“Jake,” Gottlieb came back. “There’s only one thruster pod with enough fuel remaining to reach the troposphere. Sending location.”
When the location popped up on the tactical HUD, Jake sagged in the Drift cradle. It was too far away, back near the site of their initial engagement with the Kaiju. “It’s too far away,” Amara said. The grim realization set in. “We’re not gonna make it.”
35
A NEW VOICE CAME OVER THE COMM. “GIPSY Avenger.” It was Shao Liwen. “Systems are online!”
Jake had no idea what she was talking about.
“Sending help!” she added.
What kind of help? Jake wondered. They had no Jaegers left.
“I’ve located the thruster pod,” Liwen explained. “Stand by!”
* * *
The cargo doors of a modified heavy-lift Shao V-Dragon opened as it banked over the apocalyptic ruin of Tokyo. Out into the void rolled Scrapper, dropping through the air and opening up just as it crashed through the roof of a damaged restaurant and landed heavily, collapsing the floor. Quickly it looked around and headed out into the street, closing in on the location of the thruster pod where it had been jettisoned at the beginning of the fight. The air was thick with hanging dust and the smoke from a thousand fires burning in the wreckage. Scrapper moved unerringly through it, climbing piles of rubble and kicking aside small obstacles.
In the Moyulan Shatterdome machine shop, Shao Liwen stood in a redesigned set of Conn-Pod rings, retrofitted from the remote Drone control suites so she could operate Scrapper from afar. She trotted forward and bent over, picking up a holographic thruster pod. Then she turned around and ran into the Drift cradle, propelling Scrapper through the ruins on a path that led toward the looming, stranded bulk of Gipsy Avenger in the distance. Newt Geiszler had used her factories, her inventions, her expertise, to execute his plan. What happened in her company’s name was her responsibility, and Shao was going to do everything in her power to atone for that failure. She’d had the idea to mobilize Scrapper early in the day, and had kept at it even after it seemed like the field Jaegers weren’t going to need any help. Now she was glad she hadn’t quit, because Scrapper was no longer just an afterthought. Now the little homemade Jaeger—with some improvements Shao had made—was mission critical.
“Scrapper!” Amara beamed as she saw her creation appear from the smoke on Gipsy Avenger’s HUD.
She got a direct visual through Gipsy’s broken face shield, and her smile got even wider. Shao Liwen had worked on Scrapper! Shao Liwen! She’d always been one of Amara’s idols, and to think that Shao had deemed Scrapper worthy of her attention…
Amara got a grip on her pride. “Okay, we got a rocket,” she said. But she was also running calculations about their thrust and potential altitude, and her face got grim. “Thrust is too strong. We won’t be able to hold onto it.”
“I upgraded Scrapper’s weapons!” Shao answered. “I can weld it to your hand.”
“Nice,” Amara said. She could appreciate a good field hack, and Shao was still the best.
Scrapper approached and dropped the thruster pod. Gipsy Avenger bent low to pick it up. Jake oriented it so Gipsy could hold it out at an angle with the exhaust nozzle pointed behind them. Scrapper climbed up onto Gipsy’s arm as plasma blasters with Shao Industries logos unfolded from its shoulders. The blasters fired, melting the thruster pod’s clamp assembly onto Gipsy Avenger’s hand. While Shao worked, Amara watched, admiring Shao Liwen all over again. “We’ll only get one shot at this,” she said.
Jake was also watching, and itching to get going. The Mega-Kaiju was too close to the summit. They didn’t have time to make sure everything was perfect. “Then we better make it count.”
The words were just leaving his mouth when the heat from Scrapper’s blasters ignited the thruster pod.
Gipsy Avenger wasn’t braced for the sudden thrust. She surged forward, blasting horizontally along the ground, scraping up a wave of cars and pavement, careening off buildings. “Ignition! We have ignition!” Shao exulted back in the machine shop, but Jake and Amara were completely out of control.
Outside, Scrapper’s foot hung up on one of Gipsy Avenger’s stabilizer fins. “I’m stuck!” Shao said as she struggled to get Scrapper free.
“Stay there!” Jake answered. “You’re an extra ton we can drop on that thing!”
Slowly Jake and Amara got control over the thruster pod, aiming it so the exhaust was pointed at a shallow angle toward the ground. Gipsy Avenger angled upward, shooting into the sky. They wrestled against the power of the thrust, pushing the angle a little steeper and shooting higher into the sky. They burst through a layer of high clouds over the city. Every alarm in the Conn-Pod seemed to be going off, as the vibrations from the thrust and the atmospheric friction tore pieces away from the heavily damaged Jaeger. “Hull integrity under strain. Approaching hazardous altitude,” the AI warned. “Temperatures dropping rapidly.”
“Yeah, we get it,” Amara snapped.
Another warning blared in front of them. The thruster pod, shaking in the makeshift housing of Gipsy Avenger’s fist, was threatening to disintegrate. “She’s coming apart!” Amara shouted.
Jake watched their altitude. Gottlieb had already done the math for their downward trajectory. If they could just make a few more miles… “Almost there!” he called back.
Without their drivesuits’ life-support systems, they would long since have passed out from lack of oxygen. And even those would soon run low; they were only designed for emergency use, and among the other systems damaged in the fight with Raijin and the Mega-Kaiju were the linkages to Gipsy Avenger’s full life-support systems. Jake was suddenly grateful this had not occurred to him before, or he would have been terrified that his suit had a leak that would kill him up here where there was no air. Through the Drift he could tell Amara had no such misgivings; her mind was
