The screen went blank.
A PPDC combat operations tech near Gottlieb straightened and tensed as her screen lit up with multiple new bogeys. “We got movement! Multiple hostiles! Three kilometers, southeast!” She swiped the tactical view over to the main holo screen at the center of the War Room. A cluster of red dots had sprung to life near the group of Jaegers.
Gottlieb immediately got on the comm. “Command to Strike Team. Are you reading this?”
He heard Jake first. “Where’d they come from?”
Gottlieb didn’t have a read on the location—or, for that matter, what all the bogeys were. Before he could say anything, he heard Shao over the internal Shatterdome comm from down in the machine shop.
“That’s one of my automated factories,” she said.
Gottlieb remembered Newt telling her that he had commandeered production at her automated facilities. He had managed to build an entire Jaeger with nobody noticing. These bogeys weren’t that big, but there were… He tried to count them and lost track. They were too close together. What could they be?
“Newt,” Lambert growled. He tapped at the HUD. “Triangulating his signal…” Now that they had the Kaiju on the ropes, he was already thinking forward to when they could put the traitorous scientist in handcuffs. Or in the ground. That would be fine with him, too.
When the HUD had stored Geiszler’s location, Lambert returned to the main tactical HUD view. “Hostiles are one kilometer and closing.”
Dammit, Jake thought. They were minutes from putting the Kaiju down for good. Bracer’s railgun shells had shattered Hakuja’s armor, the combined attack of Guardian Bravo and Saber Athena had Shrikethorn down, and Raijin was still trapped under the last building Gipsy Avenger had dropped on it.
But they had to meet this new threat, at least for long enough to figure out what it was. “All Jaegers, disengage from Kaiju and brace for contact!” he called over the comm.
The four Jaegers stepped back from the battered Kaiju and turned just as the new threat appeared.
Swarming around the corner from the direction of Shao’s factory came a tidal wave of tentacled cyborg monstrosities the size of small trucks. They flooded the street and surged up and over the collapsed remains of all the buildings Gipsy Avenger had thrown down with the Gravity Sling. They looked like Kaiju, with fanged mouths and multiple glowing eyes surrounded by a fan of cranial spikes. Ridges of bone-like protrusions ran down their backs, flattening into smaller spikes that stuck out laterally from their tails. But at the same time they were obviously mechanical, with metallic alloys formed to resemble the organic features of a true Kaiju. They moved in leaps and bounds, springing and scuttling by the hundred toward the waiting Jaegers. The chittering, buzzing noises they made merged into a sonic assault like a million cicadas, maddening in its intensity even though the Jaegers’ sensors did all they could to filter and deaden the cacophony.
Jake watched the HUD as it tried to target them and failed. There were too many, moving too fast. One of them, or even a dozen, probably couldn’t have done much damage to a Jaeger before the Jaeger got a grip on them and just crushed them in her fists—but this many? How could they fight this many?
“Any ideas, Gottlieb?” he asked.
Gottlieb was silent. Everyone in the War Room was stunned. This wasn’t a threat Jaegers were designed to address. Down in the machine shop, Shao Liwen looked on in horror, realizing just how completely she had been deceived. Newt Geiszler had turned her genius against her. He had made Shao Industries into the engine of humanity’s end.
Bracer Phoenix opened up with the railgun, raking the swarm without making an appreciable difference in its numbers. They didn’t even try to avoid the barrage. “Hold your fire, Bracer,” Jake ordered. With more confidence than he felt, he explained. “We’re going to need that railgun loaded when we take care of these little ones and get back to the real fight.”
But this was the real fight, at least right now. The swarm poured toward them, the sound growing even louder, and the Jaegers braced for it.
* * *
From the rooftop, Newt watched. The Ripper swarm was a thing of beauty. He had made them all by himself. Well, okay, he’d had a little help in the form of design suggestions from the Precursors, but his hands had typed the code. It made him proud to look at them. The Jaeger pilots must have been completely terrified. Newt wanted to let them stay in that head space for as long as possible, but it was time for the real show to begin. All good things must come to an end, he told himself. Like the human race.
He touched a blinking button on his data pad.
* * *
When the robots were within a hundred yards of the Jaegers, they dropped into fighting crouches… and then their heads turned as the swarm abruptly changed course. Instead of stampeding into the waiting Jaegers, they veered off to the side, around the block… toward the wounded Kaiju, lying near each other between the pit Hakuja had dug and the toppled tower pinning Raijin.
The swarm poured over the Kaiju, and within seconds the Kaiju had disappeared under the hundreds—maybe thousands—of silvery bodies. They roared in agony, rearing up and then falling back into the churning mass. “What are they doing?” Ilya wondered aloud. “Are they on our side?”
Amara echoed the question. The Jaegers stood back and watched, completely mystified by what they were seeing and hearing.
“Dude,” Suresh said. “That is so nasty.”
In the War Room, Gottlieb and Jules stood together as the three big Kaiju bogeys were blotted out by the horde of smaller red dots. The surveillance display started to behave erratically. One of the big bogeys seemed to blink out, but a moment later it was back as several smaller ones—but not as small as the individual members of the
