Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization Mass Market Paperback (20 page)

“Not in a long time,” Raleigh said.

Mako watched him remember. He could almost feel her wishing for the Drift again so she could experience the memory too.

“You named her, right?” she asked.

Raleigh nodded.

“My father was a swordmaker,” she continued. “He made each one by hand. He said when a warrior names his weapon, they share a bond.”

“Makes sense,” Raleigh said. “I missed her. She was a part of me.”

“Before we messed up—” Mako said. She hesitated, and then asked, “Did we have a good connection?”

Raleigh too hesitated. “As strong as I’ve ever seen,” he said, and it was true, although it felt disrespectful to Yancy to say it. Maybe that was part of what Mako had meant by forgiving himself.

Gipsy Danger shifted and creaked. Raleigh had a superstitious moment of curiosity, wondering if she could hear her two pilots so close.

“I’m sorry I said you were dangerous,” Mako said.

“Unpredictable,” Raleigh said. “But I like dangerous better.” Something from their Drift floated through his mind and he smiled. “When we were Drifting, I heard a song...”

Mako smiled back at him. She untangled earphones from her pocket and handed him one.

“Shibuya Pop,” she said. “Kind of corny, kind of sweet. You want to hear?”

He nodded and put the earbud in. She played the song, and they listened together, letting the music wash over and connect them. It was bouncy synthpop with a little bit of jazz to it. Music to make you feel good.
Listening to music together was maybe one of the best connections you can find outside the Drift,
Raleigh thought.

But he was also thinking that if the world didn’t end in the next week or so, he and Mako would Drift together again. Whatever had happened that morning, Pentecost wasn’t fool enough to ignore the connection Raleigh and Mako had discovered.

“We gave them an excuse to dismiss us,” he said. “But we won’t do it again.”

“If we get a chance,” she said. “A lot of people here think I’m just Sensei’s favorite.”

“Sensei, huh?”

Mako looked a little embarrassed.

“It’s been my nickname for him. More of an honorific than a nickname. He... after my parents were gone, he took care of me. Guided me. I am here because of him.” She looked at him, a challenge in her eyes. “But I deserve everything I have gotten. He does not play favorites.”

“Hey, you don’t need to tell me,” Raleigh said. “If anything, it’s the other way around.”

“First we must convince him,” Mako said. “Then the rest of them will know.”

***

Tendo Choi had spent hours putting the command console terminals back together. There was a lot of redundancy in the systems, but some of them hadn’t handled the rogue routines spawned from the Becket-Mori Drift failure very well. Others had suffered some damage when he’d yanked out their cables, desperate to stop Gipsy Danger from firing her cannons and obliterating the Shatterdome. With a tech crew pulled from Crimson Typhoon, the most battle-ready of all the Jaegers they had, Tendo had managed to get the console up and running again, and just about the minute he fired it up and ran through its first diagnostics to make sure he hadn’t missed anything, the Breach alarm went off.

There’s a mistake,
he thought.
What did I do wrong?

He looked at the alarm display. Kept looking, waiting for something in the data to tell him the console was misinterpreting the feed from the remote sensors. They had surface and deep-sea sensors focused on the Breach at all times, and every single one of them was telling Tendo Choi the same thing.

He toggled the broad-spectrum visual. The Breach was a ragged tear in the seafloor, seen in the visual-light spectrum only by the intense multi-spectrum radiation that bled out of it during a kaiju transit. That energy in turn created heat, and the opening of the Breach during a transit also bled superdense and superhot plasma through from... wherever the kaiju came from. The result was that the perfect blackness of the deep seafloor suddenly became a storm of light and bubbles created by the intense heat even at the killing pressures of the bottom of the sea.

It was a hell of a spectacle, but usually Tendo Choi didn’t watch because he got a better sense of the enemy from the nonvisual instruments. In this case, he went visual because he didn’t trust the instruments... and what he saw confirmed for him that there was not, in fact, an error in the console system.

There were, in fact, two kaiju coming out of the Breach.

Uh oh,
Tendo thought.
Gottlieb was right.

He pinged Pentecost via video link. The Marshal answered despite being shirtless and in the middle of some kind of automated body scan. Tendo caught the end of a computer voice saying, “...decay since last month, six percent.”

Pentecost’s torso and left arm were streaked with scars. Everyone who knew anything about the history of the Jaegers knew where he had gotten them. Onibaba. And a number of the people working for Pentecost—among them Tendo Choi—had a suspicion that he had other, less visible, ailments as well. Tendo had seen his nosebleeds, noted the times when Pentecost’s energy seemed to flag. He’d put that together with Pentecost’s service in Coyote Tango, and the anti-radiation meds they gave Mako and Raleigh. Marshal Stacker Pentecost was sick, and he wasn’t getting any better.

But if he wasn’t going to tell anyone, then it wasn’t Tendo’s place to discuss it, so he kept his concerns to himself.

“Mr. Choi?” Pentecost said.

“Movement in the Breach, sir,” Tendo said. “Earlier than we thought.”

“How strong is the signature?”

“Signatures,
sir,” Tendo said. “I’m getting
two
readings. And they’re headed for Hong Kong.”

“Sound the alarm.”

ONCE HE'D DECIDED NOT TO KILL NEWT, HANNIBAL
Chau took him up a series of staircases and out onto a balcony overlooking the Boneslum. Under the lowering sky, it was an eerie scene, and one that jazzed Newt to the core of his being. Imagine the scale of a creature, that when it died they had to reconstruct the city it had tried to destroy
around its bones
. There was a little poetic justice in it, too. The Kowloon Boneslum was a testament to the will of humanity to survive, to adapt, to rebuild.

You could see exactly where the boundaries of the Exclusion Zone were. They formed a sort of teardrop shape, widest around the kaiju skeleton and trailing back southward, where only a narrow part of the Exclusion Zone reached the waterfront. It had been pricey hotel real estate before. Now the whole area had a different feel. Right up to the edge of the XZ, it was Hong Kong business as usual, packing everything as tightly as possible and steeping it in neon. Every square inch of every surface was designed for one purpose: to make money.

That all stopped at the Boneslum boundary. Inside the XZ, things were built the way Newt imagined they had been before things like building codes and effective local government came along. Streets vanished and reappeared randomly. Buildings rose and leaned against each other, seemingly made of the rubble left in the wake of the kaiju’s passage and the nuclear strikes. The area inside the XZ, except right around the skeleton itself, was like a vision of Hong Kong from a hundred years before, or maybe two hundred.
Astonishing
, he thought. His mind almost wanted to interpret it as a movie set, because he couldn’t quite believe that such a place still existed literally touching the gleaming steel and neon city that enclosed it.

Newt wondered what a good geneticist would find in a population that had spent the last ten years in the Boneslum. He was guessing a pretty high mutation rate, along with the occasional outright freak.

He had the uncomfortable thought that places like the Kowloon Boneslum were humanity’s versions of the spawning pool in the Anteverse. For a moment it looked like that to him, a teeming and turbulent lawless protozoan mass. His vision of the Anteverse superimposed over it, and Newt started to sweat. He tried to blink away the image. It worked, sort of, but Newt thought he might never view urban poverty the same way again.

Chau’s balcony looked right out over the ribs, with the skull facing toward them. Newt had a strong feeling that something still lived in those bones. Kaiju carried the entire memory of their species in each string of DNA. Who could know what information, what sentience or even will, still survived in those bones?

“That kaiju made land ten years ago,” Hannibal said. “Its blood burned the pavement for a mile around,— but look.” He pointed to the south, where work lights illuminated a group of trucks and a swarm of workers cutting, transporting, and loading. “We’re still mining the bones.” Hannibal grinned. “I’d say I got the best from Stacker on that deal.”

Pentecost probably felt the same way,
thought Newt. His boss would do anything to keep the Jaegers battle-ready. Again he was struck by the way that humanity just got on with business. You couldn’t memorialize everything. You had to keep living; you had to survive. You did what you had to do. If that meant you rebuilt part of one of the world’s great cities over the radioactive bones of a dead monster from another dimension, well, so be it. Even as Chau’s men carved wealth from those bones, construction crews were welding together I-beams all around them. Kowloon had survived disasters before. It would always rebuild... as long as there was a world left to rebuild in.

Just this side of the work site was the kaiju’s immense skull. Over the decade since it fell, as the radiation grew less intense and the XZ population more reckless, the locals had made the skull into a temple. Candles, thousands of them, burned in and around it, flickering on the faces of the pilgrims who processed in and out in some kind of ritual.

“You know, some believe the kaiju are sent from heaven,” Chau said. “They think the gods are displeased with our behavior.”

That’s because people are superstitious monkeys until they’re taught better
, Newt thought. He remembered seeing some kind of documentary on kaiju worshippers, the Church of the Breach and others. Some of the names— Disciples of the Overlords of the Lands Below was one he remembered. There were prayers to the kaiju, people claiming that they were entitled to religious holidays during kaiju attacks, all that kind of bullshit.

Newt nodded and asked, “And you?”

Chau laughed. “I believe kaiju bone powder is five hundred bucks a pound. Why are you here? You’re not after powder to keep your girlfriend happy. A guy like you doesn’t have a girlfriend. You’re married to your lab.”

“Oh, I need access to a kaiju brain,” Newt said. The request was so ridiculous he had decided to just spit it out. “Intact if possible.”

Chau was already shaking his head.

“Seriously? No can do. Skull is plated so dense, by the time you drill in—”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s rotted away. I know. But there’s always the secondary brain,” Newt said.

That’s what he’d meant from the beginning. The main cranial brain would be too unwieldy to work with. How could you transport and Drift with something the size of a small whale? But the secondary brain...

“Like dinosaurs had the secondary brain back at the base of their spines, by the pelvis,” Newt continued, remembering when he’d been a little kid and first read that Stegosaurus had a second brain down by its hips. The idea had blown his mind, and maybe, as much as any single other thing, that had set him on the road to where he was today. “They’re—”

He almost told Chau that he thought the dinosaurs were an earlier, cruder version of the kaiju, but he just barely held himself back. Instead he started talking about different kinds of kaiju tissue and the way their silicon-based anatomy enhanced certain processes of neural activation, which let them move so fast and nimbly despite their immense size.

“That’s where they’re, um, different from dinosaurs,” he said, just to have some kind of conclusion. He knew he’d reached a point where he was supposed to stop and let Chau talk, but it was really, really hard.

One thing about the Drift hangover,
Newt thought.
It makes everything seems weirdly doubled. Secondary brains... spawning pools... controlled mutations...

Hannibal said, “You really know your kaiju anatomy, don’t you, little guy?” He was thinking about something. “I can get that for you... if I can have legal claim on every fallen kaiju in the Southern Hemisphere.”

This threw Newt off balance, but only for a moment. He hadn’t thought of himself as empowered to make deals on Pentecost’s behalf, but what the hell. Pentecost could complain later; he was the one who had sent Newt here. Also, considering that Newt had no power to enter into arrangements with Chau, he could say whatever he wanted and Chau would still have to get it through Pentecost later.

“Considering the world is about to end, I’d say we have a deal,” Newt said. Then his inner kaiju-nerd self got the better of him and he added, “But can I at least keep a tooth?”

Hannibal Chau shook his head. “Nope.”

“What about a gland? A tiny gland?”

“Not a one,” Chau said.