Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization (6 page)

“You know, there used to be a Jaeger factory around here,” he said. “They made a few of the Mark Is here: Romeo Blue, Tango Tasmania.” He looked back at Raleigh. “Know what they do with Mark Is now? Melt them down for pins and girders and feed them to the Wall. Probably you’ve welded part of a Mark I in here somewhere.”

“Yeah, well, I guess they’re still helping,” Raleigh said.

Pentecost started walking and Raleigh, having nothing better to do and drawn by the Marshal’s personal gravity, went with him.

“It took me a while to find you,” Pentecost said. “Anchorage, Sheldon Point, Nome...”

“Man in my position travels with the Wall. Chasing shifts to make a living.”

“I’ve spent the past six months activating everything I can get my hands on,” Pentecost said. “There’s an old Jaeger I’m getting back online. A Mark III. I need a pilot.”

Raleigh stopped and pretended to try to remember something.

“Didn’t you have me grounded for insubordination?”

“I did,” Pentecost agreed. “But I’m a great believer in second chances, Mr. Becket. Aren’t you?”

Pentecost’s face was showing the strain of the Kaiju War. He was a little grayer, a little thinner, missing some of the vitality Raleigh remembered from his Ranger tour. Raleigh had heard that the Jaeger program was on the way out. Now Pentecost wanted him back in. What was going on here?

“I’m guessing I wasn’t your first choice,” he said.

“You were,” Pentecost said. “All the other Mark III pilots are dead.”

I bet they are,
thought Raleigh. He saw Yancy, tangled in the debris of Gipsy Danger’s Conn-Pod. He heard Yancy, crying out in Raleigh’s mind in the last moment before the neural handshake was broken. Raleigh shook his head.

“I don’t need anyone else in my head again,” he said. “I’m not a pilot. Not anymore.” He paused. “Without Yancy I have no business being one.”

He started walking back toward the tent, suddenly preferring the TV and the contempt of his fellow workers to the company of Stacker Pentecost.

“Haven’t you heard, Mr. Becket?” Pentecost called after him. “The world is ending. This is your last chance. Would you rather die here, or in a Jaeger?”

Wrong question,
Raleigh thought.

The real question was how many beers he could get with his fancy new red ration card.

***

Back under the tent, the TV was still covering the kaiju attack on Sydney. Raleigh put his card on the table, got a hole punched in it and a can of beer. The bartender glanced up and over Raleigh’s shoulder at the exact moment Raleigh heard Miles’ voice.

“Flyboy! And here I thought we might be losing you to your fancy military friend.” Raleigh turned and saw Miles right behind him, flushed and full of malice. “Oh, hey, that reminds me,” Miles went on as he went over to his table. “How many Jaegers does it take to change a light bulb? None! ’Cause these days, everybody knows they can’t change a thing.”

A switch flipped inside Raleigh. He took a step toward Miles, beer in hand.

“Easy, boy,” Miles said. “Don’t you forget I’m the one in charge around here.” He sat down and kept his eyes locked on Raleigh.

Raleigh raised his beer.

“Then let’s drink to that,” he said, and took a sip. Then he set the can down on the table in front of Miles. He had to bend over a bit to do it, and Miles clapped a hand on Raleigh’s shoulder as soon as Raleigh was within reach.

“Where’s mine?” he asked.

Raleigh didn’t miss a beat.

“That one’s yours,” he said. Then with one hand he caught the back of Miles’ head and slammed him face-first onto the beer can. Foam exploded across the table, across Miles, and across Raleigh’s work coveralls. But that was okay. He wouldn’t be needing them anymore.

Miles fell sideways out of his chair. A few of the other workers looked like they might make a move. But several were laughing. Then someone clapped, and that was what caught on. The applause spread until even the bartender put down his rag and joined in.

Time to go,
Raleigh thought. He flipped his ration card to Tommy, who was staring bug-eyed from a nearby table.

“Hey, Tommy,” he said. “Knock yourself out. Feed those kids.”

By the time he got outside, he was almost jogging, and by the time Marshal Pentecost slid the Sikorsky’s side door open, Raleigh was feeling like he couldn’t get away from the Wall fast enough.

“Change of heart?” Pentecost shouted over the thump of the rotors and the whine of the engine.

“I lost my job!” Raleigh shouted back. “How come you waited?”

Pentecost smiled. It wasn’t something he did very often.

“I figured it’s been five years, four months,” he said, a little more quietly. “Another five minutes wouldn’t hurt.”

The chopper lifted away into the storm, and Raleigh was a Ranger again.

RALEIGH’S FIRST VIEW OF THE PAN PACIFIC
Defense Corps compound in Hong Kong came through a driving rainstorm as the Sikorsky came in low and touched down on the helipad at the edge of the complex. From the air, Hong Kong looked unaffected by the Kaiju War, but Raleigh knew enough to be able to pick out the general area of Hong Kong’s Boneslum.

It sat right in the heart of Kowloon, built around the massive skeleton of the first kaiju to attack Hong Kong, and only the second kaiju the world had seen. The Hong Kong Exclusion Zone officially prohibited rebuilding and residence in that area—but this was Hong Kong. Nobody paid attention to laws where there might be a dollar to be made. In the time since the kaiju had gone down under a nuclear barrage, Kowloon had regrown over its bones, almost organically. Raleigh had never seen anything like it.

The kaiju’s corpse had absorbed some of the radiation, and then been picked clean for black-market sales. The world was full of crazy theories about the health benefits of kaiju tissue. Raleigh couldn’t tell for sure because of the rain, but it looked to him like parts of Kowloon were integrated right into the kaiju’s skeleton, and there were all kinds of weird decorations and lights on the giant skull.

There were other Boneslums, Raleigh knew. He’d seen one in Thailand, and there was a place in Japan where survivors of a kaiju assault had positioned the creature’s skull on their coastline, the way you would put an invader’s head on a stake on your city walls. Raleigh didn’t think the kaiju would care. They didn’t seem like the caring kind, about each other or about anything else.

He and Pentecost stepped out of the helicopter and crossed the helipad in the direction of what Raleigh took to be the command center. He was full of questions, and Pentecost hadn’t answered many of them on the long trip from Alaska to Hong Kong, via refueling stops in Petropavlovsk, Sapporo, and Shanghai. Which Mark III needed a pilot? Why him? Why come looking for a guy you’d first grounded and then watched walk away, after more than five years? The academies were still producing Rangers, though Raleigh knew there were fewer and fewer Jaegers for them to pilot. They were being redirected to other tasks within the PPDC, or seconded to national armed forces of member nations.

Pentecost, in fact, had said practically nothing. Great company, that guy. Same as always. Raleigh would have slept, but since Knifehead he’d discovered insomnia, so he’d stared out the window for hours, chewing over his questions. Also, a couple of times he wished he’d taken another shot at Miles, just for emphasis.

All that was behind him now, though. Here he was in Hong Kong.

Walking away from the Sikorsky, they passed a cargo helicopter with its loading bay open. A team of pilots guided a huge jar down the ramp, and in the jar—Raleigh did a double-take—was a piece of a kaiju brain. Raleigh had seen images in training seminars. The brain tissue didn’t look like human gray matter. It looked more like a giant octopus raddled with tumors and unusual fibrous extrusions. Standing off to the side of the crew were two men in white coats under rain gear. Raleigh immediately pegged them as scientists. As soon as he heard them speaking, he knew he was right.

“Easy, easy!” one of them was saying. “That’s a live specimen and important learning tool!” His inflection was Grade-A Imperious Nerd. “How would you like it if someone sloshed your brain around like that?”

“Well,” the other scientist said, in a cadence that started off German and got uptight from there, “if my brain had been removed and placed in a jar, sloshing it around would probably be the least of my worries.”

They glared at each other like an old married couple, deciding which of their ancient quarrels to restart. The kaiju brain rolled away in its jar, and behind it came two smaller jars, also filled with bits of kaiju. Raleigh added several more questions to his list.

“So this is it,” he began, by way of breaking the ice, in the hope that Pentecost would finally open up.

“Hong Kong,” Pentecost said. “The very first Jaeger station.” There was fondness in his voice. “And the last one standing.”

A young Japanese woman in some kind of uniform Raleigh didn’t recognize bowed to Pentecost and glanced at Raleigh from under her umbrella as they approached. Apparently she had been waiting for them, and Pentecost explained why, as she extended the umbrella to cover him as well.

“Mr. Becket, this is Mako Mori. She’s one of our brightest, has been for years now. She’s in charge of the Mark III Restoration Project.”

Mako bowed to Raleigh as well, not as deeply, but Raleigh was still surprised.

“Honored to meet you,” she said.

Raleigh wasn’t sure how to respond to that. Had anyone ever been honored to meet him? The thought distracted him enough that it took him a second to realize that Mako was talking to Pentecost... and another second after that to register that she was speaking in Japanese.

“I
imagined him differently,”
she said.

They waited at the door of a cargo elevator. Distant pings and groans from its shaft mingled with the sounds of machinery and the shouted conversations of the work crews back out on the helipads.

Gotcha,
Raleigh thought.

“Chigau no? Yoi ka warui ka?”
he asked with a little wink.
Different how? Better or worse?

Nobody did embarrassment like the Japanese. Mako blushed right to her hairline and bowed several times.

“My apologies, Mr. Becket,” she said in English, before switching back to Japanese.
“Takusan no koto wo kikimashita,”
she said.
I’ve heard so much about you.

He would have continued the conversation—and also tried to let her off the hook for the little linguistic gaffe— but one of the scientists from the cargo helicopter started shouting at them as the elevator door opened.

“Hold the door! Hold the door!” he cried.

Raleigh did so, and the two scientists crashed into the elevator, both dripping wet and cradling sample jars with what must have been smaller bits of kaiju organs culled from the larger holding tanks outside. The doors began to close.

“This is Dr. Geiszler,” Pentecost said, indicating the man who’d shouted. Geiszler was the kind of brash, graceless nerd who had BOY GENIUS written all over him. Raleigh recalled hearing his name during his Ranger tour... well, his first Ranger tour. At least he thought he had. The scientists all seemed the same to him.

Pentecost turned to the other man, a blonder and more stuffy variant on the lab-coat stereotype, and added, “And Dr. Gottlieb.”

“Newt
Geiszler, please,” Geiszler said. To his partner he added, “Say hello to the humans, Hermann.”

“I asked you not to refer to me by my first name around others,” Gottlieb said stiffly. “I am a doctor with over ten years of decorated experience—”

“He doesn’t get out of his cage much,” Newt said. He shifted his grip on the sample jar and the arm of his coverall rode up over a sleeve tattoo of a kaiju.

“Nice ink,” Raleigh said. “Who is that, Yamarashi?”

Newt nodded. “Good eye, though you’d have to be a moron not to recognize him.”

“Well, my brother and I took it down in 2017,” Raleigh said, keeping his voice level.
Gotcha again.
“Cut its head off, if I remember right.”