“To what?” Gottlieb asked. “The lab?”
A holo screen appeared above the terminal console, showing the entirety of the Pacific Rim. The location of each Drone was a bright red dot. Many of them were grouped together, and those that weren’t moved closer to each other, forming other groups. “To the Drone subroutine,” Newt said. “I slipped one in just in case I wanted to get in there and poke around down the road.”
“Sneaky bastard,” Gottlieb said, but in an admiring way.
“I know, right?” Newt cracked a smile, but then he had to concentrate.
The subroutine’s initiation command field opened up and Newt carefully entered the code. He’d written in a failsafe so the subroutine would lock itself down if someone tried to enter the wrong code, and there was no time to wait for the lock to expire. So after he’d typed the command, he reread it several times to make sure it was correct:
LV426
It was right. He punched ENTER.
Gottlieb was watching the screen, expecting the Drones to deactivate or return to the remote Drift protocol. Instead a command-line message appeared.
COMMAND LIMA VICTOR 426 CONFIRMED
INITIATING BREACH PROTOCOL
Gottlieb read the message over twice, eyes widening in horror. “What did you just do?”
“What I’ve been planning for the last ten years,” Newt said. “Ending the world.”
He looked up from the terminal to Gottlieb, who saw something dark and malicious behind Newt’s eyes. The enormity of what he was realizing in that moment stopped Gottlieb dead in his tracks. He looked at Newt with horror, Newt’s words replaying themselves in his mind—what I’ve been planning for the last ten years—and all at once Gottlieb realized that yes, Obsidian Fury had used Shao Industries parts, but not because Shao Liwen had created it. And yes, the Drones had gone rogue, but not because Shao Liwen had done it.
Newt had. It was Newt all along.
A satellite camera view appeared on the holo screen, superimposed over the lower corner. On it, a Drone emerged from the shallows in Honolulu Harbor, joining a group to form a circle. The torso lenses covering their power cores lit up and particle beams flared out, intersecting at the center of the circle. Where they met, a brilliant sphere of energy formed, with a thunderclap that rippled the water across the harbor. Below the sphere, the water churned, and something on the seafloor began to glow.
Gottlieb understood. They were opening a Breach.
“Why?” he moaned. “Why would you do this?”
“He wouldn’t,” Newt said, his tone mocking and hateful. “Or maybe he would. Maybe he hates all of you. For laughing at him. For treating him like an insignificant little joke of a man.”
At first Gottlieb didn’t understand why Newt was talking about himself in the third person, but by the time Newt had finished talking, the conclusion was inescapable. “You…” He saw in Newt’s gaze another intelligence, alien and malevolent, and everything fell into place. “Precursors.”
Abruptly Newt’s demeanor changed. The sick smile fell away and Gottlieb saw terror in Newt’s eyes. “Help me, Hermann,” he begged. “They’re in my head…”
“Fight them, Newton!” Gottlieb stepped up and grabbed Newt by the lapels of his coat. “Fight them—”
Newt spasmed in his grip as the Precursor in his mind reasserted control. He backhanded Gottlieb, sending him sprawling back against a lab table. “He isn’t strong enough,” Newt snarled. “None of you are.”
The unmistakable metallic double click of a bullet being chambered cut through the air in the lab. Newt and Gottlieb both spun to see Shao Liwen, holding Chief Kang’s gun leveled at Newt’s head.
Unfazed, Newt chuckled. “Hey, boss. Finally figured it out, huh? What was it? The diagnostic?”
“My numbers weren’t aligning with yours,” she said, referring back to the Drift delays they had argued about only forty-eight hours before. “How did you do it? Without me knowing?”
“Thirty-eight percent of your manufacturing capacity is fully automated,” Newt said. “Wasn’t that difficult to reallocate a little here and there over the years without being detected.” He switched to perfect Mandarin and added, “Especially since you always thought you were the smartest one in the room.”
Gottlieb saw her make a decision. She might not have understood everything that was going on, but from her perspective, she knew everything she needed to know. One of her employees had betrayed her, outsmarted her, and destroyed everything she had worked her entire life to create.
Her eyes narrowed. “In about half a second, I’m going to be.”
No, Gottlieb thought. He may be under the sway of the Precursors, but Newton is still in there. My friend is still alive. He lunged forward as Shao squeezed the trigger, sweeping his cane upward and knocking her hand up as the gun went off.
Newt shoved him from behind, sending him tumbling into Shao. Both of them hit the floor, but she came up aiming the gun at Newt again. Gottlieb grabbed her arm. “Stop! It isn’t him! It’s the Precursors! They must have infected his mind when we Drifted with a Kaiju brain during the—”
“Shut up,” she snapped as she lowered the gun. Still holding her arm, Gottlieb looked around to see that Newt was gone. Shao shook him off and stepped over to Newt’s holo terminal. “And don’t ever touch me again.”
She stabbed a finger into the intercom control on the terminal and spoke in rapid Mandarin. Gottlieb didn’t speak enough of the language to understand everything she said, but he heard Newt’s name… and he heard the word for shoot.
25
FIVE THOUGHTS FROM SHAO LIWEN BOOTSTRAP.COM INTERVIEW, 22 MARCH 2033
1. Whatever you are doing, you can always do it better. This is not a bad thing. If you were already doing the best you could ever do, and you knew it, that would be the time to start doing something else.
2. Also: Whatever you are doing, you can always do it worse.The funny thing is that often you start to get worse when you stop believing
