Inside the bay, medical teams had removed most of the wounded and were working on recovering the dead. The base infirmary was more than two hundred percent over capacity, and wounded filled the barracks closest to the infirmary level. The dead, numbering in the hundreds, were zipped into body bags and held in the base morgue, which was also filled far beyond its design capacity. The traumatic aftershocks of the event would set in soon, but at that moment every member of the Shatterdome’s crew was working toward one overriding goal: stopping the three Kaiju from reaching the top of Mount Fuji.
Triage of the damage to the four Jaegers they needed to achieve that goal yielded a long list of necessary repairs. Bracer Phoenix had suffered some of the worst damage. Her right arm was completely burned out, and they had no way to repair it in time. Jules had puzzled over this problem until she had an idea that she took to Lambert and Jake. She found them elbow-deep in Gipsy Avenger’s Conn-Pod, retuning the maglev field generators. “Bracer Phoenix is down an arm. No time to get her combat-ready,” she said.
“Bracer’s railgun doesn’t need her arm, right?” Lambert asked. “It’s not ideal, but that team might just have to go out with one arm.”
“Or…” Jules looked out over the dock floor. Crews had moved parts of Titan Redeemer out of the way toward the collapsed rubble of the LOCCENT. The torso was still in place, but the limbs and head were already pushed aside—except for Titan Redeemer’s left arm, which hung in a cable sling between two mobile cranes. “Titan Redeemer’s not going to be using that one anymore.”
Both Jake and Lambert looked down at the detached arm. Then they looked at each other, and then back at Jules. “That’s Titan Redeemer’s left arm,” Jake pointed out.
“Yeah,” Jules nodded. “But we don’t have to use the whole thing. Most of the damage to Bracer is elbow down. We can take the Morning Star Hand emplacement, flip it over, and mate it to Bracer’s right arm. From there we can run new conduits to the main combat integration system that feeds the HUD in the Conn-Pod, and the crew shouldn’t notice any difference.”
“I like it,” Jake said.
“I do too,” Lambert said. “Except Bracer’s crew won’t have trained with it. Will they know what to do? It’s going to change the balance of how Bracer moves. That thing is heavy.”
“Better than nothing, right?” Jules waited for one of them to contradict her. When they didn’t, she said, “All right. I’m going to get to it.”
* * *
Amara and Jinhai paused in their work at the side of Bracer Phoenix’s head to watch as the twin cranes carrying the Morning Star Hand lifted it into position. They were a hundred feet above it all, but the scale of the Jaeger parts made it all seem closer—until you realized how tiny the people looked, swarming around the monumental limb. Jules’ crew had disassembled most of Titan Redeemer’s arm, leaving only the Morning Star Hand and the internal spool holding the cable. From the spool housing, cables as thick as a human thigh dangled, waiting to be spliced into Bracer Phoenix’s guidance systems. While Jules had been working on Titan Redeemer’s arm, a crew from Shao Industries had pulled off Bracer Phoenix’s arm below the elbow, and stripped away the external plating up to Bracer’s shoulder. They had the new cable junctions ready. Other crews were standing by with the interlocking plates of Bracer’s armor, waiting to refit it over the Morning Star Hand assembly.
Bracer rocked in the holding cradle as the crew banged the assembly into place against her elbow. Amara and Jinhai got back to work. One of the Drone missiles had hit the Jaeger square in the side of the head. Bracer’s cranial armor had mostly held together, but the blast wave had destroyed the complicated gyroscopic mechanism that served Jaegers the way the inner ear served a human being. Without it, the Jaeger wouldn’t be able to keep its balance. Heading back in through Bracer’s Conn-Pod hatch, they worked their way past Vik, who was tack-welding brackets back into place after she had repaired the damaged electronics servicing the gyroscope.
Amara and Jinhai got their hands under the gyroscope. They locked eyes. “One,” Jinhai said. Two and three were silent, but they lifted at exactly the same time, grunting and staggering with the gyroscope over to its housing. They got the edge of it resting on the flanged edge of the housing, but it started to overbalance as Jinhai shifted to get a grip on the side and ease it in. Before it could tumble out, Vik rushed over and braced it. The three of them, working together, got it in place. They exchanged exhausted fist bumps and Vik got back to her welding. Jinhai fired up a compressor powering an impact wrench to bolt the gyroscope into place, and Amara went back out onto the catwalk.
Suresh and Ilya were there, waiting for her to tell them what to do with a cart full of parts she’d sent them to get from a locker below the docking cradles. “Next thing we need is that shock absorber,”
