Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization Mass Market Paperback (25 page)

Behind Herc and Chuck, the emergency hatch was still open, and from inside Striker Eureka they heard the open comm channel on one of the speakers distributed throughout the Jaeger’s interior.

“It’s down,” Mako said.

“I made that mistake once before,” Raleigh said. “Let me check for a pulse.”

Gipsy Danger’s plasma cannon angled down to the prone Leatherback. Plasma salvos tore into the kaiju, one after another, until the barrels of the plasma battery glowed on the edge of overheating and Leatherback had been scattered over the better part of the container yard.

They heard Raleigh’s voice float out from inside Striker Eureka.

“Nope, no pulse.”

Then Gipsy Danger looked away from the smoking mess that had been Leatherback, toward the city of Hong Kong proper.

“That I-19 is a fine weapon,” Herc said.

Chuck said nothing. Sure, the I-19 was great, if it was all you had and you were riding a steam engine.

He heard Raleigh’s voice again.

“One down, one to go.”

FRACTURED CONCRETE FELL INTO THE KAIJU
shelter and the refugees pressed away from the hole toward the shadowed corners where the kaiju could not see them. Up close, it was too much to believe. Even Newt, who had devoted every waking moment of his life to studying kaiju since Trespasser first tore apart the Golden Gate Bridge— even he couldn’t believe it.

The kaiju’s head thrust down to street level. Newt could see the individual scales that covered its cranium, the beagle-sized parasites that crept between the scales, the broken and scorched places where the valiant Jaegers had hit it with everything they had.

And failed to stop it.

It lowered its snout into the shelter, sniffing at the crowd. Newt realized that he wasn’t moving—and realized a moment later that the entire population of the shelter had gotten as far away from him as it possibly could. He was still near the exit door, some distance away from where the kaiju had torn the shelter’s roof off. But around him, in every direction, there was empty space. Nobody wanted to be near the white dude the kaiju was after.

He was seeing double again, the kaiju’s sensory spectrum superimposed over his, and Newt found himself paralyzed at the sight of himself through the kaiju’s eyes.

An immense claw swept down and tore away more of the roof. More debris fell, burying dozens of the refugees. The rest fled to the other side of the shelter, screaming and shouting with panic and fear, to huddle under the remaining overhang of the street and the shelter’s roof.

A glowing blue tendril wriggled down through the opening, sprouting smaller appendages and scraping along the debris-littered floor. It stopped in front of Newt, tasting the air around him. Newt gaped at it, astonished. What an organism this was. Bioluminescent, working with an incredible sensory spectrum way beyond that of a human, capable of extreme plasticity of tissue but also highly robust and armored... It was a perfect organism— almost. And it was
created
. It was the latest version.

The next one would be even better.

Newt realized he was hearing a version of the kaiju’s mental processes. Not telepathy, exactly, but
—Sweet Jesus
, he realized. It’s the Drift hangover the Rangers are always talking about. A neurophysiological shadow of the Drift, or an echo. The neural pathways created don’t just go away when the Drift stops. The kaiju’s mental processes were leaking into Newt’s brain by a kind of synaptic osmosis. And it was a two-way street, as Hannibal Chau had immediately figured out.

The thought radiating from the kaiju—or no, through the kaiju from somewhere else, from one of the beings overseeing them, controlling them, killing them without whim or conscience—that thought galvanized Newt.

No freaking way pal,
he thought, not knowing if the kaiju could hear him or not.
You are not going to learn anything from me, no sir. Not the way I figure you’d ask questions.
He was suffering visions of his synapses, delicate little axons and dendrites, shearing apart and frying under the fatal pressures of the Precursors’ attention. Nope. Not Newt Geiszler. He liked his synapses just the way they were.

Now he did move, scrambling away over the fallen debris and tumbling over. His glasses cracked against a ridged piece of concrete. He looked up and saw the kaiju’s—what? Tongue? Palp? Tentacle?
What did you call that kind of organ?
—pass over him, close enough that he could have reached out and caught it. In the gaps between its scales, he saw parasites which looked different from those on its face, as if its sheer size created individual ecosystems on different parts of its body. He saw scoring and chipping from the kaiju’s fight with the defending Jaegers on the way in.

Were any of the Jaegers still functional?

As if the kaiju was responding to his question, Newt sensed a series of images. Crimson Typhoon, coming apart in the kaiju’s claws. Cherno Alpha, sinking to explode beneath the surface of Victoria Harbor. The flare of the electromagnetic pulse from the other kaiju, engulfing Striker Eureka and leaving it silent and still. It wasn’t communicating with him, he realized. It was communicating with the other kaiju and he was eavesdropping via the hangover of the Drift.

EMP as an organic battlefield weapon?
Newt was astonished. Amazed. Admiring, too, yes.

Also terrified.

How could humanity fight an enemy that evolved from week to week?

Rain fell throughout the shelter as the kaiju dug away more of the roof. It had started to drool. Great acidic gobs of kaiju-spit splashed on the concrete, which began to melt. Nobody was moving now. There was nowhere left to go. The last bit of the shelter roof went spinning away into the storm-filled Hong Kong night.

I should give myself up,
Newt thought.
Do the kaiju want to kill me or do they want to
meet
me? No human has ever had a connection with the kaiju like I did. I might be of interest to them. The Precursor had said as much. Also, it would save a number of lives, which is a salutary thing... even if one of those lives would be that little girl who first outed me to the crowd.

He took a small step forward. The kaiju hunched over the hole it had torn in the street. It was looking right at Newt.

Yes,
Newt thought.
This is the right thing to do.
Would it have to eat him before the conversation with the Precursor could begin? Newt was trembling. He did not want to die. He was still reconsidering his oft-articulated desire to see a live kaiju up close, but perhaps it was a bit late in the day for such regrets.

A searchlight pinned the kaiju, the beam spilling down into the shelter as well. Newt blinked against it. He could get by without his glasses, barely, but between the cracked lenses and the blinding light he was having trouble figuring out what was going on...

Oh,
he thought then.
It must be a Jaeger. But they were all...

The bone-shaking sound of a foghorn blew away Newt’s thoughts. He knew that sound. He’d know it anywhere. It was every bit as individual as a Jaeger’s insignia or armaments, and Newt could not believe he was hearing it.

Was Pentecost that desperate already?

He ran out into the open as two things happened at once. The kaiju turned at the sound of the horn and Gipsy Danger loomed over the edge of the XZ.

Newt starred, the Jaeger held what appeared to be— through the blur of his cracked glasses—an oil tanker. The huge container was gripped in Gipsy’s massive hands like a hundred-meter baseball bat. An oil tanker! Had to be several times Gipsy Danger’s mass. Newt was no engineer, but he could appreciate how amazing it was to create a machine that could take kaiju batting practice with an oil tanker.

Gipsy Danger leveled the kaiju with a blow of the tanker, then dropped it and squared off against the kaiju, horn still thundering out its challenge.

The kaiju recovered from the blow and reared up on its hind legs, brandishing its taloned forelimbs. Gipsy Danger saw it tense and rocked into a defensive pose as the kaiju charged, slamming the Jaeger into a row of buildings, driving it down the street in a storm of shattered stone and brick until both kaiju and Jaeger buried themselves in a glass and steel tower. Shimmering broken glass cascaded around them and then they were out of sight.

Newt glanced back at the shelter door. It was still closed. He needed to get out, and fast. The only way to do that was to climb the debris, so that’s what he did, and he wasn’t the only one. People flooded up onto the street, thunderstruck at their last-minute reprieve. The name Otachi started to circulate and for a minute Newt couldn’t figure out why they were talking about swords... then it hit him. Tendo Choi’s codename must have been broadcast already. It never took long for those names to go public. Tendo was secretly proud of this.

Newt’s face stung and he realized he had been scraped and cut in several places from flying debris, or the fall. He didn’t care. When he got to street level he saw that Otachi had driven Gipsy Danger straight through the lower part of a glass tower, leaving a hole he could see through. The view only lasted for a moment, however, because as Newt got both feet under him out on the street, the undermined skyscraper collapsed. A rolling storm of dust overwhelmed the refugees. They ran away from it, again getting as far away from Newt as possible, although this time he doubted that was their intention.

He went another way, doubling away around the broken edge of the hole torn in the street and cutting through side streets to follow the battle. Newt was running and out of breath, seeing the world through cracked lenses, giddy and terrified and utterly absorbed by what he was seeing and hearing and experiencing inside his head. The kaiju knew where and how to find him because
they were connected
.

Right now, the kaiju’s blood was up. It had destroyed one Jaeger today, and had another one nearly in its grip.

Newt skidded around a corner and saw Otachi charge into Gipsy Danger, snapping and raking its talons across Gipsy’s armored exterior. It spat and drooled constantly, splattering gobs of acidic saliva across the Jaeger and everything else in range.

Gipsy Danger wrestled free and leapt to the top of Hong Kong’s municipal palace. Otachi followed and the fight took on a strange neon glow from the saturating glare of Hong Kong’s downtown. Gipsy Danger ducked and counterpunched, dodged and weaved, barely staying free of the kaiju’s grip.

Otachi pivoted and swung its tail, spiked at the tip...
Stegosaurus
, Newt thought.
Yes. Stegosaurus was a first draft of this.
With a flash he realized that the Cat-4 from Manila in 2019 had been the second draft. It had also fought with a barbed tail. Whoever was creating the kaiju, they were iterating on them the way programmers iterated on code... or laboratory personnel iterated on experiments, always improving.

Gipsy Danger avoided the attack and caught the tail in both hands as it swung back.

Otachi thrashed and pulled, roaring its fury, but Gipsy Danger held tight... and then braced itself and heaved up with both hands balled around the kaiju’s tail.

Otachi screamed as Gipsy Danger ripped its tail off.

Losing its balance, the kaiju toppled onto the street. It recovered quickly and Newt saw that Gipsy Danger had another problem.

The tail had come to life.

It coiled around Gipsy Danger’s forearms and revealed itself to be a trilaterally symmetrical set of pincered jaws, which snapped and spat at Gipsy Danger’s face.

The second brain,
Newt thought. Here’s one reason why an organism would need a second brain. Amazing. He could hear the sound of cracking and groaning metal as the tail squeezed more tightly on Gipsy Danger. Then it wriggled out of Gipsy Danger’s grip and the pincers bit deep into the Jaeger’s shoulder. Oil and lubricant spurted, taking on strange colors in the ambient wash of neon. Newt’s single brain ran away with him and he could almost envision the endless chain of incremental improvements that led from Stegosaurus through Otachi. Strands of kaiju DNA danced in his head.