Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization (33 page)

Combined with the missing arm and the crippled leg, the damage was the beginning of the end for the old Jaeger. Raleigh just hoped they could stave off the end long enough to do this last, crucial, job. All they had to do was make it long enough to get through the Breach and start the reactor overload sequence. Piece of cake.

“We are losing power,” Mako said robotically. “We—”

She cut off as another alarm pinged and the heads-up flashed a warning.

“Mako’s oxygen line is cut!” Tendo warned them.

Raleigh looked over at her. Already she was starting to fade. The kaiju tore at Gipsy Danger’s head...

...And the cockpit tore open and Yancy was jerked away, screaming in Raleigh’s head as Raleigh screamed back through the howling storm—

No.

This was the moment. This was the only moment. Raleigh took three quick deep breaths and then snapped his own oxygen line loose, feeding it to Mako. She was gone, barely breathing, succumbing quickly to the combination of oxygen deprivation and the overload from the damage Gipsy Danger had suffered.

All of that happened in the space between two clawing punches from Slattern. With both arms Raleigh reached out, and Gipsy Danger reached out. Mako drove the Chain Sword into its side, just behind its front arms, and held on even as oxygen deprivation and Gipsy Danger’s collapsing control systems overwhelmed her. At the same time Raleigh and Mako leaned back, using their rear thrusters to tip themselves and the kaiju off the shelf and down onto the ledge in deepest reaches of the trench.

Mako was fading and Raleigh grabbed onto Slattern with Gipsy Danger’s other arm, holding on while he triggered the first stage of the overload protocol and opened the central heat vent, located right about where a human’s navel would be.

A column of energy exploded out of Gipsy Danger and tore through the weakened kaiju’s torso. Raleigh leaned, pulling with all of Gipsy Danger’s remaining strength... and toppled off the ledge with the kaiju held close, impaled on the Chain Sword and burning from the last of Gipsy Danger’s overload exhaust. It was still alive, still fighting, but Raleigh knew when a kaiju was mortally wounded.

But Mako, grasping the Chain Sword buried in the kaiju’s body, couldn’t hold on much longer.

There was only one thing to do. Raleigh had done it before. So had Stacker Pentecost.

He activated the Crisis Command Matrix, which transferred Jaeger operations to a single Ranger.

WARNING, it flashed. NEURAL DAMAGE MAY OCCUR.

No shit
, Raleigh thought.

He hit the button.

The Jaeger overwhelmed him and he screamed as his brain lit up, shorted out, got lost and found itself again all at once. It was too much. Even if he’d done it before, it was too much. Everything, right down to drawing breath, suddenly required focused and conscious effort. The Jaeger’s control systems co-opted all brain function except the higher processes needed to think. That meant Raleigh now had to actively think about making his heart beat, his lungs draw breath... which was fine. He wouldn’t be doing either for much longer.

Raleigh shut the vent. He would need that heat and pressure real soon. The self-destruct protocol was through its first stage. Embracing the kaiju, with the half of Raiju still twisting lazily downward through the water above them, Gipsy Danger fell into the Breach.

***

In the LOCCENT, Newt shouted, “It worked! They’re in!”

The feed from Gipsy Danger stuttered and broke up, then reformed. Unearthly sounds came from the monitor, sonic artifacts of the torsion of the universe’s fundamental forces in the throat of the Breach. Then the visual feed cut out. For a moment longer, they could hear bits of sound: “...vis... Breach... nish... verri...”

“They’re in the Breach now,” Tendo Choi said. “There’s nothing we can do.”

All eyes were on the big holoscreen, where a graphic had spawned based on Gottlieb’s first rendering of the structure of the Breach and the critical point where an explosion might destroy it. The bogey representing Gipsy Danger entered the critical zone.

“They’re out of time,” Newt said. “They have to self-destruct
now.”

***

Inside Gipsy Danger, Raleigh kept one arm wrapped around the corpse of the giant kaiju. It had died sometime during the passage back through the Breach. He wasn’t sure when. Time didn’t seem to be working right. Around him, the Conn-Pod groaned under pressures no human designer had ever imagined. He looked at his oxygen feed. His suit’s resources were used up. Did the HUD say 7%? It was hard to be sure. He was getting foggy.

Before him hung a holographic dial labeled SELF-DESTRUCT PROTOCOL. It had spawned automatically when Raleigh had triggered the first overload, which was designed to bring the reactor’s fuel rods to maximum temperature. Then all you had to do was close the vent... done... and turn that dial all the way up.

Not done. Net yet.

Raleigh took Mako’s hand.

“It’s all right now,” he said. Her eyes opened. He thought she might live, given the chance. Pan-Pac Defense doctors were the best around.

“I can finish this,” Raleigh said. “All I have to do is fall. Anyone can fall. You have to live. There’s a better world ahead. For you.”

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.