“Mr. Becket,” Pentecost said, as if they’d planned the meeting an hour before.
Raleigh nodded. “Marshal. Looking sharp.” It was true. Pentecost was wearing a tailored suit under a fine-looking topcoat, all shades of navy blue and charcoal except for the pale blue shirt. The only thing different was there were no stars on Pentecost’s collar.
Pentecost shook Raleigh’s hand and they got clear of the rotor wash from the waiting helicopter.
“It’s been a long time,” he said.
“Five years, four months,” Raleigh said. He didn’t add the days and hours, though he could have.
Pentecost thought about this.
“Seems like longer.”
“No,” Raleigh said. “It’s been five years, four months.”
Pentecost nodded.
He understands, Raleigh thought. He’s lost people, too. Pentecost had put in his time in a Jaeger and he knew what it was like to soldier on in the midst of losing people you cared about. Not a brother, but Raleigh wasn’t self-centered enough to go around thinking his losses were worse than anyone else’s just because they were his. But he also knew that he was the only man alive who had survived the death of his co-pilot. That set Raleigh Becket apart. Brother or not, two people who Drifted together achieved a kind of intimacy that didn’t exist in normal human relationships.
When you had suffered that kind of a loss, time was exactly what it was. It didn’t move faster, and it never seemed to pass too slowly. That was one of the worst things about losing Yancy, the way it had doomed Raleigh to experience every single moment of time without being able to fool himself into just letting it slip away. He couldn’t forget. He had to be present in every moment to remember.
“May I have a word?” Pentecost said, formally
It seemed to Raleigh that they already were. He nodded anyway.
Pentecost looked around, up at the Wall and then back to the collection of tents and temporary barracks, surrounded by heavy equipment for moving earth and steel.
“You know, there used to be a Jaeger factory around here,” he said. “They made a few of the Mark Is here: Romeo Blue, Tango Tasmania.” He looked back at Raleigh. “Know what they do with Mark Is now? Melt them down for pins and girders and feed them to the Wall. Probably you’ve welded part of a Mark I in here somewhere.”
“Yeah, well, I guess they’re still helping,” Raleigh said.
Pentecost started walking and Raleigh, having nothing better to do and drawn by the Marshal’s personal gravity, went with him.
“It took me a while to find you,” Pentecost said. “Anchorage, Sheldon Point, Nome…”
“Man in my position travels with the Wall. Chasing shifts to make a living.”
“I’ve spent the past six months activating everything I can get my hands on,” Pentecost said. “There’s an old Jaeger I’m getting back online. A Mark III. I need a pilot.”
Raleigh stopped and pretended to try to remember something.
“Didn’t you have me grounded for insubordination?”
“I did,” Pentecost agreed. “But I’m a great believer in second chances, Mr. Becket. Aren’t you?”
Pentecost’s face was showing the strain of the Kaiju War. He was a little grayer, a little thinner, missing some of the vitality Raleigh remembered from his Ranger tour. Raleigh had heard that the Jaeger program was on the way out. Now Pentecost wanted him back in. What was going on here?
“I’m guessing I wasn’t your first choice,” he said.
“You were,” Pentecost said. “All the other Mark III pilots are dead.”
I bet they are, thought Raleigh. He saw Yancy, tangled in the debris of Gipsy Danger’s Conn-Pod. He heard Yancy, crying out in Raleigh’s mind in the last moment before the neural handshake was broken. Raleigh shook his head.
“I don’t need anyone else in my head again,” he said. “I’m not a pilot. Not anymore.” He paused. “Without Yancy I have no business being one.”
He started walking back toward the tent, suddenly preferring the TV and the contempt of his fellow workers to the company of Stacker Pentecost.
“Haven’t you heard, Mr. Becket?” Pentecost called after him. “The world is ending. This is your last chance. Would you rather die here, or in a Jaeger?”
Wrong question, Raleigh thought.
The real question was how many beers he could get with his fancy new red ration card.
Back under the tent, the TV was still covering the kaiju attack on Sydney. Raleigh put his card on the table, got a hole punched in it and a can of beer. The bartender glanced up and over Raleigh’s shoulder at the exact moment Raleigh heard Miles’ voice.
“Flyboy! And here I thought we might be losing you to your fancy military friend.” Raleigh turned and saw Miles right behind him, flushed and full of malice. “Oh, hey, that reminds me,” Miles went on as he went over to his table. “How many Jaegers does it take to change a light bulb? None! ’Cause these days, everybody knows they can’t change a thing.”
A switch flipped inside Raleigh. He took a step toward Miles, beer in hand.
“Easy, boy,” Miles said. “Don’t you forget I’m the one in charge around here.” He sat down and kept his eyes locked on Raleigh.
Raleigh raised his beer.
“Then let’s drink to that,” he said, and took a sip. Then he set the can down on the table in front of Miles. He had to bend over a bit to do it, and Miles clapped a hand on Raleigh’s shoulder as soon as Raleigh was within reach.
“Where’s mine?” he asked.
Raleigh didn’t miss a beat.
“That one’s yours,” he said. Then with one hand he caught the back of Miles’ head and slammed him face-first onto the beer can. Foam exploded across the table, across Miles, and across Raleigh’s work coveralls. But that was okay. He wouldn’t be needing them anymore.
Miles fell sideways out of his chair. A few of the other workers looked like they might make a move. But several were laughing. Then someone clapped, and that was what caught on. The applause spread until even the bartender put down his rag and joined in.
Time to go, Raleigh thought. He flipped his ration card to Tommy, who was staring bug-eyed from a nearby table.
“Hey, Tommy,” he said. “Knock yourself out. Feed those kids.”
By the time he got outside, he was almost jogging, and by the time Marshal Pentecost slid the Sikorsky’s side door open, Raleigh was feeling like he couldn’t get away from the Wall fast enough.
“Change of heart?” Pentecost shouted over the thump of the rotors and the whine of the engine.
“I lost my job!” Raleigh shouted back. “How come you waited?”
Pentecost smiled. It wasn’t something he did very often.
“I figured it’s been five years, four months,” he said, a little more quietly. “Another five minutes wouldn’t hurt.”
The chopper lifted away into the storm, and Raleigh was a Ranger again.
PAN-PACIFIC DEFENSE CORPS
STATUS REPORT
5
RALEIGH’S FIRST VIEW OF THE PAN PACIFIC Defense Corps compound in Hong Kong came through a driving rainstorm as the Sikorsky came in low and touched down on the helipad at the edge of the complex. From the air, Hong Kong looked unaffected by the Kaiju War, but Raleigh knew enough to be able to pick out the general area of Hong Kong’s Boneslum.
It sat right in the heart of Kowloon, built around the massive skeleton of the first kaiju to attack Hong Kong, and only the second kaiju the world had seen. The Hong Kong Exclusion Zone officially prohibited rebuilding and residence in that area—but this was Hong Kong. Nobody paid attention to laws where there might be a dollar to be made. In the time since the kaiju had gone down under a nuclear barrage, Kowloon had regrown over its bones, almost organically. Raleigh had never seen anything like it.