The kaiju’s corpse had absorbed some of the radiation, and then been picked clean for black-market sales. The world was full of crazy theories about the health benefits of kaiju tissue. Raleigh couldn’t tell for sure because of the rain, but it looked to him like parts of Kowloon were integrated right into the kaiju’s skeleton, and there were all kinds of weird decorations and lights on the giant skull.
There were other Boneslums, Raleigh knew. He’d seen one in Thailand, and there was a place in Japan where survivors of a kaiju assault had positioned the creature’s skull on their coastline, the way you would put an invader’s head on a stake on your city walls. Raleigh didn’t think the kaiju would care. They didn’t seem like the caring kind, about each other or about anything else.
He and Pentecost stepped out of the helicopter and crossed the helipad in the direction of what Raleigh took to be the command center. He was full of questions, and Pentecost hadn’t answered many of them on the long trip from Alaska to Hong Kong, via refueling stops in Petropavlovsk, Sapporo, and Shanghai. Which Mark III needed a pilot? Why him? Why come looking for a guy you’d first grounded and then watched walk away, after more than five years? The academies were still producing Rangers, though Raleigh knew there were fewer and fewer Jaegers for them to pilot. They were being redirected to other tasks within the PPDC, or seconded to national armed forces of member nations.
Pentecost, in fact, had said practically nothing. Great company, that guy. Same as always. Raleigh would have slept, but since Knifehead he’d discovered insomnia, so he’d stared out the window for hours, chewing over his questions. Also, a couple of times he wished he’d taken another shot at Miles, just for emphasis.
All that was behind him now, though. Here he was in Hong Kong.
Walking away from the Sikorsky, they passed a cargo helicopter with its loading bay open. A team of pilots guided a huge jar down the ramp, and in the jar—Raleigh did a double-take—was a piece of a kaiju brain. Raleigh had seen images in training seminars. The brain tissue didn’t look like human gray matter. It looked more like a giant octopus raddled with tumors and unusual fibrous extrusions. Standing off to the side of the crew were two men in white coats under rain gear. Raleigh immediately pegged them as scientists. As soon as he heard them speaking, he knew he was right.
“Easy, easy!” one of them was saying. “That’s a live specimen and important learning tool!” His inflection was Grade-A Imperious Nerd. “How would you like it if someone sloshed your brain around like that?”
“Well,” the other scientist said, in a cadence that started off German and got uptight from there, “if my brain had been removed and placed in a jar, sloshing it around would probably be the least of my worries.”
They glared at each other like an old married couple, deciding which of their ancient quarrels to restart. The kaiju brain rolled away in its jar, and behind it came two smaller jars, also filled with bits of kaiju. Raleigh added several more questions to his list.
“So this is it,” he began, by way of breaking the ice, in the hope that Pentecost would finally open up.
“Hong Kong,” Pentecost said. “The very first Jaeger station.” There was fondness in his voice. “And the last one standing.”
A young Japanese woman in some kind of uniform Raleigh didn’t recognize bowed to Pentecost and glanced at Raleigh from under her umbrella as they approached. Apparently she had been waiting for them, and Pentecost explained why, as she extended the umbrella to cover him as well.
“Mr. Becket, this is Mako Mori. She’s one of our brightest, has been for years now. She’s in charge of the Mark III Restoration Project.”
Mako bowed to Raleigh as well, not as deeply, but Raleigh was still surprised.
“Honored to meet you,” she said.
Raleigh wasn’t sure how to respond to that. Had anyone ever been honored to meet him? The thought distracted him enough that it took him a second to realize that Mako was talking to Pentecost… and another second after that to register that she was speaking in Japanese.
“I imagined him differently,” she said.
They waited at the door of a cargo elevator. Distant pings and groans from its shaft mingled with the sounds of machinery and the shouted conversations of the work crews back out on the helipads.
Gotcha, Raleigh thought.
“Chigau no? Yoi ka warui ka?” he asked with a little wink. Different how? Better or worse?
Nobody did embarrassment like the Japanese. Mako blushed right to her hairline and bowed several times.
“My apologies, Mr. Becket,” she said in English, before switching back to Japanese. “Takusan no koto wo kikimashita,” she said. I’ve heard so much about you.
He would have continued the conversation—and also tried to let her off the hook for the little linguistic gaffe— but one of the scientists from the cargo helicopter started shouting at them as the elevator door opened.
“Hold the door! Hold the door!” he cried.
Raleigh did so, and the two scientists crashed into the elevator, both dripping wet and cradling sample jars with what must have been smaller bits of kaiju organs culled from the larger holding tanks outside. The doors began to close.
“This is Dr. Geiszler,” Pentecost said, indicating the man who’d shouted. Geiszler was the kind of brash, graceless nerd who had BOY GENIUS written all over him. Raleigh recalled hearing his name during his Ranger tour… well, his first Ranger tour. At least he thought he had. The scientists all seemed the same to him.
Pentecost turned to the other man, a blonder and more stuffy variant on the lab-coat stereotype, and added, “And Dr. Gottlieb.”
“Newt Geiszler, please,” Geiszler said. To his partner he added, “Say hello to the humans, Hermann.”
“I asked you not to refer to me by my first name around others,” Gottlieb said stiffly. “I am a doctor with over ten years of decorated experience—”
“He doesn’t get out of his cage much,” Newt said. He shifted his grip on the sample jar and the arm of his coverall rode up over a sleeve tattoo of a kaiju.
“Nice ink,” Raleigh said. “Who is that, Yamarashi?”
Newt nodded. “Good eye, though you’d have to be a moron not to recognize him.”
“Well, my brother and I took it down in 2017,” Raleigh said, keeping his voice level. Gotcha again. “Cut its head off, if I remember right.”
Newt’s whole attitude toward Raleigh changed.
“Whoa,” he said.
Raleigh couldn’t help it; he glanced over at Mako. Who could get off a line like that and not check in on the closest pretty girl to see how it had registered? She was looking at him but looked down and away. Newt kept blathering.
“He was one of the biggest Cat-IIIs ever. Two thousand five hundred tons of awesome.”
Los Angeles, October 2017. Raleigh remembered exactly how big Yamarashi had been, lumbering up onto the Long Beach waterfront and snapping the Queen Mary in half before smashing the Queensway Bridge and stomping across Terminal Island. Gipsy Danger had dropped at the mouth of the Los Angeles River as part of a two-Jaeger response. When their partner’s missiles bounced off Yamarashi’s armor, Yancy and Raleigh had been forced to take over, even though it was their first combat drop. They’d fought Yamarashi through the Port of Long Beach and back to the oil tanks along the Harbor Freeway. He and Yancy had garroted the kaiju with a cargo-crane cable, tearing its head off. It was their first kill, and the gouts of blood from the decapitated Yamarashi nearly dissolved the Conn-Pod around them before they rinsed off in the bay. Raleigh remembered looking at his brother afterward, feeling a mix of exhilaration and dumbfounded confusion. Yancy had been pure cool, shrugging like they’d already done it a hundred times.