Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization (5 page)

“Jeez,” the guy with the roll said. “What about the good news?”

Miles held up three red ration cards, fanned out in one hand like he was about to do a card trick.

“I got three new openings... top of the Wall,” he said.

The guy with the roll took one immediately.

“I got no choice,” he said to whoever would listen. “Five mouths to feed.”

The second red ration card disappeared, but there didn’t appear to be much interest in the third. Duty on top of the Wall was about the most dangerous work you could do this side of kaiju dentistry. That was why you got the better ration cards, but dead men didn’t eat.

“No takers?” Miles called out.

There was a pause. Then Raleigh walked up to him and reached out.

“I’ll do it.”

Miles turned and held out the card before he’d registered who had spoken.

“Oh,” he said. “Flyboy. Still sticking around? You sure you got the cojones to work way up there?”

Raleigh didn’t take the bait.

“I’m comfortable with heights,” he said evenly

Miles didn’t give him the card.

“Is that right? Well shut up and make sure you don’t swan dive. I got nobody left to mop you up. Comprende?”

Raleigh took the card and followed the rest of the up-top crew to the elevator. He could feel Miles staring at him as he walked.

***

Feet spaced across two parallel beams fifty feet above the framed part of the Wall and a hell of a lot farther from the ground, Raleigh welded the last angle brace from those parallel beams to a vertical one that stood another thirty feet above them. It was the highest point of the Wall. If you looked south, you could see the same thing all the way to the horizon: the Wall, different parts of it in various stages of completion depending on terrain and crew availability.

If you looked north, the same, all the way to Nome and the North Slope. No kaiju had ever appeared that far north, but it didn’t do any good to only build part of a wall. If it had been up to the brain trust behind the Wall project, it would have extended across the Arctic coast all the way to Newfoundland.

Raleigh finished the weld and waited for it to cool so he could get a look at it. Solid. He kicked the brace, just out of superstition, and clipped himself into a safety harness.

He jumped off the edge of the Wall and enjoyed the view for the fifty-foot drop down to the main up-top materials staging area, a steel platform bristling with crane arms. There, the chatty guy who liked rolls was trimming the edge of a beam. His name, Raleigh had discovered unwillingly, was Tommy.

“You’re Raleigh, right?” Tommy said as Raleigh unclipped and came over to help prep the beam so it could finish its trip to the top.

Here it comes,
Raleigh thought. He nodded.

“Is it true what they say, that you used to ride a Jaeger?”

Not ride exactly,
Raleigh thought. But he didn’t contest the point. He nodded again.

“And then you crashed one?” Tommy went on.

For the third time Raleigh nodded.

Tommy whistled. “Don’t those things cost something like sixty billion dollars each?”

Because he couldn’t stand to just keep nodding, Raleigh said, “Never got the bill.”

Tommy stared at him like he wasn’t sure whether Raleigh was joking. For a while they worked together in silence. They got the beam lashed to a crane and as it lifted away to the highest reach of the Wall.

“So how’d you end up in a hole like this?” Tommy asked.

Raleigh had been hoping that Tommy would shut up. He looked over at him and said, “I love the hours. And the silence.”

Nodding and completely missing the point, Tommy said, “Oh, me too. Love it. Some people just don’t get it. They yap and yap and they don’t know when to stop...”

Then he started talking about his kids. Raleigh sighed and flipped down his safety visor. He wouldn’t be able to hear Tommy over the sound of the welding torch... he hoped.

***

That night they did what they always did, and stopped by the commissary to pick up the day’s rations. Raleigh was walking away from the booth where a bored functionary stamped cards when he heard the word “kaiju”. He looked up.

The preferred dining area for the Wall crew was a tent with a bunch of tables in it, where the crew drank beer, ate bad food, and watched the world slowly come to an end on screens around them. Now, Raleigh’s food was slightly less bad because of the red ration card.

He ducked into the tent, as usual the TV was on, and a chirpy talking head was saying, “Less than an hour ago, a Category III kaiju breached the Sydney barrier.” In the middle of the sentence, shaky cell-phone footage of the event replaced the image of the reporter. A scrolling feed along the bottom of the screen identified the kaiju as Mutavore.

Raleigh stopped and watched. The kaiju tore through the wall built around the perimeter of Sydney Bay, hopscotching islands along an artificial archipelago that had been built in order to keep kaiju out. Aircraft fired missiles at it, as they always did, and Mutavore ignored them, as kaiju always did. It slogged through the harbor, swamping ferries and pleasure boats on its way to the city.

“That thing...” said a voice. Raleigh looked over and saw that even here, he couldn’t avoid Tommy. “It went through the Wall like it was nothing.”

Just like Stacker Pentecost had always said,
Raleigh thought. Pentecost hadn’t crossed his mind in a long time. Raleigh lived in the moment. What other choice did he have? In the past, there was mourning. In the future, an endless stretch of the Wall.

The TV reporter kept talking.

“This is the third such attack in less than two months. Two more Jaegers were destroyed.”

Cued by the change in topic, the feed cut to a Jaeger sinking in the coastal shallows, its torso ripped open and flames roaring in the open ruins of its head. Raleigh recognized it as Echo Saber. The broadcast cut again, to Mutavore hammering away at another fallen Jaeger, beating it into scrap with the Sydney Opera House in the background. Raleigh knew this doomed Jaeger, too: Vulcan Specter, a Mark III just like Gipsy Danger, launched the same year. He couldn’t suppress a shiver.

Then the news anchor’s tone brightened.

“But the Australian Jaeger, Striker Eureka, a Mark V piloted by father and son team Herc and Chuck Hansen, finally took the beast down.”

At the mention of the pilots, service portraits of the Hansens flashed across the screen, quickly replaced by a ground-level view of Striker Eureka and Mutavore going at it. Raleigh had never been inside a Mark V. None had existed when he was a Ranger. He couldn’t help being a little bit awed at Striker Eureka’s speed and power. It could have broken Gipsy Danger over its knee. Raleigh felt a little bit envious, but mostly what he felt was the anger and guilt he’d carried with him for the past five years. If he’d had one of those, Knifehead wouldn’t have lasted thirty seconds... and Yancy would still be alive.

He’d fought with Striker Eureka once, in Manila. Together they’d taken down a big Category 4. That was Gipsy Danger’s last engagement before Knifehead.

On the TV screen, Striker Eureka lit Mutavore up with a rocket barrage from short range. The rockets dug into the kaiju’s carapace and detonated inside it, blowing away huge chunks of flesh and shell. Mutavore staggered and Striker Eureka finished it off with some kind of bladed weapon. The dying kaiju slumped and then toppled over sideways at an angle from the Sydney waterfront deeper into the city, crushing an entire block of condos and tourist shops as it fell.

Before concrete dust and smoke obscured the monster, Raleigh saw it hit the ground hard enough that the impact bounced parked cars into the air—the feed was nearly overwhelmed with alarm sirens. The dying kaiju’s blood, bright blue and as corrosive as any substance found in nature, smoked and sizzled its way across the asphalt and concrete.

The feed cut to overhead footage, probably from a helicopter. Raleigh had seen similar shots before, but he was stunned every time by just how big the kaiju were. The immense carcass lay stretched out across three blocks. Between it and the water was nothing but rubble and fire.

“Hey, who wants to hear a joke?” a voice said and Raleigh immediately knew it was Miles, and by the slight slur and hoarse tone it was obvious that Miles had devoted his ration stamps for the day to beer. “What do Jaegers and my marriage have in common?”

Raleigh turned and stared at him. Miles saw him and kept right on going.

“They both seemed like a good idea at the time, now they ain’t working, and they’re both still costing a fortune!” Raleigh started to move. Enough was enough. You insulted the Jaeger program, you were insulting Yancy’s memory, is how he saw it. But before he took a step he felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Hey,” Tommy said. “It’s not worth it, man.”

Maybe he was right. Miles winked at Raleigh across the room, as if to say:
Come on, flyboy. You want to go? Let’s do it. But you won’t have a job tomorrow. So I can say whatever I want.
Which was true.

Raleigh sat down and shuffled through his ration cartons looking for whatever was least bad. He registered the sound of a helicopter and at first thought it was coming from the TV, but on the screen a reporter was interviewing Herc and Chuck Hansen. They still looked exactly how Raleigh remembered them. Herc was rugged, straightforward, no-nonsense. The kind of guy whose every motion and look said
Get to the point.
Chuck was looser, always with a chip on his shoulder about everything, eager to prove himself even to people who didn’t care. At least that was Raleigh’s recollection. He hadn’t known them really, just been on a couple of training exercises with them and then the Yamarashi drop.

No. He wasn’t going to think about that. He wasn’t a Ranger any more.

“Sergeant Hansen,” the reporter was saying, catching Herc as he walked somewhere on the grounds of the Sydney LOCCENT...

Wait,
Raleigh thought. Couldn’t be. The Sydney Shatterdome was decommissioned. Must have been some other borrowed Pan-Pacific Defense Corps facility, letting the Jaegers stage there out of courtesy. Or pity.

“With the loss of more Jaegers today, do you think this supports the theory the Jaeger program isn’t a worthy defense tactic anymore? Should the program end?” The reporter glanced at her cameraman to make sure he had the right angle.

Herc looked at her like she had just crawled out of the sewer.

“We stopped the kaiju, yeah?” The reporter nodded and started to speak, but he cut her off. “Then I have no further comment.”

He started walking again but his son hadn’t yet learned Herc’s restraint.

“I do,” Chuck said, leaning into the camera view. “We bagged our tenth kill today. Kind of a record.”

Herc started to pull Chuck away, but the reporter saw her opening and took it.

“You’re still keeping track at a time like this?” she said, putting on a show of fake incredulity for her viewers.

“What else is there to do, sweetheart?” Chuck shot back, adding a wink.

That was enough for Raleigh. He turned away from the TV and saw Tommy.

“Say, Raleigh,” Tommy said. “If you could help out, you know, with a few extra rations... cereal, maybe? I got five mouths to feed.”

“Take the cereal,” Raleigh said, flipping boxes at Tommy. “But cut the crap, Tommy. You don’t have any kids.”

Unfazed, Tommy said, “Who can, in a world like this?”

Good question,
thought Raleigh. He went outside into the snow, preferring the cold to watching the Jaeger program get carved up by media vultures and people like Miles, who couldn’t have made the Ranger cut if he’d had his whole lifetime to try.

The helicopter he’d heard was just touching down on the other side of the briefing area where Miles handed out daily assignments. Raleigh recognized it as a Sikorsky, a small single-rotor transport, but there was too much snow and blowing crap to see any insignia on it. Raleigh watched. It had been a while since he was in a helicopter. Five years, as a matter of fact—and just as he had that thought, he recognized the figure of Marshal Pentecost emerging from the storm kicked up by the Sikorsky’s rotors.

“Mr. Becket,” Pentecost said, as if they’d planned the meeting an hour before.

Raleigh nodded. “Marshal. Looking sharp.” It was true. Pentecost was wearing a tailored suit under a fine-looking topcoat, all shades of navy blue and charcoal except for the pale blue shirt. The only thing different was there were no stars on Pentecost’s collar.

Pentecost shook Raleigh’s hand and they got clear of the rotor wash from the waiting helicopter.

“It’s been a long time,” he said.

“Five years, four months,” Raleigh said. He didn’t add the days and hours, though he could have.

Pentecost thought about this.

“Seems like longer.”

“No,” Raleigh said. “It’s been five years, four months.”

Pentecost nodded.

He understands,
Raleigh thought.
He’s lost people, too.
Pentecost had put in his time in a Jaeger and he knew what it was like to soldier on in the midst of losing people you cared about. Not a brother, but Raleigh wasn’t self-centered enough to go around thinking his losses were worse than anyone else’s just because they were his. But he also knew that he was the only man alive who had survived the death of his co-pilot. That set Raleigh Becket apart. Brother or not, two people who Drifted together achieved a kind of intimacy that didn’t exist in normal human relationships.

When you had suffered that kind of a loss, time was exactly what it was. It didn’t move faster, and it never seemed to pass too slowly. That was one of the worst things about losing Yancy, the way it had doomed Raleigh to experience every single moment of time without being able to fool himself into just letting it slip away. He couldn’t forget. He had to be present in every moment to remember.

“May I have a word?” Pentecost said, formally

It seemed to Raleigh that they already were. He nodded anyway.

Pentecost looked around, up at the Wall and then back to the collection of tents and temporary barracks, surrounded by heavy equipment for moving earth and steel.