“Fifth notch on the belt,” Raleigh said, scanning the first batch of information on the kaiju as it streamed out of LOCCENT Command.
Yancy stretched and looked around for his clothes.
“Don’t get cocky,” he said.
Three minutes later they were in the suiting area.
The drivesuit was a finicky and multi-layered piece of equipment. The first layer, the circuity suit, was like a wetsuit threaded with a mesh of synaptic processors. The pattern of processor relays looked like circuitry on the outside of the suit, gleaming gold against its smooth black polymer material. These artificial synapses transmitted commands to the Jaeger’s motor systems as fast as the pilot’s brain could generate them, with lag times close to zero. The synaptic processor array also transmitted pain signals to the pilots when their Jaeger was damaged. This had proven to be the best way to minimize reaction times, and Raleigh knew from experience that when you felt a kaiju’s teeth bite into your arm, you moved faster than if you were just watching everything on a screen.
The second layer was a sealed polycarbonate shell with full life support and magnetic interfaces at spine, feet, and all major limb joints. It relayed neural signals both incoming and outgoing. This armored outer layer included a Drift recorder that automatically preserved sensory impressions. It was white and shiny and also bulletproof—though they hadn’t yet seen a kaiju that shot bullets.
The outer armored layer of the drivesuit also kept pilots locked into the Conn-Pod’s Pilot Motion Rig, a command platform with geared locks for the Rangers’ boots, cabled extensors that attached to each suit gauntlet, and a full-spectrum neural transference plate, called the feedback cradle, that locked from the Motion Rig to the spine of each Ranger’s suit. At the front of the motion rig stood a command console, but most of a Ranger’s commands were issued either by voice or through interaction with the holographic heads-up display projected into the space in front of the pilots’ faces. Raleigh and Yancy were already wearing the close-fitting cranial sleeves Rangers called “thinking caps,” which put their brain functions directly into the loop when they synced everything together for the Drift.
Once they were suited up, with a plasma display outside the suiting area tracking Knifehead’s progress in real time, Yancy and Raleigh stepped into the Conn-Pod. The tech crew followed them, affixing the feedback cradle to the backs of their suits and cabling them into the interface drivers that transmitted their nerve impulses into Gipsy Danger itself.
Back in the Stone Age, in 2015, the first rough Jaeger prototype had used a single pilot. This hadn’t lasted long. The neural overload traumatized or killed several volunteers before the first full prototype rolled out on Kodiak Island with a Conn-Pod built for two. When the Pons mechanism was perfected and the Drift made possible, the Jaeger Project became a reality. All of the Jaegers since then had been designed from the ground up with two Ranger pilots in mind—except for Crimson Typhoon, a Chinese Jaeger, which Raleigh had heard was piloted by a crew of identical triplets. One of these days maybe he’d serve with them. It was something he’d like to see.
They stood on adjacent platforms, arms and legs spread. Control assemblies extended from the floor of the Conn-Pod, cybernetically mated with each suit, and spawned the holographic HUD above the command console.
The tech crew checked each link to make sure it was solid and then they withdrew, the door sliding shut behind them.
Raleigh and Yancy ran their pre-deployment suit checks and pre-Drift link analysis. Everything looked right.
“Morning, boys,” Tendo Choi said through the comm.
“Tendo, my man!” Raleigh called out.
Yancy sent the all-clear from his suit.
“How’d your date with Alison go last night, Mr. Choi?”
“Oh, she loved me,” Tendo replied. “Her boyfriend, not so much.”
“Engage drop, Mr. Choi.” Stacker Pentecost’s voice cut off their banter.
All business, that Pentecost, Raleigh thought.
“Engaging drop, sir,” Tendo responded.
Raleigh and Yancy looked at each other.
“Release for drop,” Yancy said.
Simultaneously they each hit buttons on the command console.
With a booming metallic snap the gantry holding the Conn-Pod and its cranial frame in place let go. The unit dropped down a vertical shaft, channeled by rails on either side. Raleigh’s stomach jumped and for a moment his vision blurred, just like it did every time. Then the Conn-Pod lurched and slowed, easing into place on the cervical assembly that locked Gipsy Danger’s head into place.
Bolts and hooks connected and automated gears engaged, uniting the head and body of the Jaeger into a two-hundred-eighty-eight-foot humanoid fighting machine the likes of which had never been seen outside of movies and comics… until the Jaeger project, born out of necessity, had brought those comic-book dreams to life.
“We are locked,” Yancy said, and moments later Gipsy Danger’s nuclear-powered central turbine roared to full power as Tendo released command-and-control to the Becket brothers.
Situated on the edge of Kodiak Island, the Jaeger Launch Bay groaned as the bay doors opened and a sliding platform extended out over the water, carrying Gipsy Danger on a gantry out into a violent winter storm. Effective visual range was measured in tens of yards, but Raleigh and Yancy were also looking through sensory arrays that ranged from infrared to ultraviolet, radar to sonar, synthesized into a full-spectrum view of the North Pacific. They needed the whole spectrum to track kaiju.
At a signal from Tendo, the gantry unlocked and the Jaeger dropped into the water with the force of a small meteor impact.
“Rangers, this is Marshal Stacker Pentecost,” came their commander’s voice. He was formal as ever at this moment. No shortcuts for Pentecost. “Prepare for neural handshake.”
Inside Gipsy Danger one of the displays spawned a holographic representation of two brains, and the thousands of links between them and Gipsy Danger’s motor assemblies. Back in LOCCENT, Tendo Choi and Pentecost were looking at the same thing. Raleigh never stopped being amazed that this was possible, and that he was about to experience it again.
“Starting in four… three…” Tendo Choi counted down.
At “one,” Yancy turned his head and shot Raleigh a wink.
Then they exploded into Drift Space.
They were kids, with their little sister Jazmine, playing monkey-in-the-middle
A balloon popped
Mom took a long drag on a cigarette and coughed and coughed. Cancer, they thought, and maybe so did she but she never stopped
Mom was dead and it was maybe the last time they saw Jazmine, at the grave, Raleigh couldn’t stop humming one of Mom’s favorite Brel songs from when they were little kids and Jazmine told him to shut up
They had to get back to Jaeger training
Seesawing back through time as their minds overlapped and intermingled: Margit, and Munich, how it ached to love a girl for the first time, twelve didn’t seem so long ago she kissed him
Dad you don’t have to go
He and Yancy were sneaking through an empty factory in Budapest. It was Yancy’s eleventh birthday and they were dressed as superheroes, armed with a flashlight and a cigarette lighter from Mom’s purse
No, we’re not going to college, we’re joining the Rangers