Gottlieb was listening to a Pan-Pac Defense radio monitor and fidgeting.
“They have two signatures in the Breach,” he said when Newt came in with the Neural Connector. “Two of them.”
“Hey, you want to help, give me a hand with this,” Newt said. “Neural interface is off the scale. That didn’t happen when I Drifted with the cold cuts.” Newt was excited. He didn’t care how many signatures there were on Tendo Choi’s screen.
“This can’t be right,” Gottlieb said. “There should be three Kaijus coming, not two.”
Ohhhhh, that’s right, Newt thought. I forgot this is all about you and your model, Hermann. So sorry to be busy saving the world instead. Also he was irritated that Hermann had pluralized “kaiju” like it was an English word.
“It hurts to be wrong, doesn’t it?” he said, all mock sympathy.
“I am not,” Gottlieb insisted. “But the only way to find out is to do this…”
The next word out of Hermann’s mouth shocked Newt so profoundly that for a moment he considered the possibility that he might have been wrong all along. Maybe Hermann wasn’t a pompous, prissy, egomaniacal number slave all the time after all.
That word was, “…together.”
Hermann grabbed one of the Neural Connector squid caps and mashed it down over his head.
“I’ll go with you. That’s what Jaeger pilots do, share the load.”
“You would do that with me?” Newt looked around, half expecting the world to be ending already. Biblically. Cats lying down with dogs, rains of frogs, rivers of blood, the whole works.
“With worldwide destruction a certain alternative, do I really have a choice?” Hermann asked.
Well, Newt thought. If you were going to put it like that…
“Say it with me, then!” He slapped his own squid cap on. “We’re gonna own this!”
Hermann made a fist like it was the first time in his life he had performed the action.
“We’re gonna own this,” he repeated, less than convincingly.
Okay, Newt thought. Not the rah-rah type. But we knew that.
“Yeah,” he said. “Pass me that cable over there.”
The assembled pilots and researchers and LOCCENT staffers and displaced techs whose Jaegers were in pieces at the bottom of Hong Kong bay all had one thing in common as they assembled in the Shatterdome with a gleam of dawn on the horizon.
They all knew they were going to die.
Chuck and Herc Hansen stood close together, but only Chuck was in uniform.
“The old man’s off his rocker,” Chuck said. “I can’t pilot Striker alone.”
Tendo Choi looked up from his workstation and called out, “Marshal on deck!”
Everyone turned and snapped to attention, and then they had one more thing in common: astonishment at the sight of Marshal Stacker Pentecost in full flight suit.
No one said a word until Mako approached Pentecost and he said to her, “Funny. I don’t remember it being so tight.”
Mako did not smile. “Getting back in a Jaeger will kill you,” she said.
“Not getting in one will kill us all.” Pentecost put a fatherly hand on her shoulder. “You are a brave, brave girl. I’m lucky to have seen you grow up.”
Mako nodded. Tears stood in her eyes but she did not let them fall.
“Now, if I’m going to get through this,” Pentecost said, “I’m going to need you to start protecting me.”
The prelaunch sequence for Striker Eureka and Gipsy Danger was well underway. Above them, the petals of the Shatterdome started to open.
Chuck strode up to Pentecost.
“You’re flying with me? How are we supposed to match up?” He made no effort to hide his skepticism, or his hostility toward the idea.
In any other circumstance, Pentecost would have torn him a new one for insubordination. But now, with bigger issues confronting them than disrespect for a senior officer, Pentecost just answered the question.
“I carry nothing into the Drift,” he said. “No memories, no rank. As for you, you’re easy. You got daddy issues? Check. You’re an egotistical jerk? Check. You’re a simple puzzle I solved on Day One.” With a look over at Herc, Pentecost added, “But you are your father’s son. We’ll match up just fine.”
Chuck looked back and forth between Pentecost and his father. Raleigh could tell he hadn’t expected Pentecost to cut into him like that.
“Works for me,” Chuck said eventually.
The petals were open and the dawn sky shed light on the gathering at the center of the Shatterdome. Pentecost stepped up onto the Jaeger hand, and stood on the backside at the edge of one of the maintenance bays. He waited, surveying the remains of the Jaeger project that he had sacrificed everything to sustain. They had been abandoned by the countries they were trying to protect. They had no money. They had no resources to build more Jaegers or upgrade the two that could still take the field. The kaiju were coming faster and faster, bigger and bigger, evolving week by week to answer the threats they encountered and shared via the hive mind Newt Geiszler had discovered. The two surviving Jaegers were heading out on a suicide mission… and today Stacker Pentecost was going to die.
When there was silence in the Shatterdome, and he had taken a moment to enjoy his last dawn on Earth, Stacker Pentecost spoke. He raised his voice so that the crew up on the LOCCENT mezzanine could hear him as well as the pilots and techs nearby.
“Today, on the edge of hope, at the end of time, we have chosen to believe,” he said. “Not only in ourselves, but in each other. To depend on each other. Today, not a man or woman in here now stands alone. Today will be the day they tell stories about. The day we face the monsters at our door. We take the fight to them.
“Today, we are canceling the apocalypse.”
It was a short speech, but as Pentecost often reminded himself, the Gettysburg Address could be read out loud in about a minute. A cheer went up, and he let it go for a moment. Then Pentecost stepped down and the crew of the Shatterdome got down to business. They had Jaegers to launch, and a nuclear payload to deliver right down the throat of the Breach.
Boneslum Millionaires; or, Kingpins of The Kaiju Black Market
by Anonymous
In every city where a kaiju has made landfall, there’s a guy like him: the guy who shows up just after the kaiju has gone down, greases palms, makes sure the authorities look the other way long enough for people—the right people—to get to work. The black market in kaiju parts is one of the biggest untaxed—by which we mean illegal—industries in the world, surpassing the trade in endangered species. Anything people used to get (or think they got) from tiger blood or bear gall bladders or rhino horns… now they think they get it from kaiju bits. And the godfather of that industry was Hannibal Chau.
He’s dead now. You may have heard. You may also have heard of the manner of his death, in which case you might see a certain poetic justice in the idea that kaiju kingpin Hannibal Chau was eaten by a prematurely born kaiju committing its single living act on this Earth. That’s karma, is one way to think about it.
But you only know about Hannibal Chau because of the ostentatious ninety-year-old fashions and loud elective dental work. Did he have style? Yeah, in the way that gangsters have style because if they don’t, the kinds of knuckledragging subhumans who work for them get ideas about taking over. Style keeps people cowed, especially when you combine it with violence. Was Hannibal Chau innovative? Absolutely. He saw the potential in the postmortem kaiju market and acted on it before anyone else. Now the kaiju market is worth billions, and even government agencies need to work with the kingpins because they want what the kingpins are selling: for research so they can save the human race. The stakes couldn’t be higher.