Year 2025
Shatterdome, Hong Kong Bay
Bay 13 Decomissioned Storage
"For fuck's sake!" The shout came from within the coiled splay of white and grey tubing. The coils reached almost twenty feet high and spilled out in a widening pyramid. "Get the crane in here. The neural loops are fine, it's got to be another interface issue."
Ygor sprinted the three flights of stairs and slid into the crane cockpit. It was a deft job to maneuver the end of the two hundred pound pick into the writhing mass of Jaeger muscle fibers. One slip and he would crush the pilot standing in the middle of it. He keyed the loudspeaker on as he started to insert the pick. "Come on, sweetie. Hook me up."
There was a sudden shift in the crane's load as the tip caught. He shifted the crane's arm and it lifted the weight of muscle fibers towards the Jaeger that loomed above it. Foxtrot Angel was naked of her brilliant graphene-titanium shell that normally cloaked her. The shell was painted a deep pumpkin color over tenné shaded joints - a color choice predicated on the sleek fox that crawled down her breastplate and marked every technician and member of her crew. Without her skin the Jaeger looked like a humanoid giant with giant ball bearings, engine mounts, and ropey polymer nanocomposite muscle fibers that replaced the standard mechanical muscle of the Mark I-V Jaegers. The crane lifted them and they fell into place as sleek long fibers. The shiny white texture came from production methods that printed each muscle in tiny flexible chunks giving it an organic appearance and better feedback ratios for governing movement.
The crane continued past Foxtrot's abdomen, almost three and a half stories high, and with a practiced twist he reinserted the neural loops back into the left elbow socket. Foxtrot stood impassively throughout the procedure, the conn-pod in her head was mounted but pilotless. Its remaining pilot stood on the ground staring up at the crane and at her malfunctioning Jaeger. From the crane operator's position five floors up, Ygor could barely make out her features as they turned up to the ceiling where an alert began to shine.
"Mags," he started but hadn't turned the speaker on and she ran for the heavy blast doors as Ygor sat in the crane and stared at Foxtrot.
She was the sole Mark VI Jaeger and stood at 75 meters tall and almost 1700 tons weight. But she was not famed for the unique next generation technology that gave her increased speed, agility, and range of motion. She was infamous for her ability to burn pilots to a husk with a neural load that could not be managed. Foxtrot Alpha was an unusable Jaeger in the face of increasing Kaiju attacks. Every moment that she stood idle was another failure of their program.
Ygor's small team and Margret continued to work on her but even their bay had been forgotten. Marshall Pentecost regularly eliminated their electricity rationing forcing them to survive on less and less.
Ygor put his head in his hands as a construction tech whistled from his harness hanging down from the ceiling. Chip had rappelled the 100 meters to Foxtrot's shoulder and was reconnecting the interior shoulder connections. Instead of shouting the conversation over the speaker he switched to the quieter interpersonal comm hooked around his ear and jawbone.
"Yeah?"
"We gonna do anymore work today?"
"Not without a pilot we ain't."
"Heard that the kaiju is a big one."
"Aren't they all?" Ygor kicked the crane's control panel and stared up at Foxtrot. "Goddamn bitch, you should be out there."
"We could stop wasting on time on her and start building another Mark V. At least that tech works." Chip's reply surprised him into realizing he'd left the comm open.
Ygor didn't know what to say. Marshall Pentecost still allowed them some funding and giving up on her hurt. The honest answer was that no on thought the Mark VI was functional, not when the world had given up the entire program. The world had given up on all the jaegers as they'd started to fall to the new and stronger kaiju coming through the Breach.
"Finish the reconnection and diagnostics. Then tell the boys to take the night off."
"Roger that." Chip waved happily from Foxtrot's shoulder but Ygor wasn't paying any attention to him.
His eyes caught on the flashing light that indicated a kaiju attack and he knew that for all of his heartache, Mags was feeling it worse. Foxtrot was the pilot killer, but every Ranger in the base blamed it on Margret. She's survived. Even if they managed to fix Foxtrot, no one wanted to ride with a Jonah and be the next person to die. Foxtrot had killed four pilots and the stupid bitch still ran green on every test they gave her.
By the time she ran the mile and a half of corridor between Foxtrot's bay and the main Jaeger hub, Margret was reminded again of how much she hated the hustle and press of personnel assigned to the Shatterdome. There was something peaceful and meditative about the silence that surrounded Foxtrot. Ygor's crew was a hard-drinking, rough bunch of Jaeger mechanics too onery and combative to run on regular crews. Their out-size personalities rang loudly but didn't make much dent in the huge shell of their bay.
It was designed to hold five Jaegers. Empty now except for Foxtrot. Margret could still picture them: Beastmaster Bravo, Shrike Fire, Walleye Crew, Sol Nine, and Cherno Charlie.
She'd been fresh out of Tango Caribe's decommissioning in 2019 and Cherno Charlie was going into retirement as well. The space vacated by Charlie was still hers.
They were all gone now. Only Cherno Charlie's team was living but that was due to their age. Commander Ironside and Colonel Nyugen were in their 60s and Cherno Charlie a museum relic.
As she slowed and entered the LOCCENT, men and women glanced up at her. Every face maintained a blank composure but she could still feel the weight of their eyes. Towards the front of the room Marshall Pentecost watched the camera feeds coming in from Sydney. He cut an imposing figure with his dark blue uniform fitted impeccably to his large frame and hair that never seemed to grow out of the high and tight haircut. He did not turn as she reached his side. She was the first but the Wei triplets; Cheung, Hu and Jin, would be close behind her.
Tendo Choi gave her a chagrined smile from his station next to Pentecost.
They watched the kaiju begin to breach the waters, crushing its way through the remnants of the Great Barrier Reef. The reef was a fossilized shell after being kaiju blue'd in 2018. The kaiju, Margret saw the name assigned on Tendo's console: Mutavore. It bellowed threateningly at the helicopters buzzing around its head and kept on course towards the anti-Kaiju wall. The Sydney Wall was immense at 500 feet. The Aussies were too close to the breach to not be concerned, construction had finished almost three months earlier. Mutavore pressed the large hooked nose on its head up against the stone work.
"It's got to hold." Someone whispered from behind her but Margret ignored them. The images were almost ten minutes out of sync.
"Two Jaeger teams responded, Saber Echo and Vulcan Specter." Tendo got faster updates through his counterparts. "Saber has taken heavy damage but is still in the fight. Vulcan is…she's struggling with Mutavore. It outclasses her by over 150 tons."
New video footage started to come through and none of it was good. Mutavore was heavier than both Jaegers and outclassed them in fighting style as well, anticipating their attacks and delivering damaging punishment.
"Is Striker Eureka on-line?" Pentecost said darkly.
Tendo's hands ran across the keyboard. "They were outside the Dome when the call came. There is a military chopper bringing them back to base now, but they've still got transport rigging to uninstall from Eureka. It will be at least an hour 'til she can respond."
"An hour." Pentecost didn't need to repeat the timing but he did.
"They could have been en route." Margret said to him. "At least Sydney has a chance. Three jaegers are more than none."
"I know." The Marshall turned to glance at her and seemed to really see her for the first time in a long time. "Any progress?"
She wanted to look away or at least down at the tips of her boots. Looking away was a weakness so she straightened her back. She wore faded blue coveralls with the imprint of a crouching fox with its elongate tail curved overhead like a scorpion. She met his gaze evenly. "I need a co-pilot."
"So no progress."
"No," she said softly and her eyes tightened with anger.
The kaiju ignored the shaken jaegers and butted against the Wall again to test its strength. The screens couldn't show the weight of impact, but Margret remembered what it felt it to take the blow of Okami-oni.
The wolf-like Jaeger leapt onto Foxtrot clearing the three hundred yards in a single bound. They'd rocked back in the Conn-pod, but the drift held. She could feel a weird fluttering from Yoshi as he wrestled the kaiju back. His memories were like butterfly wings at the edges of her vision. Sometimes one would flicker and try to catch her attention but she ignored them, the drift was full of rabbits. Yoshi grunted as Foxtrot took another blow. He was just over six feet tall and with a thick head of hair and beard that made him look larger but their drift had always been strong.
He sensed her concern and grinned at her from his pilot harness, black eyes so very alive. They took the weight of Okami-oni and twisted into a standard Tai Otoshi throw that tossed the reeking weight of the kaiju over them and into the twisted hulk of a cargo ship run aground. The shipping containers lay scattered everywhere and Margret could see the fluttering cloth of shirts spilling out and getting caught by the wind of the throw as they twisted .
Foxtrot lifted Okami-oni's rear leg and stomped down to find and break the joint. The kaiju shrieked as the titanium weight of Foxtrot's stomp shook it down through the earth but didn't seem to shatter the joint like it would have in a mammal.
The drift pulled on her again. It wasn't supposed to do that. She and Yoshi were highly compatible but instead of being a seamless bond, it felt like an effort to maintain the connection. It was supposed to be sub-conscious. A connection allowing their bodies to match movements and work as one, but it to be completely conscious of it wasn't how the tech worked, it wasn't how they worked. She and Yoshi had been a team for three years.
The image of him the first time they met rolled out of the drift. The look in his eyes.
Margret gasped as Okami-oni snarled and twisted in their grasp, it bit at knee level and then again at the ankle tearing a chunk of metal and muscle fibers out of Foxtrot's right ankle.
Yoshi grunted deeply and Margret felt the drift shake as though an earthquake hit them. Alarms flashed as Foxtrot's ankle crumpled and she went to one knee in the sand. Okami-oni lunged again at her other ankle and Margret swung her left hand up - dragging Yoshi with her in the drift - and hooked her fingers, Foxtrot's fingers, through the high and flaring nostrils. She twisted so that the kaiju felt the awful torque of flesh. She drew back and hammered down on its head. The impact shook them again.
Pentecost's voice was coming over the comm. "Nagata, you're losing the handshake."
"Back-up inbound." Sasha Kaidonovsky's voice overrode his in her heavily accented Russian."Cherno Alpha is 1 minute out."
"Margret." Yoshi voice's sounded fragile.
He never sounded fragile. Quiet, Yoshi had always been quiet, too quiet. She knew why from the drift, Yoshi's father had valued silence and hard work, spending his life in the fields until K-day. The land was gone but Yoshi couldn't get rid of the feeling of working in the quiet. The sun beat down on them as they tended the terraced garden. He didn't need speech to know that his father was there, the sensation of being together was stronger than words could be. It was that way with Margret in the drift.
But this time he wasn't there.
She turned away from the screen even as Okami-oni withdrew for another attack.
"There is still some servor function in the ankle." Ygor's voice was in her ear.
Too many voices, too many outside distractions and Yoshi slipped further away from her. She reached again for him, refusing to let go. His memories bombarded her: trains - the city - watching helplessly at the crab-like Onibaba chewed through Tokyo - even as he trained in the Jaeger Academy to defend it. Meeting her.
Margret could see herself through his eyes even as she let Foxtrot drop to shikko and purposefully knee-walked towards Okami-oni. It was a startling change in approach and the kaiju did not attack as it backed away from them. Somewhere Cherno Alpha was still counting down its arrival.
She unsheathed her left gauntlet and lashed out as the kaiju attacked the right. It knew somehow that Foxtrot was injured and not just by the damage to the ankle. Margret tried to engage the right hand, tried to will Yoshi to fight. Okami-oni lunged. Foxtrot twisted out of the way but not before the large paw scraped across her breastplate leaving long claw marks and torn metal where it dug through.
Yoshi remembered thinking that Margret was irritating. How could they let her train to be a Jaeger pilot with those scars? And then, their first sparring session on the floor, when he realized it didn't matter.
The ground rumbled under them with Cherno Alpha's lumbering approach and finally Margret couldn't hold herself away from Yoshi's memories. She remembered their first handshake, their first fight out of the drift, the first time for everything.
They slipped again into another memory. "You have me in the drift." Yoshi said in rapid Japanese.
"I still need to hear it." Margret refused to answer him in Japanese. Her accent was still faint despite her attempts to eradicate it. "I know what we have with Foxtrot, but we still have lives outside of here."
"Our duty is to be Rangers first."
She challenged him to answer differently but he would not. He did not say anything in the memory of the memory.
Cherno Alpha took on Okami-oni with a thundering punch to the solar plexus. Foxtrot Alpha knelt in the sand, her orange metallic skull tilted downward even as Yoshi's heartbeat started to falter on the screen.
He said the words out-loud in the Conn-pod even as blood ran from his nose and his eyes. "Ai shiteru, Margret. Ai shiteru." And he shoved her out of the drift, cut her off from his feelings, his emotions, and she screamed. Foxtrot remained in place unaware as Cherno Alpha beat Okami-Oni into pulp that little resembled a kaiju much less a wolf.
Inside, Margret made frantic attempts to revive Yoshi until both of them were covered in his blood and he was still dead.
She put a hand on Tendo's chair to steady herself and knew that Pentecost noticed. Back-up pilots were sent to Foxtrot Alpha while Margret tried to convince the psych team to clear her. Ygor's team cleared Foxtrot of a system malfunction but Cho Li and Han Lui Do hadn't gotten Foxtrot out of the Shatterdome before the neural feedback blew out their synapses.
Not that Foxtrot would have been close enough to help Vulcan Specter and Echo Saber. There was a visible breath of escaping atmosphere as Mutavore rolled over Vulcan and crushed the jaeger's Conn-pod. The jaeger did not move after that as the water of the surf rolled around it.
Echo tried one last all-out assault but Mutavore picked up the jaeger like it was a toy and began to slam it into the ground over and over again. Life signs persisted for a few minutes and then went out. Finally assured of both jaegers' destruction, it left the crumpled metal remains and headed back towards the Wall.
Margret forced herself to watch as Mutavore decided that the Wall had no exterior defenses and began a slow lumbering run. It broke through almost immediately as its weight worked as its own battering ram and used its sheer weighted momentum to annihilate Sydney's last defense. There was a sharp intake of breath as it broke through. Concrete and steel rebar fell inwards like they were made of Linkin Logs. Mutavore seemed to barely notice as it lumbered towards the Sydney Opera House.
"Striker is now in-bound. Hansens are on-board."
"Tell them to get in there." The Marshall took a single step back. "We know where Raleigh Beckett is."
"Ah," She knew why the Marshall wanted Beckett. There was a legend about pilots who could continue fighting in their jaegers solo, there were only two and Pentecost was the first one, Beckett the second. He had survived the event that Yoshi tried to shield her from, feeling his co-pilot die.
"I want you to go to Australia and give them orders. Striker Eureka is now reassigned to the Hong Kong Shatterdome."
"They haven't beaten Mutavore yet."
"But they will," the Marshall said. "Herc is an excellent pilot. He'll take care of it."
"Where is Beckett?" Margret asked. "How do you know he'll come back to the PPDC?"
"Walk with me."
Margret did as she was told. They left the LOCCENT behind them and walked swiftly towards the flight bay. Marshall Stacker Pentecost was a hero to everyone in the PPDC, he'd fought the first missions in Mark Is and then in Mark IIs when no one knew anything about Jaegers except that they were unbelievably hard to kill. Marshall for almost ten years, he'd codified the Ranger program into something that turned out Jaeger pilots. And for eight of those ten years, they'd been winning. The slow side into defeat had started just before development of the Mark VI, but the failure build jaegers faster had doomed their attempts to keep up with increasing kajiu attacks.
"I need Mako to stay here and finish up on pilot selection and Gipsy's rebuild. I want you to go get the Hansens."
"I could, sir, but I'd like to try another boot-up run on Foxtrot."
"You mean a solo run."
Margret nodded.
"No, I've had Gottlieb run the math at least four times. Foxtrot is running too hot for two pilots. If we had more time and money we might run a third rig into the system, but I don't have the time for that. And I can't let you have Beckett, I need him in Gipsy." Pentecost stopped short of the elevator doors and turned to face her. "And I have a day job, even if we could teach an old dog your jaeger's tricks. As much as I need Foxtrot, I can't spare any resources for you. I have to focus on the four working models we have left. I'm sorry."
"So why do I have to go get the Hansens?" Margret tried not to let the devastation of his words show. "Am I being demoted to the desk?"
"Not yet." His persona softened just the tiniest bit but a heartbeat later he was just as merciless. "You get to go be the hard-ass. I just promoted you to Acting Field Marshall. Australia is going to try to keep Striker and I want her here."
"Herc wouldn't disobey your orders."
"He would under duress. You are to ensure that that does not happen." Pentecost glanced over her uniform. "Get changed and get to your bird. Tendo has given you Field Marshall access. You can read over the plan on the flight down. You do not reveal more than absolutely necessary to the Prime Minister but you get Striker Eureka on the transport ship tonight."