Shao understood. “That would finish terraforming Earth for the Precursors.”
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Lambert objected. “Why not just open a Breach right over Fuji and drop the Kaiju in?”
Lambert had a sharp tactical mind, and Jake chimed in with another angle on the same problem. “Or send one so big nothing could stop it?”
“From the data we recovered from Dr. Geiszler’s files, the Precursors can only penetrate dimensional ‘soft spots,’ as he called them, between universes,” Shao explained. “Every location the Drones chose corresponded to one of these.”
“And a Category Five is theoretically the largest Kaiju they could send through, since the energy it takes to widen a Breach exponentially quadruples as the—”
“Yeah, science is our friend,” Jake said. This was the downside of being a genius like Gottlieb. You started talking a language normal people couldn’t understand. “We get it.”
“We can’t let them reach Mount Fuji,” Lambert stated flatly. That was their mission objective, the only one that mattered.
“I’ll check with Jules, see where we are with the Jaeger repairs,” Jake said.
“Even if you had a hundred, there’s no way to intercept in time,” Shao said, looking at the distances on the map. “The Drones destroyed your Jumphawks and my V-Dragons aren’t built to carry that kind of load.”
There was a long silence. Jaegers couldn’t outrun Kaiju without getting into the air. If they couldn’t figure that part of the battle plan out, they would just have to sit here in the war room and enjoy satellite images of the Kaiju crawling into Mount Fuji and ending the human race.
Then Lambert looked away from the screen to Gottlieb. “What about your thruster pods?”
Jake remembered Gottlieb talking about those right when Jake was arriving at Moyulan. He’d been puzzled at the time, seeing Newt dismiss the idea and warn Gottlieb away from working with Kaiju blood. After all, coming up with new ideas about how to fight the Kaiju—understand them better—was the whole reason for K-Science’s existence. Now that they knew the truth about Newt, that conversation took on a more sinister meaning. Had Newt done it on purpose? How much control did he have? It didn’t seem possible that Newt could have carried around a Precursor in his head for ten years without either going crazy or letting something slip. Maybe he didn’t always know it was there? Jake figured that if a Precursor could use the Drift to get into Newt’s head across a dimensional barrier, it could probably also hide its existence from him. But that was all speculation. Right now they needed concrete solutions to concrete problems. Like the problem of whether they could use Gottlieb’s thruster pods to catch the Kaiju before they got to Mount Fuji.
“They’re not ready,” Gottlieb said.
Shao got right to the point. “Can they be?”
Gottlieb considered the question. “In theory, maybe, with your help.”
“What does that mean, ‘in theory’?” Jake asked. They didn’t have time to deal in theories. They needed results. Immediately if not sooner.
Gottlieb heard the challenge and lifted his chin a little, understanding the task ahead. “Today it means yes,” he said.
27
THEY HAD A CREW OF HUNDREDS, THANKS TO the reinforcements from Shao Industries—but not much time. A quick assessment of Valor Omega determined that she would have to be scrapped, and Titan Redeemer was also too badly damaged to take any part in the current fight. It might have been possible to repair her damaged leg, with parts scavenged from Valor Omega’s remains, but Titan had also suffered catastrophic damage in the uncontrolled fall. Her guidance systems needed a complete overhaul and the interior of her Conn-Pod had been almost destroyed by missile strikes after she fell. That left four Jaegers to be the focus of the tech team’s work. Gipsy Avenger needed repairs to her armor plating and Conn-Pod housing to get her fully combat-ready after her engagement with Obsidian Fury in Siberia. Bracer Phoenix, Saber Athena, and Guardian Bravo had all suffered damage in the Drone attack. They couldn’t go into the field at all without at least some repair. And then there was the question of the thruster pods. They had to get the idea from Gottlieb’s notes to the Shatterdome tarmac in less than twenty-four hours or none of the repairs to the Jaegers would matter anyway.
Added to that was the widespread damage to support vehicles and the docking mechanisms. The first thing Shao’s crews did was get four of the cradles welded back together so they could hold the Jaegers that needed repair. Then the Jaegers were towed into place and the real work could begin. The Jaeger bay was controlled chaos, with J-Tech and Shao teams crisscrossing it on repeated trips from parts and electronics warehouse storage to the docking cradles.
Outside, Hermann Gottlieb oversaw a caravan of tankers carrying Kaiju blood. Large reserves of it were kept in anaerobic storage in tanks deep below the Shatterdome, along with other Kaiju tissue and genetic material used in K-Science research. Now Gottlieb followed those tankers out onto the arm of the tarmac where the Jumphawk gantries stood. He thought the gantries would be strong enough to hold the Jaegers upright and true at the ignition of the thruster pods, if he could get the thruster pods built and integrated into the Jaegers’ command systems soon enough.
Near the gantries he had set up an outdoor assembly line. Crews of welders and engineers took repurposed fuel tanks and thruster cones adapted from V-Dragon engines. They had to build the rest on the fly: fuel lines and valves, electronic control systems that could be quickly mated to the Jaegers’ operating software, ignition chambers designed around catalyzing ingots of rare earth metals, brackets and housings to attach the thruster pods to the Jaegers at the correct angle so firing the thrusters wouldn’t knock the Jaegers into an uncontrollable spin. There was also the problem of waste heat from the thrusters, which according to Gottlieb’s calculations was a
