Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization (10 page)

That was the question, wasn’t it? Raleigh figured he could remember the moves. He could pilot a Jaeger. He could kill kaiju. He’d done it five times. But could he allow another person to enter the space in his mind where Yancy had once been? Tough one. He was going to have to go right through those last moments again, feel Yancy’s terror and the blast of frigid salt air and the predatory roar of Knifehead shaking its way through Gipsy Danger’s frame and Raleigh’s own bones.

In one way, he’d never stopped going over those memories. He was in Olympic physical shape because one of the few ways he’d found to push the recollections away was grueling sessions of sweat and focusing deep into his body instead of his mind. But at some point the workouts always had to stop, and the memories were always waiting.

So he didn’t know. He didn’t know if he was ready or not, and he wouldn’t until he Drifted with another human being again.

Raleigh looked at Tendo, down to the floor, over at Mako... She was looking back at him. He coughed and pulled himself together.

“I should unpack,” he said.

Tendo understood.

“Yeah,” he said. “Mako will show you your quarters. Tomorrow’s the big day. First of many. You’re back where you belong, man. Good to have you.”

Raleigh cracked a smile.

“You too, buddy,” he said.
Big day, yep.
That’s what they’d always said to each other every morning when they thought there would be a kaiju attack. It had spread and become one of those little memes that they passed back and forth.

***

His room was nothing special, a pale-colored rectangle with a bunk and a few pieces of furniture. Raleigh dropped his duffel on the bed and took it all in for a minute.

In the doorway, Mako said, “If you need anything, I’m right across the hall. You’ll meet the candidates at six hundred hours. I’ve tried my best to match them to your Drift pattern.”

Six hundred,
Raleigh thought. He had just enough time to clock eight hours in the sack and get a shower and some toast. Pentecost was throwing him right into the fire. Looking, no doubt, to see if the five years away from the Rangers had softened him up, made him weak.

And Mako had pre-screened his potential Drift partners.

“You did?” he asked as he unzipped his duffel. He didn’t have much in it. “Personally?”

She nodded. “I did, Mr. Becket.”

He wished she wouldn’t call him that, but he didn’t say anything.

Instead he asked, “What’s your story? Restoring old Jaegers for combat, showing has-beens like me around... that can’t be it.”

She met his gaze but said nothing. Her grip on the little pad she carried tightened. In there somewhere, Raleigh knew, was a detailed dossier on him and equally detailed assessments on all of the candidates to be his partner. He had no desire to see any of it. Data and pre-action analysis maybe helped to frame big generalizations about people, but Raleigh didn’t think they predicted much about how real flesh-and-blood human beings would react in realtime situations.

He opened a drawer and stuffed some socks into it.

“Are you a pilot?” he asked.

“No. Not yet. But I want to be one. More than anything...” She hesitated, and Raleigh saw her change her mind about something she’d been ready to say. “I want to be one.”

Something was going on here. Mako Mori was a puzzle, and she didn’t seem to be interested in letting anyone solve her.

“What’s your simulator score?” Raleigh asked.

“Fifty-one drops, fifty-one kills,” she said evenly.

“And you’re not one of the candidates tomorrow?”

Digging in the bottom of his duffel, Raleigh came up with the one possession that meant something to him: an old photo of him and Yancy, taken shortly after they finished Ranger training and made their first kill. Leaning into each other, bright and strong and invincible.

Mako answered but he didn’t hear her right away. He looked up at her, lifting an eyebrow.

“I am not,” Mako repeated. “The Marshal has his reasons.”

“Fifty-one simulated kills, though... what can they be?”

Mako looked him right in the eye and dodged the question.

“I hope you approve of my choices. I’ve studied your fighting technique and strategy. Every one of your victories... even Anchorage.”

“Really? And what did you think?”

“Mr. Becket. It is not my place to comment.”

Oh, but you want to, don’t you?
Raleigh thought.

“The Marshal isn’t here, Miss Mori. You can say it. And you could stop clutching that pad so hard. Looks like it’s gonna snap in half.”

The briefest shadow of irritation crossed Mako’s face. She put the pad in her pocket and took a breath.

“I think... you’re unpredictable,” she said.

Oho,
thought Raleigh. A genuine, unfiltered statement. What next?

And he found out, because Mako wasn’t done.

“You have a habit of deviating from standard combat techniques. You take risks that endanger yourself and your crew. I don’t think you are the right man for this mission—”

With that, she caught herself and looked down. Raleigh looked away from her at the same time.

“Wow,” he said. “You may be right, Miss Mori. About that, and about my past. But in real combat, Miss Mori— outside the simulator, in the real world, with the Miracle Mile at your back and millions of people just beyond it praying for you to save them—in real combat, you make decisions and you live with the consequences.”

It was a little sharper than he’d meant to be, but Raleigh didn’t appreciate someone waving her perfect simulator record in his face and then telling him about what he did wrong fighting real kaiju. He turned away from her and went back to his unpacking. He heard her footsteps crossing the corridor to her own room. Raleigh caught a whiff of himself. It had been a long trip from Alaska, and he’d left at the end of a long sweaty workday. He stripped off his shirt just as Mako started to speak.

“I didn’t mean to—”

She stopped as fast as she’d started, and Raleigh knew why. She was seeing the old scars on his back and chest, where the circuitry from his drivesuit had overloaded and burned its keloid shadow into his skin in the shallows off Anchorage, five years and four months ago. He let her look and he didn’t say anything as he got out a fresh T-shirt and shrugged into it.

That’s the real world,
he was thinking.
In the real world, real kaiju tear pieces out of your Jaeger and when things go to shit, it leaves scars. Forever. On the outside and the inside
.

He looked at her and caught her eye.

That’s right,
he thought.
You love the scars because you haven’t earned any of your own yet.

Mako ducked into her room and shut the door.

Raleigh didn’t consider himself an especially sharp judge of women, but he could practically smell the ozone in the air between him and Mako. Tension, attraction, rivalry, suspicion—all at once. It was good. Invigorating. He shut the door and thought to himself that he was exactly where he belonged.

Tomorrow, as Tendo Choi had said, would be a big day. The first of many

ROCK STAR, THOUGHT NEWT GEISZLER. ONCE
he’d wanted to be one for real. Now he would settle for the figurative sense... at least until they won the Kaiju War and he could get back to the business of putting a band together. He hadn’t been onstage since the Gymnasium back in Berlin, where he and the Black Velvet Rabbits had bent the heads of geeks at every all-ages club he could haul his gear to.

Now he was thousands of miles from Berlin, fighting for humanity’s survival by scavenging bits of junk equipment from storage rooms behind the Jaeger repair bays. He’d found a processor that should function, left over from when the Hong Kong Shatterdome had its own strike team. It looked like it might have been original to Shaolin Rogue, but Newt didn’t know for sure. He had enough fiber-optic and fluid-core cabling to get the bandwidth he needed. He had leads and copper contact pins. He had a spare monitor and a solid-state recording drive back in the lab.

He piled all the stuff on a cart and looked it over one more time, speccing out the project in his head. It wasn’t that hard to build a Pons now that the tech was established and had found its way into so many other applications.
Yep
, Newt thought. He had what he needed.

Now it was time to tinker, like he was building instruments for Black Velvet Rabbit. Newt loved tinkering. He loved to give his highly creative, instinctive, yet profoundly analytical, brain free rein, shutting down his perceived reality and seeing where his ratiocinative mind would take him. Whenever he got to construct something, he had that crackle in his head... especially when he was about to do something as balls-out crazy as Drift with a sample of a dead kaiju. Swap neurotrasmissions with a silicate cerebellum. Open himself up to the alien alpha waves of a nonhuman sentience.

Hermann wouldn’t have done it even if he had conclusive mathematical proof that it would save the universe. It just wasn’t something a guy like Hermann could conceive of. But it was exactly the kind of thing that was constantly running through Newt’s mind, which (and Newt would never have admitted this out loud, but he knew it was true) was why he and Hermann worked so well together. They struck sparks.

Newt and his Uncle Gunter had struck the same sparks when Newt was a kid, tinkering in the basement of Gunter’s studio, where fringey techno musicians stood around making sounds and waiting for Gunter to come up with the next innovation that they would turn into the club tracks that pounded out of speakers all over Europe. Gunter had pioneered many of the sounds that were probably coming out of the Kaidanovskys’ speakers right now. All that Ukrainian stuff was derived from the Berlin scene anyway.

Music, the universal language, right? The same kind of cognitive link you got from Drifting, at least that was Newt’s theory. He’d never had the time to do a proper evaluation and now it didn’t matter.

He wheeled the cart out of the storage locker and across the repair bay, back to the door he had cut his way through with wire cutters. All this stuff was kept locked up, and Newt could never figure out why. Who would have wanted it? Were random thieves from Kowloon sneaking in and making off with eight-foot liquid-synapse segment? Security puzzled him sometimes.

But whatever. Newt eased the repair-bay door back into place. It was chain-link in a chain-link wall. Nobody would notice the cut until morning, and by then Newt would be all done. He’d take the heat for cutting into the door if he had to, but if he was right nobody would care about that little transgression. Still, he looked up and down the halls warily in case he saw someone and had to make excuses.

A couple of Jaeger techs passed, arguing about something with a pair of Jumphawk pilots. They glanced over at Newt but didn’t see anything remarkable about him rolling a cartful of junk down the hall in the middle of the night. It wasn’t remarkable, really. Inspiration struck when inspiration struck, and sometimes it required you to get a load of junk and see what you could build.

***

Back in the lab, he shoved a bunch of stuff out of the way, stacking reports against a model of Trespasser’s skeleton and shoving his specimen jars over toward the Line of Demarcation so he had some floor space on which to work.

The basics of the Pons were simple. You needed an interface on each end, so neuro signals from the two brains could reach the central bridge. You needed a processor capable of organizing and merging the two sets of signals. You needed an output so the data generated by the Drift could be recorded, monitored, and analyzed. That was it.

Newt soldered together a series of leads using the copper contact pins and short fluid-core cables. He had a webbed skullcap lying around somewhere, similar to what the Jaeger pilots called a thinking cap. Newt preferred the term “squid cap,” because the one he had wasn’t sealed into a full polypropylene head covering. It was a naked web of receptors and feed amplifiers. If you mashed it out flat it looked like a spiderweb with big red plastic nodules at the end of the radiating strands. If you dangled it over your head, it looked like a squid with several extra tentacles... and big red plastic nodules at the end of each one. Therefore, squid cap. It would be the interface with his brain.