“Is it really that bad?” Raleigh asked. Maybe being the resistance wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
“It is,” Pentecost replied.
They got to a railing and Pentecost pointed.
“Crimson Typhoon, out of China.”
Raleigh recognized the unique design, with its bifurcated lower left arm giving the Jaeger three effective hands. He’d seen Crimson Typhoon before—but he also remembered that Stacker Pentecost was a big believer in doing things by the book whenever possible. In this case, reintegrating a Ranger after a five-year absence called for a full guided tour. A lot had changed.
“Piloted by the Wei Clan,” Pentecost went on. “Triplets, the only ones we’ve ever been able to get to Drift together. They have successfully defended Hong Kong Port seven times. They use the Thundercloud formation. Very powerful. Hong Kong was Crimson Typhoon’s home base from its first mission.”
At the base of Crimson Typhoon the Wei triplets were doing something complicated with a basketball, dribbling and passing it in an intricate pattern near a hoop bolted to a stanchion. They shot once in a while, but the point of the game didn’t appear to be scoring. There was an ease and fluidity about it that was all the more surprising when Raleigh noticed that most of the time none of the three were looking at either of the other two.
Raleigh had no idea what the Thundercloud formation was, and Pentecost didn’t linger. He pointed to another Jaeger bay, whose occupant Raleigh also recognized.
“That tank is Cherno Alpha, down from Vladivostok. Last of the T-90s.”
Cherno Alpha had no humanoid head like the rest of the Jaegers. Its designers had located its Conn-Pod in mid-torso for a number of reasons related to safety and energy efficiency. The Jaeger’s head was a massive cylinder containing reserves for its power supply, as well as tanks of fuel for its twin incendiary turbines, located on either shoulder. It was squat and heavy, built to get close and take a punch to give one.
Pentecost pointed down to Cherno Alpha’s feet, where a huge slab of a man was working on what appeared to be a neural relay with an ordinary-sized woman who looked like a doll next to him.
“Aleksis and Sasha Kaidanovsky, husband and wife pilot team. They hold the record for longest sustained neural handshake, over eighteen hours.”
“I’ve heard of them. Perimeter patrol on the Siberian Wall,” Raleigh said. The Kaidanovskys were also the source of the music that growled and thudded through the Shatterdome.
“That’s right. Under their watch, it went unbreached for six years.”
The music got louder and one of the Chinese triplets shouted at the Kaidanovskys.
“Your music is horrible!”
“Horrible!” another echoed.
“Don’t disrespect the Dome!” added the third.
All the while they kept dribbling their basketball. It was too instinctive for them to be doing it purposefully. Had to be some kind of hangover from the neural handshake? Raleigh had seen it before, or thought he had. He and Yancy had experienced kind of the same thing once when on leave from Lima, back when kaiju attacks were months apart and it didn’t seem too likely that the world would be ending. They’d started finishing each other’s sentences, handing each other stuff before being asked… the girls they were trying to pick up at an off-base bar had been impressed at first, then spooked. They’d spent the rest of the night playing chess, to an endless series of draws.
Aleksis stood, looming over every other human in the Shatterdome. The size of him, Raleigh thought.
“If you have problem with Ukrainian hard house, you have problem with life,” Sasha said. “If you have problem with life… maybe we can fix that.”
Ukrainian hard house, Raleigh thought. So that’s what you call it. He glanced over at Mako, who didn’t seem to think much of Ukrainian hard house either. She hadn’t said a word during Pentecost’s running introduction. What was her role? Raleigh thought he remembered a new graduate of the Jaeger Academy named Mako, coming into the Anchorage Shatterdome right as he was leaving. Was she that Mako? Now that he’d played his little language trick on her, he thought he’d either broken the ice or soured her on him forever.
Back down on the Shatterdome floor the two support crews, for Crimson Typhoon and Cherno Alpha, appeared and clustered behind their pilots. Raleigh smelled a fight coming. He glanced over at Pentecost, who didn’t appear the slightest bit concerned. He was already moving on to the next Jaeger.
“And this is Striker Eureka. The only surviving Australian Jaeger. First of the Mark Vs. Fastest Jaeger on earth. Relocated from Sydney just a couple of weeks ago. Good timing.”
He glanced over at Raleigh to see if Raleigh had gotten the joke. Raleigh had, but it was so unexpected coming from the usually dead-serious Pentecost that Raleigh’s laugh reflex had shorted out.
Striker Eureka looked pretty good for a Jaeger that had seen action just the day before. Techs had disassembled its blade retractors and were cleaning noxious kaiju gunk out of the mechanisms. Other crews ran hoses to various ports on Striker Eureka’s legs, replenishing coolants, lubricants, and oxygen. A third crew was cleaning the six rocket tubes. Nearby, a crane held a fresh magazine of K-Stunner ramjet rockets.
Herc and Chuck Hansen sat together at the edge of the maintenance bay overseeing the work but staying out of the way of their crews. Raleigh knew Herc a bit from his first tour, but had only seen Chuck on TV. They were cool and professional. Techs did the maintenance. Pilots did the piloting. Didn’t do anyone any good to get those roles confused. Chuck was tossing a ball for a bulldog, who happily left strings of drool on it at every exchange back to his master.
“You know Sergeant Herc Hansen and his son, Chuck,” Pentecost said. “They’ll be running point. The dog is Max.”
“Running point?” Raleigh asked. It wasn’t a term common to Jaeger deployments. Usually only offensive operations needed someone to run point, and it had been a long time since humanity had been on the offensive.
“We’re going for the Breach,” Pentecost said. His voice was determined but matter-of-fact. “We’ll strap a thermonuclear warhead on Striker’s back. Twenty-four hundred pounds, with a detonation yield of 1.2 million tons of TNT. You and the other two Jaegers will run defense for them.”
Raleigh was still hung up on the first revelation of the plan. He couldn’t quite process the operational details of his role yet.
“Where’d you get something like that?”
“Did you see the Russians?” Pentecost asked. “They can get just about anything.”
Nuke the Breach? Could that be done? Raleigh hadn’t kept up on the Kaiju Science briefings when he was active, and now he was five years out of date. From what he remembered, though, the energy fields outside the Breach repelled any kind of approach. Also, after spreading fallout all over Hong Kong, Sydney, and northern California, the world’s governments had lost their appetite for any more nuclear detonations. What was Pentecost doing here? Was this what it meant to be part of the resistance?
Too many questions. And no answers forthcoming. Again he looked at Mako for a cue. She didn’t seem disturbed by the idea that they were going to nuke the Breach. Maybe everyone here knew something Raleigh didn’t.
They went down a short set of steps to the floor level just as Chuck threw a ball for Max. Instead of going after it, the bulldog came galumping up to Mako, who knelt to receive his drooly adoration. Her hair fell around her face, and Raleigh noticed right then that the glossy black mane was dyed a deep blue where it framed her jawline. Which was, in truth, an excellent jawline, equaled if not surpassed by the rest of Mako. She moved like an athlete, she had blue tips, and she could rebuild decommissioned Jaegers.