Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization

PAN-PACIFIC DEFENSE CORPS ^{COMBAT ASSET DOSSIER—JAEGER}

1

“BOGIE ADVANCING FAST IN SECTOR SEVEN,” Tendo Choi said.

“Signature and category…”

Tendo scanned and synthesized the data from the array of hundreds of remote sensors that dotted the Pacific Ocean centered on the Breach south of Guam. He could get solid information on a kaiju’s mass, speed, and physical form within seconds of it emerging from the Marianas Trench.

“Jesus,” Tendo said. “Eight thousand seven hundred metric tons displacement, sir. Pegging the meter of Category III.”

“Tactics and trajectory.” The voice belonged to Stacker Pentecost. Quiet, authoritative, British.

Tendo scanned the deployment pings of the other Jaeger bases around the Pacific Rim.

“California sent Romeo Blue… but it slipped by without breaking the ten-mile line.” That was the Jaegers’ target distance for intercepting kaiju. If you let them get inside ten miles, it was hard as hell to stop them before they got their feet on land… and their teeth into the unfortunate people who had not yet evacuated that land.

Even though observing the kaiju was a piece of cake at first—they always came from the same place, so Tendo was guaranteed to get a good look at them right off the bat—keeping track of them in the open ocean was a lot harder. They were fast and their silicon-based anatomy meant they didn’t have a thermal signature that showed up against the deep-ocean background. Radar worked well at closer range, but the Pacific Ocean was big enough that nobody could get complete real-time radar coverage at the depths the kaiju occupied.

That meant defensive action had to take place along the continental shelves and inward, where the kaiju were a little easier to spot… but by then, they were also dangerously close to land. Jaeger deploys happened on a knife edge of timing and luck.

“Get California on the comm,” Pentecost said. “I want the satellite reading on-screen. And get Gipsy Danger on deck. Now.”

Raleigh Becket heard the alarm and was moving before he was completely awake, swinging out of the bottom bunk in the Alaska Shatterdome’s officers’ quarters and talking before his feet had hit the ground.

“Yancy, get up! Movement in the Breach!”

He got his shirt on. Yancy didn’t move.

“Let’s go, bro!” Raleigh kicked the edge of his brother’s bunk. They had divvied up opposite personal qualities the way siblings close in age often did. Raleigh snapped one-hundred-percent awake right away; Yancy was lucky to reach full awareness before it was time to go to bed again. “We’re being deployed!”

“Great. Good morning,” Yancy grumbled.

It sometimes seemed to Raleigh that his brother would sleep his life away, but man, not Raleigh. There was too much out there.

Including, at this moment, a kaiju to be killed.

“This one’s a Category III, biggest yet,” Raleigh said, checking the deployment monitor while he finished dressing. “Codename: Knifehead.”

Yancy muttered something incomprehensible. At least he was out of bed and moving. Raleigh was already at the door, bouncing on the balls of his feet while Yancy finished stretching and pried his eyes open.

“Fifth notch on the belt,” Raleigh said, scanning the first batch of information on the kaiju as it streamed out of LOCCENT Command.

Yancy stretched and looked around for his clothes.

“Don’t get cocky,” he said.

Three minutes later they were in the suiting area.

The drivesuit was a finicky and multi-layered piece of equipment. The first layer, the circuity suit, was like a wetsuit threaded with a mesh of synaptic processors. The pattern of processor relays looked like circuitry on the outside of the suit, gleaming gold against its smooth black polymer material. These artificial synapses transmitted commands to the Jaeger’s motor systems as fast as the pilot’s brain could generate them, with lag times close to zero. The synaptic processor array also transmitted pain signals to the pilots when their Jaeger was damaged. This had proven to be the best way to minimize reaction times, and Raleigh knew from experience that when you felt a kaiju’s teeth bite into your arm, you moved faster than if you were just watching everything on a screen.

The second layer was a sealed polycarbonate shell with full life support and magnetic interfaces at spine, feet, and all major limb joints. It relayed neural signals both incoming and outgoing. This armored outer layer included a Drift recorder that automatically preserved sensory impressions. It was white and shiny and also bulletproof—though they hadn’t yet seen a kaiju that shot bullets.

The outer armored layer of the drivesuit also kept pilots locked into the Conn-Pod’s Pilot Motion Rig, a command platform with geared locks for the Rangers’ boots, cabled extensors that attached to each suit gauntlet, and a full-spectrum neural transference plate, called the feedback cradle, that locked from the Motion Rig to the spine of each Ranger’s suit. At the front of the motion rig stood a command console, but most of a Ranger’s commands were issued either by voice or through interaction with the holographic heads-up display projected into the space in front of the pilots’ faces. Raleigh and Yancy were already wearing the close-fitting cranial sleeves Rangers called “thinking caps,” which put their brain functions directly into the loop when they synced everything together for the Drift.

Once they were suited up, with a plasma display outside the suiting area tracking Knifehead’s progress in real time, Yancy and Raleigh stepped into the Conn-Pod. The tech crew followed them, affixing the feedback cradle to the backs of their suits and cabling them into the interface drivers that transmitted their nerve impulses into Gipsy Danger itself.

Back in the Stone Age, in 2015, the first rough Jaeger prototype had used a single pilot. This hadn’t lasted long. The neural overload traumatized or killed several volunteers before the first full prototype rolled out on Kodiak Island with a Conn-Pod built for two. When the Pons mechanism was perfected and the Drift made possible, the Jaeger Project became a reality. All of the Jaegers since then had been designed from the ground up with two Ranger pilots in mind—except for Crimson Typhoon, a Chinese Jaeger, which Raleigh had heard was piloted by a crew of identical triplets. One of these days maybe he’d serve with them. It was something he’d like to see.

They stood on adjacent platforms, arms and legs spread. Control assemblies extended from the floor of the Conn-Pod, cybernetically mated with each suit, and spawned the holographic HUD above the command console.

The tech crew checked each link to make sure it was solid and then they withdrew, the door sliding shut behind them.

Raleigh and Yancy ran their pre-deployment suit checks and pre-Drift link analysis. Everything looked right.

“Morning, boys,” Tendo Choi said through the comm.

“Tendo, my man!” Raleigh called out.

Yancy sent the all-clear from his suit.

“How’d your date with Alison go last night, Mr. Choi?”

“Oh, she loved me,” Tendo replied. “Her boyfriend, not so much.”

“Engage drop, Mr. Choi.” Stacker Pentecost’s voice cut off their banter.

All business, that Pentecost, Raleigh thought.

“Engaging drop, sir,” Tendo responded.

Raleigh and Yancy looked at each other.

“Release for drop,” Yancy said.

Simultaneously they each hit buttons on the command console.

With a booming metallic snap the gantry holding the Conn-Pod and its cranial frame in place let go. The unit dropped down a vertical shaft, channeled by rails on either side. Raleigh’s stomach jumped and for a moment his vision blurred, just like it did every time. Then the Conn-Pod lurched and slowed, easing into place on the cervical assembly that locked Gipsy Danger’s head into place.

Bolts and hooks connected and automated gears engaged, uniting the head and body of the Jaeger into a two-hundred-eighty-eight-foot humanoid fighting machine the likes of which had never been seen outside of movies and comics… until the Jaeger project, born out of necessity, had brought those comic-book dreams to life.

“We are locked,” Yancy said, and moments later Gipsy Danger’s nuclear-powered central turbine roared to full power as Tendo released command-and-control to the Becket brothers.

Situated on the edge of Kodiak Island, the Jaeger Launch Bay groaned as the bay doors opened and a sliding platform extended out over the water, carrying Gipsy Danger on a gantry out into a violent winter storm. Effective visual range was measured in tens of yards, but Raleigh and Yancy were also looking through sensory arrays that ranged from infrared to ultraviolet, radar to sonar, synthesized into a full-spectrum view of the North Pacific. They needed the whole spectrum to track kaiju.

At a signal from Tendo, the gantry unlocked and the Jaeger dropped into the water with the force of a small meteor impact.

“Rangers, this is Marshal Stacker Pentecost,” came their commander’s voice. He was formal as ever at this moment. No shortcuts for Pentecost. “Prepare for neural handshake.”

Inside Gipsy Danger one of the displays spawned a holographic representation of two brains, and the thousands of links between them and Gipsy Danger’s motor assemblies. Back in LOCCENT, Tendo Choi and Pentecost were looking at the same thing. Raleigh never stopped being amazed that this was possible, and that he was about to experience it again.

“Starting in four… three…” Tendo Choi counted down.

At “one,” Yancy turned his head and shot Raleigh a wink.

Then they exploded into Drift Space.

They were kids, with their little sister Jazmine, playing monkey-in-the-middle

A balloon popped

Mom took a long drag on a cigarette and coughed and coughed. Cancer, they thought, and maybe so did she but she never stopped

Mom was dead and it was maybe the last time they saw Jazmine, at the grave, Raleigh couldn’t stop humming one of Mom’s favorite Brel songs from when they were little kids and Jazmine told him to shut up

They had to get back to Jaeger training

Seesawing back through time as their minds overlapped and intermingled: Margit, and Munich, how it ached to love a girl for the first time, twelve didn’t seem so long ago she kissed him

Dad you don’t have to go

He and Yancy were sneaking through an empty factory in Budapest. It was Yancy’s eleventh birthday and they were dressed as superheroes, armed with a flashlight and a cigarette lighter from Mom’s purse

No, we’re not going to college, we’re joining the Rangers

The last rush of time and space and feeling, stray thoughts caught up in the first tempest of the Drift: Ice cream hockey the sweep of the lighthouse beam at Pemaquid the first time we all were on a plane and the candy didn’t help my ears pop hey Moe! Nyuck nyuck nyuck you know what I don’t like is spiders

Trickle of blood coming from his nose but the guy deserved it, you can’t just pick on people

Can’t pick every fight either

Dad you don’t have to go

Nyuck nyuck nyuck

Alaska. 2020. The present asserted itself again. Time to save the world

Again

Reality coalesced from the welter of the Drift, and Raleigh heard Tendo Choi, like an anchor to the real world.

“Neural handshake strong and holding,” he said, as the graphic of two brains converged into one. The links from the overlapped brain image to Gipsy Danger’s control and motor systems lit up.

Raleigh and Yancy were part of it now, and part of each other.

“Right hemisphere ready,” Yancy said.

Raleigh always let him go first, but the tradeoff was that he got to give the all-clear.

“Left hemisphere linked and ready,” he said. “Gipsy Danger ready to deploy.”

They each raised one arm, and Gipsy Danger did the same, confirming the hundred-percent link between the gargantuan Jaeger and the twinned human minds controlling it.

“Gentlemen,” Pentecost said, “your orders are to hold the Miracle Mile off Anchorage. Copy?”

The Miracle Mile was the last-ditch perimeter, so named because if a kaiju got through the ten-mile cordon, it was usually a miracle if a Jaeger could keep it from coming ashore.

“Copy that,” Yancy said. Then he hesitated as their heads-up display showed a new signal. “Sir,” he went on. “There’s still a civilian vessel in the Gulf—”

Pentecost cut him off.

“You’re protecting a city of two million people. You will not risk those lives for a boat that holds ten. Am I clear?”

He was clear, but something else was also clear: if Gipsy Danger engaged the kaiju anywhere near that boat, the waves generated by the clash would tear it to pieces. Raleigh hadn’t joined the Jaeger program to create collateral damage. He’d joined up to prevent it.

Raleigh looked at Yancy, who was already looking at him. Raleigh turned off the comm.

“You know what I’m thinking?” Raleigh said.

“I’m in your brain,” Yancy said.

They grinned at each other.

“Let’s go fishing,” Raleigh said.

Simultaneously they hit the switches that engaged Gipsy Danger’s motor controls. The Jaeger roared to life, spouting a column of fire into the stormy night. Its warning horn cut through the storm and the Jaeger strode forward away from the LOCCENT bay doors, a phalanx of helicopters peeling away from it and returning to base as it disappeared into the snow and spray and the steam of its passage.

OP-ED Is the Jaeger Program Worth It?

2

SEVEN MILES OFF ANCHORAGE, GIPSY DANGER’S scanners picked up the conversation on the bridge of the fishing vessel identified as Saltchuck. The captain and his first mate, it sounded like, worried about the storm and which way they could run the fastest to shelter.

“We won’t even make it past the shallows,” the first mate was saying.

“What about that island?” the captain asked. “It’s three miles—”

Then he caught himself. Raleigh could almost hear him thinking: There’s no island on the chart there.

“It’s two miles, sir,” the mate said. A moment later, in a voice grown tight with awe and fear, he said, “One.”

On Gipsy Danger’s primary heads-up, Raleigh and Yancy saw Saltchuck, and closing swiftly, inexorably, on it they saw, the size of a landmass, the kaiju bogey.

“Good thing we can’t hear Pentecost right about now,” Yancy said.

Knifehead rose from the ocean off Saltchuck’s port side, standing a hundred feet and more out of the water. Four arms ended in webbed claws, each big enough to crush Saltchuck like a beer can. Its head was a blade, with one edge narrowing from its upper jaw to a point and the other defining the top of its skull. Active sonar outlined the rest of its body under the water, revealing it to be a biped with a powerful tail. Like a dinosaur, kind of, only an order of magnitude larger than any dinosaur that ever lived.

Do not confuse them with any terrestrial life forms, Raleigh remembered some egghead saying in a briefing. They are built on a template of silicon, not carbon. Whatever is on the other side of the Breach, it is a stranger place than we can imagine.

“Kaiju,” Raleigh heard the captain say, the man’s voice tinny and small over the roar of the elements and the tectonic sounds coming from the creature itself.

“Better close it up,” Yancy said.

And Gipsy Danger surged forward through the water, covering the remaining distance to the Saltchuck. On the other side of the boat, Knifehead reared up.

It was big, Tendo had been right about that. Its open mouth would have fit Saltchuck comfortably, and each of its teeth was as tall as a person. A large person. The wave of its emergence crested over Gipsy Danger’s exhaust ports and steam exploded up, swirling away almost at once in the wind.

“Aaaaaaand, showtime,” Yancy said.

Gipsy Danger had stayed low, swimming as necessary across the deeper waters of the Gulf of Alaska. Now with solid footing available in shallower water, Raleigh and Yancy planted the Jaeger’s feet and stood up, exploding through the surface of the ocean in a two-hundred-foot geyser lit by spotlights and booming with rescue horns. Raleigh loved the horns. He privately had a theory that they scared the kaiju, but he didn’t really care. They just sounded badass, was all.

“First things first,” Raleigh said.

And Gipsy Danger scooped Saltchuck up in the palm of one hand.

Then, as one, the brothers ducked, and Gipsy Danger did the same, avoiding a decapitating swipe from Knifehead’s triple claws.

“Time to burn,” Yancy said.

Gipsy Danger’s right fist rearranged itself into a barrel housing with four symmetrically amplifier lens arrays around a circular gap that extended up inside the Jaeger’s forearm. Flanges rotated on the wrist and locked the plasma-cannon assembly into place. Steam and static flares crackled around it as it powered up.

Knifehead swiped again, advancing through the water where Saltchuck had been, and Gipsy Danger ducked again, holding the boat out behind it and away from the kaiju. Over the scanner came the confused cries of the ship’s crew. In the back of his mind, Raleigh was thinking that he hoped Pentecost could hear.

“Yup,” Yancy said, which was his way of saying that the plasma cannon was ready.

The first shot hit Knifehead square in the midsection, right about where a human’s solar plexus would be. The kaiju staggered and the second shot knocked it further backward, twin charred craters in its torso. Its arms flailed and it screamed.

“Stay on it,” Raleigh said. The plasma cannon was recharging.

Didn’t look like they’d need it, though. The kaiju lost its footing and toppled sideways into the ocean, which boiled around the wounds, reacting to the mixture of salt water and the kaiju’s corrosive blood. The motions of its arms grew less coordinated and it sank slowly.

The last thing to disappear was the bridge of its bladed skull.

“I like this cannon,” Raleigh said.

“I know you do,” Yancy said. “Me too.”

“Better fire up the comm and tell Pentecost.”

“He already knows.”

“Sure, but he hasn’t heard us say it. You know how he is about following protocols.”

Raleigh toggled the comm back on, and the interior of Gipsy Danger’s Conn-Pod filled with Pentecost’s glowering face.

“Gipsy!” he barked. “What the hell is going on?”

Raleigh racked the plasma cannon back into its harness inside Gipsy Danger’s forearm. Turning to face the shoreline a few miles distant, he set Saltchuck down in the water and gave it a gentle push in the direction of dry land.

“Job’s done, sir. Lit it up twice and bagged our fifth kill.”

“You disobeyed direct orders, Ranger!”

Before Raleigh could say something wiseass and get them in trouble, Yancy cut in.

“Sir, we intercepted the kaiju, and… you know… saved everyone. Before the Miracle Mile and everything.”

“Plus nobody can get Kaiju Blue if it’s at the bottom of the ocean, right?” Raleigh added. Kaiju Blue was bad news, a kind of shock reaction the human body suffered when recently dead kaiju started to off-gas toxins in the hours after they died. It killed a lot of people when kaiju went down in populated areas. Today it would only kill fish, and who knew if they got Kaiju Blue, anyway?

Pentecost couldn’t contest the results, they knew that. But they also knew that he wouldn’t stand for the way they’d gotten there.

“Get back to your post,” Pentecost growled. “Now—”

It looked like he was about to say something else, probably along the lines of how he was going to have them busted down to permanent Boneslum latrine duty if they ever did something like that again, when Tendo Choi’s face appeared on an inset display. An alarm blared both back at LOCCENT and inside Gipsy Danger.

“Kaiju signature!” Tendo called out. “It’s rising!”

Raleigh swiped the LOCCENT feed off the HUD and spawned an area view. He and Yancy scanned and spun. Where was it? All they were seeing was open water and an iceberg.

Over the comm, Pentecost’s voice wasn’t angry anymore.

“Rangers, get out of there!” he commanded.

They felt it first, as the wave of its approach crashed into Gipsy Danger from behind. The Jaeger reeled. Before they could get their balance, Yancy’s side of the Conn-Pod collapsed inward.

Sparks shot from damaged wiring and water poured in through a ten-foot gap torn into Gipsy Danger’s head. Looking with his own eyes, no sensors necessary, Raleigh saw Knifehead swing around and down, severing Gipsy Danger’s left arm in a spray of hydraulic fluid and arcing showers of sparks.

Warning sirens went off at the same time as Raleigh registered that his brother was in crippling pain. It radiated through Raleigh, too, courtesy of the neural handshake that gave them the combined processing power to control Gipsy Danger. Emergency lights strobed in the Conn-Pod, cutting through the flickering images of the heads-up displays that still functioned.

“Arm’s gone cold,” Yancy said through gritted teeth. He was panting, trying to stay on top of the pain.

“Overriding now,” Raleigh said. He racked the plasma cannon and started to power it up again. It wasn’t supposed to fire this fast. They were going to be in a world of hurt either way.

He pivoted away from Knifehead as the wave from Gipsy Danger’s falling arm crashed over Saltchuck. The boat’s stern disappeared under the water but it righted itself and stayed afloat, tossed in the violent waves. Its fishing gear snapped off and was gone. Just like my arm, Raleigh thought. No, Yancy’s arm. The damage to Gipsy Danger was like damage to him. He was having a hard time thinking straight.

Raleigh put everything Gipsy Danger had into an uppercut that staggered the kaiju long enough for him to pull the arm back and lock in the plasma cannon… but not long enough to fire it!

Knifehead closed its jaws around the cannon itself and gnawed as it leaned forward, driving the weakened Gipsy Danger back. With an impact that momentarily blacked out all internal systems, Gipsy Danger slammed into the iceberg.

Raleigh exhaled in a whoof as if he’d had the wind knocked out of him. Before he could react, the kaiju put its head down and impaled Gipsy Danger, driving the point of its skull straight through the Jaeger’s torso and into the million tons of ice behind. Cascading failure alarms sounded as Gipsy Danger’s liquid-circuit neural pathways were interrupted.

The plasma cannon’s barrel glowed, still functioning despite Knifehead’s attempt to chew through it. They would only get to fire it once. Raleigh raised the arm high and bent at the elbow so the cannon was aimed back down at the kaiju’s head, just behind where its skull disappeared into Gipsy Danger.

It wouldn’t fire. Even overloading, it wouldn’t fire yet.

Knifehead reared up and smashed a single claw through the gap in Gipsy Danger’s Conn-Pod. The claw dug around, shredding metal and blacking out all electronics on that side.

It found Yancy.

“No,” Raleigh said quietly

There was no need to scream, Yancy could hear him. Yancy was looking at him, the raw terror of the moment cutting through the shock of the damage he had already suffered through Gipsy Danger…

“Raleigh, listen to me, you—”

And then Yancy was gone, torn away into the storm along with that entire side of Gipsy Danger’s head. Freezing rain slashed in through the hole and the Jaeger froze as the neural handshake was broken.

Raleigh hammered at a bank of manual switches, trying to engage the Crisis Command Matrix.

Yancy, man, no, don’t be gone, he was saying, or thought he was saying.

The CCM came online. Raleigh gave it a single command:

All of Gipsy Danger’s remaining control systems rededicated themselves to the single task of lifting and angling the Jaeger’s arm. Knifehead tore another piece from Gipsy Danger’s skull frame. Raleigh looked it right in the eye, and it looked back.

It knew we were in here, he thought. How did it know? When did they figure that out?

Knifehead roared, long and triumphant. It saw the plasma cannon pointed at it, and swiveled to bite down on Gipsy Danger’s arm, tearing at the cannon’s barrel housing and still roaring.

Raleigh roared back, and fired.

Dawn was breaking. Raleigh had never been cold like this. He moved Gipsy Danger step by step. He could hear random snatches of incoming comm traffic, morning news radio out of Anchorage, amplified sounds of surf and wind from the shore just ahead. Another step. Yancy was gone. He could not feel Yancy.

Gipsy Danger stepped onto dry land. Someone somewhere was shouting for recovery teams. Closer by he heard voices, too; chatter over Saltchuck’s radio. The boat had survived.

Gipsy Danger stumbled on the shoreline. Raleigh bent, and Gipsy Danger bent, within sight of the Anchorage skyline. He saw two figures, an old man and a boy, gaping at his approach. Sensors picked up the beep of a metal detector.

Raleigh had nothing left. He couldn’t feel his arm because it had been cut off. No, that was Gipsy Danger’s arm. The Jaeger’s joints squealed and began to freeze up from loss of lubricant through the holes Knifehead had torn in it. Its liquid-circuit neural architecture was misfiring like crazy. Raleigh’s head hurt and he also couldn’t really feel parts of his mind. Something was burning on his skin but if he looked down at it he would lose control of Gipsy Danger and the Jaeger would fall on the old man and the boy. He couldn’t stand upright again.

Gipsy Danger dropped to its knees and fell forward. Raleigh barely got his arm up and out to stop from going face first into the beach. The Jaeger’s hand was ten feet deep in the frozen sand. Snow blew across the beach, settling in the scalloped patterns carved by the winter wind. Gipsy Danger’s sensors picked up the beep of the metal detector again, faster.

Shut up, he thought.

Raleigh disengaged from the motion rig and blacked out for a moment. When he knew where he was again, he was standing on the sand and could hear the sound of approaching helicopters. He looked up. How had he gotten out onto the beach?

Climbed out. He realized that he’d climbed out through the shattered cranial viewport, climbed out the same hole Yancy had disappeared through. Cold stung his skin, blood was slick under his suit. The old man with his metal detector caught Raleigh as he started to fall and shouted something at the boy, who ran away down the beach.

Raleigh stared up into the sky.

There was blood in Raleigh’s eyes and a hole the shape of his brother in his soul.

“Yancy?” he said. His drivesuit was shredded. It was cold. The blood in his eyes felt cold. He blacked out again.

^{17 APRIL 2020} FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

3

STACKER PENTECOST FELT BESIEGED ON ALL sides. He had just lost two promising Rangers, the incoming class of new Jaeger academy graduates was bringing with it a particular set of problems, and the Jaeger graveyard at Oblivion Bay near San Francisco was acquiring new occupants at an ominous rate. Yancy Becket was dead, his body lost at sea. Raleigh Becket had quit the Jaeger program, suffering from clear post-traumatic stress, compounded by his mercurial temperament and survivor’s guilt. Gipsy Danger was crippled and would have to be scrapped.

On top of that, there was young Mako Mori to deal with. She was ready to stop being his student and start being a Ranger… or so she thought. Pentecost thought differently

But that was a personal issue. Pentecost put it aside and set his mind to the difficult task before him.

He stood in the Anchorage LOCCENT looking at a bank of monitors, each displaying the face of a different member of the United Nations Pan-Pacific Breach Working Group, a portion of the Subcommittee on Kaiju Defense and Security. From their expressions, he knew how the conversation would go, and he wasn’t going to like it. He’d seen the press release, and more importantly, he’d been part of the Group’s internal conversations for the past several months. Pentecost was dealing with frightened people, and frightened people always did one of two things: fight or flee. Since these frightened people were bureaucrats, they were just about guaranteed not to fight.

But Stacker Pentecost was not a bureaucrat. If he was going to go down, he was going down fighting.

“We are losing Jaegers faster than we can make them,” the Working Group’s designated speaker said. “And cities. Lima, Seattle, Vladivostok… this is no longer a battle or a strategy. It’s a slow, painful surrender. And we can’t surrender. I can’t surrender.”

Each member of the Group, a standing subcommittee of the United Nations since 2016, gazed at Pentecost from their individual monitors, their faces carefully arranged masks of professional, diplomatic regret. Around Pentecost, LOCCENT was silent. They had no more funding to keep it going. The bureaucrats were fleeing, and the first thing they always took on their way out was the money.

The only other people in the room were Tendo Choi, in his standard bowtie, suspenders, and ducktail haircut, and one of Pentecost’s veteran Rangers, Herc Hansen. Both stood out of view of the monitors.

“The kaiju evolved,” the British UN representative said. Pentecost didn’t know him. “The Jaegers aren’t the most viable line of defense anymore.”

“I am aware,” Pentecost began, then stopped himself. He reconsidered his approach. “It’s my Rangers who die every time a Jaeger goes down. But I’m asking you for one last chance. One final assault, with everything we’ve got—”

A fight, he said to himself. Instead fleeing just so we can die somewhere else.

“Marshal Pentecost,” the Australian rep cut in, “we’ve been through this before. The simple fact is the Breach is impenetrable.”

“With our current assets, perhaps,” Pentecost said. “But just as the kaiju have evolved, we are evolving as well. We have the Mark V-E Jaeger through the design phase and ready for prototyping. It’s ready to go as soon as the funding is released.”

“That just isn’t on the table, I’m afraid,” the Australian said.

Pentecost felt his last glimmer of hope disappear. The 5E was supposed to be built in Australia. If their own representative wasn’t going to stand up for it, how could it survive?

But they needed it. They kaiju were getting bigger and stronger. The Jaegers needed to match them, hell, exceed them. Not only that, they needed to make a push toward the Breach.

“My Kaiju Science researchers have made enormous strides toward understanding the physics of the Breach. You have their report. The more we understand about the Breach, the closer we get to being able to destroy it… if we have the combat assets to take the fight to the kaiju,” he said.

Pentecost had a savage dream of leading a force of Jaegers through the Breach to whatever lay on the other side, and doing to the kaiju exactly what they had done to humanity. He would need a hell of a lot more in the way of Jaeger tech and combat support if he was ever to make that dream a reality. There also didn’t seem to be any way to get into the Breach, but that was a matter of building tougher Jaegers that could withstand the electromagnetic storm it created.

They were getting closer. They couldn’t stop now. Not after so many had died.

“Nothing is impenetrable,” he continued. “We just have not yet discovered the tool that will penetrate the Breach. That is why our mission has grown even more critical. The Mark V-E Jaeger is the centerpiece of the next stage of that mission. It is crucial that we be able to continue developing to meet the threat.”

“The Group feels otherwise, Marshal Pentecost,” said the member from Panama.

Pentecost wasn’t surprised. Her country had just received an enormous windfall, billions of dollars to construct a barrier to the Pacific entrance of the Panama Canal. The kaiju had not found the Canal yet, but they had hit Guatemala and Ecuador. It was only a matter of time. The money for the Canal barrier had come straight out of the final-phase prototype funding for the Mark V-E Jaeger. The thought made Pentecost furious.

Picking right up as if the whole thing had been rehearsed—which Pentecost didn’t doubt it had—the American put in, “The world appreciates what you and your Rangers have done, Marshal. But I’m not going to expend my country’s remaining military forces and weapons on futile attacks when I could be protecting my people. And those people feel safer behind a wall.”

The Wall, Pentecost thought. The goddamn Wall. Humanity’s monument to fear, to flight instead of fight.

“But they’re not safer,” he said. “The walls won’t hold. My research team says the frequency of attacks is about to reach a saturation point. They’re going to spike.”

“We’ve intensified the coastal wall program and moved citizens and supplies three hundred miles inland to the safe zones,” the British rep said. “That is the prudent course, and that is the course we will take.”

Pentecost wanted to ask the British rep where exactly in Britain was three hundred miles inland. For that matter, why did the British have a voice in this at all? He was British by birth himself, but he had also been a front-line Jaeger pilot. He had killed kaiju and had the scars to show for it, both inside and out. All of this flashed through his mind in a swell of anger. But he controlled himself and stuck to his theme.

“Safe zones that only the rich and the powerful can buy their way into,” he said. “What about the rest?”

“Watch your tone, Marshal,” the American rep said.

Pentecost looked at the man for a long moment. A number of responses went through his mind. Take the high road, he told himself.

“Fear and walls won’t save anyone,” he said. “You can huddle in caves with hope as a pillow, but it won’t work. When the last Jaeger falls and the kaiju take the shores, they will not stop. They’ll keep coming until east meets west. There will no longer be any safe zones. Nothing will be left.”

“You have your answer, Marshal,” the American rep said. “After the eight months needed to begin the decommissioning of the remaining Shatterdomes, the United Nations will no longer be funding the Jaeger program. You are free to continue it, and I’m sure that a man of your determination will find a way to keep Jaegers in the field. We will welcome their interventions when and if more kaiju appear. However, this body has decided that the best interests of the human race are served by acknowledging that our finite resources are more effectively applied to a sure defense than to a reckless offense. Good luck to you, Marshal.”

The monitors went dark.

That was that. The bureaucrats of the world had chosen flight.

Pentecost took a moment to gather himself. Concentrating on every motion, he removed a pill box from his uniform pocket and swallowed one of the tablets. He’d have to take care of himself if the next weeks and months unfolded as he expected.

“So that’s it?” Tendo Choi asked from the other end of the command platform.

Herc Hansen approached and the three of them stood in the darkened and quiet LOCCENT.

“Suits and ties and flashy smiles,” Herc said. “That’s all they are.”

Stacker Pentecost shot him a look. Herc was right, but Pentecost also believed in respecting authority.

Until, that is, the duly constituted authorities proved themselves unable to govern. Pentecost unclipped his Marshal’s wings from his uniform and set them on the table. If any of the UN reps had still been watching, the gesture would have been clear to them; as it was, the significance of it registered immediately with Herc and Tendo.

“We don’t need them,” said Stacker Pentecost.

He was free to continue the program, the Group had said. As long as he could find a way to keep it alive.

Well, he thought, there might be such a way. It was distasteful, perhaps, but this was war.