Jake strode out to meet the V-Dragon that was landing closest to the bay doors. As it touched down and powered its engines off, Hermann Gottlieb popped out… and right behind him Shao Liwen. “I brought some help!” Gottlieb said.
From the other V-Dragons, a small army of Shao techs and engineers headed toward the Shatterdome, bearing tools and pushing cartloads of equipment.
All right, Jake thought. Maybe we can pull this off after all.
* * *
Gottlieb and Shao set up a temporary war room in a former lab space near the site of the destroyed LOCCENT. With Jake and Lambert, they gathered around a holo screen tracking the path of the three Kaiju that had managed to get through the Breaches before Shao’s quick thinking—and quick fingers—had destroyed the Drone army.
The idea that Newt Geiszler was behind it all… Jake couldn’t quite fathom that. He’d always like Newt, and to think that Newt had secretly engineered Kaiju tissue into Obsidian Fury and the Drones… that was a betrayal Jake couldn’t wrap his mind around. But facts were facts, and had to be faced. Just like the fact of the three Kaiju. “Hakuja. Shrikethorn. And the big fellow, Raijin. I took the liberty of assigning the designations,” Gottlieb said. That duty traditionally fell to LOCCENT staff.
“Yeah, great names,” Jake said. “Sound like real a-holes.”
Lambert was frowning at the patterns of the Kaiju’s motion. “Shrikethorn and Raijin are moving away from the cities, towards the ocean.”
“Maybe they’re trying to link up with Hakuja in the East China Sea,” Liwen suggested.
This was possible, Jake thought. Kaiju hadn’t been known to look for each other like that before. During the war, they had sometimes emerged in pairs, but only once had PPDC forces fought three Kaiju. That was the Battle of the Breach, when Stacker Pentecost had blown his own Jaeger’s reactor to buy Gipsy Danger the time and space to get into the Breach.
Now Jake was about to take on three Kaiju, just like his father had. At least it looked that way, because the three trajectories of the Kaiju were loosely converging. They weren’t headed directly for each other, though, which made Jake wonder. “Newt would know what they’re up to, if we could get it out of him,” he said.
“Have to find him first,” Lambert commented.
“He escaped in a Shao V-Dragon,” Shao said. “My men are trying to track him, but he disabled the transponder.”
“Then that’s off the table,” Jake said. There wasn’t any time to worry about things they couldn’t control. Nodding at the screen, he asked, “Any Jaegers closer to those Kaiju than us?”
“What was left from the Chin-do and Sakhalinsk ’domes tried to intercept,” Gottlieb said. “Emphasis on ‘tried’.”
Lambert stared harder at the map. “There’s gotta be something there. Something in the East China Sea…”
Jake looked too, sure there was something they were missing. If you looked at all of the trajectories, maybe—
That was it. All of the trajectories. “Maybe that’s not where they’re headed,” he said. “Pull up a map of Kaiju movement from the war.”
Surprised, Lambert looked over at Jake. “You know something we don’t?”
“You said you have to understand your enemy’s objective to know you’ve beaten them,” Jake responded, needling Lambert a little but also letting him know that speech had stayed with him.
A map displaying Kaiju incursions from the war appeared on the screen as Gottlieb brought it over from the PPDC strategic records server. Jake started working the screen, drawing lines that extended the Kaiju’s paths if Jaegers hadn’t stopped them. “What if the Kaiju weren’t blindly attacking our cities during the war? What if we were just in their way?”
Jake was no artist, but the more of the lines he traced, the clearer it became that they intersected at a single point.
“Mount Fuji, Japan,” Lambert said.
Gottlieb started performing the same course extrapolations for Hakuja, Shrikethorn, and Raijin. There it was, just as Jake had intuited. Their courses were also set to intersect at Mount Fuji. That left the million-dollar question, given voice by Shao Liwen. “But why?”
Hermann Gottlieb gave a quick gasp of understanding. “Rare earth elements,” he said slowly. “Mount Fuji is a volcano, rich in rare earth elements.”
“Why are you looking like you’re gonna pee your pants?” Jake asked. If Gottlieb was this scared, Jake felt like he should probably be scared as well, but he wanted to have a good reason.
“Because Kaiju blood reacts violently with them. It’s the basis of my thruster fuel experiments.”
“That sounds bad,” Lambert said. “That’s bad, right?”
“Very,” Shao said. “Mount Fuji is active. A geological pressure point.”
Gottlieb worked the holo screen, doing rapid math that the screen translated into visuals. A cross section of Mount Fuji, showing the lava reservoir below it, appeared, with a simulated Kaiju crawling into the caldera at the top of the mountain. “Based on the blood to mass ratio of the Kaiju…” He was running back-of-the-envelope calculations of Kaiju blood volatility versus the ratios of different rare earth elements in a volcanic interior. Astonishing stuff to do just off the top of your head, Jake thought. There weren’t many people in the world as smart as Hermann Gottlieb.
The screen now showed a map of the entire Pacific Rim, with active volcanoes marked. The region was known as the Ring of Fire, because of the intense volcanic activity in the areas where the Pacific tectonic plate ground against its neighbors in Asia and North America. On the screen, volcano after volcano began to erupt. When Gottlieb spoke, his tone was low and somber. “The reaction would cause a cascade event, igniting the Ring of Fire around the Pacific Rim.” The simulation continued, wreathing the globe in a gray blanket. “Billions of tons of toxic gas and ash will
