There wasn’t much to add. Bracer wasn’t their ride, anyway. They finished getting ready and headed for the Shatterdome.
* * *
Hours after they’d started work on the Jaegers, Jules caught up with Jake and Lambert in the Shatterdome to update them. They were in their drivesuits, headed for the launch pads and the long ride up the gantries to Gipsy Avenger’s Conn-Pod hatch. Destroyed vehicles and discarded Jaeger parts and armor formed mounds of debris around the cleared areas of the Shatterdome deck. If Gottlieb’s crazy plan was going to work, they would all find out soon. The last time they’d talked to him, he was full of enthusiasm, but they couldn’t follow the technical details of what he was saying, so they just nodded and let him run out of steam. But the upshot, at least as far as they could tell, was that Gottlieb and Shao Liwen working together had solved the critical problem with using Kaiju blood as fuel. So Jake was cautiously optimistic that the thruster pods wouldn’t incinerate them all as soon as someone gave the ignition command.
“Saber Athena, Guardian Bravo, and Bracer Phoenix are good to go,” Jules said. Jake and Lambert had already signed off Gipsy Avenger.
“Not a lot to work with,” Jake said. He was wishing they had Titan Redeemer still, but there wasn’t time to get her back up and running—especially not since they’d cannibalized several hundred of her parts, including her main weapon system, to speed up repairs to the other Jaegers.
“Liwen’s team kit-bashed some Fury tech into Gipsy that might help,” Jules added.
Jake was about to ask what, but Lambert didn’t seem to care. They’d find out sooner or later anyway.
“Prep everything we’ve got for deployment,” Lambert said. PPDC policy called for full deployment of an individual Shatterdome’s complement of Jaegers only in extraordinary circumstances. During the war several Shatterdomes had suffered attacks while defenseless, so the policy made sense, but if ever there had been an extraordinary circumstance, this was it. No point in holding reserves back now.
A moment passed between Jules and Lambert. Jake stayed out of it, deliberately looking the other way. There was nobody to see him off and wish him well. Hadn’t been in a long time. He was used to it, and he would fight the good fight anyway. “Don’t get yourself killed, okay?” Jules said, and kissed Lambert on the cheek.
Then she turned to Jake, surprising him. “You either,” she said, and kissed him too.
Jake and Lambert watched her go. “Well, that’s confusing,” Jake said. Here he’d been telling himself how nobody cared, and then Jules had to go and confuse everything.
With a frown, Lambert said, “Let’s stay on point. We only have four Jaegers. Against two Category Fours and a Fiver.”
Feeling optimistic in the wake of Jules’ kiss, Jake said, “Better than just Gipsy.”
“Still need pilots,” Nate said, not willing to concede the point.
Jake started walking again, skirting pieces of Titan Redeemer’s discarded armor plating. This was the one part of the plan he wasn’t worried about. “We have them.”
* * *
The cadets stood in a tight group, wearing their cadet drivesuits and holding their helmets. All of them were there but Meilin and Tahima, who had been too severely wounded in the Drone attack to serve. Jake and Lambert walked up to them and nodded. Jake hoped the gesture was reassuring. He could have used a little reassurance himself. Out in the world, the Kaiju-worshipping cults were rejoicing. They knew Kaiju had returned, and they had also gotten wind about exactly how the Drone program had been corrupted. The sites of the fallen Drones were crowded with Kaiju worshippers, touching the Drones and ritually scarring themselves with the Kaiju blood that still seeped from the tissue within. The PPDC and local law enforcement were too overwhelmed trying to cope with the damage to stop them.
Cities around the world were burning from the Drone attacks, and a fresh wave of fear was causing unrest even in places that hadn’t been directly attacked. The Kaiju were back. Ten years since the closing of the first Breach was enough time for people to begin to believe that it would never happen again. Thus the calls to scale back the PPDC, devote its resources elsewhere, lower expenses by putting Jaegers under Drone remote control. Mako had fought hard on the PPDC’s behalf, arguing that the costs of being caught unprepared were unimaginably worse than the costs of keeping up the PPDC. Who could say the Precursors would never open another Breach? How could they ever know? And how would they look the people of the world in the eye if the PPDC was shut down and a new Breach opened and there was nothing to defend them with?
Jake was choked with emotion as he considered how she hadn’t lived to see just how right she was… and then rage crackled through him. Whether he was under Precursor control or not, Newt Geiszler had built the Jaeger that killed Mako because she was about to reveal his plan. Jake still didn’t know how she’d found out, and PPDC intel services were digging into her records to see what they could learn on that front, but the details weren’t important in the end. She had known, and Newt had killed her for it. Or the Precursor inside Newt’s mind. At that moment Jake wasn’t sure he cared about the distinction.
He stood before the cadets, aware of their eyes on him, their expectations of him. He wasn’t his father. He wasn’t going to come up with a great line like “Today we are canceling the apocalypse.” But he could come at things from a different angle, an angle he understood because he’d lived it.
“If my dad were here, he’d probably give a big speech, make you all feel invincible,” Jake began. “But I’m not my father. I’m not… I’m not a hero like he was. Like Raleigh Becket and Mako Mori.
