Mako answered but he didn’t hear her right away. He looked up at her, lifting an eyebrow.
“I am not,” Mako repeated. “The Marshal has his reasons.”
“Fifty-one simulated kills, though… what can they be?”
Mako looked him right in the eye and dodged the question.
“I hope you approve of my choices. I’ve studied your fighting technique and strategy. Every one of your victories… even Anchorage.”
“Really? And what did you think?”
“Mr. Becket. It is not my place to comment.”
Oh, but you want to, don’t you? Raleigh thought.
“The Marshal isn’t here, Miss Mori. You can say it. And you could stop clutching that pad so hard. Looks like it’s gonna snap in half.”
The briefest shadow of irritation crossed Mako’s face. She put the pad in her pocket and took a breath.
“I think… you’re unpredictable,” she said.
Oho, thought Raleigh. A genuine, unfiltered statement. What next?
And he found out, because Mako wasn’t done.
“You have a habit of deviating from standard combat techniques. You take risks that endanger yourself and your crew. I don’t think you are the right man for this mission—”
With that, she caught herself and looked down. Raleigh looked away from her at the same time.
“Wow,” he said. “You may be right, Miss Mori. About that, and about my past. But in real combat, Miss Mori— outside the simulator, in the real world, with the Miracle Mile at your back and millions of people just beyond it praying for you to save them—in real combat, you make decisions and you live with the consequences.”
It was a little sharper than he’d meant to be, but Raleigh didn’t appreciate someone waving her perfect simulator record in his face and then telling him about what he did wrong fighting real kaiju. He turned away from her and went back to his unpacking. He heard her footsteps crossing the corridor to her own room. Raleigh caught a whiff of himself. It had been a long trip from Alaska, and he’d left at the end of a long sweaty workday. He stripped off his shirt just as Mako started to speak.
“I didn’t mean to—”
She stopped as fast as she’d started, and Raleigh knew why. She was seeing the old scars on his back and chest, where the circuitry from his drivesuit had overloaded and burned its keloid shadow into his skin in the shallows off Anchorage, five years and four months ago. He let her look and he didn’t say anything as he got out a fresh T-shirt and shrugged into it.
That’s the real world, he was thinking. In the real world, real kaiju tear pieces out of your Jaeger and when things go to shit, it leaves scars. Forever. On the outside and the inside.
He looked at her and caught her eye.
That’s right, he thought. You love the scars because you haven’t earned any of your own yet.
Mako ducked into her room and shut the door.
Raleigh didn’t consider himself an especially sharp judge of women, but he could practically smell the ozone in the air between him and Mako. Tension, attraction, rivalry, suspicion—all at once. It was good. Invigorating. He shut the door and thought to himself that he was exactly where he belonged.
Tomorrow, as Tendo Choi had said, would be a big day. The first of many
PAN-PACIFIC DEFENSE CORPS
PERSONNEL DOSSIER
NAME Newton Geiszler, PhD
ASSIGNED TEAM Kaiju Science, ID S-NGEI_100.11-Y
DATE OF ACTIVE SERVICE August 7, 2016
CURRENT SERVICE STATUS ACTIVE; BASED HONG KONG SHATTERDOME
BIOGRAPHY
Born Berlin January 19, 1990. Only child. Parents musicians. Strongly influenced by uncle, musical engineer, who taught Geiszler the basics of electronics; also avid consumer of manga and monster movies. Combination of these influences and genius-level intellect led Geiszler to voracious interest in all sciences. Second youngest student admitted to Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Received six doctorates by 2015, taught MIT 2010-2016, pioneered research in artificial tissue replication. Joined PPDC 2016. Psychological profile indicates profound ambivalence toward kaiju resulting from conflict between childhood adoration of monsters and contemporary observation of kaiju attacks. Borderline manic personality, poor social skills. Has performed critical research leading to upgraded Jaeger armaments.
NOTES
Born Berlin January 19,Unorthodox approach causes chain-of-command issues; these are to be handled lightly due to Geiszler’s outstanding record of research and reverse engineering Anteverse biotechnologies. Service file contains written complaints from Kaiju Science colleague Dr. Hermann Gottlieb regarding Geiszler’s laboratory procedures, personal demeanor, taste in music, and other minor issues. Complaints deemed nonessential. No action is to be taken.
9
ROCK STAR, THOUGHT NEWT GEISZLER. ONCE he’d wanted to be one for real. Now he would settle for the figurative sense… at least until they won the Kaiju War and he could get back to the business of putting a band together. He hadn’t been onstage since the Gymnasium back in Berlin, where he and the Black Velvet Rabbits had bent the heads of geeks at every all-ages club he could haul his gear to.
Now he was thousands of miles from Berlin, fighting for humanity’s survival by scavenging bits of junk equipment from storage rooms behind the Jaeger repair bays. He’d found a processor that should function, left over from when the Hong Kong Shatterdome had its own strike team. It looked like it might have been original to Shaolin Rogue, but Newt didn’t know for sure. He had enough fiber-optic and fluid-core cabling to get the bandwidth he needed. He had leads and copper contact pins. He had a spare monitor and a solid-state recording drive back in the lab.
He piled all the stuff on a cart and looked it over one more time, speccing out the project in his head. It wasn’t that hard to build a Pons now that the tech was established and had found its way into so many other applications. Yep, Newt thought. He had what he needed.
Now it was time to tinker, like he was building instruments for Black Velvet Rabbit. Newt loved tinkering. He loved to give his highly creative, instinctive, yet profoundly analytical, brain free rein, shutting down his perceived reality and seeing where his ratiocinative mind would take him. Whenever he got to construct something, he had that crackle in his head… especially when he was about to do something as balls-out crazy as Drift with a sample of a dead kaiju. Swap neurotrasmissions with a silicate cerebellum. Open himself up to the alien alpha waves of a nonhuman sentience.
Hermann wouldn’t have done it even if he had conclusive mathematical proof that it would save the universe. It just wasn’t something a guy like Hermann could conceive of. But it was exactly the kind of thing that was constantly running through Newt’s mind, which (and Newt would never have admitted this out loud, but he knew it was true) was why he and Hermann worked so well together. They struck sparks.
Newt and his Uncle Gunter had struck the same sparks when Newt was a kid, tinkering in the basement of Gunter’s studio, where fringey techno musicians stood around making sounds and waiting for Gunter to come up with the next innovation that they would turn into the club tracks that pounded out of speakers all over Europe. Gunter had pioneered many of the sounds that were probably coming out of the Kaidanovskys’ speakers right now. All that Ukrainian stuff was derived from the Berlin scene anyway.