An alarm on the heads-up drew their attention back from outside.
“Striker, I have a third signature emerging from the Breach,” Tendo Choi said, his voice tight with tension.
“Oh, God. I was right,” Gottlieb said.
“What? How big?” Pentecost asked. Striker Eureka backed a few steps away from the cliff edge, feeling turbulent currents churn up from the depths of the trench.
“Our first Category V,” Tendo said. Pentecost glanced at his face in the LOCCENT feed. He looked terrified.
Pentecost didn’t feel terrified. He knew he was going to die. The only thing that mattered to him was completing the mission first. His entire life had brought him to this point.
Something dimmed the glow of the Breach. A moment later a wall of flesh heaved over the lip of the cliff. It was three times the size of Striker Eureka, easily twice the mass of any previous kaiju.
It opened its mouth and roared, the wall of sound dislodging part of the cliff face and breaking over Striker Eureka like the blast wave of a bomb.
“My God,” Pentecost said.
From the LOCCENT there was only a stunned silence… and the filtered sounds of Mako and Raleigh as Gipsy Danger fought for her life.
“Bitch is big,” Tendo Choi said.
Pentecost’s voice came right back at him.
“Don’t use that word. Call it ‘Slattern’ if you must.”
And so it was named, the first Category V the PanPacific Defense Corps had ever encountered.
Slattern.
PAN-PACIFIC DEFENSE CORPS
KAIJU SCIENCE REPORT
32
FIGHTING THIS DEEP UNDERWATER, AGAINST an enemy as nimble underwater as Raiju, had Raleigh thinking that the Kwoon training course needed to add a couple more techniques to the existing fifty-two Jaeger exercises. They were just getting the hang of it, he and Mako—and she’d figured it out before he had. You had to start your moves a little earlier, rely a little more on inertia to do your work for you, because the density of the water made it impossible to change direction as fast as you could up in the sunlit, air-filled real world, where a Jaeger was designed to fight.
Raiju didn’t have this problem. It was seemingly built for submarine combat, nipping in and skipping out with a speed Gipsy Danger couldn’t hope to match. They’d done some damage to the kaiju, but it had also done some damage to them, and it was maintaining the upper hand by keeping them separated from Striker Eureka—which at that moment was backpedaling and trying to avoid the first blow from the category-busting third kaiju.
Striker Eureka was the finest piece of combat equipment humanity had ever built, and she stood absolutely no chance against something the size of this new kaiju. None.
Whoa, Raleigh thought. You keep your damn hopeless quitter’s thoughts out of this. You didn’t come down here to quit. You didn’t come down here to give up because the monsters got bigger.
You came down here to drop a goddamn nuke into the goddamn Breach and that’s what you’re going to do.
Was that Mako or him? He couldn’t tell.
“Move!” Mako cried.
They couldn’t move, though, because their every move was countered by Raiju, which was now clearly fighting to keep the two Jaegers separated. Probably had been since it first engaged, Raleigh thought. Keep us apart, wait for the big boy—or girl—to come on in and finish us off.
Doesn’t matter, Raleigh thought. The mission was to get Striker Eureka to the target. They’d heard the exchange between Striker and LOCCENT, even though they’d been too busy with Raiju to contribute. Now they churned toward the other Jaeger as the third kaiju slammed Striker Eureka down to the seafloor with an unstoppable blow. It followed through and landed on the Jaeger, grabbing Striker’s left arm and wrenching at it. An electrical discharge from tearing circuitry flared in the water, dissipating across the kaiju’s hide.
Chuck screamed, and for a dangerous moment Raleigh flashed back to Knifehead, to losing one of his arms.
“Don’t reach back,” Mako said. “Don’t hold on. Ride in the moment.”
He looked at her, hearing the echo of his own advice.
“Left arm offline!” Pentecost yelled over the comm. Striker Eureka was holding the kaiju’s jaws closed with one arm as it twisted and tore at the damaged limb. Raleigh glanced at the Conn-Pod feed from Striker and saw that the sensor patterns on Pentecost’s arms and chest were burning from the overload.
Yeah, he thought. I know that feeling too.
“We ain’t got the torque to hold on!” Chuck cried out.
Mako, anguished, pushed Gipsy Danger harder.
“It’s killing them!” she cried out.
“Time to see what this old girl can do,” Raleigh said. He spawned the Chain Sword startup on the HUD and with his other hand entered the pre-firing command code for both plasma cannons.
If they were going down, they were going down guns blazing.
Gipsy Danger pushed Raiju away. Mako ratcheted the swords into place and at the same time the water around Gipsy Danger’s forearms began to boil even at this incredible depth and pressure, as the plasma cannons started to warm up.
Raiju came at them again, but now Gipsy Danger could parry and counterstrike with the sword. Raleigh let Mako lead. She knew swords, even if she’d never fought with one seven-plus thousand meters under water. The water slowed the strokes, but not as much as he would have thought. Either the superconductivity of the blade’s surface lessened its drag, or Mako had just worked some of that ancient Mori swordmaker’s magic.
He stayed with her, adding power to her sword strokes and countering Raiju’s raking claws with Gipsy Danger’s other arm.
Who said the Moris wouldn’t have any more sword-makers, Raleigh thought, and through the storm of the fight he felt her mind brighten with gratitude and pride.
He kept an eye on the pressure and containment readings from the surface ports they’d had to open for the I-19 batteries and the Chain Sword. Everything was doing okay so far, mostly because the heat from the charging plasma cannons was keeping too much water from getting into the compartments.
Raiju ducked back from a slash and set itself for a charge. Raleigh knew what was coming. He felt Mako understanding what he understood.
Raiju charged, jaws wide.
Gipsy Danger set herself against the charge and stuck her non-sword arm straight out, bleeding tendrils of superheated plasma into the frigid water. Raiju clamped down on Gipsy’s gauntlet and forearm, gnawing through the exterior armor. Sparks discharged through the water.
Gipsy Danger’s other gauntlet grabbed Raiju and held its head, jamming the cannon deeper. “Now!” Raleigh said.
With a wordless cry, Mako pulled the trigger.
The plasma cannon did not fire.
Raiju thrashed its head back and forth, spitting out Gipsy Danger’s mangled gauntlet and forearm. It batted away Gipsy’s other arm and scrambled back. They went after it, landing shots with the mangled gauntlet even though Mako cried out in pain at every impact. Her arm sensors were beginning to overheat, just like Pentecost’s already had. The plasma cannon was shot, Raleigh could have seen that even if the sensors hadn’t told him. The abyssal pressure had collapsed the lensing and intensification arrays that made it work, and Raiju had done the rest.