The last rush of time and space and feeling, stray thoughts caught up in the first tempest of the Drift: Ice cream hockey the sweep of the lighthouse beam at Pemaquid the first time we all were on a plane and the candy didn’t help my ears pop hey Moe! Nyuck nyuck nyuck you know what I don’t like is spiders
Trickle of blood coming from his nose but the guy deserved it, you can’t just pick on people
Can’t pick every fight either
Dad you don’t have to go
Nyuck nyuck nyuck
Alaska. 2020. The present asserted itself again. Time to save the world
Again
Reality coalesced from the welter of the Drift, and Raleigh heard Tendo Choi, like an anchor to the real world.
“Neural handshake strong and holding,” he said, as the graphic of two brains converged into one. The links from the overlapped brain image to Gipsy Danger’s control and motor systems lit up.
Raleigh and Yancy were part of it now, and part of each other.
“Right hemisphere ready,” Yancy said.
Raleigh always let him go first, but the tradeoff was that he got to give the all-clear.
“Left hemisphere linked and ready,” he said. “Gipsy Danger ready to deploy.”
They each raised one arm, and Gipsy Danger did the same, confirming the hundred-percent link between the gargantuan Jaeger and the twinned human minds controlling it.
“Gentlemen,” Pentecost said, “your orders are to hold the Miracle Mile off Anchorage. Copy?”
The Miracle Mile was the last-ditch perimeter, so named because if a kaiju got through the ten-mile cordon, it was usually a miracle if a Jaeger could keep it from coming ashore.
“Copy that,” Yancy said. Then he hesitated as their heads-up display showed a new signal. “Sir,” he went on. “There’s still a civilian vessel in the Gulf—”
Pentecost cut him off.
“You’re protecting a city of two million people. You will not risk those lives for a boat that holds ten. Am I clear?”
He was clear, but something else was also clear: if Gipsy Danger engaged the kaiju anywhere near that boat, the waves generated by the clash would tear it to pieces. Raleigh hadn’t joined the Jaeger program to create collateral damage. He’d joined up to prevent it.
Raleigh looked at Yancy, who was already looking at him. Raleigh turned off the comm.
“You know what I’m thinking?” Raleigh said.
“I’m in your brain,” Yancy said.
They grinned at each other.
“Let’s go fishing,” Raleigh said.
Simultaneously they hit the switches that engaged Gipsy Danger’s motor controls. The Jaeger roared to life, spouting a column of fire into the stormy night. Its warning horn cut through the storm and the Jaeger strode forward away from the LOCCENT bay doors, a phalanx of helicopters peeling away from it and returning to base as it disappeared into the snow and spray and the steam of its passage.
OP-ED
Is the Jaeger Program Worth It?
We’ve all seen the pictures, and yes, they are inspiring. Coyote Tango bravely finishing off Onibaba with one conscious pilot. The flash and crackle of Cherno Alpha’s SparkFist. Lucky Seven standing toe-to-toe with a two-hundred-foot monster in Hong Kong Bay. (What names!)
Does your kid want to be a Ranger? Mine does. She’s nine years old and doesn’t remember a time when the word kaiju didn’t occur a dozen times in every news report. The Rangers are heroes to her, the way… well, there’s where I lose the thread. Because there has never been anything like the Rangers: a group of maybe one hundred people who hold the entire fate of the human race in their hands.
But hold on a minute. Is that really true?
What if the Rangers are really just holding us back? What if we’re being programed into believing that it’s okay to lose slowly rather than take a shot at winning once and for all?
What if our reliance on Jaegers, and on the visceral thrill of watching one of them beat a kaiju into hamburger, is distracting us from something that might actually work? Because let’s face it, folks. The Jaeger program isn’t working. The kaiju keep coming, faster and faster, and there’s no way we can build Jaegers fast enough to keep up. Not forever.
Kaiju are big. They move slowly. Let’s just get the hell out of the way. Build the Walls, pick up all those millions of people from Shanghai to San Francisco and move them inland. and spend those trillions of dollars currently rusting away in Oblivion Bay on something that might actually work.
The Rangers are heroes. But like all heroes, they’re bound to find that time has passed them by
2
SEVEN MILES OFF ANCHORAGE, GIPSY DANGER’S scanners picked up the conversation on the bridge of the fishing vessel identified as Saltchuck. The captain and his first mate, it sounded like, worried about the storm and which way they could run the fastest to shelter.
“We won’t even make it past the shallows,” the first mate was saying.
“What about that island?” the captain asked. “It’s three miles—”
Then he caught himself. Raleigh could almost hear him thinking: There’s no island on the chart there.
“It’s two miles, sir,” the mate said. A moment later, in a voice grown tight with awe and fear, he said, “One.”
On Gipsy Danger’s primary heads-up, Raleigh and Yancy saw Saltchuck, and closing swiftly, inexorably, on it they saw, the size of a landmass, the kaiju bogey.
“Good thing we can’t hear Pentecost right about now,” Yancy said.
Knifehead rose from the ocean off Saltchuck’s port side, standing a hundred feet and more out of the water. Four arms ended in webbed claws, each big enough to crush Saltchuck like a beer can. Its head was a blade, with one edge narrowing from its upper jaw to a point and the other defining the top of its skull. Active sonar outlined the rest of its body under the water, revealing it to be a biped with a powerful tail. Like a dinosaur, kind of, only an order of magnitude larger than any dinosaur that ever lived.
Do not confuse them with any terrestrial life forms, Raleigh remembered some egghead saying in a briefing. They are built on a template of silicon, not carbon. Whatever is on the other side of the Breach, it is a stranger place than we can imagine.
“Kaiju,” Raleigh heard the captain say, the man’s voice tinny and small over the roar of the elements and the tectonic sounds coming from the creature itself.
“Better close it up,” Yancy said.
And Gipsy Danger surged forward through the water, covering the remaining distance to the Saltchuck. On the other side of the boat, Knifehead reared up.
It was big, Tendo had been right about that. Its open mouth would have fit Saltchuck comfortably, and each of its teeth was as tall as a person. A large person. The wave of its emergence crested over Gipsy Danger’s exhaust ports and steam exploded up, swirling away almost at once in the wind.
“Aaaaaaand, showtime,” Yancy said.
Gipsy Danger had stayed low, swimming as necessary across the deeper waters of the Gulf of Alaska. Now with solid footing available in shallower water, Raleigh and Yancy planted the Jaeger’s feet and stood up, exploding through the surface of the ocean in a two-hundred-foot geyser lit by spotlights and booming with rescue horns. Raleigh loved the horns. He privately had a theory that they scared the kaiju, but he didn’t really care. They just sounded badass, was all.