Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization (13 page)

“Will you at least tell me why?” he asked.

“I will review all the data,” Pentecost said.

Raleigh bridled at the word “data.” Data didn’t win battles with kaiju. Rangers did.

“Report to the Shatterdome in two hours to meet your co-pilot,” Pentecost continued. “And Mr. Becket? Dress the part.”

With that, he left the Kwoon. Raleigh looked to Mako, shaking his head. He thought they had a real connection and he didn’t want to lose it, whatever Pentecost thought.

But Mako wasn’t looking at him. She was looking only at where Stacker Pentecost had been, her face tight and angry. She didn’t speak as she followed Pentecost out, leaving Raleigh confused and uncomfortable as the other co-pilot candidates looked on.

NEWT FINISHED HIS BREAKFAST AND SHOVED THE
sandwich wrapper and potato salad cup out of the way. He set up the recording software and took a deep breath.
Go time.
Newt Geiszler was about to reach for immortality.

He hoped that when his biographers took up the task of memorializing this moment, they would make sure to point out that Newt had spent all night cobbling together a Pons setup from bits of junk-room scrap and various components littering his side of the lab. He was a tinkerer in a lineage of tinkerers that led back through Edison and Tesla to da Vinci, all the way to whichever caveman had first decided that if he put a rock in a piece of hide, he could throw it farther.

As of this moment, he was ninety-five percent sure it would work.

Those were good enough odds for him. Hell, he’d done riskier things with the stats against him... well, no. He hadn’t. But what the hell.

Newt started a portable recorder.

“Oh eight hundred hours,” he said. “Kaiju/Human Drift Experiment. Take one.”

Newt picked up the squid cap from the tabletop. He worked it down over his head and checked the fit of the liquid-core trunk cable that led to the processor. It was solid.

Next to the chair he’d selected to be his Drift pilot’s seat was the makeshift Pons, an aggregation of cables and switches that he hoped would approximate the more polished setups in each Jaeger’s Conn-Pod. The jar of kaiju brain put him in mind of an old movie with Erich von Stroheim. He couldn’t remember the title, which irritated him momentarily until he reminded himself that he had more important things to do. He picked up the recorder again.

“Brain segment. Frontal lobe. Chances are the sample is far too damaged to Drift with. However, neural activity is still detectable.”

This was the conservative assessment. Newt’s intuition was, in fact, quite a bit more radical. He didn’t believe the brain was dead at all. It was dormant, maybe, but Newt was certain that if you stuck that brain back into a kaiju, the kaiju would get up and walk around and level Honolulu or Melbourne.

He just needed this experiment to prove his theory.

He rested his finger on the switch that would activate the neural handshake between the brain of Newt Geiszler and the kaiju brain formerly belonging to the exo-being known as... well, he didn’t know. In fact he didn’t know if the kaiju had names, or considered themselves individuals. Maybe he was about to find out.

“Unscientific aside,” he said. “Hermann, if you’re listening to this, I’m either alive and proving what I’ve just done, in which case ha! I won!”

Ungrammatical, yes. Satisfying, also yes.

“Or I’m dead,” Newt went on, “and you need to know that it’s you who drove me to this, and it’s all your fault. In which case... ha! I won. Kind of.”

He kept the recorder on and rested finger and thumb against the activation switch.

“I’m going in... five, four, three, two... One!”

Click.

***

Newt had never Drifted, so at first he didn’t know he was Drifting. He thought he was dreaming, even though in the midst of the dream his conscious mind observed— until it was blown away by the welter of sensations at the beginning of the Drift.

He was a boy. It was summer. He and his parents were on holiday, at one of the lower-Alpine resorts that aspired to be Lake Como. His mother had a concert that night. Newt felt wet sand between his toes. He swam, closed his eyes, envisioned the water around him as a matrix of flow equations. He wondered if there were fish looking at him, and what they thought
.

Oh right I’m Drifting.

His uncle’s study, where Newt had learned both music and tinkering. Gunter, we dig this, can we take it? We’ll pay you when we’re back from tour.

Gunter’s laugh, from his belly, roughened along the way by cigarettes. Uncle Gunter who gave people things before they could steal from him. The gear in his studio. A new sound, one that nobody had ever made before. Lines on a monitor danced out the data, expressing it. Ecstasy of sound and idea, endlessly dividing inside Newt’s mind.

The lake in the summer, the skies growing dark and the water surging, getting heavier and thicker

Oh no,
Newt thought, like a dreamer knowing his dream is about to become nightmare. He wasn’t looking at the lake of his childhood anymore. The scene in his mind, no human had ever seen it before. Sky turning red and the lake was a heaving sea of bio-slurry stirred and channeled into great sacs inside the sacs things moved and grew

This satisfied him and it satisfied the Precursors

The word speared its way into Newt’s consciousness and he could not fight it off.
Precursors that is not who is who is where did I get that word oh god the kaiju it’s talking to me

Looking down with mind cold and empty save for hunger to conquer, Precursors

Around them a city made of bone and flesh, bred and grown not built now dying as the world around them was dying he was one of them he was not one of them they realized they were being watched

From a sac surged a monster, slick with fluid it shambled forward the Precursor saw it and beckoned

Behind it the factory

Factory

Spread under a dying sky sacs and watchers and the churning pools from which they sprang

Like Mutavore but larger, it spread wings deformity thought the precursor dying the kaiju fell back into the bio-slurry and was absorbed another sac split and another kaiju rose from within like Mutavore but larger, it spread wings

Mother never left the lake she fell in love there and

And died

Realization shattered the intensity of the Drift and for a moment Newt had clarity.
Oh God, I understand

The kaiju died the first time around

The Precursor looked at him it looked at him and knew him they were ready this new world was ready for them they had waited a time for the world to prepare itself and now it had

They were coming now they were certain and they were coming

Pay you when we get back from tour

Another and another another another

Laughter of the Precursor from its bone belly roughened by brutal exhilaration of conquest the sound was bits and waves and

Newt

He was coming back. Was he coming back? Slowly.

was a brain Drifting in Lake Como below him fish burst from their sacs and

Newt

All those fish were probably dead from pollution acidification runoff pesticides estrogen mimics the world was dying Earth was dying, yes. But that other place, too... Their world was dying

Was that a voice calling him?
Newt!

***

“Newt!”

The world was shaking around him. No, he was shaking.

No, someone was shaking him.

Hermann. Shaking him. Also he was shaking, spasming, making sounds.

“Newt!” Hermann shouted again. He tore the squid cap off Newt’s head and slapped him hard.

Newt froze. The world fell into place around him again. He had two thoughts at once.

The first was that he had no idea how the Rangers could do this more than once. As for the second... he looked up at Hermann and said, “I was right.”

Then he slumped into unconsciousness.

***

Mako sat on the edge of her bed, music shuffling through her earbuds. She didn’t care what. Over the sound she heard the speaker feed in her quarters crackle. Tendo Choi’s voice mixed with the guitars and drum beat.

“All crews! Ready for Gipsy Danger neural test!”

There was a pop as Tendo signed off.

Mako sighed and looked around her room. A chessboard pieces scattered mid-game sat on a table. Above it, a small bookshelf stuffed with papers and books. On her desk, tactical manuals and schematic diagrams. Maps of kaiju attacks were tacked to the wall. It was the room of a singleminded person. Mako knew this and embraced it, because she was a single-minded person. Other than the tiny red shoe displayed on a shelf near her bed, everything in the room focused her on Jaegers and the practice of battle.

She was permitted no luxuries. Pentecost made sure of that. Made sure Mako got nothing for free, because he knew everyone in the Shatterdome assumed that she was his personal favorite because of what had happened in Tokyo. The shadow of Onibaba hung over Mako, and always would until the day she could make her first kill.

Everything in the room, other than the red shoes, was a testament to her determination. Everything in the room contributed to her goals of rebuilding superannuated Jaegers, learning about kaiju, and preparing herself for the day when she would at last be a Ranger.

That day, however, would not be today. Marshal Pentecost was not quite ready to let her go.

She and Raleigh Becket had a connection. Everyone in the Kwoon had seen it. They had fought evenly, fiercely, and by the end—even in that short minute—they had been on the point of being able to anticipate each other’s moves. Their styles matched. Their emotional patterns and neural structures matched. They both had something to prove. They were a perfect fit, practically born to stand side by side in the Conn-Pod of Gipsy Danger.

Still Pentecost had said no.

So she had retreated into this room, to sit among the mementoes and forge her frustration and anger into renewed determination. Her entire life was contained within this space, and all of her life’s ambitions were focused on someday being in a Jaeger Conn-Pod deploying to fight.

She lingered over the shoe. It was her reminder of the day her childhood had been destroyed, and the rest of her life preordained. Her totem. Her memorial, over which she swore remembrance and revenge.

There was a knock at the door. Mako went to answer it, anticipating a technician asking her to help prepare Gipsy Danger. She would say yes, because she was a good soldier. She would monitor the neural-handshake test and the Drift between Raleigh and the co-pilot who should have been her. She would collate data, write a report, tinker with Gipsy Danger’s systems to optimize them for a new pilot pairing. She would do this because it was her duty, but the whole time she would be aflame with resentment, ambition, and hunger.

Just like every other day.

All of this went through her mind as Mako took out her earbuds and opened the door.

Marshal Pentecost stood there.

She waited, not daring to hope.

“Mukashi no yakusoku datta yo
,” Pentecost said.
A long time ago I made you a promise.

He held a red shoe out in the palm of one hand. Mako looked at it for a long moment. She realized she was holding her breath and let it go. She bowed and accepted the shoe. As she touched it memories flooded over her but she held them back. This was not the time for dwelling in the past. It was time for the future to begin.

Then, in English, Pentecost said, “Suit up.”

RALEIGH WENT THROUGH THE SUITING PROCEDURE
from memory, with Tendo assisting remotely and a pair of techs doing the hands-on work. It all came back to him almost instantly—it hadn’t changed much. The drivesuits sure had, though. The new model was black and sleek—a long way from the one Raleigh had worn on his last mission.

By the time he had the drivesuit on and was stepping onto the motion rig in the Conn-Pod, he felt like the last five years were an illusion. The same console spawned the same HUD from crossed particle streams out of the same holoprojectors. It had never been any different. That feeling wouldn’t last, and he didn’t want it to, but he was gratified to know that he hadn’t forgotten how to be a Ranger.

This was where he belonged.

When he hit his mark on the platform, a control arm descended with his helmet. It slotted into place on the suit collar, and he heard a series of clicks and pings as the helmet’s systems activated and interfaced with the neural feeds coming out of the suit.

“Good to go,” he said. “Can you hear me, Tendo?”

“Five by five,” came Tendo’s voice. A lover of outdated slang, was Tendo Choi. Just like outdated haircuts and way retro clothing.