Amara crouched and jumped. The wind dragged her toward the hole in the front of Gipsy’s head and she stretched out toward Jake, desperate and terrified. He lunged forward in his own cradle, feeling the straps dig into his shoulders… and he caught her hand as her legs swung around toward the hole. Straining with the effort, he pulled her close. As soon as she got within arm’s reach, she clung to him, trembling with the terror of a brush with death.
Jake grinned, keeping one arm wrapped around her and punching in the escape pod initialization sequence with the other. “Gipsy to Command,” he announced. “We are getting the hell out of here.”
A bright red warning bar appeared on the HUD. The escape pod wasn’t responding. “Warning,” Gipsy Avenger’s AI said. “Escape pod inoperable. Warning…”
Jake looked at the holo indicator counting down the kilometers to impact. It was moving way too fast for them to come up with another plan. His glance shifted to Amara, and he saw she was coming to the same conclusion.
“I’m sorry, smallie,” he said. It was all he could think of.
She mustered a brave smile. “For what? We got to save the world.” After a beat she added, “Your dad would be proud.”
Jake nodded, grateful for the sentiment. Would his dad be proud, now that Jake Pentecost was about to continue the family tradition of sacrificing his life in a last-ditch effort to save the world? He had fought hard today. They’d put two Kaiju down, and were about to take out a third. Maybe Jake was never going to be a great Ranger, but on this day he’d done everything he could.
A loud crackling noise from behind them interrupted the moment. Jake looked over his shoulder, thinking he would see the back of Gipsy Avenger’s head starting to break apart from the re-entry stress. But instead he saw a plasma beam cutting through Gipsy’s armor at the rear of the Conn-Pod. There was already a hole there from the Mega-Kaiju’s tail, and the beam enlarged it. Then a familiar metallic hand pushed through the gap and tore away another section of Gipsy’s head, revealing Scrapper clinging to the outside.
“Gipsy Avenger.” Shao Liwen’s voice rang out over the comm. “You guys need a lift?”
36
ON THE BACK OF GIPSY AVENGER’S HEAD, Scrapper clung tight, rocking in the powerful turbulence of their fall toward Earth. Shao hadn’t been able to communicate while they were coming through the electromagnetic disturbances of the upper atmosphere, and then she couldn’t move Scrapper when they were in the re-entry phase or the stresses would have torn the little Jaeger free. Only now could she act, and she had Scrapper’s plasma torches cutting a ragged hole through the back of Gipsy Avenger’s head. Sweat burned in her eyes and dripped from her chin as she finished the work and reached out. Scrapper tore loose the piece of armor she had cut and let it tumble away. Then Scrapper rubbed a hand around the inside of the hole, trying to cool the edges. Shao leaned Scrapper in close and opened her torso Conn-Pod hatch. Scrapper’s feet were braced on a metal ridge at the base of Gipsy Avenger’s skull, and her hands now dug into the battered armor on either side of the hole, pressing Scrapper as close as it could get.
“Twenty kilometers to impact!” Gottlieb warned over the comm. “Get out of there!”
Inside the Conn-Pod, Jake and Amara judged the situation. They had to get out of the Drift cradle and across the Conn-Pod, through the hole, and into the damping alcoves inside Scrapper’s Conn-Pod—all with hellacious wind ripping through the Conn-Pod from front to back now that there were two holes in Gipsy Avenger’s head. Scrapper was close to the back hole, but there was still plenty of room for them to miss the transfer and go flying off into the sky.
But that was the plan they had, so that was the plan they were going to execute. Jake started the sequence of commands to disengage the Drift cradle from his drivesuit.
He touched the final command and the Drift cradle unfolded and disconnected. The raging wind in the Conn-Pod immediately flung Jake and Amara across toward the hole leading to Scrapper’s Conn-Pod. They hit hard against the wall on either side of the hole and slid down, bloodied and stunned. Neither of them had had time to get their hands up before hitting the wall.
Gottlieb’s voice was high and tense in the comm. “Impact in ten seconds!”
Jake shoved Amara ahead. “Go! Go!”
They scrambled up and dove through the hole, Amara first and Jake right behind her. The cramped Conn-Pod inside Scrapper’s torso didn’t have the updated maglev field or a next-generation Drift cradle, but it did have two alcoves with motion-damping hydraulics. Amara and Jake squeezed into these and braced themselves. Jake couldn’t do math fast enough to figure whether the alcoves would be enough protection when they hit… but then again, if they didn’t do the job, he wouldn’t be around to worry about it. In these last ten seconds, he felt calm. Not fatalist, because he knew they had done everything they could and he no longer held the cynical illusion that nothing he did would ever be good enough. But calm. He had done his job. He had lived up to the standard set by the Rangers who came before him… including his father. That was enough to give him peace.
“Hang on,” he said.
“I am hanging on!”
“Hang tighter!”
* * *
In the skies over Mount Fuji, Gipsy Avenger streaked down, trailing smoke and shedding pieces of herself. Below, the Mega-Kaiju bounded up the last stretch of the snow-covered slope leading to the vast crater at the mountain’s summit. It tipped its head
