As the echoes of its roar died away, the Mega-Kaiju heard another sound. A screaming in the sky. It looked up.
In the last second before the end of Gipsy Avenger’s long fall back to Earth, Scrapper flung its arms out and jumped. Gipsy Avenger plummeted away below and Scrapper curled into a ball, falling at an angle away from her.
The explosion of Gipsy Avenger’s impact whited out sensors in the Shatterdome War Room and registered on seismometers all over the planet. The fireball rolled down the slopes of Mount Fuji as the snowpack flashed into steam. Clouds gathered over the peak, condensing around the heat of the blast as it rose in a column of fire and dust thousands of feet into the sky. The shock wave caused landslides all across the mountain’s upper slopes, and caved in the steep interior of the crater just over the rim from where the Mega-Kaiju, moments ago, was crouched to spring. A casual observer might have thought the mountain was erupting for the first time since 1707, and in the War Room, Gottlieb understood the visual irony—since such an eruption was exactly what they had just sacrificed their last Jaeger to prevent.
The question was: Had it worked?
And had Jake and Amara survived? There was no signal from Scrapper. Electromagnetic noise from the explosion of Gipsy Avenger and the sudden lightning storm made it impossible to know what was going on. The blast of fire began to fade. Winds swirled around the peak, twisting the column of smoke into a vortex that gradually dispersed as it eddied higher away from the site of the impact. “Jake,” Gottlieb said, “Amara. Status, please.”
The sudden condensation of clouds around the peak brought snow that began to fall over the upper slopes as the site of Gipsy Avenger’s detonation cleared. Jake and Amara kicked at Scrapper’s Conn-Pod hatch. It was damaged from the blast. Scrapper had held its ball form until the blast wave hit, but the shock had shorted out most of the little Jaeger’s systems. It opened up, arms and legs going limp, as it crashed down through the stunted trees at Mount Fuji’s treeline and came to a halt in an open space, with snow and earth plowed up around it.
They got out and saw the snow… but they also saw the Mega-Kaiju, above them, still struggling to get to the rim of the crater.
Part of it, anyway. Everything below the middle of the Mega-Kaiju’s torso was gone, smeared and scattered for hundreds of yards down the slope. Its blood sizzled in the wet earth. Still it tried, digging into the stones near the summit and pulling its mangled body up. It tried to rise, and sagged back down, agonized roars subsiding to groans. One last effort dragged it to the very edge of the long fall into the crater, its claws hooked over the edge… and then it collapsed. Its eyes dimmed and it was silent.
Watching, Jake and Amara realized that against all probability, they had won. Cheers rang over the comm from the War Room as the Mega-Kaiju’s locator bogey blinked out. They heard other voices joining in, the exultant cadets grouped together on a rooftop near where their Jaegers had fallen.
And on another rooftop, Newt Geiszler stood seething. “All right. Okay. Sure. Plan B, then. Always a Plan B.”
He turned toward the Shao V-Dragon, its engines still warm on the far end of the roof—and walked straight into Nate Lambert’s fist. The crack of the punch was followed a second later by the meatier thud of Newt hitting the ground.
“That’s about enough of that,” Lambert said to the unconscious Newt. He grimaced at the effort of throwing the punch. It felt like he’d torn something loose in his side, but by God, it was worth it.
The minute he’d managed to get out of the escape pod, he’d checked his drivesuit data feed to make sure he still had Newt’s location. He did. It had taken him a while to get to the building, and then he’d had to climb thirty flights of stairs because the power in the building was out, but when he’d come out on the rooftop and found Newt Geiszler standing there watching the remnants of the explosion that had put the final nail in the coffin of his plan… well, that had been a moment to savor.
The only thing better was knocking that sonofabitch on his ass. “Command,” he said into the comm, “this is Lambert. Be advised, I just caught us a Newt.”
In the War Room, Jules closed her eyes as relief flooded through her. Then she heard Jake’s voice.
“Copy that, Nate. Good to hear you’re still with us.”
“You too, brother. Knew you could do it.”
On the mountain, Jake looked over at Amara, who was removing her helmet and turning her face up to the snow. “I had a lot of help,” he said.
“Nice work, Ranger Namani,” Nate said.
Amara closed her eyes, basking in the compliment—Nate Lambert had called her a Ranger! She fluttered her eyelashes as she felt snowflakes land on them. Then she looked over at Jake, amazed. “I’ve never seen snow before.”
“Yeah,” Jake said with a grin. “Almost makes you forget the giant dead monster over there.” He looked upslope at the remains of the Mega-Kaiju, and thought of the other Kaiju, as well as all the multitudes of Kaiju mechs scattered between here and there. He was also thinking of Newt Geiszler and how easy it was to twist genius to evil purposes. Was Newt a bad person? Jake didn’t know. Maybe it was true the Precursors got into his head. Maybe the potential power of harnessing and engineering Kaiju biotechnology was just too much for him to resist. In the end,
