Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization (18 page)

He spoke as if he knew something they didn’t. Several things, perhaps. Raleigh didn’t care at the moment, though.

“What?” he said, challenging the Marshal. “So you’re grounding us?”

Pentecost looked him right in the eye, answering the challenge and forcing Raleigh back down.

“Not you,” he said.

Raleigh’s boiling point had already been reached once in the past ten minutes. He didn’t want to reach it again, especially not in front of Pentecost, but this was bullshit. Mako was going straight under the bus, and it wasn’t her fault. He looked over at her and saw that she was standing at perfect attention, eyes gleaming with tears she refused to shed. She threw a textbook salute.

“Permission to be dismissed, sir?” she asked.

Pentecost nodded.

“Permission granted, Miss Mori.”

Mako glanced at Raleigh, briefly. The glance communicated everything that had passed between them during the Drift. It said:
I know you and you know me and both of us know that we should be piloting Gipsy Danger together.

Then she was gone.

Raleigh could tell Pentecost was not enjoying this, but in the end it didn’t matter whether he enjoyed it or not. He was making the wrong decision and Raleigh had to make him see that.

“She has a clear connection to that Jaeger,” Raleigh said. “She has the strongest neural handshake I’ve ever felt. Even stronger—”

He caught himself. Considered what he was going to say. Decided it was true.

“Even stronger than Yancy.”

Pentecost did not look impressed.

“Don’t let my calm demeanor fool you, Ranger. This is not a good moment for your insubordination.” Pentecost moved past Raleigh on his way to the door. Raleigh swung around and followed. “Mako’s too inexperienced to rein in her memories during combat.”

This was evidently true, and Raleigh didn’t bother to challenge it. But it was also a bullshit excuse, and Raleigh
did
want to challenge that.

“I don’t think that’s why you grounded her,” he said.

“I didn’t ask for your opinion,” Pentecost said.

Time to level with the man in charge,
Raleigh thought.
No point in letting him think he’s still keeping a secret.

“Look,” he said, walking fast to keep up with Pentecost, who was headed for the LOCCENT. “You rescued her when she was a little girl. I saw that.” Some kind of exercise was going on, and the hallway was full of crews scrambling toward the Shatterdome. “You raised her, but you’re not protecting her now. You’re holding her back.”

Those last four words might have set Pentecost off all by themselves, but just in case, Raleigh broke every rule of military and paramilitary protocol and grabbed Marshal Pentecost by the shoulder as he said them.

Pentecost stopped and spun on Raleigh, stopping him dead. People passing down the halls or heading for the elevators saw what was about to happen and gave them a wide berth.

“First: never touch me again,” Pentecost said, his voice low and tight. “Second: never touch me again. Third: you have no idea where the hell I came from and I am not about to tell you the story of my life.

“I, on the other hand, know the story of
yours.
All I need to be to you and everyone in this dome is a fixed point. The last man standing. I don’t need your admiration or your sympathy. All I need is your fighting skills and your compliance. And if you don’t give me that... well, then, you can go back to your damn wall.”

This is bullshit
, Raleigh thought again. Raleigh had just Drifted with Mako, and knew all about Pentecost adopting her. He knew all about Pentecost protecting Mako from the backward hicks on her father’s side of the family who blamed her because Masao Mori had no sons to carry on the family tradition of sword-making. He knew Pentecost had adopted her and put her through school. He knew Pentecost had let her into the Jaeger program to keep her close to him, and had put her on the Mark III Restoration Project because he didn’t want her in a Jaeger.

Raleigh knew all that because he’d been in Mako’s mind. Pentecost knew that he knew, and evidently didn’t care. What he wanted from Raleigh, as he said, was compliance.

And he would get it, because Raleigh Becket was a good soldier when he needed to be... but he also knew that if this was anyone other than Marshal Pentecost, they’d be throwing punches.

Pentecost watched him thinking all this.

“Is that understood?” he asked. The unspoken challenge hung in the air. Pentecost was daring Raleigh to step further over the line.

Raleigh waited long enough to let Pentecost know he was aware what was going on, and was conceding because he was a good soldier.

“Yes, sir,” Raleigh said.

“Good,” Pentecost said, and entered the elevator. Raleigh needed to go that way too, but decided to wait.

You had to pick your battles.

***

After the scrap outside Pentecost’s office, Herc allowed himself precisely fifteen minutes to get his temper under control and decide what he was going to say. Then he went looking for Chuck in Striker Eureka’s maintenance area. He found his son working with a three-foot wrench on a single bolt whose head was bigger than Herc’s fist. Though compared to the size of most of the machined parts of Striker Eureka, it was a sliver.

“He’s grounding Mako,” Herc said over the sound of whatever turn-of-the-century guitar hero was playing on the radio. It all sounded the same to him.

“Well, that’s half of the right decision,” Chuck said. He wiped his hands and added, “But I want him off the mission even more than the bird.”

Something about the moment—Chuck’s flip attitude set against the immensity of the task before them, or his knee-jerk impulse to destroy an ally because he thought he might be a rival when the Pan-Pacific Defense Corp needed every warm body Hannibal Chau’s market share could finance... Whatever it was, it tipped Herc over an edge that he’d been moving toward for a long time.

He reached down and turned the radio down. Not off, but down.

“Hey, I was listening to that,” Chuck said.

“Who are you?” Herc asked his son.

Chuck looked confused and belligerent at the same time, like it irritated him not to know the answer to a question, but it irritated him even more that his father would ask him a question he couldn’t answer.

“What?”

Herc smashed the radio into the floor. A few small pieces of it bounced away, but it was a shop-floor model, designed to take a beating. He hadn’t wrecked it, but it made an impression on Chuck. Got his full attention for the first time in Herc’s recent memory.

“Who
are you?” he demanded, stepping up into his son’s face.

“I’m the only chance we’ve got to deliver that bomb, is who I am—” Chuck started.

“Not the point,” Herc said.

“—but I’m stuck with two prison guards, the basketball triplets, Tokyo pop, and a washout.”

“Not the point!” Herc said, louder.

Chuck got louder, too. “Pentecost may be a good man, but he hasn’t seen combat in, what? Ten years, maybe? More? The only chance we’ve got at a future is delivering that bomb, and I am the one doing it—”

“That’s not what I’m talking about!”

“That’s who I am!”

“I know,” Herc said, dialing it back just a notch. “I know you’re a great Ranger, and I’m proud of that. But dammit, kid... why are you not a better person? Why didn’t I make you a better person?”

“A better person?” Chuck echoed, as if he couldn’t believe this mattered to Herc. “Don’t blame yourself. It’s not like you really brought me up anyway. After Mom died, I spent more time with these machines than I ever did with
you.”
He tapped the wrench fondly against the chassis of Striker Eureka.

Herc remembered the mushroom cloud rising over Sydney. The second one. The first had been out at the islands, an hour before, and had slowed the kaiju down. The authorities had given the entire population of downtown Sydney one hour to clear out.

One hour for five million people to get to safety

Then the second nuke came down. The kaiju died. So had Angela. He had not known whether it was the kaiju or the bomb that had killed her. Pentecost had taken him aside and told him it was the kaiju, that she had been killed in the collapse of the building where she worked. Herc had never made up his mind if he could believe that or not. All he knew was that he’d only had an hour. He’d gotten from the base, where he was an active-duty pilot with the Air Force, across the bay into Sydney while everyone else was getting the hell out. Cell networks were down. There was no way to find anyone. He had to guess, and he could only get one of them. He chose Chuck, and Chuck had never forgiven him for it.

Chuck’s school had survived the kaiju but been reduced to ashes and slag by the second nuke. Herc could see the mushroom cloud in his mind, rising over downtown Sydney as he got the hell out of there in an old Bell Kiowa that had probably seen its first service in Vietnam. Was Angela already dead by then? He would never know.

But Herc Hansen had sacrificed everything for this boy, and Chuck would always hate him for it. Sometimes Herc wanted to sit him down and say,
Hey, listen, would you really rather I had let you die so I could save your mother? Is that what you want?

Because I pray to any and all gods that have ever existed that you never have to make that choice.

Not that Chuck would listen. Because Chuck didn’t listen to anyone.

“Let’s face it,” said Chuck. “The only reason we even
speak
today is because we’re Drift-compatible. Because we’re good at smashing things together. In fact, we don’t even
need
to speak.”

He picked up the battered radio and dialed it back to its original volume.

“Catch you in the Drift, Dad,” he said, and turned it up a little higher.

NEWT GOT OUT OF A CAB AT THE CORNER OF FONG
and Tull, on the edge of the area officially known as the Hong Kong Exclusion Zone, but unofficially called the Kowloon Boneslum. When they’d taken the kaiju out with a series of small tactical nukes, they’d made part of the city a radioactive monument. Nobody had expected people to move back in so soon, but then again, nobody had expected that more kaiju would come so thick and fast. Thousands of people lived in the Kowloon Boneslum now, and the gargantuan skeleton was a tourist attraction... unofficial, of course, since the Chinese government would hardly condone tourism in a nuclear hazard site.

Newt looked up at the ribcage, the boney structure arching up over the lower buildings and curving into and back out of taller structures. Things got rebuilt quickly in Hong Kong, and in the eleven years since that kaiju bit the dust, the city had pretty much absorbed it, except for the skull, which Newt had heard was some kind of religious something-or-other. He wasn’t sure. The only parts of the Kaiju that interested him were the bits he could study, and he’d long since learned as much as he could from the bones. They weren’t that different from the bones of terrestrial animals, except a whole lot bigger and denser and made—literally
made
, Newt now knew—from silicon compounds instead of carbonated hydroxyapatite.

Clouds gathered overhead, picking up the city’s illumination and reflecting it as a pink glow that made the area look a little sickly. It fit the Boneslum’s atmosphere. Newt shouldered his way through the crowds to a pocket of open space on one corner and shone a portable luma lamp on the orange paper he’d gotten from Pentecost.

In the lamp’s glow, a kaiju symbol appeared on the paper. The glyph representing the kaiju whose bones were the bedrock of this new neighborhood.

Okay, now he knew what to look for. But where to find it? Newt looked around and saw similar glyphs everywhere.
Great,
he thought.
I’ll knock on every storefront in Kowloon and ask for the guy who traffics in kaiju parts. That ought to earn me a quick trip to the bottom of the bay.

Think.
Pentecost wouldn’t have sent you out here to wander around. He needs you and he knows it. He wants you out and back with what you need to Drift again, because that’s the order he gave you. So. What are you missing, Dr. Geiszler?