April 11th 2035
Shatterdome, Hong Kong
OPS/ Blue Winter
1000
"So why do they call you the penguin crew anyway?" Newt asked the stocky man who ran Blue Winter's small support staff, making small talk while waiting for the pilots to finish suiting up for the test activation today.
"You know that old joke about getting posted to Antarctica?" Skipper asked. When the scientist nodded gamely, he continued in a deadpan, "Not a joke."
Newt was going to press for details of what had to be a great story, when The detached Jaeger head dropped from the roof along its rails to mate with Blue Winter's torso.
"Alright people look alive!" Skipper shouted as his team began the connection process. "We managed to dodge a bullet last time but Kowalski won't always be around to do some computer voodoo and pull our fat out of the fire. I run a tight ship, bipedal though it may be, and I demand of you nothing but the best! Furthermore-"
"Uh, Skipper?" Private interjected
"What!?"
"We're ready to initialize the Bridge"
"Oh."
"Alright boys, that means that now its my show." Newt said as he stepped toward the nearest holographic pedestal. "Kowalski, Private, Give me the pilot telemetry. I'm talking alpha waves, bravo waves, gama waves, the whole neurological shebang. Rico, double-check the safety on weapons.
"Flight doc" he turned to look at the only female in the room, a tall, leggy nordic blonde who introduced herself as Cami, "give me their EKG over here too."
After the displays came up he addressed the team again:
"Alright, last time you made one crucial mistake:" Newt asserted, ticking off Skipper something fierce, "you operated by the numbers. You assumed (which makes an ass of you and me) that your Rangers were normal. This is not your fault. This is the programs fault. I am here to correct that, now.
"So before we begin I will go over the modified procedure I briefed you upon." He continued, now every one was a bit annoyed by his condescension. "Item one: initialize pons equipment. Item two: activate TT/BW bridge. Item three: activate TI/BW bridge. Item four initialize TT/TI. Interval between operations to include full diagnostic between individual execution.
"Are we clear?" he asked, only to get disgruntled grunts in return. "Then lets begin."
\
It was different this time, in the Drift. Before they were very different, from each other and in a lot of ways from everybody else. This time, they had found their common ground, the foundation of their partnership.
He would protect her, and she would heal him. Neither was perfect. Tooth was inexperienced, and a little judgemental, and just a bit pushy. Jack cracked jokes to keep from crying and his... unique circumstances made him aggressive even for a 19 year old. But they got who they were underneath the flaws circumstance had put on them. That hard won understanding was what would keep them together, and drag their machine up to standing.
Her memories, seen through his eyes drew more and more of him out of himself, made him something like whole. And for her, the union he shared with his Jaeger, deeper than any other team, was the most natural place in the world to be.
Like an alloy of imperfect metals, they were stronger together.
They would not break, even in the face of armeggedon.
They were Blue Winter, and they were ready for whatever came next.
/
April 18th 2035
1320
"Again" Sasha said, and Tooth dragged herself off the floor by her half-exhausted will than anything else.
Tooth was still in sorely need of remedial combat training. Jack was good, but she'd be handling half of Winter and the last thing anyone needed was a crappy fighter being pushed into combat and getting people killed.
They had taken in more recruits as Shatterdomes closed down. They didn't have enough Jaegers to go around, but they needed replacements in case a Ranger became a casualty. There was also a lot of competition to fill the open slot in Gypsy Danger, once that machine was up and running and the former pilot was dragged back by his ear. Nobody wanted to have to scab for a felled Ranger or worse, a team, but needs must. So, the Shatterdome was glutted with recruits.
Tooth getting her butt kicked by her 43 year old mother for two hours a day was something that impressionable recruits could never see. Rangers were an ideal to them, something to aspire to. It would cripple their development if they saw her picked above them, and then be substandard in combat. That is pretty much what happened, but circumstances dictated that outcome. Her training was, by agreement of the Marshall, herself, and her trainer, ie: her mom, to be done in isolation.
While she was training, she spent a lot of time with her mother in a storage room converted with surplus safety matting adjacent to the training facilities getting skill beaten into her like strengthening carbon into an anvil-forged sword.
It was not fun.
She felt a forming bruise from where she had landed on her thigh when Sasha had swiped her feet out from under her a minuet ago. She refused to back down, and everyone could hear 'again,' being said over and over from behind the shut door of the room, followed by a few cracks of wood on wood then a thud of one landing hard on the mats, followed by groaning and Russian curses that made even North blush.
Jack was watching after his own regular workouts, offering advice to both her and Sasha. Tooth would have rather he not see her a sweaty, tired, uncoordinated mess, but they needed the help. She got pointers on execution, her mother on the best direction for her training to take. And Jack was the expert, much like any other Ranger, on how to fight in his particular machine.
Blue Winter was very different from pretty much every other Jaeger in existence.
It was a rebuild of a much larger machine, stripped down from Meteor Epoch. Epoch had been a heavily armored missile platform full of ammo magazines. As a result it was rather bulbous and hunch-backed, with a thin endoskeleton everything hung off of.
That frame, the actuators in its limbs and the electronics were what was reconstructed into Blue Winter. The armor and the novel freezing system under it were more compact than most weapons and as a result Blue winter was rather lanky, with overpower actuators and a large range of motion. Overall, Blue winter was a contender for fastest Jaeger, and easily the most dexterous. It could sidestep and dodge instead of having to take the hits that Kaiju dish out, and it pretty much had to, or the lighter armor would crumple under heavy abuse.
This was important in that it an odd duck when it came to the techniques to operate it properly. While most of the training for the program focused on grappling, straight-up punches and a little ranged combat, Winter needed an entire different skill set.
Under Jack's advice, Tooth had become very good at dodging. Most of her training was footwork and reaction time. She was getting faster than she'd ever been in her life, but her mother had hit her with her eskrima sticks so often that she was sure she had hairline fractures in her forearms no matter what Camicazi said, and more purple and yellow-green bruises than regular tan skin showing.
Her mother took her sturdy stick and hooked it between her hands, behind her knee. The forward tug pulled her feet out from under her as her ligament lost tension, and her back and head slammed to the mat of the converting the floor of the converted storage room.
Still not quite fast enough.
"Again" Sasha said
/
During down time Jack and Tooth were pretty isolated. Usually individual crews spent a large amount of time together, between the language barrier and the inevitable blatantly nationalistic posturing. Rangers spent most of their time with their partners, a lot of their time with their individual crews, and a bit with other Ranger teams they got on with. It wasn't a matter of hard fast rules, so much as the simple social dynamics that worked themselves out.
Jack was here only for a few days, and already he had gotten into a fist fight with Striker Eureka's crew. He was winning no friends there. The Chinese contingent were inscrutable and kept to themselves. And things with Tooth's parents had been professional, polite, and very frosty the times he had reason to talk to them since their little interrogation.
Tooth herself had to deal with the issue of her change in station. Her old friends were a bit awkward around her, and the recruits were watching her to see why she was tapped to be a Ranger. The other pilots kept a respectable distance, as they had since Chuck hit on her and her dad dragged him out of the common room for 15 minutes, only to return pale and rather sickly looking. And her parents themselves were holding back a bit in a transparent effort to let her assert her independence in her new position.
And of course, there were the rumors. There always were. The aborted Drift hadn't helped anything either.
Really, it was probably just a matter of settling in. The rapid transitions were keeping things from achieving to any sort of stability. With a little time, her friends from her old crew would figure out how they felt about the whole thing and the awkwardness would end. The new rumors would die a slow, and hopefully painful, death. Things would become some sort of normal.
Life went on.
/
April 25th 2035
Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea
Miracle Mile Temporary Demilitarized Zone
With the heavy lifting helicopter wing ascended on reflex as the explosive bolts securing Blue Winter released it cascaded into the ocean. Immediately the Jaeger was frosted as the mist of droplets flash froze on contact with its armor, only to crackle off as it began to stride forward.
The airlift was an indeterminate period of strung out boredom for the two rangers in the cockpit, as the rush of adrenaline from their scramble into the Conn-pod when they had first been alerted to the emergent Kaiju inbound for Indonesia tapered off into dregs.
Tooth was particularly antsy, fidgeting in her harness in a mix af anticipation and nerves. Jack was positively mellow by comparison, having sortied five times before, with four kills to his name.
As Cherno Alpha hurled up a massive impact shock behind them, their satellite uplink, tectonic sensors from a round the region, and sonar from Military vessels near the area located the massive dragon they were here to slay.
"Winter, Cherrno; you are currently on the continental shelf a mile and a half off the coast of Port Moresby." Skippers voice came over the joint comms, "We have Catagory 4 Kaiju designated Hellbender detected incoming off the coast. ETA is two minutes. Good luck, and Godspeed."
In Winter's cockpit Tooth and Jack were running through the star-up procedures for the Jaeger's armaments, compressing the already insanely pressurized inert gasses held in cylinder reservoirs in the limbs and torso, preparing to freeze the surrounding water to ice in combat.
As a thought passed through their collective mind, Tooth opened a haptic interface window showing the split-screen pilot view of their partner in this engagement while Jack fiddle with the controls for the armor radiators. One thing about the drift was, it did wonders for your ability to multi-task.
"Mom, Dad?" Tooth asked, in blatant disregard for any communications discipline, "Can you hang back a bit in the fight?"
Her parents shared a look that was rendered moot, redundant, and patently ridiculous by the combination of their shared drift and the rather medieval faceguards of their interface suits.
"Tooth, are you sure?" her father asked, his voice typically gruff, but with an edge of concern, "A Kaiju is like nothing you have seen."
"I'm sure." Tooth said, selling the point with the force of both her and Jack's conviction. "Blue Winter is an unknown. So are both of us, especially me. If we're going to get anywhere we need to show we can pull our weight. That happens now."
"Fine, Tulika, go." Her mother said with resignation, "We will hold back to give you your chance. Do not die for foolish pride."
Tooth closed the line of communications and sighed into her helmet.
"Yeah, here's hoping." She said wryly.
The two goliath machines continued toward the incoming beast churning the ocean into a rising froth. The slender blue machine was leading by a few strides.
"Are you ready?" Jack asked, one last belated time
"Born ready." Tooth shot back with a cheeky smile that showed off her dimples.
"Nice!" Jakc barked out, half laughing.
Together the two of them ducked the Winter down into a crouch, the armor of it's forearms expanding to allow the seawater to flow into a cavity within. An instant of beyond freezing gas vented within crystalized in each an icicle the size of a radio tower, mounted within the armor along the top of the arms.
When the disturbance in the water reached them it diverted around the two machines, trying to circumvent them to reach the city. The Kaiju seem reluctant to engage, something of a rarity, so Jack decided to take the initiative.
Pouncing with one arm extended and the other cocked back in a ready position, they crashed onto the turbulence in the shallows, swinging one icicle-wielding arm around wide to wrap around the bulk of whatever it was and pulling it thrashing from the water, tossing it onto a submerged sandbar. Consequently, they got their first look at the thing.
Hellbender was quite possibly the only Kaiju Jack had ever seen that didn't have bony armor on its head. It was long and thin mostly like a smooth skinned crocodile. Its head was a shot and wide rounded chevron that extended well beyond its neck on both sides with tips each extending into hoary bone or horn spikes with bioluminescent light escaping along the edges. The low width of it was filled with a line of tiny glowing blue eyes that paralleled the leading edge where teeth like needles interlaced from either side of its maw. Its body was smooth, nearly frictionless, and its back and sides where specled with bioluminescent spots that burst and oozed glowing blue once out of the water. For limbs it had eight flippers at something close to regular places along its bloated torso, each feathery along the back and ending with a chitinous claw like a mantis. Finishing its body was an unusually long tail lined top and bottom with razor sharp plates of enamel, in a rough fan shape.
"Well this is a little different." Jack commented. as he tried to skewer the thing through its flat rounded torso.
"Really? Tooth asked as the gaping jaws of the thing tried to latch onto the arm as it slithered like a sidewinder and the ice spike embedded itself in the sand until it seemed to catch fast."What's so odd about it? seems like any other Kaiju I've seen."
"No idea." Jack said to Tooth as she beat the beast about the neck and first set of shoulders with the side of the left icicle, the length of the weapon making stabbing the thing too difficult while it was latched on. "But stay frosty. Some of these guys have tricks besides smashing us."
"Oh, you did not just say that!" The Kaijus had taken a bit of a beating and a few shallow slashes, and its teeth, though sharp, hadn't dona enough to make hanging on worth it. It released the arm it had and flailed its tail wildly at their head to distract he two of them. "I' ll leave staying 'frosty' to you, ice man. I've been doing all the work since you lodged that ram int the ground!"
"Just letting you get your shots in." Jack taunted, as he shattered the ice spike pinning his arm to the ground with little effort, and raised the arm to shoulder height while prompting tooth to guide the other to support it from the elbow. "As for staying cool, watch the master!"
Thought the sharp tip was broken off, the rest of the icicle still knocked the regrouping Kaiju for a loop when it impacted its oddly shaped skull.
"Good one!" Tooth shouted, really getting into the spectacle of the battle. "My turn!"
The other arm was raised and braced, and the massive frozen javelin clipped the torso near the back, digging a bit into the side and tearing off one of the middle flippers on the right side completely. Biohazard blue blood gushed from the wound, mixing with the brightly glowing slime that had been flowwing form it's back the entire fight, coating Blue Winter's arms and floating in a sticky, sickly film on the surface of the water.
In fact, the seemed to be surrounded by a ring of the gunk.
"Damn it!" Jack cursed, his realization hitting Tooth a millisecond later, and both of them pulling back. They were too slow, however, as the Kaiju writhed and twisted, spewing the glowing fluid in long snotty ropes flying through the air, surrounding and coating their Jaeger.
That wasn't the bad part. The bad part was when the thing passed an electric arc between the spikes on the side of its head and the tip of its tail. Not a large one when the scale was considered, but enough to ignite the slime on the water and to risk Winter as the flames crept closer.
Tooth was near panic when Jack's prompting took them in a rolling dive over the ring of flame behind them, dousing Blue Winter to put out the surface fires as the Jaeger landed in a kneel.
"Cherno, tag in!" Jack shouted into his helmet, and the other Jaeger menaced forward to keep the Kaiju off of them for a moment.
"Take it easy," Jack said to his partner as she struggled to reign in her temporary panic. He punched away at the center console, redirecting the internal coolant. "We need a moment to set this up anyway."
"Set up what?" Asked Tooth, as her heart rate stabilized a little watching Cherno give the speedy animal something to dodge or face the consequences.
"Remember the secondary armor?" Jack asked, challenging her to forget, with her purported expertise in all things Jaeger (outside combat at least). She nodded, understanding.
"You think it will be enough?" She asked, using her side of the console to activate the external radiators. "That napalm gunk is nasty."
"Only one way to find out." Jack shrugged, then continued, "We'll need to get back in there or your folk's'll finish without us."
Outside, Blue Winter was standing in the shallows, the thin fins fitted within the slots of its armor extending and rotating out from its body. Frigid gassed passed within the extensions, and the humid tropical air turned bitter cold, drawing a thick mist that not even the nearby inferno could drive away. The machine at the source of it was frosting over, first on the legs as seawater froze solid, thicker and thicker, then the fog itself condensed and became solid as well. After a scant few moments, the ice covered the entire machine, fused solid and thick enough to cover the massive radiator fins within the armor. When all was quite solid and the glacial mass changed the silhouette form that of a proverbial beanpole to a hulking neckless brute, a faint rumbling sound came from within the froze bulk. Along every seam and joint in the armor plates ice saws and drills and milling blades of ridiculous scale ground the ice into shape, freeing the giant to move before withdrawing under the metal plates. Only its hands were free of the ice, and their size was made to fit this larger frame, though they looked over large without all of the glacial armor.
"Switching over visuals to active sonar" Jack announce, hitting a short sequence of buttons on the console that opaqued the sapphire-matrix window and bour=ght up the appropriate sensors to let them see through 20 feet of ice encasing the head.
"I can't believe how long that took." Tooth complained, wanting to get back to monster pummeling and irritable from the cold. Also, she wanted her parents away form the pyromaniacle thing, just a little. "And all those edging tools, this is so inefficient!"
"Don't knock it till you've tried it, Majesty" Jack teased as the dragged the now much heavier Jaeger back into the fray. "All this extra bulk hits like the iceberg that sank the Titanic."
"Winter is more than big enough to sink it by itself." She retorted, mostly to be contrary. That took real effort, and a bit of talent while you were mind-melded with someone.
"Whatever," Jack rolled his eyes. "Cherno, Winter's ready for round two. YOu ready for a break?"
"Da, roger that Winter." Aleksis's gruff baritone came over the comm. as Cherno proceed to throw a powerful cross the crumpled Hellbender's wide jaw along near half its length. "Its good to see that little tussle didn't keep you down. We've shattered the horns it used to make the spark. Should make it a little easier for the children."
Jack just snorted at the ascertain, while Tooth made a note for future petty vengeance against he father.
Heavily encumbered as it was, Winter was now even larger than Cherno Alpha, with massive weight to throw behind its blows and armor thicker than the machine inside in many places. but that came with a trade off for speed. The Kaiju was fast, but if they got in a solid hit the thing was alien chutney.
The fire was down to a few smoldering spills now, but the glands on its sides were still stolen and glowing bright. They had to catch it before it caused another firestorm, otherwise their armor would shatter like sugar glass under its own weight.
"Jack, I have an idea." Tooth announced, then pushed the details tho the forefront of her mind where they would be easier to understand. It was unspoken that just reading each others mind about everything would be rude and invasive and way too awkwardly intimate for them while a fight was going on, but when prompted they could dig a little deeper than the motor control they constantly shared to control their Jaeger. It was more or less considered polite to wait for prompting to read your partner's mind deeper than you did by default.
"Gotcha" He agreed, and they both bent into a runner's crouch and pushed forward like a charging bull, bearing down on the great animal. The Kiaju dodged nimbly to the side and doused them with its goo, but they managed to keep it from lighting on one of the remnant , Winter Stumbled onto its stomach, face in the water
Seeing the larger of its enemies down, it pounced like a jungle cat to try and finish it. Its clawed fins scrabbled to grip the ice as it gnawed with the needle teeth on the intact side of its jaw and its fang-frilled tail whipped against Winter's impervious armor randomly.
This only went on for a short moment, before winter flipped onto its back sideways, carrying its attacker with it and catching the thing between itself and the seafloor. Reaching near its waist, Blue Winter caught the flailing tail of the pinned monster and righted itself without letting go.
"Whooh!" Tooth hooted in exaltation, "It worked! My plan totally worked"
"Don't get a big head." Jack countered as they dragged the thing over to Cherno Alpha so they could share the beating "The thing's about as smart as a house cat. It's not a huge deal to outsmart one."
"Apparently you've never had to get a cat in a kennel. I've still got scars." Was all Tooth felt she needed to say to end the argument. Jack let the petty argument go, as he was often doing these days, on the grounds it was not worth the effort. He knew he was right, and even if she thought she won, he won by not putting forth all the effort to win only for her to be mad at him for making her wrong. It was a win-win, except for her slowly inflating ego.
She snorted at the irony of that though and shot him a look, as they held the Kaiju down for her parents to pummel like it owed them money.
Mid-drift arguments were weird.
Welcome to the new normal.
The head design was similar to those giant prehistoric salamanders, and the name is taken from an American giant salamander breed. It also excreted flammable goo, which makes it also an elemental salamander.