“Yeah,” he said. “I agree.”
“Come,” she said. “Marshal Pentecost wants me to show you something.”
It was a short walk back to the main central space beneath the Shatterdome proper. Mako led Raleigh to a different side of the dome. Through another security door was a repair bay, one of the six that defined the organization of the Shatterdome, along with the deploy ramps and conveyors that spoked out from the central landing and staging area.
The construction was all steel, designed for function, and the entire bay was littered with repair benches, tool cabinets, totes and bins full of parts and wires… everything you might need if your job was to keep a skyscraper-sized robot in fighting trim. They passed a crew tuning up a relay engine the size of a small car. Other smaller motor assemblies sat on benches in various stages of cleaning or repair. Crews were scraping, welding, cutting, soldering…
And standing in the center of it all was Gipsy Danger.
Raleigh stood perfectly still.
He forgot all about Mako, and the Shatterdome, and Hong Kong, and the past five years he’d spent chasing construction jobs from Nome all the way down to Sitka, where Stacker Pentecost had found him. He forgot all of that. He even, for a moment, forgot that the world was ending. Five years…
She looked pretty good, was Raleigh’s first thought, when he could think again. The last time he’d seen her, she’d been missing an arm and half her head, and was spouting fluid from a dozen holes, including the gaping wound punched through her torso by Knifehead. He fell back into that moment, remembering the driving snow on the beach, the blood in his eyes, the shocked look on the face of the old man with his metal detector. The last thing he’d seen before he passed out was the young boy at the beachcomber’s side, eyes wide. There had been snowflakes in the boy’s eyelashes.
The last thing Raleigh had felt, as he slumped to the frozen sand, was the empty space in his mind where Yancy had once been.
Now Gipsy Danger towered over him into the floodlit night sky, her hull flickering with the light cast by welding sparks, as if none of that had ever happened.
“She looks like new,” Raleigh said.
“Better than new,” Mako said. “She’s one of a kind now.”
“Solid iron hull,” someone else said from behind Raleigh. It took him a moment to reset and place the voice. Then he turned and saw Tendo Choi coming across the repair deck with a big welcoming grin on his face. “No alloys,” Tendo went on. “Forty engine blocks per muscle strand. Hyper-torque drivers in every limb and a new fluid synapse system. And this little lady,” he pointed to Mako, “oversaw it all.”
“Tendo!” Raleigh exclaimed. They clapped each other into a bear hug. Raleigh held it, feeling suddenly that perhaps he belonged here after all. Not everything had changed. He took a stop back and said, “So what’s going on?”
Tendo popped open a small tin and handed Raleigh a pill.
“Metharocin,” he explained. “New precaution. It’ll shield you from radiation while you’re out of your suit.” Pointing up at Gipsy Danger’s torso, he added, “Exposed core is still fuel rod.”
Raleigh took the pill.
“No, I meant with you,” he said. He pointed at Tendo’s left ring finger, which bore a gold band that hadn’t been there last time they’d seen each other.
“Um, well, remember Alison from munitions? We got married. Got a one-year-old son.” Tendo grinned proudly, but just as quickly his happiness was tempered and his tone wavered. “Haven’t seen him in six months. You know Pentecost, got me on Breach watch. Night and day, day and night; I am a caffeine-driven low-rider, my friend!” Having gotten his Tendo-bonhomie back, he watched Raleigh studying Gipsy Danger. “The Drift’s going to stir it all up, man. Memories. You sure you’re ready for this?”
That was the question, wasn’t it? Raleigh figured he could remember the moves. He could pilot a Jaeger. He could kill kaiju. He’d done it five times. But could he allow another person to enter the space in his mind where Yancy had once been? Tough one. He was going to have to go right through those last moments again, feel Yancy’s terror and the blast of frigid salt air and the predatory roar of Knifehead shaking its way through Gipsy Danger’s frame and Raleigh’s own bones.
In one way, he’d never stopped going over those memories. He was in Olympic physical shape because one of the few ways he’d found to push the recollections away was grueling sessions of sweat and focusing deep into his body instead of his mind. But at some point the workouts always had to stop, and the memories were always waiting.
So he didn’t know. He didn’t know if he was ready or not, and he wouldn’t until he Drifted with another human being again.
Raleigh looked at Tendo, down to the floor, over at Mako… She was looking back at him. He coughed and pulled himself together.
“I should unpack,” he said.
Tendo understood.
“Yeah,” he said. “Mako will show you your quarters. Tomorrow’s the big day. First of many. You’re back where you belong, man. Good to have you.”
Raleigh cracked a smile.
“You too, buddy,” he said. Big day, yep. That’s what they’d always said to each other every morning when they thought there would be a kaiju attack. It had spread and become one of those little memes that they passed back and forth.
His room was nothing special, a pale-colored rectangle with a bunk and a few pieces of furniture. Raleigh dropped his duffel on the bed and took it all in for a minute.
In the doorway, Mako said, “If you need anything, I’m right across the hall. You’ll meet the candidates at six hundred hours. I’ve tried my best to match them to your Drift pattern.”
Six hundred, Raleigh thought. He had just enough time to clock eight hours in the sack and get a shower and some toast. Pentecost was throwing him right into the fire. Looking, no doubt, to see if the five years away from the Rangers had softened him up, made him weak.
And Mako had pre-screened his potential Drift partners.
“You did?” he asked as he unzipped his duffel. He didn’t have much in it. “Personally?”
She nodded. “I did, Mr. Becket.”
He wished she wouldn’t call him that, but he didn’t say anything.
Instead he asked, “What’s your story? Restoring old Jaegers for combat, showing has-beens like me around… that can’t be it.”
She met his gaze but said nothing. Her grip on the little pad she carried tightened. In there somewhere, Raleigh knew, was a detailed dossier on him and equally detailed assessments on all of the candidates to be his partner. He had no desire to see any of it. Data and pre-action analysis maybe helped to frame big generalizations about people, but Raleigh didn’t think they predicted much about how real flesh-and-blood human beings would react in realtime situations.
He opened a drawer and stuffed some socks into it.
“Are you a pilot?” he asked.
“No. Not yet. But I want to be one. More than anything…” She hesitated, and Raleigh saw her change her mind about something she’d been ready to say. “I want to be one.”
Something was going on here. Mako Mori was a puzzle, and she didn’t seem to be interested in letting anyone solve her.
“What’s your simulator score?” Raleigh asked.
“Fifty-one drops, fifty-one kills,” she said evenly.
“And you’re not one of the candidates tomorrow?”
Digging in the bottom of his duffel, Raleigh came up with the one possession that meant something to him: an old photo of him and Yancy, taken shortly after they finished Ranger training and made their first kill. Leaning into each other, bright and strong and invincible.