back in Santa Monica, there was no book. You got away with what you could until someone stronger or smarter than you put an end to it. Amara was only then realizing how much she was going to miss a world governed by rules.
“This isn’t fair,” Suresh said.
Amara looked up as Jinhai approached her. His arm was heavily bandaged from thumb to above the elbow. It was hard for Amara to look at, but she made herself do it. Actions had consequences. She had caused this and she didn’t have any right to look away because it made her uncomfortable.
“I tried to talk to my parents,” Jinhai said. “But they wouldn’t listen.”
“It was my mission,” Amara said, trying to let him off the hook. “This is on me.”
She appreciated his gesture, but regulations were regulations. She hadn’t caught a break because her parents didn’t have any influence, but if she had caught a break, that wouldn’t have been abiding by the rules, would it? You couldn’t have it both ways.
Her locker was empty and the security detail came to lead her out. “Amara,” Vik called. “The next Jaeger you build. Make it a big one.” She grinned, and Amara almost lost it then, at that gesture of support from Vik of all people. She remembered Vik taunting her: Bigger is better. God, how was she going to leave all these people and go back to the life she’d been leading before? Were they even going to let her keep Scrapper?
Security held the door for her as she left. Amara didn’t look back because she didn’t want the rest of the cadets to see the tears in her eyes.
* * *
Newt had been in the lab for almost twenty-four hours straight, cracking the whip over his tech crew as they slowly ticked off deployment after deployment. The plan overall was to have demonstrations of Drone Jaeger teams at all the major cities around the Pacific Rim, from Vladivostok all the way around through Los Angeles and back up through Sydney, Shanghai, Tokyo… It was a lot of Drones, and that meant a lot of Drift-trained pilots Shao had hired away from the PPDC. Other Drone pilots weren’t veterans of Ranger service, and had gotten their Drift training from new cradles and simulation rigs of Newt’s own design—though of course because he was working for Shao, she held all the patents and got all the credit.
Sometimes that bothered him. She couldn’t have pulled this off without him, and she knew it, even though she would never have admitted it in front of him. But that was all right. Newt had a pretty good idea just how smart and capable he was. Sometimes that came across as arrogance, but what the hell, that was the price you paid for being honest.
Right now he didn’t have patents or credit on his mind. He was singularly focused—as focused as he’d been able to get in weeks, if not months.
In Santa Monica, there was one last tricky pair of Drones that were having trouble processing the signals from their Drift pilots here in the Remote Conn Lab.
It took up most of a floor in the Shao Industries tower, nearly a full city block of equipment and Drift cradles modified to operate solo without the immediate visual and tactile stimulus that came from working inside a Jaeger. Here everything was done virtually. One hundred pilots, in nice even rows of twenty, worked identical Drift rigs conveying their commands to identical Drones. Glancing over at them, Newt felt a flush of pride. This was so much better than relying on the two-pilot Drift to control a Jaeger. The interaction of two minds always caused unexpected emotional resonance, which complicated the task of handling thousands of tons of heavily armed steel. With a single remote pilot, not only were commands clearer, the pilots were safer. Kaiju—or any other enemy—couldn’t get them here in the Remote Conn Lab.
This was the next step in Jaeger evolution. Newt felt good about it, like he was about to change the world.
He worked the deployment screen, making sure the Drift connections were stable and the Drones were coming online according to the specified schedule. They were almost there…
The Drift rigs handling the Santa Monica Drones went from red to green. Stable Drift, good contact, Drones operational. They were flanking November Ajax, conveying a message of unity to the millions of people watching all over the world. At other Shatterdomes, and other cities, Drones marched out in formation with Jaegers. Where there were no Jaegers, Shao had made sure there were video feeds showing the lockstep presentation of Drones and traditional Jaegers. She very much wanted everyone to believe that the Drones weren’t replacing the Jaegers, even though Newt didn’t see how anyone could believe that for more than a split second after they saw the Drones in action.
The last two Drones were still being flown in to Moyulan Shatterdome, but their board readouts were also green. Even though the Jumphawks hadn’t dropped them yet, they were ready for service. Their pilots grumbled about being the last to actually take the field.
Newt decided he was calling it. Every Drone but Moyulan was up and running, and those last two were deploying at that moment. “Delivery at one hundred percent!” he crowed, setting off cheers from the techs in the lab. “That right there, that’s the
