It was something he’d learned way back during his first training on Gipsy Danger, when nuking the kaiju was still part of the standard response protocol. Way down in one corner of the HUD console were toggles to activate the self-destruct response and trigger the escape-pod mechanism. Raleigh had hoped he would never have to use either one, but life was like that.
He could feel Mako, stunned and withdrawn. She operated Gipsy Danger mechanically, without feeling. It was easy to stop feeling when all you could control was the way you were going to die.
An alarm went off in the Conn-Pod. Raleigh and Mako looked at each other, then at the heads-up.
It showed a bogey, closing fast. But nothing had come out of the Breach.
No, Raleigh thought.
They turned in mid-fall, looking up and along the wall of the cliff, which receded away into darkness above them. Swimming toward them like a mountain-sized missile, disfigured and burned and missing an arm, was the giant kaiju. They just had time to see it before it plowed into them.
The impact threw both of them to the floor of the Conn-Pod and smashed Gipsy Danger down onto the ledge Raleigh had been aiming for.
Raleigh had a whole series of thoughts all at once. How did it live through that? Are we going to make it long enough to trigger the overload? What if we—?
Wait a minute, he thought. If Newt and Gottlieb were right, this is our chance. Maybe a better chance than trying to sneak through with half a dead kaiju.
The kaiju clawed at Gipsy Danger. Mako and Raleigh answered it blow for blow, but they couldn’t hurt it. It was too big, too frenzied—just too much. A secondary series of alarms went off as part of Gipsy Danger’s armor collapsed and fell away with a section of her interior, crumpling in the abyssal pressure and dropping toward the Breach. The kaiju tore at the exposed area, and an explosion of bubbles burst from the wound in Gipsy Danger’s side.
Combined with the missing arm and the crippled leg, the damage was the beginning of the end for the old Jaeger. Raleigh just hoped they could stave off the end long enough to do this last, crucial, job. All they had to do was make it long enough to get through the Breach and start the reactor overload sequence. Piece of cake.
“We are losing power,” Mako said robotically. “We—”
She cut off as another alarm pinged and the heads-up flashed a warning.
“Mako’s oxygen line is cut!” Tendo warned them.
Raleigh looked over at her. Already she was starting to fade. The kaiju tore at Gipsy Danger’s head…
…And the cockpit tore open and Yancy was jerked away, screaming in Raleigh’s head as Raleigh screamed back through the howling storm—
No.
This was the moment. This was the only moment. Raleigh took three quick deep breaths and then snapped his own oxygen line loose, feeding it to Mako. She was gone, barely breathing, succumbing quickly to the combination of oxygen deprivation and the overload from the damage Gipsy Danger had suffered.
All of that happened in the space between two clawing punches from Slattern. With both arms Raleigh reached out, and Gipsy Danger reached out. Mako drove the Chain Sword into its side, just behind its front arms, and held on even as oxygen deprivation and Gipsy Danger’s collapsing control systems overwhelmed her. At the same time Raleigh and Mako leaned back, using their rear thrusters to tip themselves and the kaiju off the shelf and down onto the ledge in deepest reaches of the trench.
Mako was fading and Raleigh grabbed onto Slattern with Gipsy Danger’s other arm, holding on while he triggered the first stage of the overload protocol and opened the central heat vent, located right about where a human’s navel would be.
A column of energy exploded out of Gipsy Danger and tore through the weakened kaiju’s torso. Raleigh leaned, pulling with all of Gipsy Danger’s remaining strength… and toppled off the ledge with the kaiju held close, impaled on the Chain Sword and burning from the last of Gipsy Danger’s overload exhaust. It was still alive, still fighting, but Raleigh knew when a kaiju was mortally wounded.
But Mako, grasping the Chain Sword buried in the kaiju’s body, couldn’t hold on much longer.
There was only one thing to do. Raleigh had done it before. So had Stacker Pentecost.
He activated the Crisis Command Matrix, which transferred Jaeger operations to a single Ranger.
WARNING, it flashed. NEURAL DAMAGE MAY OCCUR.
No shit, Raleigh thought.
He hit the button.
The Jaeger overwhelmed him and he screamed as his brain lit up, shorted out, got lost and found itself again all at once. It was too much. Even if he’d done it before, it was too much. Everything, right down to drawing breath, suddenly required focused and conscious effort. The Jaeger’s control systems co-opted all brain function except the higher processes needed to think. That meant Raleigh now had to actively think about making his heart beat, his lungs draw breath… which was fine. He wouldn’t be doing either for much longer.
Raleigh shut the vent. He would need that heat and pressure real soon. The self-destruct protocol was through its first stage. Embracing the kaiju, with the half of Raiju still twisting lazily downward through the water above them, Gipsy Danger fell into the Breach.
In the LOCCENT, Newt shouted, “It worked! They’re in!”
The feed from Gipsy Danger stuttered and broke up, then reformed. Unearthly sounds came from the monitor, sonic artifacts of the torsion of the universe’s fundamental forces in the throat of the Breach. Then the visual feed cut out. For a moment longer, they could hear bits of sound: “…vis… Breach… nish… verri…”
“They’re in the Breach now,” Tendo Choi said. “There’s nothing we can do.”
All eyes were on the big holoscreen, where a graphic had spawned based on Gottlieb’s first rendering of the structure of the Breach and the critical point where an explosion might destroy it. The bogey representing Gipsy Danger entered the critical zone.
“They’re out of time,” Newt said. “They have to self-destruct now.”
Inside Gipsy Danger, Raleigh kept one arm wrapped around the corpse of the giant kaiju. It had died sometime during the passage back through the Breach. He wasn’t sure when. Time didn’t seem to be working right. Around him, the Conn-Pod groaned under pressures no human designer had ever imagined. He looked at his oxygen feed. His suit’s resources were used up. Did the HUD say 7%? It was hard to be sure. He was getting foggy.
Before him hung a holographic dial labeled SELF-DESTRUCT PROTOCOL. It had spawned automatically when Raleigh had triggered the first overload, which was designed to bring the reactor’s fuel rods to maximum temperature. Then all you had to do was close the vent… done… and turn that dial all the way up.
Not done. Net yet.
Raleigh took Mako’s hand.
“It’s all right now,” he said. Her eyes opened. He thought she might live, given the chance. Pan-Pac Defense doctors were the best around.
“I can finish this,” Raleigh said. “All I have to do is fall. Anyone can fall. You have to live. There’s a better world ahead. For you.”
He reached in the direction of the self-destruct icon, but instead touched the button next to it. EJECT. With a hiss of escaping gases and a series of metallic bangs, the control arm extending from the main junction of the motion-capture rig to Mako’s boot interfaces lifted up, tipping her back until she was lying supine on the control arm itself. From the Conn-Pod’s ceiling, an escape module assembly lowered and constructed itself around Mako, swallowing her up entirely in a second. Without another command from Raleigh, the escape module blasted up through the top of the Conn-Pod, through a circular aperture that irised open, revealing an airlock. Mako shot into it and the Conn-Pod aperture sealed itself. With a slight bang, Raleigh heard the external port open. He tracked her for a moment on the HUD, shooting straight up through the ocean water trapped in the Throat of the Breach.