Ride the Drift

Viridicus

A/N: Couldn't help myself. I was planning to do about an update a week but I've been writing about a chapter a day, so it might be less time between updates. I've just got some really exciting stuff in the pipeline and I really wanna share it! Thanks to mr. Canadian, guest, alecita122, and Nobody2012 for the reviews.

Chapter Two

"Here's the deal, people: you work, you eat!"

It was the same thing the foreman said every day; Marceline had heard it most every morning for the last five years. She kept her eyes down, away from the foreman's familiar bulk. She had tried to stay low, off his radar, ever since she'd decked him last year with a swift right hook for grabbing her ass. It was a good thing one hit had floored him - she didn't have a left to follow it up with. Her arm had never been the same.

But she could still work, and he knew that, so he didn't try to stop her from working. He just gave her the most dangerous jobs. "I got good news and bad news, people. Which one do you want first?"

Somebody near her shouted, "Bad news?"

"Three guys fell off the top of the wall yesterday."

A pulse of trepidation rippled through the crowd. The foreman let it subside before saying, "Good news is I got three open spots, top of the wall. How bout...Jenkins, Taylor, and..." He made a show of squinting around the crowd, then settled on her. "Abadeer. Go flying."

She'd known he'd say that, and she didn't mind. She would pick up any kind of work she could get, and the height didn't bother her, not after being the pilot of a robot the size of a skyscraper. She shouldered one of the beat-up jetpacks - named ironically, as they could only send out little combustive bursts to keep someone from falling too hard, and even that was theoretical - and made her way to her assigned section of the wall.

Up here at the top, welding and pounding in beams on the Sitka section of the Great Coastal Wall - supposed to be the final defense against the kaiju incursion - she let her mind drift. It still hurt to fade into that mindset and not hear an answer, just like it hurt to not meet an answering smirk and snarky comment at the foreman's attitude, but up here the pain was duller. She could almost forget what she had lost.

When Marshall Petrikov's escort had picked her up on the beach, she was raving with cold and pain and lack - the inescapable lack of Marshall Lee's answering thoughts in her head, his smile, his voice in her ear. She had refused to leave the beach until she found him and had had to be sedated and carried back to the base on a stretcher. In the infirmary she'd managed to work free of the straps keeping her in her bed one night and they'd found her a mile down the coastline, half frozen and quartering the beach like a dog.

Eventually the terrible fog had lifted, but that almost made it worse - she was forced to come to terms with what she'd lost, with the fact that Marshall Lee really, truly wasn't ever coming back. She wasn't in any kind of psychological shape to be going it alone, but the jaeger program's budget was already tight and getting tighter every day, funds being drained off for the Coastal Wall. There wasn't money for therapy, physical or otherwise. So when the base's doctor had pronounced her arm healed enough, she was honorably discharged. They even tried to give her a medal, but she refused to attend the ceremony, and she didn't have a fixed address for them to send the thing to.

For a while she drifted. Fighting and Marshall had been all she'd ever known, but Marceline was lucid enough to understand that the loss of the one had made the other impossible. She traveled for a while, bumming rides and smokes and beds where she could get them and taking odd jobs when she couldn't, but it wasn't enough, not in the new kaiju economy. When she caught herself considering doing some things she had promised herself and Marshall she would never do, she realized she was going to have to settle down somewhere, find some steady work. At this point the only steady honest work to be found was on the Wall. They hired her for day labor, didn't care when she couldn't come in because she was deep in a sweating, shaking waking nightmare, reliving that day over and over and over. They had a massive pool of laborers to draw from, after all.

She'd put in a good four hours of work and the sun was starting to get high, and she was starting to miss the lunch she didn't have enough ration cards for, when the first chopper buzzed over the horizon. She lifted her welder's mask to watch it pass, and saw that it was actually making a beeline for the nearest cleared area: the workyard. From the looks of it, it was about five or six years old - the same model she had been used to taking to and from drops, and seeing Marshall Petrikov zooming around in - and it was showing its age. But she doubted there'd been money in any budget for purchasing new ones, let alone R&D. The constant kaiju threat had pretty much shut down everything in that department.

So: military choppers. She didn't need to see the jaeger head stamped peelingly on their sides to know they were here for her. Turning on her jetpack, she dropped from her perch and slid down one of the beams, feeling little percussive bursts of air every five seconds or so, keeping her from reaching too high a velocity. She made her way to the ground that way.

As she passed through the skeleton of the wall and made her way into the warehouse, she noticed a group of workers gathered around a dusty, elderly television. She wondered why they weren't being barked at to get back to work, and then noticed the foreman was watching too, his mouth hanging open. She paused to take a look. What she saw sent a dull coil of despair arcing through her gut, though it was nothing she hadn't anticipated. Kaiju got bigger with every attack. There had to be a Category Four sometime.

But this…this thing was ripping through the Coastal Wall in Australia like it was nothing, sending water cascading through the barrier and into the Sydney harbor. "The enormous Category Four breached the Wall in less than an hour," the newscaster said, sounding panicked, "which the Wall's architects had previously deemed impossible."

"Why're we even building this thing?" someone shouted. To make yourselves feel better, Marceline thought but didn't say. To make you able to sleep at night. There's only one thing that can truly protect against the kaiju, and that's…

On cue, footage played of a slim, streamlined jaeger dealing quick – for a giant robot, anyway – blows to the jaw of the massive beast, which looked like an inverted hammerhead shark. It shoved the kaiju into a building and, while it was still struggling to recover, fired off six quick rockets from its chest, thumping into the beast and laying it flat. It didn't rise.

"After four hours, the kaiju was downed by jaeger Stryker Eureka, piloted by Ash and Maja Magus." Marceline growled a bit under her breath, hearing the first name. She and Ash had a bit of a history. She'd had a brief fling with him while she'd been in the corps until she'd realized what a psycho he was, which had taken about .5 seconds. He'd had all the signs of not getting over it easily – he'd stolen one of her most precious objects, the only toy she'd managed to keep during all her years of foster care, and it had taken her and Marshall a lot of work to get it back. Luckily they'd been transferred to different bases after training – her to Alaska, him to Australia – and she hadn't thought of him since. Oh boy. This'll be fun.

"The jaeger program was decommissioned because of mediocre pilots," Ash was saying to the camera. "This'll be Stryker Eureka's tenth kill to date. That's a new record, babe." He gave the reporter a smarmy grin.

Marceline couldn't watch any more of this, so she headed out past the watching crowd to the courtyard, where the helicopter blades were whipping the thin dusting of snow into a fine frenzy. Marshall Petrikov was stepping out of his helicopter, looking far thinner and greyer than he had since she'd last seen him. The stress of fighting a losing war for the last six years had clearly told on him. But his icy blue eyes still snapped with the same electricity she remembered, and she had to swallow the impulse to salute.

"Miss Abadeer," the Marshall said, by way of greeting. "It's been a while."

"Five years, four months," she allowed.

"May I have a word?"

Marceline turned, gesturing back towards the darkness of the workshop. "Step into my office."

Once inside, the chill was lessened, but not by much, so Marceline headed over near one of the huge smelting furnaces, where iron bars were being turned into the beams that made up this apparently useless artifact they were building. "Took me a while to find you," Petrikov said. "Where have you been?"

"Up here, mostly," Marceline said, digging at the dirt of the workshop floor with her iron-capped boot toe. She didn't really want to say more – she'd failed to anticipate just how painful this reminder of her past would be. But the Marshall was gazing at her keenly, and she found herself saying, "Been around a bit, too. Anchorage, Nome…a few places." She didn't like the feeling of being interrogated, though lord knows she was used to it from the Marshall – he had a way of making you feel like you were in the principal's office and the sooner you got it over with the easier it'd go for you – so she said shortly, "What do you want?"

Petrikov turned, making a show of examining the scaffolding, the smelting furnaces, the various workstations that made up the workshop, before he deigned to answer. "Spent the last six months reactivating everything I can get my hands on," he said, then turned to face her. "There's an old jaeger – Mark III – that needs a pilot. You may know it."

Marceline had to swallow hard before answering. "I'm guessing I wasn't your first choice."

"You were my only choice," said the Marshall, his gaze level and yet kind, like he knew what he was asking, or thought he did. But he had no idea. "All the other Mark III pilots are dead." Marceline had to clench her jaw hard at that, and turn away.

"Look…I can't have anyone else in my head again. I was still connected to Marshall Lee when he died. I felt his fear, his pain…and then all of a sudden it was gone, all of it, and that was worse. I can't let anyone else in that way again." Only the respect she had for the Marshall – and her fear of him – kept her from hitting him and running away, like she usually did when anybody tried to talk about her brother, or her past, or any of it. The only thing she could bring herself to say was, "I'm sorry." She started to walk away, knowing, of course, that he wasn't done.

The Marshall's voice rang through the vast space of the workshop, stilling her footsteps. "Haven't you heard, Miss Abadeer? The world is coming to an end. So where would you rather die? Here, on this frozen wall? Or in a jaeger?"

It all came flooding back then: the thrill of the hunt, the kill, the way her fist felt as it slammed into a kaiju's jaw and the flesh and bone gave way beneath it; the way her body felt charging the cannons and releasing; the screams and whoops of elation that had filled her helmet and the cockpit as she and Marshall Lee fought. The way she'd looked in her leather jacket, the way the boys (and girls) had looked at her as she walked (swaggered) into pretty much any bar, just how much of a badass she had felt. She'd felt like a rock star. She'd felt like a queen. All of that had been taken from her by a kaiju… And yet here was the Marshall again, offering her a chance to take it back.

But he had also put her at war with herself, as she was sure he was aware. He was giving her a chance to go through it all again – to relive her brother's death like it was not only yesterday, but happening that very moment. The phenomenon was called random access brain impulse triggers, or RABIT – the sensation of re-experiencing memories like they were happening in the present, and it was a very real danger in the drift. Usually you shared something with your copilot – blood, love, marriage – and they could prepare for your past traumas, anticipate them, help you work through them – but to drift with someone entirely unknown… It was theoretically possible, but highly dangerous. And chasing the RABIT was a good reason why.

Yet she knew, as the Marshall had likely known, that she was going to do it. She hated him a little bit for that, even as she packed her meager belongings into a duffel and slung them into a helicopter. But no Abadeer had ever shrunk from a fight, and she didn't intend to start. She'd get one last chance to die gloriously, and hopefully take a few of the bastards down with her.

It was only after the chopper had swung into the sky that Marceline even thought to ask where they were going. The Marshall, gazing out the window, simply answered, "Hong Kong."