And again, the other creatures. The creators of the kaiju. Newt couldn’t get a clear image of them, but he could feel that the kaiju feared them. God, he thought.
It saw him it recognized him
There’s something out there that scares the kaiju, and they’re coming for us. He wished he could remember the term that had floated through his head during the Drift. Could he recover it from the drive he’d set up to capture the Drift? How had that worked? He looked around for Hermann, who was sulking over on his side of the lab.
“Hermann, quit feeling sorry for yourself just because I was right and I’m Pentecost’s new favorite,” he said. “Did you get a chance to look at the Drift recording?”
“I was otherwise occupied with saving your life, Dr. Geiszler,” Hermann said.
“For God’s sake, Hermann.”
“Dr. Geiszler, what is it you need?” Pentecost asked.
“I tried to make a recording of sensory impressions from the Drift,” Newt said. He stuttered as the language centers of his brain were momentarily shorted out by a Drift flashback.
Time after time after time they came up from the spawning pool they burst from the sac they made the trip up toward the Breach it looked out over their great city like a promise that soon they would leave their dying world for another
And kill that one too
Stegosaurus dimetrodon plesiosaur mosasaur gorgosaurus
We named them but they were something else before
Now we have made the pathway clear
Now we have created the world they only dreamed of before
They knew we would
“Dr. Geiszler.” Pentecost’s voice.
Newt’s eyes focused again. “Hermann,” he said. “Stegosaurus. They’ve done this before…”
“You mentioned that,” Hermann said. “Your kaiju Drift recording is fragmentary. Practically useless. Perhaps an image here and there that might help Kaiju Science progress.”
Coming from Hermann, that probably meant the recording was in pretty good shape and Newt could learn a lot from it as soon as he got the chance to sit down and sift through the data.
“I need you to do this again,” Pentecost said. “I need more.”
Oh, sure, Newt thought. Let me just run right out and do that again.
“I can’t,” he said. “Unless you happen to have a fresh kaiju brain lying around.” He laughed at his own joke.
But Stacker Pentecost wasn’t laughing.
“Wait,” Newt said. “Do you?”
EXCEPT FROM THE UNOFFICIAL HISTORY OF THE JAEGER PROJECT
14
IN THE CONN-POD, AN ALARM TONE SOUNDED.
“Neural bridge initializing,” said a digital voice.
Raleigh waited. Outside in the Shatterdome, everything had stopped. The other crews were watching. The Russians had turned off their music. The Wei triplets had even stopped dribbling their basketball.
Tendo Choi started the countdown.
“Initiating neural handshake in ten… nine…”
“Here it comes,” Raleigh said. “Watch the memories go by. Like they don’t belong to you. Don’t chase the rabbit.”
Mako was looking at him like he had two heads.
Tendo said, “Six…”
“Random Access Brain Impulse, if you want the technical term” Raleigh said. It was a phrase from training that he’d always hated because it overcomplicated a simple idea. “Memories. Don’t chase them in the Drift. Let them flow. Don’t latch on. Stay in the Drift… the Drift is silence.”
“One…” said Tendo.
At her father’s side, the glow of the forge lighting his face: Tatara satetsu and patience. Break the kera. Find the Three Steels, hochotetsu, tamahagane, nabegane. Hochotetsu is the core, the others are the skin. Fold the steel, Mako. When you have folded it sixteen times and forge-welded it sixteen times, it is ready to become a blade.
Could use a piece of gum
Was that an earthquake I never felt an earthquake before!
You are my only daughter whatever anyone tells you never believe that I loved you any less than I would have a son
Never never believe that
Fold the metal
Forge-weld it again you can be the steel but first you must be forged. We have forged steel for twenty generations Mako and it has forged us as well
Mako and Raleigh, consciousnesses overlapping, each hearing the other’s childhood ambitions: When I grow up I want to be Spike Spiegel Neil Armstrong Winston Churchill Towa Tei Paul McCartney a Sasuke champion
Mom
Dad
Shadows of conflicting emotion swirling through Mako’s mind: Cancer I must go to Tokyo for treatment. But Mako-san we will make a day of it, we will make something good of this
Mom
Dad
What is that alarm?
Red shoes one of my laces broke Mom Dad
Now Mako feeling Raleigh’s fear: Yancy where are you?
Whoa we’re here now, we’re here
I saw the shadow of it first the demon-hag that stole them
In the silence of the Conn-Pod, their bodies twitched. Gipsy Danger lifted its right arm.
Cheers rose from the assembled crews and techs below. Tendo Choi was riveted to the displays. The graphic projections of Raleigh and Mako’s brains superimposed. With a slight flare, the Pons remote monitoring system indicated perfect superimposition.
“Neural handshake one hundred percent. Holding strong and steady,” Tendo said.
“At least he remembers how to turn it on,” Chuck said. “It’s the driving part I’m worried about.”
“Show some respect,” Herc said. “When his brother died, he got the Jaeger back to shore. On his own. Only know one other pilot that’s been able to do that.”
Chuck just glared back.
Gipsy Danger lifted its left arm.
Inside the Conn-Pod, Raleigh took a step into a formal defensive stance. Mako completed the move.
“Can you feel it?” Raleigh asked. “The Jaeger’s an extension of yourself.”
She nodded, but even before that he could feel her in his mind agreeing.
This was what he’d felt in the Kwoon, only multiplied by a factor of a thousand, a million, a number so large that the word multiply didn’t mean anything anymore. The connection they’d felt in the Kwoon was like a distant glimpse of this. He felt her out, tested the places where his psyche ended and hers began.
Yancy, he thought.
Drift with Yancy had been like riding white-water rapids when you weren’t sure who had the oars. You always got there, but a lot of the force and current were invisible and impossible to control. Mako was different. She was… well, there was a reason her first Drift thoughts had been of swords. She was steel, forged and folded, brought to a lethal edge and polished… and then left in a scabbard where she yearned to be drawn, to no longer be Sensei’s ornament. To be a weapon against the enemy that had helped to forge her.
Yancy had been so different. They’d joined the Jaeger Academy when someone bet them they couldn’t pass the screening tests. Thousands of people had been trying to qualify in those days, with the paint still drying on the Academy’s front door and the first kaiju attacks still open wounds in the psyche of humankind, bleeding fallout and fear. They’d torn through Jaeger training and beat out a nation full of would-be Rangers for the chance to ride Gipsy Danger.