Amara went down the catwalk toward Saber Athena, in the next bay, to see how things were going there. She was exhausted from work and lack of sleep, but she was also riding a wave unlike any she had ever felt before. Jake had put her in charge of what he called “Scrapperizing” some of the repairs. The way he explained it, that meant Amara had to figure out how to rig up on-the-fly solutions for repairs that they didn’t have time to do according to the procedures in the Jaegers’ technical spec. Amara had almost refused, since she was the new kid at Moyulan and didn’t want to be put in the position of making the other cadets treat her like the teacher’s pet. Jake had cut her refusal off. “Look,” he’d said. “You’ve built a Jaeger. They haven’t. So we need what you know and there’s no time to worry about how anyone feels about it. If they’re giving you trouble, save it for later.”
After we ride Gottlieb’s experimental thrusters over hundreds of miles of ocean into combat against three powerful Kaiju, with all of our Jaegers held together essentially by duct tape and baling wire. The more Amara thought about it, the more she realized Jake was right not to worry about how anyone would feel about it tomorrow… because the odds of there being a tomorrow didn’t look all that good.
But if they were going to go down, they were going to go down fighting.
Renata and Ryoichi hung in rappelling harnesses from the catwalk ringing Saber Athena’s berth. They were welding a plate closed on Saber’s chest, covering a crack left by a plasma missile. Saber was in decent shape overall. Her weapons systems were housed on her back, so the missiles hadn’t affected any of them directly. But her front side had taken a lot of impact damage. A small army of J-Tech and Shao personnel hung in other harnesses, welding repair plates into place. It wasn’t going to be pretty, but Amara thought they had figured out a way to get the repairs done without compromising Saber Athena’s superior speed and agility. At least she hoped they had.
And she hoped they hadn’t missed anything when they did the repair analyses on Gipsy Avenger or Guardian Bravo. Of all the Jaegers, Guardian Bravo seemed to be in the best shape. That was why Suresh and Ilya were free to help with the repairs to Bracer Phoenix. They’d already worked through all the diagnostics they could run on Guardian Bravo. The Arc Whip was good, hull integrity was good, Conn-Pod stability checked out okay… the only repairs Guardian Bravo needed were basically cosmetic, and could wait for another time. So while crews swarmed over the other three Jaegers, Guardian Bravo was moving slowly on a tracked platform out to the launch gantries on the far end of the tarmac. They had a path cleared, largely by bulldozing destroyed Scramblers and Jumphawks out of the way. Then outside crews had covered the missile craters in the tarmac with armor plates taken from Valor Omega and Titan Redeemer. It was ugly, but it worked well enough to get Guardian Bravo into place on a gantry. The crew waiting there locked her into place and cranes lifted the twin thruster pods up. Once they were swung into place near Guardian Bravo’s back, the whole gantry lit up with the flare of welding torches and rang with the sound of impact wrenches.
Gottlieb watched the final maneuvers, clutching a data pad and a sheaf of papers with his original notes on the potential energy of Kaiju blood. He had hit a snag in the process because he couldn’t get the fuel equation to balance. If they’d had the time to design a second component to add to the fuel mixture and create a hypergolic combination that would self-ignite, everything would have worked brilliantly. But as it was, they had to use the raw Kaiju blood, and its properties were not fully understood—at least not where potential energy was concerned. All the simulations he had run with raw Kaiju blood and a single ignition component came out slightly wrong. They either led to insufficient thermal energy release, or caused a runaway reaction that could not be controlled in the combustion chamber. In short, despite Gottlieb’s best efforts so far, the Jaegers either wouldn’t get off the ground or would explode at liftoff. He was starting to panic under the pressure.
Shao Liwen was also working on the fuel equation, and Gottlieb decided to run back inside and see how her work was going. If they couldn’t crack the problem together, there was no way on Earth to stop the Kaiju from entering Mount Fuji… except for multiple nuclear strikes.
28
KAIJU CONVERGE ON JAPAN
INTERNATIONAL NEWS AGENCY STAFF REPORTS
Three Kaiju have survived the eruption of numerous Breaches around the Pacific Rim and appear to be converging on Japan, according to information released by the Pan Pacific Defense Corps.
The three Kaiju, first seen along the east coast of the Asian mainland, appear to be taking different routes that will intersect at some point in Japan, though the PPDC cautioned that their future movements could not be projected with any certainty.
A source within the PPDC, requesting anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the details of the Breaches’ appearance and collapse, said an unknown number of other Kaiju died while crossing Breaches that closed suddenly when the Drone Jaegers were simultaneously deactivated. The PPDC and Shao Industries have declined to address questions about this event, but it is known that at least nine other dead Kaiju are present in the shallow waters near various
