The sky was black around them, and full of stars. Below, they could see the vast urban sprawl of the Tokyo-Osaka megaplex laid out, and to the east the green and white cone of Mount Fuji. It was a beautiful sight, and looking down at it Jake felt a fierce love for all of Planet Earth and its people. He would do anything for them, up to and including sacrificing his life if need be. There was no sound, and for a long moment there was no gravity as Gipsy Avenger reached the apex of her trajectory. Jake had a fleeting memory of a similar weightless moment in Scrapper, right after he’d met Amara. Then they were pounded back into their cradles as Gipsy Avenger turned over and began to fall. “We’re locked on target,” Amara said, tracking their path on the HUD.
“Get out of there!” Gottlieb called over the comm. “Eject.”
On the HUD, another alarm flashed. They were no longer locked on the target zone at the edge of Mount Fuji’s crater. “We’re drifting off course.”
There had been so many alarms going off that Jake didn’t notice the target warning right away, but now it had all of his attention. The projection of their return trajectory was going to miss Mount Fuji by miles. That first burn, straight ahead instead of up at an angle, had altered the distance they had traveled when they finally did get oriented in the right direction. Now they had to find a way to course-correct or Gipsy Avenger was just going to put a big crater in a town square somewhere north of Fuji… while the Mega-Kaiju took its final swan dive into the caldera. Amara was already thinking hard about a solution, considering and discarding possibilities faster than Jake could grasp them.
“Use the plasma cannon!” she announced, and started pecking commands out on her holo terminal. The tactical HUD showed the correction, and the correct angle of the plasma burn. Eight seconds would do the trick.
There was only one problem. The cannon wasn’t built for continuous fire because it had a tendency to overheat and melt down its housing… and Gipsy Avenger’s arm. But it was long past time to worry about that.
Amara brought up the source code of the plasma cannon’s fire control software. Jake marveled at this. He wouldn’t have had any idea where to find that code, let alone access it—yet here was fifteen-year-old Amara, hacking a Jaeger she’d never been in before while it fell out of the sky towards its certain destruction and her probable death.
If she noticed his admiration, she didn’t react. “Disengaging safety protocols,” Jake said. He found the failsafe and disabled it. They nodded at each other and thrust their left hands straight down. Gipsy Avenger’s left arm deployed its plasma cannon. They shifted their posture slightly to match the simulation in the tactical HUD, and then they fired the cannon.
Normally it fired single bursts, with a minimum interval of a half-second, but Amara’s quick hack had removed that limitation. Instead of bolts of plasma energy, the cannon poured out a continuous stream. The countdown on the HUD was at 7… 6…
Gipsy Avenger shuddered, plummeting down at near-terminal velocity as the plasma cannon shifted their trajectory to aim them back at the Mega-Kaiju. Gipsy’s arm began to glow as the plasma cannon overloaded. Pieces of overheated armor broke off and spun away behind them. New alarms shrieked in the Conn-Pod, and the system AI repeated a warning: “Warning. Exceeding structural limits. Exceeding structural limits.”
None of this would do any good if Gipsy Avenger shivered to pieces on her way back down, Jake thought. But they didn’t have any other solution. Amara was counting down the burn, matching the numbers on the HUD. “Four seconds… three… two…”
The plasma cannon burned out. Weakened by the heat and the incredible stresses of the flight, pieces of Gipsy’s forearm shattered and fell away. Eyeballing their path, it looked like they were headed straight for the rim of Mount Fuji’s caldera. On the HUD, the Mega-Kaiju was squarely in the middle of the targeting reticle. Amara confirmed this on the holo display of their downward trajectory, recalculating their path based on the adjustment from the plasma cannon. “Target locked!”
“Jake! Amara!” Gottlieb was watching their path and velocity from the War Room, and he saw they didn’t have much time. “You need to eject!”
They hit the thicker part of the upper atmosphere and Gipsy Avenger started to glow from the friction of re-entry. The rest of Gipsy’s face shield burned away in a swirl of superheated plasma, along with more pieces of her destroyed left arm.
It was time to bail out. “Disconnect!” Jake could barely scream over the raging wind and the sounds of Gipsy Avenger threatening to break apart as they plunged toward Earth. Amara reached for the buckles holding her into her Drift cradle, then froze. What if the wind howling in the Conn-Pod sucked her out through the gaping hole in the front of Gipsy’s head?
Jake reached out a hand, leaning across toward her. “It’s okay! I got you!”
She swallowed, tensed… and touched the command that unlocked her from the Drift cradle. It opened and disconnected from her drivesuit. The wind rocked her, nearly pulling her loose before she got a grip on the frame of the cradle. Slowly she worked her way toward Jake, but she couldn’t get close enough to him without letting go. Realizing this, Amara watched Jake, gauging the distance. She would have to jump. Again. Jake saw the terror in her eyes, and knew it went all the way back to when she was a child on the pier at Santa Monica. Her life must have seemed like a long series of jumps with no guarantees that anyone would be there to catch her on the other side.
He held his hand out,
