Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization (31 page)

RAIJU WAS THIRTY-FIVE HUNDRED TONS OF MUSCLE
and hate, crocodilian in shape save for longer and better articulated arms and legs. Its back, legs, and shoulders were a forest of spikes and knobbed plates. It barrelled into Gipsy Danger moving at perhaps forty miles per hour. There was an incredible discharge of kinetic energy when the kaiju appeared from the silt cloud and slammed into Gipsy Danger’s left side.

Raleigh and Mako staggered. Systems were shocked offline as the impact caused ripples in the fluid-core synapse systems, but they kept Gipsy Danger upright as they grappled with Raiju and emergency shunts restored Gipsy’s neural-pathway cohesion.

Jaeger and kaiju rolled across the seafloor, crashing into a subsea mountainside a few hundred meters from the lip of the last drop toward the deepest part of the Marianas Trench: Challenger Deep, where the Breach glowed and poured out energy that baffled the Jaegers’ instruments. Raiju pinned Gipsy Danger and snapped at her head. Moving in unison, Raleigh and Mako dodged to the left on the motion rig and Raiju’s jaws scraped along the side of Gipsy Danger’s shoulder.

Raiju pulled back for another bite and Gipsy Danger spun them both around and rammed the kaiju against the mountainside, holding it there with a forearm under its elongated jaw.

“Can we get the Plasma Cannons ready?” Raleigh asked.

“They might not function under these pressures,” Mako said. “Tendo?”

The response from the LOCCENT was garbled. Did these new kaiju have some kind of built-in jamming ability? Raleigh didn’t know, but after Leatherback and Otachi he wouldn’t be surprised. Then he had more pressing problems because Raiju had another trick up its sleeve... or, more accurately, up its jaw.

Its skull split open in three sections, peeling back to reveal an interior head, complete with its own set of jaws, snapping forward on an elastic column of muscle to tear at Gipsy Danger’s shoulder plating—they managed to hold it just far enough away that it couldn’t bite all the way down. It was like a snake’s head inside a crocodilian skull helmet. Nightmarish, flashing through different moves and strikes, in and out of the illuminated shafts from Gipsy Danger’s running lights.

“Chain Swords might not work under these conditions,” Mako said

“Want to deploy them and see?” Raleigh asked.

“Opening the compartment might cause all kinds of damage to the hyper-torque nodes,” Mako said. She didn’t have to add that if the nodes in Gipsy Danger’s forearms were damaged, the Jaeger’s hands would be compromised. It was quite a risk to take.

Scunner flashed out of the silt and headed for Striker Eureka, which had stopped and turned to assist Gipsy Danger. It was moving fast enough that at first Raleigh thought it was a copy of Raiju. Data relays from remote sensors and both Jaegers’ onboard arrays corrected that impression. Scunner was longer and thinner, a collection of sharp edges and armored protrusions.

The original plan had called for Gipsy, Cherno Alpha, and Crimson Typhoon to engage Scunner and Raiju, drawing them away from the Breach far enough that Striker Eureka could get there before the third kaiju—if there was going to be a third kaiju—came out.

With Cherno and Typhoon down, that plan was out the window. Now Gipsy Danger had to hold the kaiju off on its own while Striker Eureka made a beeline for the Breach.

“We got this, Striker! Run the ball home!” Raleigh shouted.

He hoped it was true.

***

Pentecost hesitated. “Mako...”

“This is our window!” Chuck yelled. “Sir!”

He was right. There was too much at stake. If Raleigh and Mako couldn’t handle their assignments, all of them would be dead anyway.

Striker Eureka surged ahead, with Scunner coming close behind. It massed slightly less than Raiju, fourlegged with a forked tail and armored protrusions on either side of its head that came to lethal points. Another armored point stuck several meters out from the center of its torso, making any grappling approach a suicidal act. But Striker Eureka had her orders, and they weren’t to stand and fight. The fastest Jaeger around, she covered a hell of a lot of ground considering the density of the water and the sludgy seafloor. Still, she was running and Scunner was swimming, propelling itself largely with its tail and staying right on Striker’s heels, no matter what evasive action Pentecost and Chuck took.

The kaiju closed the distance between them and snapped with double sets of jaws.

“It’s trying to catch the payload,” Chuck growled.

Onboard sensors detected multiple small points of damage to Striker Eureka’s back and shoulders. They dodged and wove, taking full advantage of their Jaeger’s agility and speed. Scunner couldn’t land a clean shot, but Pentecost knew they wouldn’t be able to dodge forever. Striker Eureka couldn’t turn and fight, and even if she could have, they couldn’t open the K-Stunner ports this far underwater without causing fatal damage to Striker’s internal mechanisms.

“Almost there,” Pentecost said. The silt cloud was clearing as they neared the cliff that dropped straight down to the floor of the Marianas Trench. Currents generated by seafloor subduction drew the silt away. It poured over the cliff face, which Pentecost could see at the distant edge of Striker Eureka’s spotlights.

Chuck looked around and saw that they had suddenly put some distance between themselves and Scunner.

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.