Another voice cut through over the comm. “Gipsy Avenger, this is Amara Namani! Stand by for assist!”
On the HUD, Jake saw Amara’s signal, moving fast along the rooftop of a nearby building. It was partially destroyed, its interior exposed and bits of concrete cascading in small slides down its exterior walls. She was running hard toward Gipsy Avenger.
Jake had just gotten Gipsy up on one knee. He wasn’t sure he could get her any farther.
Amara kept coming, at a dead sprint. Jake understood what she was about to attempt… and understood it wouldn’t work. “Amara, don’t! You won’t make it!”
“I’m gonna,” she panted.
“Don’t!”
“Gonna!”
With that last word, she jumped, kicking out over the void between her and Gipsy Avenger. She was never going to make it. She started to fall, not even halfway across the gap.
Jake surged forward, feeling the blood pour more freely from his nose as he leaned out and extended Gipsy Avenger’s hand, fingers spread. In that moment, he saw Mako again, felt the sorrow of her death and his admiration that even knowing she was going to die, she had made sure he would be able to finish the work she had started. His overtaxed mind slipped back to the Drift with Amara, to another time when she had jumped across a gap and no one had been there to save her. But this time, she did not plunge down into dark water, and no Kaiju annihilated the loved ones she was trying to reach.
Gipsy Avenger caught Amara just before she would have crashed down into the rubble of concrete and rebar in front of the building.
Jake barely kept his balance, raising her up so she could scramble in through the hole in Gipsy Avenger’s face shield. Barely keeping it together through the agony in his head and the unpredictable shifts in his mind under the neural load, he tried to glare at her. “Told you,” he said.
“Since when do I listen?” she shot back. But in her eyes he could see how shocked she was to see the state of Gipsy Avenger’s Conn-Pod. Not to mention that Jake was in rough shape, and Lambert much worse off than Jake.
“Amara,” Lambert said, barely clinging to consciousness. “You’re up.”
Amara rushed over to the maglev platform and initialized Lambert’s ejection sequence. She took his Drift helmet and stepped back. “What are you doing?” Jake asked.
“Getting out of the way,” Lambert said. He grimaced as he tried to move out of Amara’s way. “Thank God you’re crazy enough to kick that thing’s ass.”
Then he looked over at Jake and they locked eyes. “You got this, brother. Show ’em what you can do.”
Behind that, Jake heard Lambert telling him that he could have been great.
Well, now he would have to be.
Jake gave Nate a nod. Amara hit the final command in the ejection sequence. Nate’s Drift cradle opened and he was raised up into the escape pod. There was a soft popping sound, and a whoosh. “Escape pod ejected,” Gipsy Avenger’s AI said.
Amara was already locking herself into Lambert’s empty Drift cradle. “You ready for this, smallie?” Jake asked.
“One way to find out,” she said, looking straight ahead and getting her helmet settled.
Jake reset the Drift initialization and let Gottlieb know. “Stand by, Command. Initiating neural handshake.”
Gipsy Avenger was still on one knee amid the debris, looking as beaten as the devastated city around her. Jake felt the Drift fade out. His mind relaxed, clearing of the crazy superimpositions he’d felt while trying to handle Gipsy Avenger on his own. He looked over at Amara as the reboot brought them both into the Drift together, through the welter of images and impressions and on into a strong and steady neural handshake.
As one, they stood, and Gipsy Avenger stood, rocking her left fist into her right palm. They started to march forward—and Gipsy’s right leg buckled. Alarms blared in the Conn-Pod. A hologram of the leg appeared on the tactical HUD, showing extensive damage in the battle with the Mega-Kaiju. She crashed back down to one knee. Amara frantically punched commands.
“Right leg’s down!”
Gipsy Avenger’s AI voice calmly described the nature of the problem. “Warning: cascading failure. Multiple systems.”
“Reboot!” Jake yelled.
Amara worked her holo screen furiously. “I’m trying!”
“Command to Gipsy. Hostile is two kilometers out and closing fast on the summit of Mount Fuji!” Gottlieb warned.
Satellite and virtual overlays showed the Mega-Kaiju plowing steadily through the forested terrain of Mount Fuji’s slopes leading up to the treeline. Above the Kaiju, the steep snow-covered shoulders of the mountain were all too close. “We need to intercept!” Jake said.
“How? We can’t even stand up.” Out of sheer stubbornness, Amara tried to get Gipsy to her feet again, but it wasn’t going to happen.
Jake had an idea. It was crazy and virtually certain to fail, but it was better than nothing. “Maybe we don’t have to.” He started punching commands into the holo terminal. Amara, understanding through the Drift what he was thinking, looked at him like he had lost his mind.
“That’s a really bad idea,” she said. No snark, no insults, just a simple declaration. That alone told Jake how scared she was by what he was contemplating. But he figured she could sense that he was just as scared, and fear couldn’t be allowed to stop them now.
“Gottlieb,” he said. “Is there enough fuel left in any of your thrusters to get us into the atmosphere?”
“The atmosphere?” Gottlieb echoed. They heard him mumbling to himself as he ran some quick equations. “Possibly, but there won’t be enough to slow your re-entry.”
“Not going to slow down. We’ll come in hot and drop Gipsy right on top of that thing.”
Jake heard Amara’s thought before she said it
