Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization Mass Market Paperback (22 page)

For this reason, we expect to see more innovations in kaiju combat capability and tactics in the near future. After the hiatus of 2023 and the acceleration of 2024, this may be the year known for the kaiju reaching a threshold in understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the Jaegers deployed against them.

Dr. Geiszler's Drift with a kaiju brain was a landmark moment in the laboratory study of kaiju. It is also a significant advance in the area of neural overlay matrix technology, since all previous Pons structures had been designed with two humans in mind. What possibilities lie ahead for a Pons that can adapt its connection procedures to variations in brain structure on each side of the neural handshake?

HANNIBAL CHAU TOOK OFF THROUGH THE MAZE
of stairways and rooms that led from the balcony back down to street level. Newt followed, barely keeping up.
A kaiju attack on Hong Kong,
he thought. It would be all right. All of the Jaegers were deployment-ready, except for Gipsy Danger. The other three would be more than enough to handle one kaiju.

When they got to the ground floor, one of Chau’s goons looked up. Seeing his boss, he said, “There are two goddamn kaiju heading for Hong Kong city!”

Two?

Newt had simultaneous reactions. One was simple:
Oh shit
. The other was a little more complicated, being composed partly of curiosity about what kind of kaiju they were—what category, how they would fit into the partial taxonomy he’d been painstakingly constructing— and partly of irritation. Because two kaiju meant that Hermann had been right about something, and if there was one thing that irritated Newt to the core of his being, it was having to admit that Hermann was right.

“This is totally against the pattern,” he said. “There’s never been
two
kaiju.”

Chau shocked him by grabbing Newt’s nose and hauling him close.

“Maybe that’s because nobody’s ever
Drifted
with them before, genius! When Jaeger pilots Drift, it’s a two-way street. A bridge, right? Sets up a connection both ways. A hive mentality... the kaiju are coming to find
you!”

He let Newt go, but Newt just stood there, stunned all over again by what Hannibal had said. It was true. Newt should have already seen it, he should have known it from the moment he came out of the Drift.

“What are we going to do?” he asked. He was suddenly terrified at the idea that the kaiju were looking for him. They were awesome and all, but still.

What would they do if they found him?

“Well,” Chau said, “I’m going to wait out this shitstorm in my own personal anti-kaiju bunker.”

Chau bent forward and took off his sunglasses, revealing that the scar on his left cheek ran through the eye socket and across the bridge of his nose. The socket itself was filled by a milky ball that might have been artificial.

“No public shelter for me,” he said with a ghoulish leer. “I’ve been there before.”

He snapped his fingers and four of his goons pulled guns and pointed them at various parts of Newt’s body. Newt was so shaken by the idea that he was being hunted by kaiju that the sight of all the guns didn’t make much difference.

“You’re going out there, into the public shelter like anyone else,” Chau said, pointing toward the street. “If you can get in. Being around
you
ain’t a risk worth taking. But I’ll make you a deal. If you end up alive, I’ll get you that brain. Big if.”

He gave Newt a shove in the direction of the door. The four gun barrels tracked Newt’s stumbling progress.

“Now get the hell out of here,” Chau said.

Newt ran.

He could barely keep his legs moving with his brain so full of new knowledge that just kept falling into place. The kaiju were assembled in great vats, like... God, what was the movie? It had come out before he was born, but it was the same thing, with alien life forms assembled to take over Earth. He’d been a kid watching it on the seven-inch screen of his first tablet late at night after his parents were asleep. Now he’d never remember the title because all of a sudden a kind of alarm went off in his hindbrain again.

They were looking for
him.

No, not they.
It.
The big one. It was looking for him. He had come through the Breach and he’d left a trace of himself behind, enough to follow. Newt had a flash of insight. Had any city on Earth been targeted twice before now? He didn’t think so. That meant two things.

One, the kaiju knew what they were doing. They were seeking out new population centers and avoiding places they’d already hit, to maximize the shock value of appearing somewhere for the first time. And two, if they were hitting Hong Kong a second time, it wasn’t random. Especially not coming less than twenty-four hours after Newt had Drifted with a kaiju brain. It was a mission to recover or kill or kidnap or extract one Newton Geiszler.

Hannibal Chau was right about that. Now Newt was irritated that he hadn’t seen it first.

The dinosaurs had been a dry run. Whoever sent them hadn’t liked what they had found. So they waited for the climate to change, and while they waited they did a carbon-to-silicon upgrade.
Bam!
You got kaiju. The silicate molecular basis gave you the additional strength you needed to get bigger and carry more mass, as well as carry more information at a genetic level. The hundred-plus million years between dinosaurs and Trespasser in 2013, well, that was a lot of time to refine your prototypes and get them field-ready.

It was also a lot of time for the composition of the atmosphere to change, for the seas to grow more acidic, for the rise of industrial civilization to put Earth’s ecosystem on a trajectory that suited the makers of the kaiju. Running through the streets of Hong Kong, Newt remembered telling Pentecost that humanity had terraformed Earth for the kaiju. That was pretty much true. Had the kaijus’ creators known this would happen? Was there some kind of blueprint for the rise of industrial civilizations, that the kaijus’ creators—

Precursors

—knew about, so they could watch Earth and think to themselves: Yes? Carbon-based life, vertebrates just emerging, the rise of mammals probably another fifty million years down the road, which would lead to primates, which would eventually lead to mastery of fire, industrial revolution, et cetera and so forth... Was it all by the book? How many other worlds existed where the same drama had unfolded itself in the same way?

How had the Precursors been so accurate in deciding when to come back, if they hadn’t
known
?

The more Newt thought about this, the more frightened he got. And the more frightened he got, the less able he was to navigate the chaos of Kowloon’s streets on the edge of the Exclusion Zone. Getting around in an XZ was a difficult task any day of the week. Add a kaiju alert and it became nearly impossible. Newt gave himself up to the crowd. They seemed to know where they were going. They weren’t stampeding, at least not yet, and they started to move in a particular direction. Newt went with the flow, figuring that the public-service messages blaring over loudspeakers in Chinese must mean something to someone. If he couldn’t understand them, it was maybe best to blend in and imitate the people who could.

***

Pentecost and Tendo Choi stood front and center on the command deck, eyes roving over displays and console monitors. Behind them the command crew worked quietly, and Gottlieb observed, along with Raleigh and Mako. The Jumphawks were in position at the Miracle Mile, toward the mouth of Hong Kong Bay. A mile behind stood Striker Eureka, holding position in case worse came to worst.

The sound of the Russians’ damn house noise ground through the feed from inside Cherno Alpha.

“Reaching target zone,” Sasha said. “Disengaging transport.”

Both Jaegers dropped from the Jumphawks, which leaped up as their load decreased from thousands of tons to zero. A split second apart, Cherno Alpha and Crimson Typhoon splashed down, disappearing behind impact waves. As the waves radiated out from their splashdown, both Jaegers turned their running lights on.

“Cherno Alpha holding the coastline,” Sasha reported. “Beacon is on.”

There was a moment of quiet at the mouth of Hong Kong Bay. Tendo watched the monitor as it tracked the kaijus’ approach.

“They’re right there,” he said. Camera feeds from both Jaegers displayed nothing but the splashdown waves breaking against the shore. “Typhoon, Alpha. We are reading both kaiju signals in your area. Do you have visual?”

“Crimson Typhoon here. No visual,” responded one of the Wei triplets. “Our signal shows same as yours.”

Both Jaegers turned to scan the area.

“Evacuation in the city progressing as requested,” one of the techs said.

Pentecost nodded, his gaze steady on the twin bogeys representing the kaiju. Yet again he wished for the time and money and technology to pursue them underwater. The waiting game not only put the Jaegers at a disadvantage by forcing them to play only defense, it took a serious stress toll on everyone in the LOCCENT.
Come on,
he thought.
Come on.

As if it had heard, Otachi breached.

“Jesus Christ, it’s big,” one of the techs said.

It is,
Pentecost silently agreed. A mountain of kaiju malice, erupting from the ocean and barreling straight into Crimson Typhoon. It came out of the water plowing toward the Chinese Jaeger, forelimbs spread and armored head low. Its tail arched up behind it like a scorpion’s, snapping out straight at the moment of impact.

The Jaeger staggered, but Crimson Typhoon was agile and did not go down. The Wei triplets immediately absorbed the first blow and set Crimson Typhoon for a counterstrike. A blow that she never got to deliver because Otachi hit first, punching a deep dent in Crimson Typhoon’s torso. Another strike at the Jaeger’s head pierced a hole in the Conn-Pod.

On the feed from inside Crimson Typhoon, Pentecost saw one of Otachi’s claws puncture the pilot compartment. The Weis held their Drift and held mission discipline, counterpunching with the twinned left-side power gauntlets and driving Otachi back so they could regain their posture. Otachi charged in again.

Crimson Typhoon answered by spawning triple saw blades, one from each wrist, carbide-tipped and powered to spin at 6000 revolutions per minute. The Weis came at Otachi with a nimble, fluid barrage of strikes, acrobatically avoiding most of the kaiju’s powerful blows and gouging pieces of its flesh away with the saws. But Otachi did not slow down. None of Crimson Typhoon’s attacks seemed to damage it.

The Jaeger was taking a pounding. She could barely keep up with Otachi’s clawing forelimbs, and the kaiju’s tail snapped forward with deadly timing to cut holes in Crimson Typhoon’s armor at vital junctures. The saw blades retracted, save one which was too badly bent to get back into its housing. The Weis were trying to get their I-22 Plasmacaster warmed up, but already Otachi had damaged the channels that fed the plasma reservoirs.

Where was Leatherback?

Cherno Alpha was only then able to close and engage Otachi.

“Double hook, Aleksis!” Sasha commanded in Russian. She threw a sweeping right hook and Aleksis mirrored the motion with his left arm. Cherno Alpha reflected the command with a smashing pincer hook as the energies of the SparkFist bloomed across the knuckles of each gauntlet. Otachi reacted faster than they would have thought possible, blocking the strike with such ferocity that Cherno Alpha rebounded backward.

Crimson Typhoon, released from Otachi’s grasp, began to sink, leaning at an angle with both arms dangling limp. One of the twinned gauntlets on the left was gone. From the other hung the bent and useless saw assembly, all of the saw’s teeth broken off. Plasma energies bled weakly from the deployed barrels of the Plasmacaster, but it was too badly damaged to reach any kind of full charge. Crimson Typhoon’s skull frame was partially torn open and seawater was beginning to short out its motor arrays. The Weis, steady to the last, kept running self-repair protocols and trying to reroute energy from nonessential systems.

“Typhoon is no longer combat-operational,” Tendo Choi said.

The readouts coming from Crimson Typhoon were all bad news. Everyone in the LOCCENT could see that she was doomed.

Otachi struck at Cherno Alpha, knocking the Russians away. Sasha and Aleksis staggered in their Conn-Pod, and Cherno Alpha flailed to regain her balance. With the time gained, Otachi turned back to the immobile Crimson Typhoon.

In the Conn-Pod feed, the Wei triplets watched it come. They stood proud and firm, bowing their heads in unison as Otachi seized Crimson Typhoon’s head in its forelimbs, hooking one of its leg claws into the center of the Jaeger’s torso to hold it steady. With a deafening grind of tearing metal, accompanied by the flare of ruptured energy conduits, Otachi tore Crimson Typhoon’s head off and crushed it. It heaved and threw the head an incredible distance across Hong Kong Bay, releasing the decapitated Jaeger torso to topple slowly over and disappear under the water.

The feed from inside Crimson Typhoon still flickered sporadically on Tendo’s monitors, revealing the stop-motion horror of shattered fixtures and the Wei triplets crushed among the wreckage of their motion-capture rig. Then, at the moment Crimson Typhoon’s head hit the water, the Conn-Pod feed went black.

“Crimson Typhoon is down,” Tendo Choi said unnecessarily.

Pentecost nodded. It was protocol to make the announcement even when the fact was plain for all to see.

Otachi was already turning to go after Cherno Alpha.

Herc Hansen’s voice boomed through the feed from Striker Eureka.

“LOCCENT, Typhoon and Alpha are in trouble. We’re moving in.”

“You are to hold your ground,” Pentecost answered. “Do not engage. Hold your position!”

Chuck swore, but Striker Eureka held her position. Out in the bay, Leatherback rose from the water near where the lower half of Crimson Typhoon had sunk. True to the initial sensor outline, it was hulking and heavily armored, with forearm carapaces that extended well beyond the elbow joints to form pointed plates like twin shields. Along its spine was some kind of animated fluorescence, extending down a bony ridge from the back of its skull to the just above the base of its stubby tail.