Shao was calling his name, and Hermann snapped back to the present. He had wandered back into the Shatterdome and now he looked up to see Shao coming toward him, falling into step so he could see her new calculations as they walked on. “See,” she said. “The raw fuel will undergo a chain reaction in the presence of any pure lanthanides, but there is possibly a way to use smaller amounts of the raw fuel in a primary combustion chamber and then inject the full supply into a secondary combustion chamber where the—”
“Yes!” Hermann said. “Yes. We must get to the lab and run these simulations immediately.” Reaching out to a nearby Shao Industries technician, he started to explain what he needed. Shao took over, instructing the tech in careful Mandarin exactly what modifications the gantry crews needed to make to the thruster pods. She sent him on his way and joined Hermann for the short walk to his lab, where they would find out if it had any chance of working.
Her idea was sound. To stop the Kaiju blood from undergoing a chain reaction and consuming the entire supply at once—in other words, from going off like a bomb—they had to use extremely small amounts of the catalyzing lanthanide to ignite small amounts of the Kaiju blood. But then they had to feed that ignited Kaiju blood into a second combustion chamber where it would mix with an unburnt supply fed in through a second line. If they modulated that mixture correctly, they would have an amount of thermal release sufficient to fly a Jaeger but not overload the engines.
Outside on the launch pad, the gantry crews were already installing the second feeder lines and adding the secondary combustion chamber. They had to refit the exhaust nozzles and rewrite the operating software as well, and they could not complete that second task until Gottlieb and Liwen could provide a stable fuel-mix equation. They were close, but still not there. Liwen was moving numbers around on a holo display while Gottlieb worked the same numbers on the screen at his main terminal. At this point, it was a process of elimination. There was a value that would succeed. They just had to run the sequence over and over again until they found it. Part of that process could be automated, but part of it had to come from the intuition of scientists working in the lab.
“Gottlieb,” Shao said. He looked over and saw she had found a solution.
He rushed over to the terminal next to hers, checking her numbers and running them again several times to make sure there was no error. The equation checked out. They had a primary combustion ratio.
Hermann felt a spike of sorrow as he realized he could not share this discovery with Newt. It was the kind of work they had done together once, and now Hermann was forced to do it again because Newt had fallen under the sway of the Precursors. Where was he now? What was he doing? Was he able to watch the Kaiju make their slow progress toward mainland Japan, and ultimately the slumbering caldera of Mount Fuji? Hermann hoped there was a way to cure Newt, if PPDC forces did not kill him when he was found. A sane Newton Geiszler would appreciate what he and Shao had done. He was one of the few people on Earth who could… which of course was what made him such a dangerous adversary as a tool of the Precursors. But if he could be cured…
“Gottlieb,” Shao said. “Do you confirm my result?”
He nodded. “I do. Superb. This is going to work.”
* * *
Outside it was morning. Four Jaegers stood at their launch gantries, with four new sets of thruster pods attached to their backs. Separate smaller impulse thrusters were also attached to their lower legs. Gipsy Avenger already had these, and J-Tech crews had added them to the other Jaegers to increase maneuverability. At dawn, Bracer Phoenix had paused on her journey out to the gantry so tech crews could do a test deployment of the Morning Star Hand grafted on from Titan Redeemer. With everyone in the Shatterdome watching, a remote operation team ran the Morning Star Hand system, raising Bracer’s right arm.
The target was one of the fallen Drones, dragged out of the Shatterdome and now lying near the oceanside lifts. Jake and Lambert were back in the ready room, putting on their drivesuits and running pre-deployment checks on their Drift helmets. Over their commlinks, they heard the tech crews arguing about something in Mandarin. Then one of them ordered Bracer Phoenix to fire.
Jake and Lambert looked up at the video screen in the ready room, which was set to a feed from the tarmac. The Morning Star Hand exploded from Bracer Phoenix’s arm, crossing the hundred yards of tarmac in less than a second. The impact on the torso of the fallen Drone sounded like a bomb going off. Pieces of the Drone’s armor spun away over the water and the target itself was blasted off the ground, landing with a splash that slopped waves up to the edge of the tarmac. The water churned around the sinking Drone as Bracer Phoenix snapped the Morning Star Head back into place. Waiting Jumphawks, among the few that had survived the attack, dropped cables down to retrieve the Drone. As they pulled it up out of the water, they could see the enormous dent in the side of its armor. Both of them were imagining what that would do to a Cat-4 or Cat-5 Kaiju, gauging whether it would be enough.
Jake glanced over
