Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization Mass Market Paperback (31 page)

Pentecost saw it too.

“Wait. It’s stopping. Why is it stopping?” he asked.

“I don’t give a damn,” Chuck said. “We’re a hundred meters from the jump!”

They kept moving, approaching the edge of the cliff. When they were three long strides from their final jump, chaos erupted in the LOCCENT.

***

Newt and Gottlieb stormed into the LOCCENT disheveled, out of breath, and stinking like kaiju guts.

“It’s not going to work! It’s not going to work!” Newt shouted.

Herc held up both hands and the two scientists skidded to a halt in front of him.

“What’s not going to work?” he asked.

“Blowing up the Breach!” Newt panted.

Herc looked to Gottlieb for confirmation.

“Newt’s right!” Gottlieb said.

For a moment everyone in the LOCCENT was speechless. Newt and Gottlieb had agreed on something. Stacker Pentecost’s voice came over the comm from the ocean floor two thousand miles away.

“LOCCENT, Scunner has broken off pursuit. We are less than one hundred meters from the jump location to the Breach. What’s the problem there?”

Newt ran to Tendo’s workstation so Pentecost would be able to see him.

“Sir, even though the Breach is open, you still won’t be able to get a bomb through! There was another reason DNA strands were repeated from kaiju to kaiju!”

Gottlieb picked up when Newt ran out of breath.

“The Breach genetically reads the kaiju... like a barcode! It only lets them pass if they scan correctly!”

“You have to fool the Breach into thinking you have the same code!” Newt cut in.

Tendo watched readouts from Gipsy Danger’s containment and reactor systems. The fight with Raiju was putting a lot of strain on the old Jaeger. He had a bad feeling that if they didn’t get the payload delivered pretty damn quick, there wasn’t going to be any delivery at all... and if the Kaiju Science squints were right, their delivery plan was DOA.

From Striker Eureka there was stunned silence.

Then Chuck asked, “How the hell are we supposed to do that?”

Newt and Gottlieb looked at each other. They’d worked something out, and Tendo was afraid he knew what it was.

“You have to lock up with a kaiju,” Gottlieb said, confirming Tendo’s worst suspicion. “Then ride it into the Breach and detonate the payload!”

There was a pause as the implications of this sank in. Before, they had all believed that there was a tiny chance some of the Rangers would survive.

Now there was none.

“Are you sure?” Pentecost asked.

Newt nodded. “Yes.”

“Well...” Gottlieb looked to his colleague.

Then both of them said, “We think.”

“You learned this...?” Pentecost trailed off, waiting for confirmation.

“We Drifted with the brain of a fetal kaiju,” Newt said. “Otachi was pregnant. Incredible. But never mind that. We know, that’s what we learned. If you don’t do this, the bomb will deflect off the Breach... and the mission will fail.”

***

Inside Striker Eureka, Pentecost and Chuck looked at each other. Chuck shrugged.

“Long odds before, anyway,” he said. “We knew it was a snake when we picked it up, as my Grams would have said.”

His words pretty much matched Pentecost’s take on the situation. They looked back at Scunner, which was swimming back and forth a hundred meters or so from Striker Eureka, keeping them pinned at the cliff’s edge. They could just barely see Gipsy Danger locked up with Raiju farther away, where the silt cloud thickened again.

An alarm on the heads-up drew their attention back from outside.

“Striker, I have a third signature emerging from the Breach,” Tendo Choi said, his voice tight with tension.

“Oh, God. I
was
right,” Gottlieb said.

“What? How big?” Pentecost asked. Striker Eureka backed a few steps away from the cliff edge, feeling turbulent currents churn up from the depths of the trench.

“Our first Category V,” Tendo said. Pentecost glanced at his face in the LOCCENT feed. He looked terrified.

Pentecost didn’t feel terrified. He knew he was going to die. The only thing that mattered to him was completing the mission first. His entire life had brought him to this point.

Something dimmed the glow of the Breach. A moment later a wall of flesh heaved over the lip of the cliff. It was three times the size of Striker Eureka, easily twice the mass of any previous kaiju.

It opened its mouth and roared, the wall of sound dislodging part of the cliff face and breaking over Striker Eureka like the blast wave of a bomb.

“My God,” Pentecost said.

From the LOCCENT there was only a stunned silence... and the filtered sounds of Mako and Raleigh as Gipsy Danger fought for her life.

“Bitch is big,” Tendo Choi said.

Pentecost’s voice came right back at him.

“Don’t use that word. Call it ‘Slattern’ if you must.”

And so it was named, the first Category V the PanPacific Defense Corps had ever encountered.

Slattern.

FIGHTING THIS DEEP UNDERWATER, AGAINST
an enemy as nimble underwater as Raiju, had Raleigh thinking that the Kwoon training course needed to add a couple more techniques to the existing fifty-two Jaeger exercises. They were just getting the hang of it, he and Mako—and she’d figured it out before he had. You had to start your moves a little earlier, rely a little more on inertia to do your work for you, because the density of the water made it impossible to change direction as fast as you could up in the sunlit, air-filled real world, where a Jaeger was designed to fight.

Raiju didn’t have this problem. It was seemingly built for submarine combat, nipping in and skipping out with a speed Gipsy Danger couldn’t hope to match. They’d done some damage to the kaiju, but it had also done some damage to them, and it was maintaining the upper hand by keeping them separated from Striker Eureka—which at that moment was backpedaling and trying to avoid the first blow from the category-busting third kaiju.

Striker Eureka was the finest piece of combat equipment humanity had ever built, and she stood absolutely no chance against something the size of this new kaiju. None.

Whoa,
Raleigh thought.
You keep your damn hopeless quitter’s thoughts out of this. You didn’t come down here to quit. You didn’t come down here to give up because the monsters got bigger.

You came down here to drop a goddamn nuke into the goddamn Breach and that’s what you’re going to do.

Was that Mako or him? He couldn’t tell.

“Move!” Mako cried.

They couldn’t move, though, because their every move was countered by Raiju, which was now clearly fighting to keep the two Jaegers separated.
Probably had been since it first engaged,
Raleigh thought.
Keep us apart, wait for the big boy—or girl—to come on in and finish us off.

Doesn’t matter,
Raleigh thought. The mission was to get Striker Eureka to the target. They’d heard the exchange between Striker and LOCCENT, even though they’d been too busy with Raiju to contribute. Now they churned toward the other Jaeger as the third kaiju slammed Striker Eureka down to the seafloor with an unstoppable blow. It followed through and landed on the Jaeger, grabbing Striker’s left arm and wrenching at it. An electrical discharge from tearing circuitry flared in the water, dissipating across the kaiju’s hide.

Chuck screamed, and for a dangerous moment Raleigh flashed back to Knifehead, to losing one of his arms.

“Don’t reach back,” Mako said. “Don’t hold on. Ride in the moment.”

He looked at her, hearing the echo of his own advice.

“Left arm offline!” Pentecost yelled over the comm. Striker Eureka was holding the kaiju’s jaws closed with one arm as it twisted and tore at the damaged limb. Raleigh glanced at the Conn-Pod feed from Striker and saw that the sensor patterns on Pentecost’s arms and chest were burning from the overload.

Yeah,
he thought.
I know that feeling too.

“We ain’t got the torque to hold on!” Chuck cried out.

Mako, anguished, pushed Gipsy Danger harder.

“It’s killing them!” she cried out.

“Time to see what this old girl can do,” Raleigh said. He spawned the Chain Sword startup on the HUD and with his other hand entered the pre-firing command code for both plasma cannons.

If they were going down, they were going down guns blazing.

Gipsy Danger pushed Raiju away. Mako ratcheted the swords into place and at the same time the water around Gipsy Danger’s forearms began to boil even at this incredible depth and pressure, as the plasma cannons started to warm up.

Raiju came at them again, but now Gipsy Danger could parry and counterstrike with the sword. Raleigh let Mako lead. She knew swords, even if she’d never fought with one seven-plus thousand meters under water. The water slowed the strokes, but not as much as he would have thought. Either the superconductivity of the blade’s surface lessened its drag, or Mako had just worked some of that ancient Mori swordmaker’s magic.

He stayed with her, adding power to her sword strokes and countering Raiju’s raking claws with Gipsy Danger’s other arm.

Who said the Moris wouldn’t have any more sword-makers,
Raleigh thought, and through the storm of the fight he felt her mind brighten with gratitude and pride.

He kept an eye on the pressure and containment readings from the surface ports they’d had to open for the I-19 batteries and the Chain Sword. Everything was doing okay so far, mostly because the heat from the charging plasma cannons was keeping too much water from getting into the compartments.

Raiju ducked back from a slash and set itself for a charge. Raleigh knew what was coming. He felt Mako understanding what he understood.

Raiju charged, jaws wide.

Gipsy Danger set herself against the charge and stuck her non-sword arm straight out, bleeding tendrils of superheated plasma into the frigid water. Raiju clamped down on Gipsy’s gauntlet and forearm, gnawing through the exterior armor. Sparks discharged through the water.

Gipsy Danger’s other gauntlet grabbed Raiju and held its head, jamming the cannon deeper. “Now!” Raleigh said.

With a wordless cry, Mako pulled the trigger.

The plasma cannon did not fire.

Raiju thrashed its head back and forth, spitting out Gipsy Danger’s mangled gauntlet and forearm. It batted away Gipsy’s other arm and scrambled back. They went after it, landing shots with the mangled gauntlet even though Mako cried out in pain at every impact. Her arm sensors were beginning to overheat, just like Pentecost’s already had. The plasma cannon was shot, Raleigh could have seen that even if the sensors hadn’t told him. The abyssal pressure had collapsed the lensing and intensification arrays that made it work, and Raiju had done the rest.

Raiju escaped them, and rocketed around in a wide arc across the seafloor, coming back for another shot at Gipsy Danger.

“Come on!” Raleigh said. As they ran toward Striker— well, limped toward Striker on a leg that wouldn’t hold much longer—he tried to close the plasma-cannon plates.

No dice. Raiju had done too much damage. Liquid-path neural arrays were holding, and Tendo’s new hyper- torque motor nodes were proving to be pretty tough, too... but none of them would last too long exposed to these kinds of temperatures and pressures. At least the reactor was holding steady. Nothing like immersion in an infinite amount of thirty-three-degree water to give you a great heat sink.

Around came Raiju, cutting off Gipsy Danger and arrowing in.

One chance,
Raleigh thought. He felt Mako understanding. Timing would be everything.

Raiju closed. Scunner broke off its patrol, sensing an advantage, and dove in toward the vulnerable Striker Eureka.

“Both kaiju are converging on Striker,” Tendo Choi said.

Yeah
, Raleigh thought.
We know
.

The giant kaiju, Slattern, bit down on Striker’s damaged arm, cracking it again before it let go and clamped down across Striker’s torso. Striker threw a punch straight down into the monster’s eye, leaving a visible dent in the orbital bone. The kaiju let go, a bubbling plume of blood gushing out into the water. Striker got free and onto her feet just in time for Scunner to land on her from another angle, torquing Striker’s good arm and biting down on the edge of Striker’s torso, where the larger kaiju had just let go.