He glanced over at Lambert and saw his partner acknowledging Jake’s callback to Lambert’s speech to the cadets a couple of days before. “This is our time. This is our chance to make a difference.”
The cadets were standing straight and tall now, their young faces set in expressions of resolve. Jake looked from one to the next, making eye contact with each one. He was asking a lot of them, and they wouldn’t know if they were up to the challenge until they were inside a Conn-Pod with a raging Jaeger on the HUD. There was no training for the flicker of terror any human being felt on seeing that.
After he’d had a brief moment with each of them, he nodded. “Mount up and let’s get it done.”
29
WORLDWIDE PANIC
EVACUATIONS ACROSS PACIFIC RIM AS KAIJU PASS THROUGH MULTIPLE BREACHES
PPDC CONFIRMS THREE KAIJU
Humanity’s worst nightmare came true yesterday, as multiple Breaches opened up across the Pacific Basin, resulting in the appearance of three Kaiju and the destruction of many of the Pan Pacific Defense Corps’ Shatterdome bunkers.
The Kaiju did not immediately make landfall after appearing separately in the East China Sea, the Sea of Japan, and the Sea of Okhotsk. Their current pathways appear to be taking them toward Japan, but all coastal populations are being urged to evacuate.
The PPDC refused to confirm reports that the Breaches were created by Drone Jaegers. Multiple eyewitness accounts claim to have seen Drone Jaegers coordinating the Breach creations, but Shao Industries spokespeople have vigorously denied this, saying Shao Industries and the PPDC are continuing to work in partnership to fight all Kaiju threats.
The catastrophic failure of the Drone program, which resulted in rogue Drones destroying several Jaegers and causing incalculable damage in Pacific Rim cities from South America to Russia, is stimulating calls for investigation of Shao Industries and its founder, Shao Liwen. She was understood to be at the Moyulan Shatterdome near Shanghai and was unavailable for comment.
More on this developing story as it becomes available.
On the gantries, Ranger teams exited the elevators and ducked through their Conn-Pod hatches. Techs making last-minute adjustments still scurried up and down the scaffolding, mostly around the thruster pods. Everything else they’d done was working with existing systems that had been tested over a period of years. The thrusters not only hadn’t been tested, they hadn’t even been through a design process. They were cobbled together from Jumphawk fuel tanks, repurposed V-Dragon thrusters, and fuel lines adapted from plasma feeders. The software controlling them was a series of patched-together code blocks borrowed from other systems. The math checked out, and the materials had been tested under other circumstances, but the history of rocketry was a story of unexpected failures that only had obvious causes after engineers spent months picking through the pieces. Neither the PPDC nor the human race as a whole could afford that today.
Among the crews, a strange fatalism prevailed. They had to trust Gottlieb and Shao, so they did. There was no point worrying about what would happen if the thruster pods didn’t work, because that wouldn’t change the ultimate outcome for any of them. They could either die in an explosion on the tarmac, or die of starvation after the Precursors re-engineered Earth’s climate. This was a time to take chances.
Amara, Jinhai, and Vik got settled in Bracer Phoenix’s Conn-Pod. The three Drift cradles were arranged with two in the front and one in the back, attached to a rail that dropped down to the railgun turret. That was Vik’s chair. Amara and Jinhai had the two front ones, responsible for moving Bracer and handling the other weapons systems—including the newly installed Morning Star Hand. They had all used it in simulations, but on Titan Redeemer’s left arm. Jake and Lambert had warned them it would feel different in Bracer Phoenix. They accepted this warning the same way they accepted the possibility that the thruster pods wouldn’t work. In other words, they shrugged it off, because they either had to make it work or they would die.
Each of them stood in the holographic rectangles marking the points where their boots would lock into the maglev field.
“Initiating neural handshake,” Amara said.
They felt the psychic swirl of the Drift reaching through them and binding them together. Amara felt cool and resolved, Jinhai a little giddy, Vik excited at the prospect of combat. Jinhai grinned at the readout on his display as the floor dropped away and they hung in the maglev field. “Neural handshake strong and steady,” he said. They could all feel it. They were a team. Jinhai and Vik had spent more than a year training for this. Amara was new to it, but her hard work with Sarah had paid off. Almond Joy, she thought, and she felt the other two react to the joke.
“So,” Vik said. “How’s it feel to be in a real Jaeger?” The joke was playful, not hostile like it would have been just a few days before.
“Bigger’s… not bad,” Amara allowed. She had a wide grin on her face just from the rush of the Drift, and the realization that she was in the Conn-Pod of Bracer Phoenix. It wasn’t long at all since she’d been climbing out of Scrapper, figuring she was on her way to jail.
Now she was on her way to saving the world instead.
* * *
Renata and Ryoichi relaxed into their Drift, feeling the connection like an extension of the rapport they already had from countless hours of sparring and drilling together. Saber Athena felt like an extension of themselves, a perfect match to what they were already good
