Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization Mass Market Paperback (29 page)

While he’d worked on preparing Baby Otachi’s body, Pan-Pac Defense Corps vehicles bearing soldiers and security equipment had arrived. They had put up plastic tents to keep the experiment out of the rain, and brought floodlights to keep the experiment out of the dark. One of those tents extended over most of Baby Otachi’s upper body. They had also brought Hermann Gottlieb, who was now fluttering around and getting in Newt’s way.

Newt wheeled his custom-built Pons unit through the last of the rain, which was almost over. There was a hint of light in the eastern sky, far out over the Pacific.
The Breach was that way,
thought Newt.
It’s already morning there.

Gottlieb was listening to a Pan-Pac Defense radio monitor and fidgeting.

“They have two signatures in the Breach,” he said when Newt came in with the Neural Connector.
“Two
of them.”

“Hey, you want to help, give me a hand with this,” Newt said. “Neural interface is off the scale. That didn’t happen when I Drifted with the cold cuts.” Newt was excited. He didn’t care how many signatures there were on Tendo Choi’s screen.

“This can’t be right,” Gottlieb said. “There should be
three
Kaijus coming, not two.”

Ohhhhh, that’s right,
Newt thought.
I forgot this is all about you and your model, Hermann. So sorry to be busy saving the world instead
. Also he was irritated that Hermann had pluralized “kaiju” like it was an English word.

“It hurts to be wrong, doesn’t it?” he said, all mock sympathy.

“I am not,” Gottlieb insisted. “But the only way to find out is to do this...”

The next word out of Hermann’s mouth shocked Newt so profoundly that for a moment he considered the possibility that he might have been wrong all along. Maybe Hermann wasn’t a pompous, prissy, egomaniacal number slave all the time after all.

That word was, “...together.”

Hermann grabbed one of the Neural Connector squid caps and mashed it down over his head.

“I’ll go with you. That’s what Jaeger pilots do, share the load.”

“You would do that with me?” Newt looked around, half expecting the world to be ending already. Biblically. Cats lying down with dogs, rains of frogs, rivers of blood, the whole works.

“With worldwide destruction a certain alternative, do I really have a choice?” Hermann asked.

Well
, Newt thought.
If you were going to put it like that...

“Say it with me, then!” He slapped his own squid cap on. “We’re gonna own this!”

Hermann made a fist like it was the first time in his life he had performed the action.

“We’re gonna own this,” he repeated, less than convincingly.

Okay,
Newt thought.
Not the rah-rah type. But we knew that
.

“Yeah,” he said. “Pass me that cable over there.”

***

The assembled pilots and researchers and LOCCENT staffers and displaced techs whose Jaegers were in pieces at the bottom of Hong Kong bay all had one thing in common as they assembled in the Shatterdome with a gleam of dawn on the horizon.

They all knew they were going to die.

Chuck and Herc Hansen stood close together, but only Chuck was in uniform.

“The old man’s off his rocker,” Chuck said. “I can’t pilot Striker alone.”

Tendo Choi looked up from his workstation and called out, “Marshal on deck!”

Everyone turned and snapped to attention, and then they had one more thing in common: astonishment at the sight of Marshal Stacker Pentecost in full flight suit.

No one said a word until Mako approached Pentecost and he said to her, “Funny. I don’t remember it being so tight.”

Mako did not smile. “Getting back in a Jaeger will kill you,” she said.

“Not getting in one will kill us all.” Pentecost put a fatherly hand on her shoulder. “You are a brave, brave girl. I’m lucky to have seen you grow up.”

Mako nodded. Tears stood in her eyes but she did not let them fall.

“Now, if I’m going to get through this,” Pentecost said, “I’m going to need
you
to start protecting me.”

The prelaunch sequence for Striker Eureka and Gipsy Danger was well underway. Above them, the petals of the Shatterdome started to open.

Chuck strode up to Pentecost.

“You’re flying with me? How are we supposed to match up?” He made no effort to hide his skepticism, or his hostility toward the idea.

In any other circumstance, Pentecost would have torn him a new one for insubordination. But now, with bigger issues confronting them than disrespect for a senior officer, Pentecost just answered the question.

“I carry nothing into the Drift,” he said. “No memories, no rank. As for you, you’re easy. You got daddy issues? Check. You’re an egotistical jerk? Check. You’re a simple puzzle I solved on Day One.” With a look over at Herc, Pentecost added, “But you are your father’s son. We’ll match up just fine.”

Chuck looked back and forth between Pentecost and his father. Raleigh could tell he hadn’t expected Pentecost to cut into him like that.

“Works for me,” Chuck said eventually.

The petals were open and the dawn sky shed light on the gathering at the center of the Shatterdome. Pentecost stepped up onto the Jaeger hand, and stood on the backside at the edge of one of the maintenance bays. He waited, surveying the remains of the Jaeger project that he had sacrificed everything to sustain. They had been abandoned by the countries they were trying to protect. They had no money. They had no resources to build more Jaegers or upgrade the two that could still take the field. The kaiju were coming faster and faster, bigger and bigger, evolving week by week to answer the threats they encountered and shared via the hive mind Newt Geiszler had discovered. The two surviving Jaegers were heading out on a suicide mission... and today Stacker Pentecost was going to die.

When there was silence in the Shatterdome, and he had taken a moment to enjoy his last dawn on Earth, Stacker Pentecost spoke. He raised his voice so that the crew up on the LOCCENT mezzanine could hear him as well as the pilots and techs nearby.

“Today, on the edge of hope, at the end of time, we have chosen to believe,” he said. “Not only in ourselves, but in each other. To depend on each other. Today, not a man or woman in here now stands alone. Today will be the day they tell stories about. The day we face the monsters at our door. We take the fight to them.

“Today, we are canceling the apocalypse.”

It was a short speech, but as Pentecost often reminded himself, the Gettysburg Address could be read out loud in about a minute. A cheer went up, and he let it go for a moment. Then Pentecost stepped down and the crew of the Shatterdome got down to business. They had Jaegers to launch, and a nuclear payload to deliver right down the throat of the Breach.

NEWT PLUGGED IN THE LAST OF THE CABLES
leading from the electrodes driven into Baby Otachi’s brain to the customized Pons, which he was already mentally designating the Geiszler Array. He went outside and asked some of the PPDC marines guarding the area what was going on back at the Shatterdome. They didn’t know.

“Well,” Newt said, “I’m about to do a kind of hairy experiment in here. You mind pulling the plug if it looks like things aren’t going as planned?”

One of the marines looked at the Geiszler Array and Baby Otachi, with Hermann standing at attention like an undertaker. Then he looked back at Newt.

“Are you kidding me?” he asked. “How the hell will we know if things aren’t going as planned?”

Well,
Newt thought.
That was a good point.
He went back into the tent and tapped the squid cap into the Geiszler Array. Hermann had his own squid cap on already.

“Okay,” Newt said. “You ready?”

Hermann sniffed and said, “Of course I’m ready.”

They both took deep breaths. Newt started the sequence.

“Neural handshake initiating, in three... two... one...”

***

Then they were in full Drift together... with the brain of Baby Otachi Junior right there with them. Gottlieb had never Drifted, and his mind went through a moment of screaming dislocation before the Geiszler Array took over and performed the neural handshake. Newt had a complete tour of Hermann’s mind, within a faction of a second.

numbers language of the universe and they will hide me I can hide behind them because they are never angry they are never wrong they choose no sides and expect nothing they are purely themselves and will never betray me

Newt had mud between his toes at Lake Como. Gottlieb was soldering together a robot
can I build an intelligence that will pass a Turing test and if I could of course I can I must never say anything about it until it is done or Father will

Something triggered a response deep inside Baby Otachi’s species memory. The light around them grew strange, watery and distorted, the Anteverse seen through amniotic fluid, Baby Otachi perceiving its world through Otachi’s senses, aware in the womb, waiting knowing hungry

Precursor

Hermann had never seen one. Newt felt his mind unhinge and put itself back together.
Is that what happened to me
—

The Precursor knew it was being watched. It looked at Newt, right at him. It knew who he was. It did not care, but it knew. For a hundred million years this being had waited for Earth to be ready. Now it was done waiting. It looked at Hermann too, sizing them up, knowing them for what they were. It had nothing to hide from them because it did not consider them worth hiding anything from.

die all of you will die it is already over you are feeling the last dying impulses in a brain already too far gone to decay we are coming for you and you cannot touch us we have waited and now you will wait for the end we bring you

***

Newt tore off the squid cap and waited for the world to settle into place around him again. He looked around and saw that Hermann didn’t look any better than Newt felt. One of Hermann’s eyes looked like one big internal hemorrhage.

“Ugh,” Newt said. “Are you okay?”

“Of course. I’m completely fine,” Hermann said. “But you saw it. Didn’t you?”

Then he leaned over and puked violently on the ground between them. Newt sighed and waited for him to finish. Then he stepped around the mess and handed Hermann a handkerchief.

“I did,” he said. “We have to warn them. Their plan...”

“It’s not going to work,” Hermann said.

As soon as Newt was sure Hermann could stand, they both ran out of the tent shouting for someone to get them a helicopter.

***

Raleigh and Mako were already in Gipsy Danger’s Conn-Pod running their pre-deployment checklist and integrating their Drift. Pentecost was at the elevator door, waiting. Time was short, but he had to be patient because Herc Hansen was sending his son off to die.

Pentecost had sent a lot of people off to die in the years of the Kaiju War, but had had no children. The closest he knew to the experience of fatherhood was his relationship with Mako and he’d found it virtually impossible to permit her to deploy. Herc and Chuck had assumed they would be together whatever happened, but even a tough old bastard like Herc Hansen couldn’t run a Jaeger with a broken clavicle.

He stood a little way off from Pentecost, the fat bulldog Max sitting at his feet as he regarded his son for the last time.

“When you Drift with someone,” Herc said quietly, “you feel like there’s nothing to talk about.” He hesitated, trying to master his emotions and failing. When he spoke again, his voice quavered and the sorrow on his face was impossible for Pentecost to look at. He dropped his gaze to the dog, who looked up at Herc and then around the room, searching for the source of his master’s sadness.

“But I don’t want to regret all the things I never said out loud,” Herc said.

“No need,” Chuck said. “I know them all.”

He wrapped his father in a crushing farewell hug, then took a step back. Pointing down at Max, Chuck said, “Take care of him for me.”