After the Kaiju War ended, nobody expected multiple Breaches, but then they came, and the bloody struggle against the Kaiju resumed in force.
The alert went off in Columbus Shatterdome—activity in the breach beneath Lake Erie, and a Category-V hastily codenamed Rattletrap.
The LOCCENT responded quickly.
Chuck and Eureka Willis were fraternal twins born in Indianapolis just after Gipsy Danger destroyed the Breach in the Marianas Trench. The twins were named after a Ranger who died in the mission, and a Jaeger that was destroyed in the mission, respectively. Had Eureka been a boy, the name Stacker—for the famed Marshal who died—would have been given.
A banging noise on their door let them know it was time to go. Chuck came out from behind his partition in their shared quarters first, and pounded on the sliding door that screened off the view of his sister's sleeping area.
"Not tech drills again," came Eureka's muffled lament.
Then the official PA announcement came:
"Now hear this! This is not a drill: movement in the Erie Breach, Category Five, codenamed Rattletrap!" Luke Choi's voice announced, "This is a multiple Jaeger drop alert! Calypso Thunder Deploy! Saint Ogre Deploy! Carson Cannonball Deploy!"
"That's us!" Chuck shouted, banging hard on the partition and hoping the impacts wouldn't knock the sliding door off-track again.
The door opened before he could strike it again, and Eureka caught Chuck's balled right hand in her left palm.
Her flight suit's sleeves were tied around her waist, and her tank top was tucked under. She turned back toward her cot and grabbed her tablet. Chuck was already out the door before she could remind him to bring his, and sure enough, it was on his bedside table.
She caught up with him at the Bay 3 elevator, and tucked her older brother's tablet under his left arm.
"Are you ready for this?" Chuck asked Eureka.
She shook her head.
"You know I never am," she said.
"Then get'cher game face on!" Chuck said, flashing a wolfish grin.
The elevator's heavy doors parted to admit them. At the last minute, Eureka heard rapid footfalls and shoved her tablet between the closing doors.
"Thanks!" Corbin Rogers squeezed through with his partner Martina Juarez.
"Never fear," Corbin said, "Saint Ogre's here!"
The elevator roared upward to the Conn-Pod Entry Level where a bevy of technicians nearly poured into the elevator to begin prepping the teams for launch.
The work went by in a blur: being escorted toward their Jaeger's preparation area, stripping to don the neural interface sensor suit, then donning the cumbersome armored drive suit, and then clambering into the motion capture harnesses. Eureka tried to ignore the lack of privacy, the claustrophobic feeling of the layers of armor and padding, and the restrictiveness of being clamped snugly into the controls.
"Saint Ogre initiating neural handshake," Luke Choi announced.
"They always beat us, Eureka," Chuck complained.
The loading screens projected, and holograms came to life as technicians hurried out the rear hatch. It shut with a loud bang, locking Eureka and Chuck alone inside.
"Ready to go?" Chuck asked.
Chuck and Eureka both touched the activation controls at the same time.
"Left hemisphere engaged," the Jaeger computer's mechanical voice said. Eureka felt the computer interface join her mind.
"Right hemisphere engaged," the computer's voice added.
"Here we go, Sis!" Chuck said.
And the "little sister" felt more than heard the report of Luke Choi:
"Carson Cannonball initiating neural handshake!"
And then came the Drift.
Twinned memories of the same birthdays but with different flavored cakes, the flavors mingling. Bicycles and riding, one flowery and girlish, the other blue with racing stripes. Toy Jaegers as Christmas presents—Eureka's favorite was of course "Striker!" Chuck liked Romeo Blue.
Flashes of different schools with some shared friends, and then two different memories of a Kaiju breaching in Lake Superior shortly after their thirteenth birthday, making landfall in Ontonagon, crawling across the whole of the UP before a refurbished museum-piece of an early-prototype Jaeger trashed it.
And then suddenly, the Jaeger Program was back up and running, under the auspices of the new Pan Global Defense Council.
Flashes of memory involve repeated neural scans, starting with the ones required of all fifteen-year-olds in the United States—the notorious "Drift Draft," and the concerned looks on parents who are still too worried about their children's innocence.
Then more neural scans with higher-level doctors and Pan Global Defense Council agents. Then came the call for additional scans and Kwoon training.
Memories mingled and comingled, Ranger Academy, swimming lessons wearing weights to simulate armor, wearing heavier weights to simulate a Jaeger, the Kwoon's mock-fights, and the way she could predict every move her older brother Chuck could make. The same memory came back from Chuck, but his frustration turning to focus as the fights became more and more even, and he could guess Sis' moves better than those of any other candidate.
They were assigned a Jaeger.
She did not go to prom, she did not have a boyfriend, she was not the typical seventeen-year-old. Something about Ranger Academy changed her...
...Then Eureka snapped back into herself. Not just herself, but into the synchronized shared sensations of the Drift.
Neural Handshake complete!
"Carson Cannonball ready for conn-pod drop," she said, reaching to the trigger with her right hand as Chuck's made for his copy of the same trigger.
"Clear for the drop," Choi said.
"We always beat them," Eureka said.
They jabbed the triggers, felt their bodies ride up against the shoulder harnesses and their boots ride up against their foot harnesses.
Then, a series of incomplete slowdowns were followed by a hard slowdown, accompanied by clanging and heavy booms as various servos and hardpoints struck home, clamping the conn-pod securely atop their Jaeger.
Outside, in the LOCCENT, technicians watched as Carson Cannonball's massive gauntlets rose, the hands touched edge-to-edge at the pinkies, and then closed together like a book.
Gantries and support booms released from Carson Cannonball, and the rolling deploy tractor, big enough to haul an Orion rocket into position at Cape Canaveral—back when it was still there—drove the Jaeger up Scramble Alley to the 'Dome.
Saint Ogre was behind them, with Calypso Thunder in the back.
"I hate this part," Eureka said.
"You always say that," Chuck and Eureka both said at the same time.
"Well," Chuck added, "I hate it too."
The cables came down from above, finding their latches by activating electromagnets. Then they fell slack and slowly tightened.
"This is Jumphawk Deploy One to Carson Cannonball, pickup in five..." a pilot's voice crackled over the cockpit radio.
The Willis twins counted down.
"Carson Cannonball lifting to deploy," Eureka reported to Choi.
Under the heavy thumping rotors of the Jumphawks, the twenty-five story tall Jaeger rose up from its Shatterdome into the rainy night, climbing high over Columbus, Ohio. They crossed over the Olentangy River, the Jaeger's massive feet swooping past the Arena District, and then Ohio Stadium as landmarks appeared to accelerate. Then they flew over the Interstate 71, heading northeast toward Cleveland.
"Picking up speed, Carson Cannonball, we have some chop so we'll be gaining altitude," the pilot from Deploy One said. Deploy Two and Deploy Three replied with "copy."
Then the pilots dropped the hammer, and landmarks whipped by even faster, shrinking until they became blurred by the low-lying cloud cover and the misty rain.
"Rattletrap's doing something," Chuck said, watching the feed from LOCCENT.
"They want us to bring it down quick," Eureka said.
They watched the LOCCENT feed more than the landmarks on their GPS feed, and were startled when the Jumphawk pilot in Deploy One announced "three minutes to Jaeger drop."
But at thirty seconds to drop, Deploy Two screamed "the heck was that?" And Eureka saw the blue-green bioluminescent blur streak past.
"Rattletrap's trying to spoil the LZ," Deploy One said, "Carson Cannonball, change of plan, we're dropping you out deep. Carson Cannonball Deploy Team to Saint Ogre and Calypso Thunder Deploy Teams, hold back and drop on land, Rattletrap's dropping some kind of biological bombs!"
Another wad of blue-green flashed past, this time on the other side of Carson Cannonball.
"Get some altitude!" Deploy One said.
Eureka felt her stomach lurch, and in the Jaeger's viewport, she saw the gaping maw of some kind of wormy looking creature with tentacles whip past—Rattletrap. The Jumphawk pilots executed a banking swerve so tightly synchronized Eureka was sure they were Drifting with one another.
"Get ready for Jaeger drop," Deploy One said, "in five!"
Carson Cannonball gained altitude so fast Eureka had to work her jaw to make her ears pop. Then the count reached zero.
The Jaeger flew up and forward, rising past the Jumphawks as they released the tethers and scattered.
"Jump Jets primed!" Eureka shouted as she punched in a rapid series of commands on the center console.
Chuck was the flyboy of the pair, and as Carson Cannonball lurched, and then plummeted toward the water, he used his feedback cradle controls to put the Jaeger on course for a clear region near the kaiju.
"Brace—"
The Jaeger went in feet first, throwing up huge foamy waves and then making solid contact. It bent its knees and ankles, and landed softly.
"—yourself!" Chuck said.
Eureka's ears popped again.
"Let's do this!" she said, for as squeamish as she was, and as much as she disliked armoring up and strapping in to pilot the Jaeger, Eureka Willis lived for the Drift.
"LOCCENT, Carson Cannonball on deck!" Eureka reported.
She triggered the Jaeger's running lights, and sent out a blast on the foghorn to let the kaiju know its time on this side of the Erie Breach was numbered in minutes.
Rattletrap did not turn on Carson Cannonball—its head was facing land, where Eureka saw Calypso Thunder and Saint Ogre deploying now. The pair were silhouetted against the blue-green glow of whatever crap it was that Rattletrap spread onshore.
Saint Ogre drew its massive sniper rifle, cocked it, and dropped to a knee on shore.
Then the bioluminescent stuff quivered and then it moved.
"Holy Crap!" Martina screamed, as thick tentacles wrapped around the back leg of Saint Ogre, "It's got us!"
Calypso Thunder was in the same predicament, its pilots Edwin and Keogh shouting to turn the plasmacasters on it.
Then Rattletrap began to shift, to slither, toward the shore.
"Gross!" Eureka exclaimed, "That stuff's alive!"
"We're alone," Chuck told Eureka.
"We've got to stop it!" Eureka said.
Carson Cannonball charged to the kaiju, then bent and reached into the water. The swooping tail of the massive creature nearly knocked her down, but Eureka stuck out a leg and snapped the Jaeger's foot anchors down.
"Not going anywhere!" Chuck shouted.
This, of course, did more than annoy Rattletrap, and it whipped its tail savagely, but failed to free itself. Spiny plates on the tail scraped across the Jaeger's armor, but no damage signals came through.
Stegosaurus, Eureka thought, recognizing the shape of the plates. That thought whirled away into the Drift.
"Crawl up it!" Chuck hollered, and they both scrambled in the motion capture harness. The tail thrashed again, but the effect lifted Carson Cannonball off, and Chuck, in pure flyboy mode thumped the jump jets, and the Jaeger landed higher up Rattletrap's back.
"Grab on!" he shouted.
Eureka felt her left hand engage, slip, then grasp a plate.
The Jaeger slammed forward hard, and Eureka screamed.
The damage signal indicated the plate had gone partway through the leg armor on the left side. Chuck groped for purchase on the monster, then twisted his feet against the foot controls, rolling the impaled leg up and off the plate.
Over the massive shoulder of the kaiju, they could see its arms scrabbling in a furtive attempt to remove them while Saint Ogre now assisted Calypso Thunder with its huge oscillating combat knife blades. They were making short work of the tentacles, lessening their chance of keeping them immobilized long enough for Rattletrap to finish them.
But it was going to be close.
Keogh shouted something, and then a tentacle sweep sent armor plates flying as Calypso Thunder took a heavy blow.
"We're almost to the head!" Eureka shouted.
"Keep climbing!"
Up Carson Cannonball went, straining to reach a place where they could do some real damage.
"Right there!" Eureka said.
The 'Cannonball's payload was a set of rail-mounted jackhammers that could cut right through a kaiju's silicon-based armored skin. They were deadly when they struck home, cauterizing as they pierced flesh and rattled bone. But to get one sunk in required hunting quarry that did not move. Rattletrap's back was not an ideal spot.
Is something planning this? Eureka thought, sending the thought whirling into the Drift rather than staying preoccupied. It'd go into the playback logs, and they'd get debriefed about it later, when it mattered.
What mattered now was getting Rattletrap to fall.
She and Chuck anchored the left arm, and then wound up with the Jaeger's right arm. The rails came online and the piercing tips extended past the Jaeger's massive left fist.
"Go!"
And in that moment, a tentacle from the mouth snaked past the left wrist. As the right arm came down, the Jaeger pulled loose from its handhold and got flung.
"Hunh!" Eureka grunted as they flipped in a dizzying arc.
Thrusters! Chuck thought, gripping the feedback cradle and firing the jump jets.
Carson Cannonball landed in the water, gracefully, feet-first. But they were in the water again.
Sacs in the "neck" of the kaiju expanded.
"Move it!" Eureka shouted. They both dove to the right as more bioluminescent tentacled slime splashed down where Carson Cannonball stood a moment ago.
Saint Ogre finished getting disentangled and brought its massive rifle to bear.
A moment later, Eureka felt the pulse in her chest, like an extra heartbeat. She knew that rifle blast would be audible as far inland as Crestline, Ohio.
Rattletrap shrieked, a gaping wound opened up in one of the sacs, and mangled tentacle stuff—
Triffids, Chuck's thought replaced Eureka's.
—spilled down dead into the lake.
Rattletrap's other sac pulsed, but bright purple bursts erupted near its maw—bursts from Calypso Thunder.
The plasmacasters let loose, and burning triffids spattered across the shore, writhing and dying as they landed.
Get close, Eureka thought, honing in on the gaping wound Saint Ogre had dealt.
And that's when all hell broke loose.
She saw it on the sonar feed an instant before it flashed in a blur, the anemone tentacles that lay slack around Rattletrap's chin flexed. One caught Carson Cannonball, whipping around its legs before Eureka could trigger the clamps. One knocked Calypso Thunder and Saint Ogre into a heap using the former Jaeger as a bludgeon against the latter.
"Roll! Roll!" Eureka heard Rogers holler. Saint Ogre rolled out from beneath the other Jaeger before it could strike again. Fighting to regain its balance, Saint Ogre used its rifle butt to steady it as it rose to its feet.
Then with a flicking motion, Calypso Thunder was thrown against Saint Ogre's back, tumbling them away in different directions.
The feedback from the motion capture harness kept the Willis twins immobilized below the waist. Rattletrap's head turned one of several menacing beady eyes upon them.
Before they could angle one arm to bring the rails to bear on the tentacle gripping them, the Jaeger upended, and a moment later, was underwater.
Eureka followed the bubbles with her eyes, but the bubbles turned, swooshed, and her head spun.
"Oof!" Chuck grunted as the conn-pod flipped and spun.
"Errgh!" Eureka grunted as somehow, they slammed against one another. She felt her left ankle pop, and struggled to keep her foot engaged in the harness as the Jaeger's twisting motions tossed her this way and that.
They slammed and jammed again, whirling until Eureka had no sense of up and down, and even the Drift couldn't help her.
Chuck's nausea surged through their neural handshake, and then Eureka remembered the last time she barfed.
"Stop!" Chuck groaned.
"Can't stop it!" Eureka felt her bowels clench.
They spun again, and finally Eureka thanked God they hadn't had time to eat back at LOCCENT, because all she got were dry heaves.
"Gotta break loose!" Chuck shouted.
They spun like a rag doll in a centrifuge, this way and that, and Eureka fought to remember something from biology—
—that Chuck had studied about reptiles—
—"death rolls" when alligators—
—caught their prey!
Somehow, they both ended up slammed against the center console again, and both pilots caught its grip rails. Both keyed in separate keystrokes that—
—attenuated the Drift—
—to the Jaeger's digital stabilizing—
—gyroscopes!
"ATLAS sequence initiated!" the Jaeger's mechanical voice announced.
It stood for Active Terrain Leveling and Adaptation System. The pilots both rolled with the Jaeger, but the Jaeger's computer now served the neural handshake a data feed of the Jaeger's own electronic guidance systems. Confusion and nausea fell away.
"It's a death roll," Eureka said.
They could feel the Jaeger's body again, and as one, they moved the left hand to clamp the nearest loop of tentacle while the right one reared back with its rails fully charged.
Up and down, Carson Cannonball's arm hammered, blasting the rail mounted wedges into the tentacle, gouging away at armor, skin, and at last flesh.
"Up is thataway!" Chuck said, but they were in deeper waters now, and the Jaeger was sinking.
Eureka saw the tentacles questing, searching for them as they began to thrash their motion capture harness. The Jaeger swam.
She thumped a hand onto the center console, triggering the purge that would clear the jump jets. Right before another tentacle caught, Chuck triggered the jets.
Carson Cannonball breached seconds later, climbed higher than the irate Rattletrap could grope, and then arced toward the shore.
Saint Ogre was bent down over Calypso Thunder as Carson Cannonball landed.
For an instant, Eureka felt a somber awareness fall over her.
Are they dead? She thought.
Then Calypso Thunder's running lights flicked on, and the downed Jaeger pushed itself up.
Relief surged through the Drift, and Eureka glanced at Chuck long enough to see him grin.
And then, just like that, they were back in battle, Eureka hammering at the foghorn to let that kaiju know she meant business!
Calypso Thunder fired up its sonic wail for the first time, driving Rattletrap berserk before it could spew another glob of triffids their way.
"Hit it!" Corbin Rogers and Martina Juarez both hollered as Calypso let loose with its plasmacasters.
Rattletrap possessed enough sense to back away, and the lurid purple bursts sailed wide, out over the water.
Parts of the kaiju twisted, and for the first time, Rattletrap revealed its secret, it was no serpent, it had legs, a set of six of them. The serpentine body elevated above the water as the legs pushed free from pockets all along its bloated underside.
Saint Ogre drew its rifle and shouldered it as the long tail of Rattletrap arched, then flipped.
Eureka and Chuck both pumped their legs hard against their motion capture harnesses, and Chuck thumped the jump jets.
With a horrible smash, the tail batted away Saint Ogre's rifle just as it fired, ripping the left arm off the Jaeger and sending it careening into Calypso Thunder's middle. Cables and artificial muscle strands, and liquid suspension organic circuitry raked across the armored midsection of Calypso Thunder, wiping out electronics and hydraulics as surely as Leatherback's electromagnetic pulse appendage had done to Striker Eureka. Saint Ogre struggled on one working arm and one working leg, Calypso Thunder's arms went limp, and were it not for Edwin and Keogh's quick thinking, the Jaeger would have collapsed. Instead, they dropped to one knee, locked each elbow joint, and landed in a kneel.
But as Eureka's eyes refocused, she realized this had been all about planning:
Triffids to immobilize multiple jaegers to get a particular jaeger to attack. Multiple sacs of the triffids to force as many jaegers as possible to exhaust their reserve munitions. And multiple defensive strategies to force jaeger pilots to think hard.
But to what end? She asked herself.
Then Chuck's mind metabolized Eureka's thoughts, handing them back across their neural bridge in an eyeblink.
They want us to show what we can do.
Us? Eureka thought in that fraction of a second that it took for Rattletrap to focus on Carson Cannonball.
No, all pilots, Chuck answered through the Drift, but why?
To engineer an attack against jaegers that targets the pilots'ability to fight!
It had always been an arms race with the Progenitors. This was the chess match of survival, and artificial selection was evolving better and brighter Kaiju. They wanted one thing—Earth.
Rattletrap charged as they landed, and Chuck shouted:
"Carson Cannonball, flame-out!"
They were out of fuel for the jets.
"Go!" Eureka screamed, calling for a constant foghorn as Carson Cannonball surged toward their attacker.
They were fighting pilots, not Jaegers.
Chuck caught the thread of her mind, and handed back answers of his own through the Drift.
And this is what Eureka Willis lived for, the surging power of knowing her enemy, and knowing it could be defeated.
Not the overconfidence of some rocket-jockey fighter who's gun-happy, but the firm belief that each Kaiju was a puzzle waiting to be solved. It took humility to pause in the welter of the Drift, and actually think, rather than follow her brother's hormone-fueled raging energy.
But that was why they complemented each other.
Like clockwork, Carson Cannonball did the unthinkable, she went into a different fighting style.
Confused alien limbs shot out where the Jaeger should have been, but was not.
Tail swipes anticipated jump-jet powered maneuvers that didn't come, and Carson Cannonball danced closer and closer to her foe.
"Piston Hammer!" Chuck shouted.
"Impact Charge!" Eureka hollered.
The two combined the power of Carson Cannonball's powerful cutters with expendable blades—blades tipped with white-hot plasma storage cells.
The one-two punch combo knocked aside the clawed forelimbs of Rattletrap, driving the expendable blades in.
Then they punched at two legs in quick succession, dodged a tail swipe, but dragged an arm in the dodge, just enough to fire a blade into the tail. They went for the shoulders, for the body, and for the neck until—
Beep! Beep! Beep!
—their supply of charges was exhausted.
Rattletrap took a swipe at Carson Cannonball but the pilots were too quick.
"Hit it!"
Rattletrap managed a tail swipe that knocked Carson Cannonball back. But as the tail wrapped the jaeger's legs up for another death roll, Eureka raised her feedback cradle in unison with Chuck's.
They raised their thumbs, and a display read "Charged."
They pulled their index fingers in, and a display read "Armed."
They pushed their thumbs back down, said:
"Bye, bye!"
...and a display read "Firing."
The blasts ripped Rattletrap to shreds.
Mustering strength in its core, it gaped its maw one final time, as if to say I can take a Jaeger with me!
Eureka saw her life—and her brother's—flash before her eyes in the Drift. The Drift Draft, the swimming, the Kwoon.
Would it all end here, now?
The concerned looks of their parents. The mental examinations and the scans. The metharocin allergy tests that came up negative.
Missing the prom, not having a boyfriend, schooling at Ranger Academy, moving to Columbus, Ohio.
Then the muzzle of Saint Ogre's rifle flashed, and Calypso Thunder's plasmacasters went rapid fire, full-automatic.
This was what Chuck lived for, and what Eureka was not quite so fond of.
"Fireworks," Chuck said, as the combined fire of the other Jaegers lit up Rattletrap and terminated its attempt to seal their fates together.
"You're gross," Eureka said.
But Chuck only grinned.
Somewhere in the depths of the Drift, though, Eureka knew she enjoyed the fireworks too. It meant another day for Planet Earth, and that meant not taking any of it for granted.
The Jumphawks flew them home, and after the late night debriefing, Eureka shambled through the Columbus, Ohio Shatterdome, back to her quarters. She had her tablet tucked under one arm, her flight suit sleeves tied at her waist, her tank top tucked in, and another kill on her record.
She brushed her teeth.
Another day, she thought. For a moment, it pained her not to have the perks of having a boyfriend, or a pretty gown for prom, or getting to go to school in town like the rest of the people her age.
"Start the clock," Luke Choi's voice reverberated through the Shatterdome.
Eureka crawled into bed. Her aching muscles slowly relaxed.
They're still alive. They'll enjoy their dances, she thought. They'll come up with the next advances to stop the Kaiju.
The lives that continued were thanks enough for Eureka Willis. She was sure Chuck felt the same way.
She closed her eyes and let sleep take her away.