Author's Note: My sincerest apologies, dear readers, for the unexpectedly-long wait! Work really slammed me and hasn't let up, so updates will be coming on weekends. I'll try to keep them reasonably consistent. (Don't become lawyers, boys and girls. Seriously, if you're considering that career path...don't. I haven't slept in 15 years.) This chapter's a little short, but contains a LOT of information, and is written in epistolary style, a favorite tool of mine.
Chapter Thirteen: Character Evidence
BOMBSHELLS ON FINAL AFTERNOON OF JAEGER COMMITTEE TESTIMONY!
Marshal Hercules Hansen reveals pattern of corruption, exploitation, and abuse by PPDC Secretary General and UN Representatives!
As testimony resumed before the Joint Committee on the Jaeger Program over the objections of the same members of Congress who initially called for its formation, Marshal Hercules Hansen finished his testimony on the subject of Marshal Stacker Pentecost's fitness by declaring Pentecost was forced to dismiss Raleigh Becket from the Jaeger Program in May 2020 by Becket himself! Faced with a forced publicity tour only weeks after the death in combat of his brother and co-pilot, Yancy Becket, Ranger Raleigh Becket threatened suicide if Pentecost did not dismiss him from the Jaeger Program.
Secretary General Krieger and PPDC UN Representative Lawrence Taylor attempted to disavow any involvement with such tour, only for Sasha Kaidanovsky to turn over nearly 1,000 pages of documents showing how injured and retired Rangers, including Duc Jessop, Hayase Shindo, Raleigh Becket, and others, were targeted as propaganda tools by their superiors with little regard for their welfare. Those documents included e-mails and messages between Krieger, Taylor, and the other senior PPDC officials planning these publicity tours over the objections of the Rangers and their commanders.
ROTTEN AT THE TOP: How Corruption Among PPDC Senior Officials Spelled The Downfall of the Jaeger Program and Millions Under Its Protection!
Audits are being ordered by multiple nations of PPDC officials accused of siphoning funds from promotional activities conducted by the Jaeger Program that should have gone towards its maintenance and support of its personnel and equipment. Documents released by several former Shatterdome commanding officers and Jaeger Program staff suggest budgets devoted to advertising and promotional appearances could have built and maintained more than ten additional Jaegers and the crew who operated them.
Part of the problem, according to financial experts, is the unique formation of the PPDC. Because it was not administered and financed by any one nation and operated as a military rather than civilian organization, budgets were classified and often only accessible by the most senior officials. Even the commanding officers who oversaw the deployment of the Jaegers only had access to their particular Shatterdome's budget, while the promotional budgets were handled by entirely different departments.
RANGERS EXPLOITED AT THEIR DARKEST HOURS!
Naomi Sokolov, Associated Press
As testimony grew more emotional before the Joint Committee on the Jaeger Program, Marshal Hansen and Rangers Kaidanovsky spoke of pilots being forced in the immediate aftermath of injury and death of their partners to participate in propaganda tours for PPDC officials. Hansen confirmed earlier reports that the most famous of these pilots, Duc Jessop, felt coerced into touring after the death of his wife and co-pilot from cancer, and was forced to continue even after he himself received a terminal diagnosis.
Ranger Hayase Shindo, pilot of Japanese Tidal Dragon, lost her brother and co-pilot to radiation poisoning 9 months after the Razorfin engagement in 2018 and also toured until she was too ill to travel. Colonel Sanae Okita, former commander of Nagasaki Shatterdome, released documents that the publicity tour was ordered by the PPDC over the repeated and vehement objections of Tokyo commander Admiral Yamamoto and Shindo herself.
Rangers Cheung and Jin Wei released a statement that the most famous face of the Jaeger Program, Shaolin Rogue's Fei-Yen Wang, was likewise forced into a propaganda role by her superiors, who controlled everything from her hairstyle to her public relationships, and prohibited her from making her romance with her co-pilot Huan Che public. More stunning are documents revealing Wang became unexpectedly pregnant in late 2020, something assumed impossible as nuclear Jaegers were thought to have rendered their pilots sterile. The Kaidanovskys and Rangers Pang So-Yi and An Yuna of Nova Hyperion have all confirmed on the record that Wang and Che went absent without leave from the Hong Kong Shatterdome out of fear she would be forced to terminate the pregnancy.
Chinese officials are calling this a lie and a stereotype perpetrated by Westerners, but what is known is that Wang and Che abruptly announced their previously-secret marriage after the Atticon engagement in November 2020.
Hansen testified that in spring 2020, he and Marshal Stacker Pentecost were driven to desperate measures to save then-21-year-old Raleigh Becket from a similar fate after Yancy Becket was killed in the Knifehead engagement. This was a unique and terrible event in the history of the Jaeger Program, as until then, prevailing pons science theory was that one pilot would not survive the death of the co-pilot while drifting. Documents now reveal that this theory was debunked and Raleigh Becket did experience his brother's death mentally and emotionally, suffering irreparable brain damage made worse by the neural load of piloting Gipsy Danger to shore alone. Despite Becket's grave injuries and incapacitating grief, memos show Secretary General Krieger himself was requesting that Becket sit for official interviews within 10 days of his brother's death.
Hansen and Pentecost considered many options for protecting Becket, then the youngest combat pilot in Jaeger Program history at age 18 when Gipsy Danger took on Yamarashi in 2017. Hansen even proposed keeping Becket active as a potential co-pilot for Australian Jaeger Striker Eureka, for which Hansen himself was the front-runner.
This testimony set off a flurry of new questions from the Committee, and Hansen confessed his motives weren't entirely selfless; he considered Becket, at age 21, an alternative to his son, then-16-year-old Chuck Hansen, who is now revealed to have been placed in consideration against his father's will.
Former Sydney Marshal Blake Ketteridge has already been subpoenaed by the Australian government and an official military inquiry is under way regarding Ketteridge's actions. He has made no comment, but Chuck Hansen, now 21, has spoken to press briefly to confirm his father's testimony: Chuck Hansen's entry into the Jaeger Academy was at the behest of Ketteridge, not his father, and indeed, kept secret until after the Manila disaster when Hercules Hansen discovered his brother had raped and murdered two teenaged girls.
Hercules Hansen testified about an emotionally-charged confrontation after Christmas 2019, in which Ketteridge threatened that if he did not sign off on his underaged son's application to the Jaeger Academy, Ketteridge himself would help the boy become emancipated. Ketteridge and senior PPDC officials also threatened that Scott Hansen might not be fully prosecuted if Herc Hansen didn't agree to test with his teenaged son as co-pilot.
"Before you say anything about Stacker Pentecost's judgment, you better recognize he was the one person during those months who tried to do right by all of us," Hansen testified. "I admit I wasn't in a good place when I came to Academy that winter, and the few people who ever knew I wanted to test with Raleigh said it was a dangerous idea. Hell, I owe Becket an apology; he doesn't know any of this. I'd lost my own brother, my son had been taken from me, I'd just had a front row seat to the most unforeseen tragedy in the Jaeger Program; my judgment was off. Stacker Pentecost's wasn't. He was doing the best he could for all of us with damn little support from his superiors, and when the heat came up, he took the fall for all of us."
Show Me a Ranger and I'll Write You a Tragedy: How Humanity Failed Its Protectors
Matthew Davis, Freelance, Harvard University
Nearly every civilization on Earth pays lip service to showing gratitude to its servicemen and women, but when it comes to practice, there's no better example than the Jaeger Program of how often actions fall far short of promises.
From its inception, the Jaeger Program had enemies and embezzlers who undermined the efforts of its personnel and drained funding and support whenever possible.
The first five years of its existence are – mostly – a story of humanity's triumph over its greatest adversity, the setting aside of old rivalries to create weapons powerful and adaptable enough to combat the harbingers of Armageddon. The early PPDC recruited military and civilian personnel with competitive salaries and benefits, pouring financial support towards the building and staffing of Jaegers and Shatterdomes.
The world knew these war machines would be costly – so was the death and destruction that accompanied every kaiju, to say nothing of the nuclear detonations it took to bring them down before Jaegers were invented!
How quickly we forgot.
The first Rangers and PPDC Strike Troops who fell in battle were given the heroes' memorial they deserved. Injured pilots and crew received the best medical care available along with mental health care. But within a few years, voices began complaining that the costs of the Jaeger Program were too high, and a cheaper, simpler defense might be found in simply building a wall around the entire Pacific Coast.
Armchair quarterbacks, naysayers, kaiju worshipers, and inland real estate owners jumped on this as the new miracle option, and as early as 2019, funds and resources were being diverted from the Jaeger Program.
Kaiju experts warned that the creatures had the power to break through or simply scale any wall that could be built with the technology humans had available, but this was disregarded by the Wall's supporters, who amassed fortunes, political offices, and grant money in the process. PPDC Secretary General Dustin Krieger himself is under investigation for connection to purchases of over 80 square miles of formerly-public inland property in Canada and United States PPDC Representative Lawrence Taylor has likewise been exposed as one of the backers of a scheme that acquired over 300 square miles of grassland in Mongolia. President Jerald Lunk made no secret that he was buying up land in the U.S. plains states and Rocky Mountains while defaulting on financing for some of his coastal hotels and casinos.
Amid this wheeling and dealing, Jaeger pilots and crews were suffering and dying, and every setback was touted by the Wall proponents as evidence without regard for the feelings of the front-line fighters or their families. Pilots forced to retire due to injury or radiation poisoning were paraded around their home nations and the world until their deaths by the same senior officials who were quietly investing in the Wall and inland real estate.
The Knifehead engagement – while touted as a victory in many ways – was a tragedy for the Jaeger Program and illustrates the forces coming together to undermine the Rangers and their supporters. Knifehead killed only a handful of civilians at deep sea before being destroyed by Gipsy Danger, but at the terrible cost of Yancy Becket's life and devastating physical and mental injuries to Raleigh Becket. PPDC senior officials were quick to point the finger at Anchorage's commanding officer, but they would like the public to forget that weeks prior to the attack, a Program-wide directive was made to cease pre-deployment of all Jaegers unless their protection zone came under red alert. This shortened the warning time for Jaeger deployment from 24 hours to 6, and in the stormy conditions in the North Pacific, the group deployments that had saved so many Jaegers and cities could not be prepared in time. As a result, Gipsy Danger went into the Gulf of Alaska to defend its coastline alone.
After the Knifehead engagement, Shatterdome commanders staged a minor mutiny and began making the decision to pre-deploy their bases earlier despite the command edict against it – and no Jaeger was sent against a kaiju alone again until there were simply no Jaegers left.
The story of Chuck Hansen is another tale of triumph mingled with tragedy as well as infamy, as the sordid truth of blackmail and exploitation of a vulnerable teenager has now come to life. Hansen himself has confirmed the worst of his father's testimony that his entry into the Jaeger Program was accomplished by coercion of Hercules Hansen only weeks after the devastating revelation of Scott Hansen's crimes and the deaths of pilots Jing and Min Li in the Meathead engagement.
"Marshal Ketteridge played me completely, then threw my dad under the bus when the press heat turned up," Chuck Hansen told Chinese media after his father finished testifying. "I wanted to apply, but my dad had said no, not until I was at least 17. After Lucky Seven went down and Scott was out, Ketteridge came to me. Of course, I jumped on it. I was a stupid kid with something to prove. Ketteridge proof-read my bloody application, then swore me to secrecy so he could choose the right time. They had me come swanning into a meeting without any warning to my father who was already going through hell over what'd happened in Manila. He blamed himself for not realizing earlier what Scott'd done. Truth be told, I'm amazed my dad and me could drift at all. We fell completely out over it."
Commenters will be quick to point out that Chuck Hansen's record as a pilot should vindicate Ketteridge and Krieger's actions, but Chuck himself disagrees. "They never gave a damn about me. I was a means to an end, and that end was not the bloody defense of mankind, whatever oath we took. I don't regret that I'm a Ranger, but you bet I regret ever listening to them. My dad warned me. He pointed out how Ketteridge treated the Hassans and how stupid it was to trust him."
Devi and Susanti Hassan, late pilots of Australian Jaeger Vulcan Specter, held the record for the most engagements and the most kills until Striker Eureka destroyed Mutavore in 2025 one week before Operation Pitfall. But their tenure in Sydney was marred by allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination gone unaddressed – and instigated – by Marshal Ketteridge.
"He never wanted them there," said Chuck Hansen. "He hated that they were Muslim, that they were first generation, that they were women. He treated every woman in the Dome like crap – he bloody said it in front of a camera, remember? He tried to deploy Vulcan alone against Spinejackal in 2022 – he was gonna leave Striker sitting there in Sydney with a Category III almost as big as Knifehead running at Melbourne. My dad nearly had to mutiny to stop it. Ketteridge thought Devi and Susanti were expendable at best – he tried to get them off the roster permanently at worst. Bastard needs to answer for it."
Ironically, the Mutavore engagement broke another record – the myth of an unbreachable Wall of Life. The Sydney Wall fell in less than an hour and exposed it for the mirage that it was – but not before its proponents had made themselves obscenely rich and ascended to unprecedented levels of political and economic power as the Jaeger Program and humanity's first responders suffered and died fighting the kaiju.
More than half of the brave men and women who ever piloted a Jaeger are dead. Nearly all of those still living suffered permanent physical injuries, and all surely carry the mental scars. A third of the Strike Troopers who ever served as first responders under the Jaeger Program are dead, and nearly three-quarters of those still living also face permanent effects on their health.
Most of the Jaegers were either left to rust and decay where they fell or were transported to Oblivion Bay, formerly Oakland, California, a graveyard of nuclear waste left by the passage of Trespasser in the first kaiju attack in history, August 13, 2013. Only one remains operational: Crimson Typhoon in Hong Kong, though it is being refitted as a two-man Jaeger, since Hu Wei, one of the fabled Wei triplets in the only three-man Jaeger ever built, died defending Victoria Harbor three days before Operation Pitfall.
Looking back on the last 12 years, humanity can find a great deal to celebrate. But we should also recognize the many wrongs committed behind the shield of general war, and that humanity's protectors are the ones who suffered most.
PPDC POLITICAL CARNAGE: KRIEGER OUT, ALL UN REPS OUT!
Multiple senior PPDC officials now targets of criminal investigations!
Secretary General Dustin Krieger's resignation was rumored to be imminent, but the PPDC general assembly decided not to wait as the Second Seoul Conference convened on September 30, 2025! Former Marshal Gabriel Morais of Brazil, now a PPDC delegate, moved for Krieger's removal as soon as the session opened, and the motion passed with over 75% in favor.
United States Representative Lawrence Taylor and the other five members of the PPDC Security Council soon suffered the same fate, and other officials named in the growing corruption probe rushed to deliver their resignations.
Pundits are calling this a day of reckoning for the PPDC in the wake of Operation Pitfall and the triumph by the handful of remaining Jaeger Program pilots and crews when these same officials abandoned them at the cost of millions of lives in the second half of the Kaiju War.
In the US, a special prosecutor has been appointed to investigate President Jerald "Jerry" Lunk and his cabinet's ties to the Wall of Life program and its funding, and the investigation may be expanded to include multiple members of the United States Congress. Similar investigations are taking place in multiple nations.
Amid massive public pressure, the U.S. has ended its demands that Raleigh Becket and other surviving American Rangers appear before the Joint Committee on the Jaeger Program.
The Chinese government is reportedly in negotiations with all experienced Rangers still capable of piloting to serve as the successor pilots of Crimson Typhoon, which will be deployment ready by the end of October. Surviving pilots Cheung and Jin Wei declined the rank of PPDC Marshal, but have agreed to stay on as drift and combat instructors at Hong Kong Shatterdome. This puts China far ahead of all other nations trying to reboot their Jaeger Programs.
President Lunk Tweets: "I've been saying for months we should leave those Jagger [sic] pilots in peace!"
The Question on Humanity's Mind: Why Continue the Jaeger Program?
K-Scientists worldwide have the answer: Are you prepared to gamble on not continuing it?
Media outlets polled the myriad scientists from all disciplines who've committed their skills to studying the Breach, its creators, and the monsters that came out of it beginning in 2013. The response has been nearly unanimous, spearheaded by the warning given by Drs. Newton Geiszler and Hermann Gottlieb before Congress's Joint Committee on the Jaeger Program in August: the Precursors, the beings that opened the Breach and sent the kaiju, made two attempts with 65 million years between them to colonize Earth. There is no reason to think they won't try a third time.
Veterans of the Jaeger Program have called it a bitter irony that funds are being devoted to Jaeger Programs now that might have saved lives during the height of the war. They're calling Operation Pitfall a lesson and a warning that humanity might not survive making the same mistake twice.
What form will this new Jaeger Program take? It may be too early to say, although experts are predicting that it will be plural: Jaeger Programs, operated by individual nations or a few regional alliances, rather than a single, centralized organization as before. However, the PPDC's formation treaty will remain as a guide should the kaiju ever appear again.
FIRST ARRESTS FOR JAEGER PROGRAM CORRUPTION!
Sources in multiple countries say officials who enriched themselves at the expense of the Jaeger Program will be made an example of.
Former PPDC Secretary General Dustin Krieger turned himself in Tuesday after a grand jury indicted him for embezzlement of government funds, tax fraud, and other charges in connection with corruption while leading the organization. These charges are strictly in connection with financial crimes using American funds and offices, but the governments of Japan, China, Australia, and Peru – nearly every nation that housed a Shatterdome – are considering remedies from extradition to lawsuits against the U.S. government for Krieger's misappropriations of funds those countries contributed for the maintenance of the Jaeger Program.
Senator Gill Block, R-MO, resigned Tuesday amid growing reports that he too will be among the government officials charged with corruption in connection with the Jaeger Program. 4 other Senators and 17 Representatives, nearly all from inland states, are also under investigation for bribery, insider trading, and corruption-related charges stemming from the diversion of funding from the Jaeger Program to the failed Wall of Life.
ENDURING JAEGER PROGRAM MYSTERY: What Happened to Caitlin Lightcap?
She has been called the savior of humanity, the Tony Stark of our time, the mother of dragons. She invented the neural bridge that brought Jaeger technology to life – literally – allowing human pilots to control the giant mechas in combat against the largest, most deadly enemy humanity has ever seen.
In the final six months of the Kaiju War, however, she vanished, along with her husband and co-pilot, Sergio D'Onofrio.
Sources share rumors that she suffered a mental breakdown, or worse, committed suicide after the devastating battle between Romeo Blue and Harbinger in Seattle that left Bruce and Trevin Gage dead on January 8, 2025. The beloved Gage twins were among the founding pilots of the Jaeger Program, and even amid dozens of pilot deaths during the war's final year, their lost was especially painful. Lightcap and D'Onofrio attended every pilot funeral after Brawler Yukon was destroyed in October 2024, but they did not attend the Gages', or any subsequent services. This has fueled rumors that Lightcap is dead.
If so, it's yet another heartbreaking casualty of the callousness, corruption, and opportunism that undermined humanity's strongest defense and left thousands of servicemen and women in the Jaeger Program dead, along with millions they were trying to defend, before the War's end, while PPDC senior officials and the government and military officials who should have supported them skimmed money and power.
Lightcap's former partner in inventing Jaeger Tech, Jasper Schoenfeld, refused to comment to the media about her.
To Be Continued...
Coming Soon:Cheung and Jin make an unexpected nomination for Team Typhoon 2.0, and our heroes get to demonstrate the future for Jaegers in the post-kaiju world in Chapter Fourteen: Less Talk, More Action!
PLEASE don't forget to review!
Original Character Guide
President Jerald "Jerry" Lunk: President of the United States. Billionaire hotel mogul who ran on a campaign of "make America safe again" in 2024, proponent of the Wall, likes to use Twitter. No, he's not based on anyone in the real world. No, really.
Marshal Ana Ramirez: former Commanding Officer of Los Angeles Shatterdome, 50ish, Mexican-American, US Army officer. She was in command when Gipsy Danger and Yankee Star defeated Yamarashi in 2017, but after Yankee Star was destroyed in 2024, she was replaced by an unsympathetic, anti-Jaeger Program general who closed the Los Angeles Shatterdome soon after.
Marshal Blake Ketteridge: former Commanding Officer of Sydney Shatterdome, mid-60s, former Air Vice Marshal of the Royal Australian Air Force. Lost his daughter and grandchildren in the nuclear bombing of Scissure, but also misogynistic and bigoted.
Marshal Gabriel Morais: former Commanding Officer of Lima Shatterdome, mid-60s, Brazilian engineer, now PPDC delegate, suffered radiation poisoning from Horizon Brave's destruction in Lima in 2025.
Devi and Susanti Hassan: late Rangers of Vulcan Specter, Australia's Mark-3, first generation daughters of Indonesian Muslim immigrants, they were not who Marshal Ketteridge had in mind, and he never got past his sexism or bigotry. Graduated Jaeger Academy Class 2016-B along with the Beckets, they were very close until Yancy's death, but also very close to Chuck and Herc during his childhood and after he became a pilot. Killed in action in September 2024 with a record unmatched until Striker destroyed Mutavore.
Fei-Yen Wang: late Ranger of China's Shaolin Rogue, the beautiful Chinese woman seen briefly during Pacific Rim's opening montage, she was used as a propaganda figure by Chinese PPDC authorities throughout her life, required to keep her relationship with her rather plain co-pilot, Huan Che, secret.
Hayase Shindo: late Ranger of Japan's Mark-2, Tidal Dragon, which had only one engagement in which its unsafe design exposed the pilots and crew to severe radiation. Her co-pilot and foster brother, Jiro Shindo, died within months, and Hayase was used as a propaganda tool until her death two years later.