All four Jaegers were down. Newt Geiszler watched in delight. “Yes!” he shouted, raising his arms in triumph. “That’s what I’m talking about!” His creation had put them down in seconds, and now it thundered forward, toward the outskirts of the city and the ultimate target beyond. It was a beautiful day, Newt thought. Clear skies, the white peak of Mount Fuji vivid against the blue sky.
But this would be the last blue sky Planet Earth ever saw.
33
JAKE AND LAMBERT STRUGGLED TO STABILIZE Gipsy Avenger, which had taken more damage from the shockwave and the secondary impact than in the whole fight with the three Kaiju. Sparks showered in the Conn-Pod as overloaded circuitry shorted out. There was a plasma leak somewhere near Gipsy’s power core, not critical yet but nothing they could ignore either. Lambert swiped and punched commands as fast as he could, patching systems and rerouting the links between the Conn-Pod and Gipsy Avenger’s weapons control systems. They were going to be all right, but they were a long way from one hundred percent.
Jake was more worried about Ilya and Suresh. “Guardian Bravo, sit-rep!” he barked over the comm. “You guys okay?”
There was nothing but static on the comm.
“Ilya,” Jake said, more urgently. “Suresh. Report.”
Ilya heard Jake’s voice and started to come to his senses. He could feel blood dripping off the side of his head. Some of it was getting in his eyes. He blinked and fumbled to activate the comm. “Guardian’s down. I’m pinned in the Conn-Pod. Suresh…”
He was looking around the Conn-Pod for Suresh, trying to wipe the blood out of his eyes and get them refocused from the crash landing. Pain lanced through his hands as he touched his own face, and he looked down to see that some of his fingers were broken. Lowering his head, he also saw Suresh, and the crumpled wreckage of the Conn-Pod around him. Girders from the building that had collapsed on them were punched through Guardian Bravo’s cranial armor, and…
He tried to breathe, keep control, react like a Ranger would. “Suresh… Suresh didn’t make it, sir.”
Jake and Lambert heard this and it hit them hard. The death of any Ranger was a tragedy, but the battle-tested veterans knew what they were getting into. The kids, though… they had never counted on a Kaiju war. They had trusted the PPDC and their senior Rangers to train them, guide them, protect them. But the war had found Suresh instead.
“Copy, Guardian,” Jake said slowly.
“We’ll send help soon as we can.” Lambert had Gipsy Avenger’s balance problems back under control. The Jaeger pushed herself up and stood.
“Bracer Phoenix, report,” Jake said.
Amara’s voice was loud and clear. “We’re a little banged up, but still in the fight.”
“Us too,” Renata chimed in from Saber Athena. She sounded more optimistic than she was. Ryoichi was preoccupied responding to system warnings and actually getting them vertical again. Saber Athena should have been able to land upright after that shock. The fact that she had fallen said she’d taken more damage from Hakuja than either Renata or Ryoichi had expected.
She realized she hadn’t given her call sign. “Saber, I mean. Saber Athena, sir.”
Jake let out a long breath. Okay. They still had three Jaegers. Things could be a lot worse. He started punching in coordinates from the holo map of the area around Mount Fuji. “Bracer, Saber, prepare to intercept at the following coordinates.”
“Haul ass and don’t be late,” Lambert added. Once a cadet trainer, always a cadet trainer.
“Copy,” Amara said. “Bracer Phoenix, hauling ass.”
Gipsy Avenger took off, building speed as she chased the Mega-Kaiju toward the lower slopes of Mount Fuji. Bracer Phoenix and Saber Athena were close behind. Trapped in the damaged Conn-Pod of Guardian Bravo, Ilya could not stand the idea of piloting the only Jaeger that couldn’t make it to the final confrontation. He struggled to shoulder the neural load of Guardian Bravo himself, forcing the Jaeger to break free of the debris trapping her. “Sir,” he said, voice high and tight. “I’m going to try to pilot Guardian myself.”
“Negative,” Lambert responded. “Stand down, Cadet.”
They had all heard the stories about what happened when a single pilot tried to take on the entire neural load of a Jaeger. Some Rangers could handle it for a little while, but the long-term physiological and neural consequences could be crippling. Lambert wasn’t going to bend on this. He already felt personally responsible for losing Suresh today, and the fight wasn’t over yet. He wasn’t going to put another cadet in danger, especially when Guardian Bravo would be operating at diminished combat capacity with only one pilot to handle its operations.
“I can help, sir—” Ilya protested.
Lambert cut him off. “Ilya, stand down. That’s an order.”
“We know how bad you want back in the fight,” Jake added. “But even a seasoned vet can’t pilot a Jaeger without help.”
As the words left his mouth, a whole new train of thought fell together in Jake’s mind. Jaegers were built for two-Ranger piloting teams because the neural load of piloting a Jaeger was too much for one brain. That knowledge locked together in his mind with a memory of Gottlieb talking about the Kaiju brain they had recovered from Obsidian Fury. Not a central brain, but a secondary organ, a cluster of nerves and synapses like you might ordinarily find at the base of a Kaiju’s spine.
Ahead of them, he saw the Mega-Kaiju heading for the base of Mount Fuji, and he had an idea. “Gipsy to Command. Do you have a tactical scan of the hostile?”
* * *
In the War Room, a technician by the name of McKinney answered his query right away. “Assessing data from their sensors.” She pulled up everything they had from
