Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization Mass Market Paperback (23 page)

Cherno Alpha was barely holding her own against Otachi.

No,
Pentecost thought. The Russians were losing. They were doing it slowly and bravely, but they were losing. There was no way they would survive a two-on-one engagement. The Kaidanovskys discharged the Incinerator Turbines directly into Otachi’s face, searing away the kaiju’s flesh and driving it back, but only for a moment. There was no respite for Cherno Alpha: the moment Otachi released its grip, Leatherback moved in.

“Recovery team, can you reach the site of Crimson Typhoon’s impact?” Pentecost asked. One of the Jumphawk pilots called back in the affirmative. “Keep a prudent distance from the fight,” Pentecost instructed. “Sweep for survivors. There was a breach in Crimson Typhoon’s cranial hull. One or more of them might have survived.”

A long shot, but one worth taking. Tendo had not detected an escape-pod release, but it was possible one of the pilots had escaped through the hole in Crimson Typhoon’s Conn-Pod into the open water. All Rangers could swim.

The Jumphawk peeled away from the formation returning from the deployment and headed toward the impact site, swinging in a wide arc around the spot where Leatherback and Otachi were tag-teaming Cherno Alpha. The Russian Jaeger’s Incinerator Turbines had gone dark. Leatherback had crushed them both, shattering their fans and overloading their command systems. The overpressure from that would eventually detonate Cherno’s reserves of incendiary fuel.

Leatherback was now riding on Cherno Alpha’s shoulders, digging through the cylindrical outer housing of the Jaeger’s fuel reservoirs. The combined weight of the two kaiju drove Cherno Alpha down into the water.

Tendo tried desperately to remotely disable the turbines, but Cherno Alpha’s systems were already a mess.

“Screw this,” Herc said. “LOCCENT, we’re moving in.”

STRIKER EUREKA WAS SOMETHING ELSE IN A
fight. Whatever Raleigh thought about Chuck Hansen, he had to admit that the Jaeger was a beauty. It moved faster than Gipsy Danger, hit harder than Cherno Alpha, and made moves that even Crimson Typhoon couldn’t have kept up with. Those Mark Vs were incredible machines. Raleigh wanted to pilot one—and then as soon as he had that thought, he felt a strange guilt, as if he was being disloyal to Gipsy Danger.

Striker took on Otachi before it could deliver a killing blow to Cherno Alpha, hitting the kaiju with a barrage of punches that staggered it and forced it away from the distressed Russians. Blows to Otachi’s head beat it down toward the water, and before it could recover, Striker caught it flush with a knee.

Already Striker had dealt more than enough punishment to kill off most of the previous kaiju they’d encountered. But Otachi gathered itself and came right back at Striker. They were close enough to the Shatterdome that the dome’s searchlights could pick out the battle. Simultaneously they watched Herc and Chuck, wordless and in perfect Drift, ripping through their gunslinger moves in Striker’s Conn-Pod.

They were knocked off-balance by Otachi’s brutal counterattack, but Striker didn’t go down. Jaeger and kaiju hammered away at each other, blood spraying from Otachi to crackle on Striker Eureka’s armor and boil on the surface of the churning sea. Striker had activated its thermal blades and was using them to deadly effect.

Maybe,
Tendo thought.
Just maybe Striker can still save the day.
The Hansens had done it before.

Inside Cherno Alpha’s Conn-Pod, Sasha and Aleksis were fighting for their lives... and losing. Leatherback had finished what Otachi had started, ripping away pieces of Cherno Alpha’s armor and puncturing its torso-centered cockpit in several places. The Russian Jaeger could no longer lift its arms. It was crippled, and after a final blow from Leatherback it toppled and began to sink.

The Conn-Pod feed showed water surging over both Kaidanovskys, who struggled to break out of their harnesses. Drowning was the single most common cause of death for Jaeger pilots, and the waters of Hong Kong bay were about to claim two more as Leatherback stomped Cherno Alpha deeper under the surface.

***

Looking out from the Shatterdome, Raleigh watched Cherno Alpha disappear beneath the waters of Hong Kong Bay. Leatherback roared, limbs spread in triumph. Cherno Alpha’s Conn-Pod feed went dark, but Raleigh knew that somewhere out there, two Rangers were drowning. He’d seen their faces through the churning water inside the Jaeger. They had known they were going to die, but they were still fighting.

A moment later, a huge underwater explosion raised a churning dome on the surface, illuminated from below by the fire of Cherno Alpha’s incendiary tanks exploding.

Leatherback dove and disappeared.

“Cherno Alpha is down,” Tendo Choi said without inflection. “Striker, repeat: Cherno Alpha is down. Leatherback has sounded.”

“Got it,” Herc said.

At the same time, Striker Eureka stunned Otachi with a double-fisted blow to the top of its head. The Jaeger lifted Otachi and flung it away, gaining time.

“Engage missiles,” Herc said.

In their Conn-Pod feed, Raleigh watched Chuck spawn a virtual launcher holo.

“On it,” he said. A missile bay ratcheted open on Striker Eureka’s chest, exposing the stubby tips of K-Stunner ramjet missiles.

“Ready salvo one,” Chuck said. “Say good night, Otachi.”

Leatherback surged back to the surface, barely two hundred yards from Striker Eureka, which was angled away from it toward Otachi.

“Warning, Striker Eureka,” Tendo said. “Leatherback on your flank, eight o’clock.”

“Salvo one—” Herc began, but the rest of his order was drowned out by the atmosphere-splitting crackle of an electrical shockwave bursting from Leatherback. It raked across the surface of the ocean, the energy of its passage bulldozing a trench through the water before it hit Striker Eureka. The sound of its impact was almost as loud as Leatherback’s generation of the wave, which surrounded Striker Eureka in a writhing cage of electrical tendrils.

Striker Eureka went dark, its missiles unfired.

“What the hell is this?” Chuck yelled.

Herc unlatched himself from the control platform and went to the port side of the cockpit, looking around to see what had happened. They saw Leatherback come into view, and through the feed Raleigh heard Chuck say, slow and a little awed, “Damn...”

Then the LOCCENT went dark, too. Through the windows Raleigh watched Otachi, under the spotlights of circling Jumphawks, swimming almost casually through the shallows of Hong Kong Bay toward the city.

“It’s some kind of EMP,” Tendo cried. “It jumbled the Jaeger’s electrical circuits!”

“They’re adapting,” Gottlieb said. His voice was part horror and part admiration. “This is not a defense mechanism. It’s a
weapon!”

Emergency power kicked in and the LOCCENT came back to life.

“Striker?” Pentecost said.

“Nothing, sir. The Mark Vs are all digital. It’s fried. In fact, all the Jaegers are digital.” Tendo Choi looked like he was on the edge of panic. Two Jaegers down, one bricked by EMP, and still two kaiju running around just offshore from Hong Kong.

“Not all of ’em,” Raleigh said.

Everyone turned to look at him. Some already knew what he was about to say. Some were just hoping he would say something miraculous. Raleigh saw himself registering in their minds again. He was no longer the washout, the Ranger who couldn’t handle his return to duty.

At the moment, he was the only Ranger they had left.

And...

“Gipsy Danger’s analog,” he said. “Nuclear.”

***

Newt watched the kaiju appear over the line of buildings nearest the water. It hauled itself onto dry land, bracing its incredible bulk against a high-rise parking lot as it stood and sniffed the air. It was a quadruped, though with obvious capability to stand on its hind legs. Its head, a blunt arrowhead, sprouted two hooked battering protrusions above the nose.
They would protect the eyes,
Newt thought,
and make it difficult to land a square shot on the kaiju’s face.
Its front legs were much longer than the rear, so when it walked on all fours its elbows—also with armored protrusions—stuck up and out to the side.

A three-pronged tail, serrated thorns along its entire length, snapped and waved behind it. When it roared, windshields shattered in nearby cars. It sniffed again, flicked its tail in a curl that uprooted a block of pavement, and began to force its way deeper into the city.

Looking for me,
Newt thought.
It’s looking for me.

A panicking crowd was sweeping him along the street away from the kaiju, and he was fighting to slow down and get a look back at it. He wondered what ridiculous code name Tendo Choi had come up with. Fang? Wendigo?

Abruptly Newt lost his sense of humor as a kaiju flashback washed over him.

Something moving in the sac when it came before the Precursor it spread its wings

He’d seen this one before. He’d seen it born and watched the Precursors destroy the first iteration and move on to the next. He’d been present, via Drift, at the creation of this monster, and now it was
coming for him
. Like a baby bird imprinting on the first thing it saw.

The Precursor looked at him and it knew him and as it knew him so did they all

When his vision cleared, he was moving with the crowd, looking over their heads at the chaos of the evacuation scene.

“Hey,” he said, noticing something that he probably should have noticed right off the bat. Along the streets were posted signs reading ANTI-KAIJU SHELTER in English and Chinese, with arrows indicating the way to go.

So that’s why the crowd isn’t running straight away from the monster currently stomping Hong Kong’s waterfront to rubble,
thought Newt. He’d heard of the shelters—most Pacific Rim cities that were still standing had some—but because he spent all of his time in the lab, he’d never seen one.

The kaiju had stopped to sniff the air again. It roared, splaying out its claws... and then it looked right at Newt.

His kaiju flashback kicked up again. Colors fell out of order in the spectrum and he was seeing through the kaiju’s senses. A chaos of odors and information absorbed through its skin, exaltation that the masters had sent it, pain from fire and broken skin and bone. Hunger to find...

Him. Me, he thought.
They all know me now.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “You can handle this.”

The crowd had swept him right to the threshold of the nearest shelter. He went with the flow down a flight of stairs and through a large vault door. Inside the shelter, hundreds of people were jammed shoulder to shoulder, parents holding small children up off the floor or shielding them against walls. Newt was not a big fan of enclosed spaces, unless there was loud music playing and he could dance. He was a terrible dancer, fully aware of and undaunted by his terribleness.

Also, right now, he reminded himself, he was being pursued by a kaiju. A big one. Like, the biggest one they had yet seen.

More and more people shoved into the shelter. If there was some stated maximum capacity, nobody was paying attention to it. Newt started to wonder whether there was adequate air circulation. It wouldn’t do them any good to survive the kaiju if they just all suffocated instead.

The vault door boomed shut, with a sound similar to what Newt imagined Fortunato might have heard when Monstresor shut the distant basement door. Only bigger, the way that kaiju were bigger than people. So maybe the whole comparison didn’t really hold together, but Newt was thinking of it because one of Poe’s lifelong obsessive fears was of being buried alive—inhumation, he called it—and Newt was feeling right then as if he was coming as close as he ever wanted to the experience of inhumation.

“Ohh, this is so bad,” he moaned, mostly to himself. “It means Hermann was
right.”

That was almost like being buried alive, admitting that Hermann was right.
Two kaiju
. A powerful data point in Hermann’s favor. But still only a data point. If there were four kaiju at once next week, that would be more persuasive...