Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization (19 page)

It hit him then, the kind of
duh
moment that Newt had when he missed something. He was so smart that missing anything made him feel stupid. He wasn’t just looking for particular glyphs. He was looking for those
particular
glyphs that would only show up in the light of a luma lamp.

Why had Pentecost not just told Newt this? Because he figured Newt was smart enough to come to that conclusion on his own. Which was true.

Okay, then, minor and self-inflicted obstacle out of the way, Newt got on with finding the glyphs in question. He played the luma lamp around the area, up the wall of the building closest to the corner. Nothing. Then he tried the sidewalk, on the theory that maybe glyphs would be painted here and there like breadcrumbs leading him to the mysterious Hannibal Chau. He didn’t see anything.

Time to broaden the search parameters, then. He shone the lamp’s beam around everything on the corner: a trash can, a couple of boxes full of free newspapers, the traffic signs.

Ah.

There it was, on the one-way sign pointing down an alley that ran perpendicular to the main road, either Fong or Tull, heading in the direction of the kaiju’s arching ribcage.

Newt walked down the alley. Like most of Hong Kong—especially the older parts like Kowloon, and even the parts of Kowloon that only looked old because they were built after the kaiju attack—this alley wasn’t just back doors. There were plenty of storefronts and houses. The distinction between streets and alleyways wasn’t always relevant here. People were watching Newt and he had a feeling some of them did not have his best interests at heart. He wished he had made an effort to learn Chinese... but then, which damn language did you learn?

He played the luma lamp here and there, on doorframes and signposts and the edges of windowsills. A couple of times he shone it right at a visible glyph, on the off chance that Hannibal Chau would be hiding in plain sight.

Eventually the kaiju symbol lit up on the storefront of a small apothecary.

Figures,
Newt thought.
A guy like Hannibal Chau who makes his living from kaiju parts, where else would he do his business?

He entered the store and caught the attention of an old Chinese guy grinding some kind of paste with a mortar and pestle.

“Want some bone powder?” the man asked.

“Bone... what? No,” Newt said. “Why would I?”

“Male potency,” the old guy said with a knowing leer. “Guaranteed real. I harvest it. I take it.”

From kaiju,
Newt realized. The old guy was proud of being one of the bold souls who dug into the acidic, lethal kaiju corpses. Newt wasn’t sure that was something to be proud of, but it did take guts. Maybe not as much guts as it took to Drift with a kaiju brain, but still. You had to respect an old guy like this who—

Wait a minute,
Newt thought.
This guy thinks I need bone powder for potency?
Now he was irritated.

“Guaranteed? Whoa, no.”

He took another step forward and held the orange piece of paper where the old guy could see it while he stayed bent over whatever he was grinding in the mortar. The old guy looked up. His expression changed minutely.

“I’m looking for Hannibal Chau,” Newt said.

The old guy walked past him to the front of the store. He locked the door and flipped a sign around. Then he beckoned Newt over to a small shelf. He touched a mechanism somewhere on the shelf, triggering a set of hidden doors that slid open to reveal a wall of shelves lined with jars. The fluid suspension in the jars was backlit in amber, silhouetting the various kaiju samples within.

“Good luck,” the old guy said as Newt’s jaw dropped open.

That set of shelves slid aside, revealing a second set. Newt’s mouth dried up and he thought he might be having a heart attack. Then that second set slid aside, revealing a third, and Newt was no longer certain he was living on a fallen Earth. The third shelf slid aside to reveal what Newt could only consider paradise.

Stunned, Newt stepped through the doorway into Hannibal Chau’s hideaway.

It was bigger than the apothecary out front, but still a lot smaller than, say, Newt’s side of the lab he shared with Hermann. The room was lined with shelves stuffed with various bits of kaiju: lymph nodes the size of basketballs, tiny glands and nerve bundles, slices of organs, bits of skin and carapace, jars of liquids distilled from vitreous humor, and Hannibal Chau only knew what else.

Farther back in the room was a multiracial group of flashy tough guys with dead eyes: Chau’s muscle. They were keeping watch over a group of workers at a pair of long tables, peeling and chopping and slicing pieces of kaiju like prep cooks before the opening of a restaurant. They showed no expression and did not speak.

“Oh, my God,” Newt said, peering excitedly at the shelves. “This is heaven!” He couldn’t help himself. “Lymph nodes from a Category II! A gall bladder, in mint condition!”

Nobody seemed to care that he was there. The workers kept their heads down, the tough guys leaned up against the stair railing watching them and making conversation in Chinese. Newt headed for a fish tank full of crab-like creatures.

“Kaiju skin parasites,” he breathed, as if witnessing something holy. “I’ve never seen them alive. They’re always dead by the time I get to a site. I thought—”

“Not if you bathe them in ammonia,” one of the tough guys said. Newt looked over at him with a special Geiszler Conversational Riposte in mind, and then completely forgot what he was going to say.

He was a big guy, this goon, and his voice was all whiskey and broken glass. But that’s not what caught Newt’s attention. This guy wore a dark-red suit cut like he was on his way to see Cab Calloway at the Cotton Club in 1938. His shoe uppers were plated with overlapping scales of pure gold, giving each of his steps a slight jingle. His teeth were customized with a variety of metals adorned with various patterns. He wore sunglasses with leather membranes around the lenses that turned them into goggles, and the combined value of his jewelry and personal adornments would have bought the entire building that Newt’s family had lived in near Boston.

The goon appeared to enjoy Newt’s surprise. He stepped toward him.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“Oh, uh, I’m looking for Hannibal Chau,” Newt said. “I was told he’s here.”

“Who wants to know?”

“Well,” Newt said. He’d been debating how much to tell Chau’s underlings, and for the sake of Pentecost’s project he’d decided to play it close to the vest. “I can’t really say.”

He heard a snicking noise and the thug made a motion too fast for Newt to follow, but it ended up with the tip of a butterfly knife tickling the inside of one of his nostrils.

“Stacker Pentecost sent me!” Newt said quickly.

The guy studied Newt’s face for a moment and then relented, pushing him back a step and stowing the butterfly knife.

It didn’t take Newt long to see through the whole charade.
Oh,
he thought.
Stupid. I was so distracted by the kaiju parts I didn’t spare any focus for the humans. So typical.

“So... you’re Hannibal Chau?” he asked, even though he already knew the answer.

Pentecost had described Chau as a big white guy with coarse features and a scrub of salt-and-pepper hair. Some kind of big scar on the left side of his face. Brash and informal in demeanor, not deliberately cruel but also not averse to cruelty if it would make him a buck. Now that Newt had decided to pay attention to the other members of his species in the room, it was pretty clear that he should have known who he was from the beginning.

This is why I was never actually in the military,
Newt thought.

“You like the name?” Chau said with a half-smile. “I took it from my favorite historical figure and my second favorite Szechuan restaurant in Brooklyn.”

“Your favorite historical figure is Hannibal?” Newt had a hard time believing this. “You know he was a political and financial reformer, right? That’s why the Romans kept after him and why he kept fighting them. He ran all over Asia Minor until the Romans forced him into exile, then he poisoned himself.”

“So you’re a historian,” Chau said. “You want me to know you’re smart, okay, I get it. Now tell me what you want before I gut you like a pig and feed you to the skin louse.”

Newt opened his mouth and started talking.

“We’ve, um, done business before,” he said. “I’m Newt Geiszler, one of the leads on Kaiju Science for PPDC. I’m sure I’ve made some purchases from you.”

“If you’ve made ’em anywhere between Manila and Sapporo, yeah, you dealt with me,” Chau said. “So Pentecost sent you? What’s he want?”

“That’s, um, classified,” Newt said. Chau’s hand dropped toward the pocket the knife had come out of and Newt said, “Okay. Okay. I’ll tell you. But not with so many people around. Where’s there a, um... a place we can do business?”

HE DIDN’T WANT TO EAT, BUT RALEIGH KNEW THAT
a guy with his responsibilities and workout schedule needed nutrition to stay on top of his game. Plus he was still amazed at the kind of grub available in Hong Kong. So after spending the afternoon in the gym, he showered and headed down to the mess hall.

The minute he walked in, he knew that the disastrous test from that morning had changed his status with the other teams. Before, he’d been an unknown quantity. He had kaiju kills on his record, and a bit of a reputation because he’d gotten Gipsy Danger back to shore on his own after losing Yancy and taking Knifehead out. That kind of battlefield history went a long way with other Jaeger crews.

But they were also a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately kind of crowd, and to them, Raleigh could see, his failure this morning had pretty much erased whatever standing he’d earned in the early years of the Kaiju War. Nobody greeted him. The kitchen staff put food on his plate silently. He walked along the tables and the people who didn’t turn their backs on him just stared, daring him to sit near them.

So this is how it’s going to be,
he thought.
Okay. I work better with a chip on my shoulder, and you guys are all carving me a nice big one
.

Looking around, he saw Mako, also carrying a tray and being subjected to the collective shunning. Even Gipsy Danger’s maintenance team huddled at a table avoiding eye contact with her and Raleigh.

He walked up to her.

“Let’s get out of here.”

It was technically against the rules to take trays out of the mess hall, but at this point it didn’t seem like had much to lose. They headed for Gipsy Danger’s repair area and sat on the gantry, eating in silence. Technicians went about their business on the Jaeger, finishing the run of tests Pentecost had ordered and getting the Jaeger fully fit for battle.

And,
Raleigh thought,
ready for whoever was going to be Gipsy Danger’s next pilot team.
Pentecost hadn’t grounded him, but Raleigh didn’t think any of the other candidates would be nearly as good as Mako in the field. Pentecost knew very well how he felt and might install a new pairing, just to avoid the problem of Raleigh corrupting the neural handshake with resentment and distraction.

“I am ashamed about today,” Mako said eventually, looking at Gipsy Danger.

“So am I,” Raleigh said. He pointed down at the technicians. “They’re trying to figure out what went wrong, but nothing did. You had one of the strongest machine-pilot handshakes I’ve ever seen.”

He was still feeling it, the post-Drift hangover. He could smell the dust of Tokyo stinging in young Mako’s nose. He could hear the sound of Onibaba’s pincers dragging across the pavement. In a non-sensory kind of way, if that was possible, he also remembered the way Gipsy Danger had responded to Mako. Like they knew each other... which, given how long Mako had worked on the Mark III Restoration Project, wasn’t too much of a stretch. Raleigh thought again of the stories he’d heard in the Academy, of Jaegers moving in tune with their Rangers even after the neural handshake had broken. He thought of how he and Yancy had always felt the post-Drift hangover, and how he was feeling it now.

Mako must have been feeling it too. She looked emptied out, shocked by the persistence of Raleigh’s loss in her mind. Could she feel Yancy too, an echo of him, because she had Drifted with Raleigh? How far did it go?