Pacific Rim Uprising E-Book

Alex Irvine

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

The official novelization to the upcoming Pacific Rim Uprising movie, the sequel to Guillermo del Toro's critically acclaimed Pacific Rim.It has been ten years since The Battle of the Breach and the oceans are still, but restless. Vindicated by the victory at the Breach, the Jaeger program has evolved into the most powerful global defense force in human history. The PPDC now calls upon the best and brightest to rise up and become the next generation of heroes when the Kaiju threat returns.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Also Available from Titan Books

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

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About the Author

Available now from Titan Books

Also available from Titan Books:

Pacific Rim Uprising: Ascension

The Official Movie Prequel

FROM DIRECTOR

STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT

NOVELIZATION BY

ALEX IRVINE

TITAN BOOKS

Pacific Rim Uprising: The Official Movie Novelization

Print edition ISBN: 9781785657689

E-book edition ISBN: 9781785657696

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: March 2018

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

© 2018 Legendary

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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TO HARUO NAKAJIMA, THE MAN IN THE

GODZILLA SUIT

1

EDITORIAL: THANKS, PPDC, AND SO LONG

Look, the Breach has been closed for ten years. If the Kaiju were coming back, they would already have done it. You think they’re not spoiling for a chance to get back at us after we dropped a nuke straight through the Breach into their… world? Dimension? Whatever. It’s not going to happen. We’ve got a Pan Pacific Defense Corps that stands guard against a threat that doesn’t exist. There are how many Shatterdomes? How many Jaegers? How many Rangers and support staff? How much does all that cost?

Shouldn’t we be spending that money to rebuild everything that was destroyed during the war? When I fly into Los Angeles now, all I can see from Long Beach all the way up to Santa Monica is ruins. Ten years later! Europe was rebuilt sooner than that after World War II! Why, you ask?

Because everybody knew the war was over. They put their money into rebuilding. They didn’t waste it on more armies, more bases. No. They got on with their lives.

We’re not doing that. We’re still staring out at the Pacific Ocean thinking it’s full of monsters, and it’s not.

It’s time to move on. It’s time to demobilize the Pan Pacific Defense Corps. Mothball the Jaegers, shutter the Shatterdomes, and get on with the twenty-first century.

The Pan Pacific Defense Corps scrapyard in Santa Monica, California spread over hundreds of acres that had once been prime beachfront. During the course of the Kaiju War, much of Santa Monica had been destroyed, and fallen Jaegers from up and down the West Coast now lay behind barbed wire. Around the scrapyard, what had once been one of the Los Angeles area’s most beautiful cities was now a ruin. Those who could get out were long since gone, and only the desperate remained.

Jake Pentecost wasn’t exactly desperate, but he was in a bit of a bind. He’d gotten on the wrong side of one of the local crime bosses, by the name of Sonny, and now he had to buy his way out of the problem by finding Sonny some high-quality salvage that Sonny could move on the local black market. Ordinarily Jake would have steered clear of burgling a PPDC facility—the penalties were pretty stiff—but he knew the area around this Jaeger graveyard well enough to figure he could skip out before any trouble arose.

Even so, it was risky, and Jake wouldn’t have been here if Sonny hadn’t made it clear that the alternative involved lots of pain and maybe death. Well, definitely death.

He led Sonny and Sonny’s goons up to a part of the electrified fence surrounding the yard and pointed to the spot they should cut through. The goons were quick about it—this clearly wasn’t the first time they’d cut a fence—and a minute later Jake stepped through a nice big hole right next to a NO TRESPASSING sign that also bore the logo of the PPDC. Seeing it gave Jake a little spike of regret. He’d been a Jaeger pilot once.

But that was the past. He couldn’t do anything about it, just like he couldn’t do anything about all the other bullshit that came along with being the son of Stacker Pentecost. When your father died saving the world, there was no way to live up to that. Jake had long since quit trying. He’d turned himself into a pretty good… well, some people would call him a thief. He thought of himself as more of a salvage expert.

It was a good life if it didn’t get you killed. In this world you had to hustle. The coastal cities, most of them, were still relief zones, filled with people just trying to get by—rubbing up against Kaiju-worshipping cults that went around bemoaning the closure of the Breach like it was the Crucifixion. Then you had your homegrown gangsters doing what gangsters always did—only now they had another sideline in cobbling together homegrown junk Jaegers from salvaged parts. Anyone with money had moved inland, getting away from the chaos and the possibility that another Breach would open up and the Kaiju War would start all over again. But their fear was his opportunity, because they left behind empty mansions like the one Jake squatted in up in Malibu. He also had a little bit of experience of Jaegers, which meant he had a better nose for where to find Jaeger tech than the average person. That put him in a pretty good spot. Usually. He had gotten a reputation for delivering the goods, and then—okay, being honest here—he’d let it go to his head and he’d started bending the rules a little. Ignoring well-established informal boundaries between different gang lords. Getting your hands on good bits of Jaeger tech was usually worth the risk, since a good score could set you up for a year… but every once in a while it blew up in your face, which was why Jake was in Santa Monica instead of back in Malibu where he belonged.

Once they were inside the yard, Jake got out a beat-up old plasma tracker. It detected the energy signatures of plasma components even through a Jaeger’s heavy shielding. Indispensable equipment for the ambitious salvage expert. As he was turning it on, Sonny started to walk ahead. Jake caught him and pulled him back behind the mangled remains of a Mark II Jaeger. When he was a little kid, he’d known them all by sight and talked about them the way kids of a previous generation had known all the details about their favorite Pokémon or baseball players. Just as Jake yanked Sonny back, a searchlight swept over the spot where he’d just been. The PPDC patrolled the yard, but their timing never varied. Jake had done his research.

Sonny glared at him, but he could hardly be mad that Jake had just saved the operation and kept them all out of jail. Jake led them around the first scrapped Jaeger, keeping an eye on the plasma tracker. It emitted a soft ping as they neared another Jaeger. This one wasn’t quite as messed up as the first, but it was missing one arm and its head was shattered. Jake recognized it, of course: Romeo Blue, the only tripedal Jaeger ever put into service. Three Kaiju kills, all in partnership with Gipsy Danger. Destroyed by Insidia in Panama City, 2020, with the loss of both pilots. Before that, Jake remembered seeing the parade after Romeo Blue had killed the Kaiju Takubus back in the early years after the opening of the Breach. It was huge, lumbering, slow, but seemingly invincible.

Seemingly. To a little kid whose father was already a hero after Tokyo. But now Jake was all grown up.

“This one,” he said.

Sonny and his men followed Jake through a hatch and into the Jaeger’s immense interior. Other than Jake, none of them had ever been inside a Jaeger before, and they eyed the surroundings with awed expressions.

“You sure it’s here?” Sonny asked.

Jake found the access door he was looking for. On the other side of it would be Romeo Blue’s plasma chamber, where the Jaeger’s power core and associated hardware would have been collected and shielded. The door was jammed shut, but the control panel next to it would have an override. Jake got his fingers into the seam at the edge of the panel and wrenched it open.

“Power cores are stripped before Jaegers get decommissioned,” he said as he felt around inside the panel. “But sometimes they miss the tertiary plasma capacitors. Hell of a score on the black market, if this one’s still holding a charge.”

“You’d better hope so,” Sonny said.

Something about his tone of voice made Jake look back over his shoulder. Sonny was holding a gun. “Okay,” Jake said. “Let’s not get all excited.”

“Just playing the odds,” Sonny said. “You cheated Barada in Juarez, skipped out on Azimi in Hong Kong—”

“They had it coming,” Jake said. Who wouldn’t take the chance to cheat Tony Azimi? That guy was a scumbag.

“And stole from me in my own backyard,” Sonny added.

That was a little harder to paper over. Jake had in fact pulled a job in Sonny’s territory without telling Sonny about it or cutting him in. From Sonny’s perspective, that was a problem. From Jake’s perspective, it had been a chance to make a quick score and maybe establish his bona fides as someone who knew where to find the good stuff in the ruins of Southern California. Sonny must have at least partially bought into that, because he was giving Jake a chance to make good by displaying those bona fides. “And now I’m stealing for you,” Jake said. “Circle of life. We good?”

“You deliver, and yeah, we’re good.” Sonny’s expression didn’t change. Jake tried to gauge whether or not he was telling the truth. It didn’t really matter at the moment.

His fingers found the emergency release lever behind the control panel. Jake grinned and pulled the release. A heavy thunk sounded from the door as its bolts disengaged. It opened with a low grinding noise. The Jaeger wasn’t powered anymore, but the backup battery systems on the old Mark I models held their power for a long time.

Jake stood and noticed that Sonny hadn’t put the gun away. Not a good sign. But he put his best face on it, keeping up his grin and gesturing through the open door. “Let’s get rich,” he said.

He went into the chamber first. These old Jaegers had big plasma chambers because PPDC techs hadn’t been able to optimize the plasma density before they had to get the Jaegers into service. The space was the size of several rooms in his mansion. Cables and conduits ran along the walls, converging on a central spot where the plasma capacitor was located.

Or should have been.

Jake stopped in the middle of the room, unable to believe the bad luck. The capacitor shunt cables were still sparking, which meant that someone had gotten there within the last few minutes. Any longer and the residual energy would have all bled out already. “No, no, it says it’s here,” Jake said. He glanced down at his tracker, which still said the capacitor was right there in front of him.

He turned toward Sonny. “It should be right here—”

Sonny smashed him across the face with the butt of his gun. Jake went down, landing on hands and knees. Blood dripped off his chin from a cut high on his cheek.

“Somebody please kill this guy for me,” Sonny said. His goons drew guns and leveled them at Jake.

“Wait, wait!” Jake gave the tracker a smack. The screen flickered and went dark… then came back on. Now it showed the capacitor on the move.

But not too far away.

“Someone else is in here!” he said, jumping up.

“Someone what?” Sonny seemed to have forgotten about killing him for the moment.

Jake scrambled over cable housings and big emplacements of dead machinery, aiming for an exit door halfway up the far wall. “They have the capacitor!” he said. “Come on! The signal’s close!”

Sonny and the goons came after him. “Jake!” Sonny shouted. “Jake, you sonofa—”

His voice was cut off as Jake pulled the release lever on the door and it slammed shut. Now all Jake had to do was keep track of the capacitor signal and get out of the Jaeger before Sonny’s goons caught up with him. He ran through the maze of maintenance corridors inside Romeo Blue’s torso, ducking into a tunnel lined with heavy power cables. Echoing through the Jaeger’s interior, he could hear Sonny shouting. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to beat them to one of the exits… but then again, maybe he didn’t have to. A plan started to form in his head. Like most of his best plans, it was half-assed and risky.

The cable tunnel split and as Jake shoved some of the cables aside to make the turn, he came face to face with one of Sonny’s goons. The goon was pretty fast, getting his gun up… but Jake was that much faster, laying the guy out with a single punch before he could pull the trigger.

Before the goon had hit the ground, bullets tore into the cables around him. Sonny had found him. He scrambled into the side tunnel, which angled down steeply enough that it was easier to slide to the bottom. When his feet hit level ground again, he was in a shunt room. A dead end. He ran to the far end of it, turning to face the mouth of the tunnel as Sonny and his other men caught up.

“Nice try,” Sonny said with a cruel grin. This time he apparently didn’t want anyone else to shoot Jake, because he raised his own gun.

And that’s when Jake’s plan paid off. He kicked out and his booted foot hit a lever on the floor. It cranked over and a maintenance door sprang open under Sonny and the goons, dropping them into a hold under the floor. They landed hard and Jake kicked the lever again, slamming the door shut.

“Yeah,” Jake said. “We’re good.” Sometimes it paid to know odd details about old Jaegers.

Then he took off running, following the signal on the tracker.

He came out of Romeo Blue’s torso at the shoulder joint, maybe fifty feet off the ground. Below, a figure in a hoodie was sprinting across the open ground toward a motorcycle, a backpack in one hand.

The capacitor was in that backpack. Jake made a jump for a cable hanging down from a crane near Romeo Blue’s head. He caught it and started to let himself down, hand over hand—then the mechanism let go and he was hanging on for dear life. It seized up again after he had dropped about twenty feet, and his momentum jerked him loose. He fell the rest of the way to the roof of a shipping container on the ground, landing flat on his back. The impact knocked the wind out of him, but he rolled off the container and started after the thief again. The motorcycle revved up and the hooded figure skidded off in a spray of gravel. Jake started in pursuit, hoping he could maybe get over the fence and out the access road before the motorcycle went around through the open gate… but he heard engines and froze.

PPDC security vehicles tore past, following the motorcycle. Dammit, Jake thought. That’s what happens when you fire guns in a Jaeger scrapyard. If the thief was caught, he’d never get the capacitor. If the thief got away, though…

He looked down at the tracker. The signal was strong, and it was still moving.

2

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SHAO ANNOUNCES DRONE INITIATIVE

SHANGHAI, 9 JUNE 2034

Shao Liwen, founder and CEO of Shao Industries, announced today that her company had secured funding from the Pan Pacific Defense Corps to build a fleet of Drone Jaegers based on prototypes created by Shao and demonstrated at a PPDC Council closed session earlier this year. The potential impact on worldwide PPDC budget expenditures is significant, since current deployment models require the upkeep of Shatterdomes in every region of the Pacific Rim. Each Shatterdome must be staffed with Rangers and enormous support crews of technicians and engineers.

Shao envisions a new PPDC, with fewer Shatterdomes and smaller crews. Drone Jaegers would be operated remotely from a single central PPDC facility, eliminating the operational expense of Ranger team stations at every Shatterdome. Further, Drones would not require the installation of expensive Conn-Pods and Drift cradles, reducing the unit cost of each Jaeger by as much as fifteen percent. Another benefit is reduced risk to the lives of Rangers, who suffer a regrettable number of training accidents and Drift-related maladies even apart from the combat dangers risked when they face Kaiju or other threats.

If approved by the PPDC Council, the Drone fleet will be ready for initial deployments and field testing within the next calendar year.

By the time Jake got going after the capacitor thief, the signal was all the way across town, headed south. He followed, going all night until dawn found him in the southern part of Santa Monica, which was even more of a ruin than the area around the Jaeger graveyard.

Before the Kaiju War, he’d heard it was a nice place. But now it was a half-destroyed slum, full of people picking through the ruins to survive. The old pedestrian mall was now an open-air market, and farther south, the towering bones of the Kaiju Insurrector lay on the beach where it had fallen, after destroying much of the Santa Monica Pier. Scavengers and black-market entrepreneurs had stripped the body of everything from its blood to the parasites wriggling in the gaps under its armor plating. All of it was valuable, and most of it was lethal if the scavenger crews didn’t take adequate precautions. You could get dissolved by Kaiju blood, infected by Kaiju germs, suffocated when the decaying tissue trapped you inside their corpses. They decayed incredibly fast once exposed to the foreign atmosphere of Earth. And that was if other scavengers didn’t jump you before you could get your goods to market. Jake had steered clear of the trade in Kaiju parts, by and large. The sight of their monumental skeletons dotting the coasts filled him with sadness for what the Kaiju had done to the world, and behind it a more distant sadness about his father. Jake missed the world he’d been born into. He wanted it back.

Well, sometimes, anyway. Then there were the mornings when he got up and there was a sea breeze as the light of dawn crept along the tops of the bluffs falling toward the Pacific, and he’d just pulled off a score that was going to set him up for months… then this world didn’t seem so bad. If he was smart and a little bit lucky, he’d have one of those days tomorrow, after he got the capacitor back and moved it. Already he was deciding he wouldn’t sell it to Sonny. At this point it wouldn’t stop the man from trying to kill him again, so Jake figured he might as well get something out of the capacitor.

As dawn broke, Jake followed the tracker through the decaying ruins of Santa Monica, passing buildings tagged with the symbols of various Kaiju cults. Kaiju worshippers clustered in ruins like this one, to be closer to the bones of their gods. He passed beggars, and people trying to sell worthless junk so they wouldn’t be thought of as beggars. Ignoring them all, Jake followed the tracker’s signal. The plasma capacitor was somewhere on the other side of the pier.

He had to climb the rubble of buildings destroyed years ago by Insurrector before he got a good look at where the thief had gone. There, on the other side of the pier, the PPDC had built a shipyard for support vessels and barges big enough to transport damaged or incomplete Jaegers. Now the whole thing was decommissioned and abandoned, had been for years. There were dry docks, hangars, huge old warehouses, all of them filled with squatters and lowlifes… including the thief who had his plasma capacitor.

That capacitor had already caused Jake a lot of trouble. So he and the thief would have to reach an understanding.

Actually, it would be better if he and the thief never met. If Jake was lucky, the thief was tired from the trip, and Jake could get into the shipyard, find the capacitor, and get back out without them ever knowing he was there.

He started the long scramble down the bones and rubble, aiming for a warehouse at the water edge of the shipyard. The tracker said the capacitor was somewhere inside.

* * *

He worked his way along the edge of the warehouse until the tracker said he was as close as he was going to get. Then Jake pried open the closest window, wincing at the creaking sound. He swung through and dropped into a room that maybe used to be an office or a break room. Now it was clear someone was squatting there. A dirty mattress in the corner, surrounded by food wrappers and other personal trash, told him that much. The rest of the floor was covered with bits of machinery and tools.

Jake scanned the walls and knew he was in the right place. Whoever was living here had a serious obsession with Kaiju and Jaegers. The walls were plastered with magazine pages, newspapers, printouts from online stories—all of it a chronicle of the Kaiju War from the very beginning, the opening of the Breach. A blurry photo of one of the old Mark II Jaegers was taped up next to it. Someone had written “HOW BIG?!!!” in silver Sharpie. The rest of that part of the wall was a gallery of shots of Jaegers and Kaiju, with other notes.

Then the wall’s focus shifted to Shao Liwen, a one-time computer prodigy who now ran a multi-billion-dollar company, Shao Industries. She had been a pioneer in several different aspects of Jaeger design, and the most recent headline suggested she still was. SHAO INDUSTRIES: THE FUTURE OF JAEGER TECH?

Jake wouldn’t know. He’d been out of touch with that world for a long time.

Scanning down the wall, he stopped when he saw a faded Time magazine cover portrait of Raleigh Becket. The only words were Raleigh’s name and his dates: 1998–2026.

Seeing that hit Jake hard. Raleigh had been one of his idols when he was a kid and Raleigh was the young loose cannon. And he had served under Jake’s father. Then he had been the hero of the Battle of the Breach, surviving the mission that had taken Stacker Pentecost. Jake had a lot of complicated feelings about then that he’d spent the last ten years ignoring, so he wasn’t going to start now. He moved on, toward the door at the far end of the room. So far he hadn’t heard a sound other than his own quiet footsteps.

On the other side of the door was the main floor of the warehouse, acres of concrete with a roof maybe fifty feet high. And in the middle of that expanse stood a homemade Jaeger. Not full-sized, but its head was close to the ceiling. For a moment Jake just stood, amazed at the sight. Someone in the midst of all this chaos and misery had built a Jaeger out of spare parts. It was ugly, cobbled together from mismatched junk, including some scavenged armor plating Jake recognized as coming from a Mark II. But others could have started their service life in any machine from a water pump to a blast furnace. The overall effect was strange compared to a full-sized Jaeger. This one was maybe forty feet tall, with no room inside its head for a Conn-Pod, but the designer had given it two lights there, like eyeballs. Jake remembered an old engineer telling him people always wanted to humanize machines, even if it didn’t make design sense, because somewhere deep down inside they thought of machines as their children. Jake wasn’t sure how seriously to take that idea, but he’d been remembering it for a long time so it must have meant something to him. The Conn-Pod—or what passed for one—in this little Jaeger was set into its torso. Armored window frames gave pilots and passengers a view of the world beyond their wannabe Jaeger creation. One of its hands was a three-fingered pincer, and the other arm ended in a… Jake wasn’t sure what it was in the gloom. Some kind of saw blade.

Whoever had put this thing together was a seriously gifted tinker… and now, it occurred to Jake, he was in the presence of a truly great score. The plasma capacitor he’d been after was plugged into a hatch in the mini-Jaeger’s ankle, but Jake was already thinking bigger. People were always trying to build Jaegers to make some kind of personal statement, but not too many people could actually do it. This thief had pulled it off, and by the look of it there wasn’t a big gang involved. They wouldn’t have let something this valuable sit around without security. But whoever had built it, well, they must not have understood how the real world worked, because there it was. Who did Jake know with enough assets and ego to pay for a functioning personal Jaeger…?

He felt movement in the room. Behind him. Instinctively Jake skipped to the side and turned toward the person coming at him. He saw a length of pipe swinging toward his head and caught it. The assailant was wiry but small. Jake wrenched the pipe loose and in the same motion slammed the thief down to the floor. He’d learned a long time ago that when a fight started, you didn’t let it end until you were sure the other guy wasn’t going to get up again, so he raised the pipe—and then froze in mid-swing.

The figure on the floor was wearing dirty jeans and a hoodie. Impact with the floor had pushed the hoodie back far enough for Jake to see that the thief was a young teenager, and also a girl.

“What—how old are you?” he asked, still holding the pipe.

She sat up and pulled the hood the rest of the way off. Dark hair, a face that in other times would have led the homecoming parade—but those eyes, they were all grown up. Tough and smart and angry.

“Old enough to kick your ass,” she said, and started to get up. Jake planted the pipe in her shoulder and nudged her back to the floor.

“Let’s take a minute,” he said. Cocking his head back toward the mini-Jaeger, he asked, “You build this thing yourself?”

“What do you think?” she snapped.

“I think I could sell your little toy for a whole lot of money.”

“Scrapper’s not a toy,” the girl said. “And she’s not for sale.”

Scrapper, Jake thought. Good name. Evocative of both attitude and origin. You had to admire the resolve, but this was business. “The man holding the pipe says she is, so—”

Sirens sounded from outside the warehouse. The girl looked toward the main hangar doors at the far end of the room. “You led them here!?”

“What?” Jake was offended at being called out by a little runt squatting in the Santa Monica slum. “Nobody follows me! It must have been you.”

He glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the sirens and the girl seized her chance. She kicked the pipe out of his hands and rolled to her feet, scrambling away across the floor toward the mini-Jaeger.

“Hey!” Jake started to go after her, but he was almost certain that would end up with him arrested in the back of a PPDC van. She kicked the capacitor hatch closed and scrambled up Scrapper’s leg to the Conn-Pod in its torso. She powered it up as she got settled in a gyroscopic cradle.

“Yes! It works!”

Wait, Jake thought. Is this the first time she’s used this thing?

The sirens were closer, and there were a lot of them. Jake took another look at Scrapper’s Conn-Pod. There was room for two, and if it worked, it worked…

He headed for the mini-Jaeger and hauled himself up just as she had, diving in next to her just as she slammed Scrapper’s chest plate shut. “Hey!” she shouted. “Get out!”

Jake turned around in the tight compartment. “Where’s the other one?”

“The other what?” Busy powering up various subroutines, the girl wasn’t looking at him.

“The other cradle! Jaegers need two pilots!”

“Scrapper’s small enough to run on a single neural load,” she said proudly.

“Then move over and let me pilot!”

“Screw that!” Then she punched a final command, and Scrapper’s power gauges surged to max readings. The little Jaeger charged forward, smashing through the warehouse wall. Sheet metal and broken glass scattered over the pavement in a parking lot full of PPDC security vehicles. Scrapper kicked them aside, sending PPDC personnel scattering.

“Woohoo!” she cheered, like she was having the time of her life. “Told you she’s not a toy!”

“You’re gonna get us killed. Now come on…” Jake started trying to uncouple her from the gyroscope so he could take her place in the cradle. She couldn’t have known this, but he knew his way around a Conn-Pod.

“Stop it.”

“I can get us out of here.”

“I just got us out. Get off! Hey!”

They stopped struggling as a huge bogey appeared on Scrapper’s HUD. It wasn’t as fancy as a full-scale Jaeger’s heads-up display, but it was a pretty slick piece of work for a teenager working with scraps. She skidded Scrapper to a halt, throwing Jake to the floor.

“Oh my God,” she said, as they got a visual. Straight in front of them was a huge Mark VI Jaeger, one of the newest in the fleet. Steely gray, with black accents and a blue tinge to its exterior running lights, it looked every bit the part of the law-enforcement Jaeger—which it was. Jake recognized it. So did she. “That’s November Ajax!”

A moment before, Jake had been trying to get her away from the controls, but now there wasn’t time. November Ajax was the PPDC’s designated patrol Jaeger for the whole of the devastated area from Santa Monica down through Long Beach. Occasionally it was called into service to handle social unrest, but the PPDC typically didn’t send November Ajax out unless there had been an attack on a PPDC installation… or a theft of PPDC property. This meant the PPDC had tracked the theft of the plasma capacitor just as Jake had, and decided it warranted a full response. If they were caught, there would be serious consequences. They’d use them as examples to other would-be thieves, and put them away for a long time. “You’re gonna get us nicked!” Jake said, his voice tight. “Keep moving!”

“Pilots of unregistered Jaeger.” The voice boomed from November Ajax’s external speakers, shaking the two of them in Scrapper’s small Conn-Pod. “This is the Pan Pacific Defense Corps. Power down and exit your Conn-Pod.”

The girl raised her hands.

“That’s it?” Jake was disappointed. “You give up way too easy, kid.”

“That’s what they think,” the girl said.

She clenched her fists and smoke canisters shot out of sockets in Scrapper’s arms. Clouds billowed around November Ajax’s legs, hiding Scrapper—who shot between the larger Jaeger’s legs and barreled down the street.

Jake got a grip on one of the cables connecting the Conn-Pod capsule to the counterweights inside Scrapper’s torso. They were there to deaden momentum shifts and prevent the pilot from getting knocked around when Scrapper made sudden movements. A primitive solution, but a workable one—as long as you were in the gyro cradle. Jake wasn’t, so just had to take his lumps and hang on for dear life.

“Hang on!” she yelled as November Ajax turned and caught up to them with one long stride.

“I am hanging on!”

“Hang tighter!” She was working her command array, and she punched a final command.

The next thing Jake knew, he was upside down. Then right side up again, then rolling over and over and bouncing hard off the inside wall of the Conn-Pod.

Scrapper had apparently curled into a ball and was rolling in tight figure eights around November Ajax’s feet. The girl stayed upright and level the whole time—Jake had to hand it to her, she’d done the cradle design just right—but Jake slammed around until he got himself jammed into one of the counterweight alcoves. It wasn’t a dignified solution, but it would keep him from getting knocked out or breaking an arm while they escaped November Ajax.

If they escaped November Ajax.

November Ajax swiped down at Scrapper, but the girl had seen it coming. She ducked her body to one side and Scrapper careened that way, crashing off palm trees and over burned-out cars. She rolled Scrapper fast up a high pile of rubble and it came crashing down through the wall of a partially collapsed building.

For a moment everything was silent except the sound of debris shifting around them. Jake started to get himself back together now that he knew which way was up again.

“See?” the girl said triumphantly. “I just out-piloted November Ajax.”

Jake shook his head. “You didn’t.”

“Did,” she insisted.

With a huge rumble, November Ajax tore away one wall of the building Scrapper was hiding in.

“Didn’t,” Jake said.

The girl froze. He could see she wasn’t sure what to do next. “Okay. What do you got? And I’m not getting out.”

This was a point where it paid to have plans go wrong all the time, Jake thought. It meant you were always ready to come up with a new one on the fly. He glanced around the Conn-Pod, figuring there must be something in there he could use. To do what, he didn’t know—but Jake was an optimist, at least when it came to his ability to get out of tight situations. He’d find something.

There.

He pointed at a pair of ion cells set into the Conn-Pod’s wall. “One of these ion cells redundant?”

The girl frowned. “No.”

Jake figured Scrapper could run for a little while without it. Ion cells usually weren’t mission-critical, since they were normally wired to different yields than the plasma capacitors that powered the mainframe and systems. They handled things like reserve power, backup systems.

In other words, things you didn’t really worry about when November Ajax was chasing you down.

He primed the subroutine that would eject one of the ion cells. The eject chute was on the outer hull. Cells were typically only ejected when their power reserves were exhausted. There was a reason for that, as November Ajax’s pilots were about to find out.

“Is now,” he said. “Get us close to Ajax’s head. Go!”

She was steamed, but she did it. The girl gunned Scrapper forward and climbed straight up November Ajax’s arm, which was maybe three times as long as Scrapper was tall. The minute they got level with the Jaeger’s head, Jake hit the eject button. “Go! Go!” he shouted.