Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization Mass Market Paperback (33 page)

He reached in the direction of the self-destruct icon, but instead touched the button next to it. EJECT. With a hiss of escaping gases and a series of metallic bangs, the control arm extending from the main junction of the motion-capture rig to Mako’s boot interfaces lifted up, tipping her back until she was lying supine on the control arm itself. From the Conn-Pod’s ceiling, an escape module assembly lowered and constructed itself around Mako, swallowing her up entirely in a second. Without another command from Raleigh, the escape module blasted up through the top of the Conn-Pod, through a circular aperture that irised open, revealing an airlock. Mako shot into it and the Conn-Pod aperture sealed itself. With a slight bang, Raleigh heard the external port open. He tracked her for a moment on the HUD, shooting straight up through the ocean water trapped in the Throat of the Breach.

They were still in the real world, or close enough to it that he thought he’d shot her back up into it. The module would do the rest after that. All he had to do was fall; all Mako had to do was float, just for a little while.

Raleigh had been holding his breath the whole time since he’d stopped talking. He couldn’t do it much longer. He reconnected his oxygen line and took a deep breath.

Then he touched the self-destruct icon.

WARNING, the holo flashed. MALFUNCTION. MANUAL ACTIVATION REQUIRED!

***

In the LOCCENT, data from Gipsy Danger had slowed to a trickle as it fell deeper into the Breach.

“What the hell is going on?” Herc demanded.

“The trigger is offline,” Tendo said. “He has to do it by hand.”

“We’ve got an ejection,” Gottlieb said from another workstation.

“We what?” Tendo couldn’t believe it. The countdown hadn’t started. “It must be an error. No way Raleigh Becket gets this far and then bails. I don’t believe it.”

Then the last bits and bytes of data from Gipsy Danger stopped.

***

Raleigh unsnapped himself from the control harness, released his boots from the platform, and struggled across the floor of the Conn-Pod. Outside Gipsy Danger’s windows were colors no human had ever seen. Looking at them hurt Raleigh’s head. He remembered to breathe. Gipsy Danger tumbled, banging Raleigh around the cockpit interior. The manual self-destruct switch was all the way on the other side, hard to get to. You had to mean it.

Raleigh did.

He forced his way across the floor, breathing hard, every neuron that wasn’t keeping Gipsy Danger operational focused on the individual motions of his muscles. He had to skirt the edge of a circular hole in the floor, a combined ventilation shaft and gyroscope stabilizer column assembly. It went down the length of Gipsy Danger’s neck into her torso, feeding fresh air into the reactor circulator. Its walls were divided into levels of spinning sensors that together formed the spine—so to speak—of Gipsy Danger’s three-axle awareness. Each of those levels spun in a different direction at a slightly different speed. If Raleigh fell in there, he wouldn’t survive the whole drop to the outer casing of the reactor chamber. He scooted carefully, pain screaming in his arm and leg, focused only on crossing the distance and keeping solid floor under his hands and knees.

He got to the switch.

Something happened to gravity. He started to float. Then he thumped back onto the deck near the motion-capture rig, farther away than he had been. Gipsy Danger tumbled and Raleigh nearly slid into the stabilizer assembly. He caught himself on the edge and scrabbled for toeholds, breathing hard and trying to keep his eyes and mind focused on the task.

Blow the reactor. Save the world.

He hung on the edge, with spinning stabilization rails ticking against the toes of his boots. Bit by bit he got himself over the brink again.

Staying low, because Gipsy Danger was having trouble keeping upright in her freefall, Raleigh army-crawled the rest of the way across the deck to the hatch protecting the manual reactor override switch.

He spun the hatch’s lock and hauled it open. Gipsy Danger rocked and swayed in the energies of the Breach. Something was funny in one of his eyes and he wondered if it was bloodshot. Maybe going to the Anteverse, experiencing it from a human perspective, just did that. Raleigh blinked the thought away. He had more immediate problems. He pulled the extending column holding the override switches up out of its well under the hatch. It was a two-part process. First he turned a couple of toggles to match the visual cues on the switchplate. Then he flipped the switch.

A display on the switch column started counting down. 1:00... :59... :58...

Raleigh started the long trek back across the Conn-Pod, where the HUD was mimicking the countdown. :48... :47... :46...

Motion by motion. He reminded himself to breathe. :35... :34... :33... Around him, Gipsy Danger’s noncritical systems started to shut down. Plasma cannons offline. Sword offline. Gross motor offline. Raleigh monitored each one, keeping only what was necessary. :22... :21... :20... The rest of the Jaeger’s energy built up in the reactor. He got to his harness and buckled in so he could start the escape pod process. :12... :11... :10...

:04...

It can’t have happened that fast,
he thought.

Outside Gipsy Danger, the Breach gave way to the Anteverse. Raleigh watched as a series of membranous gates opened, the last glottal sequence that allowed him entry to the Anteverse. Each membrane irised or slotted open, allowing Gipsy Danger and the bisected half of Raiju passage, as well as the scorched and blood-flecked remains of the giant Slattern.

And all in an eyeblink, the entirety of the Anteverse washed through Raleigh, his every sense overwhelmed with the wrongness, the utter alienness.

A great city made of flesh and bone and organ, grown and made over millions of years. The center of everything the Precursors had built, the last gasping remnants of a planet they had come to from somewhere else and somewhere else before that. They had drained it of everything they could use and now if they could not move on they would die, here in this city that spanned from horizon to horizon under an aging sun that smudged pale and dim across a sick and smoky sky. A hundred million years and more they had waited, the Precursors and their soldiers who dwarfed even Slattern, who made Gipsy Danger look like a child’s toy.

Over it all, the Anteverse side of the Breach, held in a gantry of magnetic force surrounded by biomechanical engines that pulsed in time to the Breach’s oscillations, supported by machine-organs whose nerves led invisibly through the substrata of the Anteverse’s great and dying city to the places where the Precursors did their work, sorting, breeding, blending, building.

Gipsy Danger was just emerging from it, slowly, in a wash of energies that painted the nearer structures of the city in colors for which Raleigh had no names. The Jaeger fell slowly, as if still falling through water, from the Breach fully into the Anteverse. Raleigh looked out over an endless landscape of bone bridges, bone roads, rivers and lakes of bioslurry, buildings like exoskeletons, carapaces, within which pulsed organs.

The Precursors looked up from their work.

They stared at Raleigh and he saw they were afraid. The Breach was at the center of their civilization.

Goddamn well better be afraid,
he thought.
You killed my brother
.

The Precursors’ fear radiated through the city on nerves built into its streets, with endings in each and every kaiju. They looked up at Gipsy Danger and snarled their fearful hunger.

:03...

Raleigh reached out. Wrong arm. He focused.

Not after all this
, he thought.
No
.

You killed my brother.

:02...

He felt the Precursors in his mind, not understanding. Through Gipsy Danger’s cranial windows, he saw the Precursors looking at him.

:01...

He hit the EJECT button.

IN THE LOCCENT, TENDO CHOI STOOD STARING
at the Breach graphic, with its trumpet-shaped mouths on either end of the long narrow passage in the middle. There was no signal from Gipsy Danger. Around him stood Newt and Gottlieb, Herc, and all the rest of the command techs. Nobody spoke. Even Max looked up because all of the humans were looking up.

It seemed like it had been a long time since Gipsy Danger had entered the Throat and vanished. Tendo started to think again what he had thought from the beginning, which was that this whole bomb-the-Breach idea was noble but doomed.

Then the electromagnetic signature of the Breach changed. At first Tendo Choi thought another kaiju was coming through. The intensification pattern looked like that... but it grew until the energy discharge outstripped any kaiju passage by a factor of a thousand.

And just as quickly, it dwindled away to nothing. On the display, the physical structure of the Breach disintegrated, swirling away into random sparks.

“The Breach has collapsed!” an officer shouted.

The LOCCENT erupted in cheers, and tears of exhausted relief. Newt and Gottlieb embraced, and Gottlieb even consented to a high-five. The ranks of techs behind them jumped and shouted. Tendo couldn’t blame them. After Hong Kong, he hadn’t thought they could win either.

But they had.

Herc cut through it all.

“The pods,” he said. “Do we have the pods?”

Tendo looked back at the feed from Gipsy Danger’s subsystems.

“One,” he said. “Just emerging. Full oxygen, occupant vital signs strong and stable...” He paused, waiting, then admitted, “No sign of the second one.”

“Send the choppers,” Herc said.

***

The Pacific sky was high and blue and visibility was unlimited south of Guam, over the deepest waters on Earth. Super Sikorskys swept in a search pattern over a grid centered on the spot directly above the Breach. One of them heeled over as its pilot spotted an escape pod breaking the surface. It was not much bigger than an ornate coffin, a steel-and-polycarbonate shell containing a Jaeger pilot and a small amount of oxygen, ringed with floats that drove it to the surface... or, in case of an aerial release, acted as shock absorption when the pod fell to earth.

The pod rolled over and settled in the waves, green tracing dye spreading in an irregular patch around it. Its hatch popped open and a plume of vapor escaped as the pressurized dry air inside met the humid Pacific atmosphere.

Mako Mori hoisted herself up onto the top of the pod, rocking with the motion of the waves caused by the pod’s surfacing. She blinked in the sunlight and looked around, scanning the horizon in all directions.

She was alone.

One of the Sikorskys closed on her, approaching low and fast. She looked up at it, then resumed her search of the still seas around her. There was an eerie calm. No wind, no waves, the only sound the small slap of the water on the pod’s hull and the approaching beat of helicopter rotors.

Then she saw the second pod breach and roll over and spill its own canister of dye.

Mako cried out and plunged into the water, swimming toward the second pod. It was scorched and dented. Its hatch had not opened. Under the beat of the approaching Sikorskys she reached the pod and hauled herself up over its floats to the hatch, which had not opened automatically. There were manual latches on the outside and she snapped them open one by one, flinging the hatch open and leaning over to look inside.

Raleigh was there, silent and still.

She leaned in and down, shaking him, slapping his face. Still Raleigh didn’t move. Mako pulled him upright and hugged him, remembering how he had cradled her in the terrible aftermath of their first Drift together.