Author's Notes: Many thanks to everyone for the feedback, and please keep it coming! The Rangers that are referred to in this chapter, Peter Lepp and Hedy Keres, are OCs, the pilots of Russia's Mark II, Eden Assassin.

Chapter Fourteen: Drawbacks

PPDC Proving Grounds and Assembly Building, Kodiak Island, Alaska…

January, 2017…

"It's not all romance and glamor," the newbies – both Ranger and non-Ranger – were warned by the senior officers. "There's pain, there's sacrifice, there's frustration, and exhaustion. The clock is always running until the next attack. The last one was at the end of September. Usually, they fall between four to five months apart, so we're heading into the red zone just by virtue of the time that's gone by. We need to start re-locating the Jaegers, but we can't do it until the next attack has happened. We just can't risk having Jaegers in transit if something comes out of the Breach."

So Coyote Tango was stuck in Anchorage until the all-clear so she could head back to Japan, and Talon Tasmania was twiddling her thumbs in Lima waiting to go back to standing guard over Australia and New Zealand. As the month of January wore on, all the construction crews at the half-finished Shatterdomes were spending a lot of time looking over their shoulders.

As for Class 2016-B, they were warned off the Academy for the first trimester. "Let the recruits concentrate, and let the instructors do their work. Now that the Shatterdome simulator is up and running, you can do some of your exercises there instead of on campus. Hands off the new meat!"

Dr. Lightcap joked that she had such a hard time not giving the recruits advice that they were packing her off to another hemisphere for eight weeks. "Really?!" someone exclaimed.

"No, not really. I'm going to Hong Kong. Special project."

"Special how?" Raleigh asked slyly, and she winked at him.

"Special, meaning I'd have to kill you." She pointed at Yancy. "You keep him in line while I'm gone!"

"Yes, ma'am!" Yancy mock-saluted as the others snickered at Raleigh's wounded expression.

A few times they were out on the grounds doing their own exercises as the drill masters went thundering over the hills with a flock of recruits, bellowing instructions and commands to keep up. "How big's this class?" Raleigh wondered.

"At opening assembly, they'd admitted four hundred sixty-two," said Vic Tunari. "It's been three days now, so they're probably down by at least fifty."

The temptation for Raleigh and Yancy to go pep-talk the recruits wasn't too severe, since they were preoccupied with drivesuit fitting and preparing to start logging time in Gipsy. They were finally cleared on the last week of January, and even Yancy was a fidgety bundle of nerves. As in 2016, everybody who could get off-duty was out on the hills surrounding the proving grounds to watch the launch, just as Raleigh and Yancy and their Academy fellows had done with Yankee Star and Eden Assassin. There were no press permitted until the official, formal launch, but the entire PPDC population was using insider privilege to get a peek at the first Mark III.

"Have you two ever done those Tower of Terror drop thrill ride things?" Priya asked them in the drivesuit room.

"A few times, why?"

"Well, you're about to do it again."

Locking into Gipsy's rigs in their fit-to-order suits and armor, Raleigh and Yancy exchanged glances. "Well, they call it a drop," Yancy mused.

It was. Raleigh let out a yelp that he quickly smothered by turning it into a whoop as the conn-pod plummeted. Note to self: new blackmail material. Rals hates those drop-rides, Yancy thought, and grinned as they slowed to lock into place.

They got a brief look at the masses of watchers crowded onto the catwalks and clear spaces before the screen obscured for the neural handshake. "Ready to step into my head, kid?" Yancy asked, carrying on their running joke.

"Ready to step into hers, right, pretty girl?" Raleigh said, addressing the conn-pod.

The drift had certainly gotten easier.

"We have a lot of good shared memories. But the best one, bar none… the first time we walked in him. He's ours." The twins pointed down the hill at Romeo.

"You are all declared Ranger Ready."

"She's the first of the Mark IIIs, flying the American flag," said Jasper Schoenfeld. "And she's yours."

"She's pretty, guys."

"She is that."

"My pons knows what you did in the daaaark! So light 'em up, up, up!"

"Note to self: new blackmail material - "

HEY!

Reality re-formed as they laughed. "Neural handshake complete."

Hello, there, Gipsy. Yancy grinned sideways at Raleigh. Not that they hadn't been doing conn-pod testing in her actual conn-pod for over a week, but this was the first time she'd been fully online and operational. "Right hemisphere, calibrating."

"Left hemisphere, calibrating."

"Looking good, gentlemen," said Priya from the pod room. "Handing you over to LOCCENT."

Oh my god, Yance.

Easy there, kiddo.

But they were both wearing shit-eating grins as the Assembly Building's massive bay doors opened, and the scramble crawlers rolled them out onto the proving grounds. There were people swarming the surrounding hillsides, crowded onto the few upstairs balconies of the buildings, sitting on top of vehicles, looking like ants from the Beckets' perspectives.

"Rangers, this is Marshall Vincent Gagnon. Begin pre-combat diagnostic drills."

"Acknowledged, Marshall. Initiating walk-through." He glanced at Raleigh. Ready?

Very.

And Gipsy Danger took her first steps, to a roar of tinny-sounding cheers over the comm speakers. "Heads up, Romeo Blue, there is a new girl in town!" yelled the Tunaris over Coyote's pod comm.

"We see her, Coyote! And she is HOT!"

"Gage, Tunari, you are not authorized to be in your pods or distracting the other pilots," Gagnon snapped. "Now zip it!"

"Sorry, sir!"

A part of Yancy and Raleigh was a little irritated; they were trying to concentrate, so Gagnon was right. But for the most part, they were too absorbed with the tests, to move their limbs and feel her respond, to turn their heads and see with superhuman eyes, to really register anyone or anything else.

They knew the diagnostic tests and walk-through drills by heart. They could have done them in any and every Jaeger currently commissioned. They'd done them all multiple times in the simulator.

But this was their Jaeger. This was Gipsy Danger. She's ours.

I think I'm in love, Rals.

You and me both, bro.

They didn't get to fire Gipsy's plasma cannons until the third test, and that day, nobody was allowed outside to watch – or anywhere within a hefty radius of the proving grounds. Air traffic control had to be notified, and all shipping traffic diverted for a "live fire exercise" that was even more involved than firing Brawler's shoulder rockets. There was a specially-made target in place, instruments surrounding the proving grounds to measure the heat and energy and byproducts from every possible angle.

They were only allowed one discharge for the first test. Yancy was fully prepared to toss a coin, but Dr. Schoenfeld and the munitions specialists laughed and said, "Sorry, Big Brother, executive override. We'll start with the right hand. Be patient, Raleigh, you'll get your turn."

Yancy grimaced apologetically at Raleigh, but his brother wasn't too miffed. Raleigh did ask, "Is it that experimental?"

"Everything about anti-kaiju weaponry is," said the chief weapons developer. "It took multiple nuke hits to take those bastards out. Directing that kind of power into the Jaeger systems without obliterating the Jaeger and everything else for fifty miles? And keeping it under control? Very, very new territory. We've had fatalities in the test runs for some of this stuff."

Jesus. That's what we get for asking questions. So they were both pretty tense as they took Gipsy out onto the proving grounds that day. Test warning sirens were going off for hours. Yancy had a nagging headache by the time they had the order to fire.

It took a long time to even load the thing. He could have sworn it didn't take that long to charge in the simulator. At least the configuration mechanisms worked like they did in the sim, and he didn't bungle that. The charge built straight through Gipsy's frame, making them vibrate until Yancy was gritting his teeth, and he could feel Raleigh doing the same.

He felt the cannon's charge complete even before the screen flashed READY. Then, the massive blast of liquefied energy seemed to go through his body before passing into the cannon. For a few seconds, his vision whited out, and he was seeing only with Gipsy's eyes through the drift that he hit the target.

"Direct hit!" announced LOCCENT over cheers of the onlookers in the bunkers. "Nice shot, Gipsy One!"

"Holy Christ," Raleigh breathed. Their target was now a blackened, distorted heap on the water. "Did we fry all the instruments?"

Someone laughed. "The ones on the target, yeah, but that's par for the course for this material."

"Good work, Gipsy Danger, proceed to reentry."

"Roger," Yancy croaked, not wanting to admit how disoriented he felt.

Too bad there was someone else in his head. "Yance?" You okay?

Fine –

"Gipsy One? Yancy, you all right? Your vitals are shaky."

"I'm good," he insisted, but then one of the medics in LOCCENT barged into the conversation.

"Reminder, Rangers, part of your job during testing is to let us know how it's affecting you physically. You won't do us any good if you disable yourselves in the fight."

Okay, you got me. And he didn't have the energy to argue. "Okay, my head's killing me, and... kinda disoriented."

"Hmm. Let's get you scanned along with the system diagnostics. We may need to tweak the controls. Get yourselves onto the crawler, then we'll deactivate, see if that helps."

He thought that detaching the handshake and powering Gipsy down would ease it, but it didn't. He could sense Raleigh's alarm as he tried not to shake in the harness and fought to keep his eyes focused. By the time they were back in the bay and the pod was ready to detach, he couldn't stand the light and had his eyes squeezed shut.

"Something's wrong," he dimly heard Raleigh saying. "He can't see!"

I'm okay, Rals. That line always tripped off his tongue easily and automatically, regardless of whether it was true, but it couldn't now. He was going to vomit if he opened his mouth. The pressure in his head was so intense that his skull was going to blast his helmet apart. He hoped like hell that Raleigh wasn't getting any of this.

He thought he blacked out a few times, but it hadn't given any relief, and the next thing he knew, there were people around the rig, detaching him, voices chattering about his blood pressure. He just wished they'd all fucking shut up and be quiet and turn the damn lights off!

Over it all, worst of all, was his brother's frightened voice. He hated it when Raleigh got scared.

"What the hell did that thing do to him?!" Raleigh was yelling, and Bruce and Trevin had to tackle him to keep him from lunging at the chief weapons developer.

"This doesn't make any sense - the charge was no worse than the simulator!" the man was protesting. "We made the systems identical, and you both came through that just fine!"

"Raleigh, kiddo, back off. Let the medics work," the twins insisted, and hauled him to the side while the techs got Yancy out of his armor and were making way for the doctors.

One of the medics came over to check on Raleigh. "Are you having any symptoms?"

Raleigh shook his head, but submitted to having lights shined in his eyes and vitals monitors hooked up. "My head hurts, but I think that was him. There was... this pressure."

Suddenly, Dr. Tán from the Academy looked up from where he was examining Yancy. "Are either one of you prone to migraines?"

"What? No. Is that what this is?" Raleigh looked baffled.

Bruce slapped his forehead. "Gah! I get you, Doc."

"What?!"

"Take it easy, Raleigh," said Trevin. "It's probably Jaeger-head."

"What the hell is Jaeger-head?!"

"It's a lesser-known, unpleasant side effect of training among our later generations," said Dr. Tán, studying his instruments. "Where's the nearest dark room?"

"Academy," said someone.

"Then it's time we put one in the Assembly Building sickbay. Let's move. It's not that bad," he told Raleigh as the medics wheeled Yancy to the elevator. "We'll do brain scans, make sure there aren't any aneurysms or brain clots, but nothing's shown up before now, and we check you regularly. The Tunaris have both had it," he added as an aside to Bruce and Trevin.

"I don't get it," Raleigh protested as they trailed after the medical team. "What's Jaeger-head?"

"By all accounts, it's a kaiju-sized migraine headache. We haven't had it," Bruce explained. "Only pilots who've trained in more than one Jaeger have, and only the ones who don't get migraines. It doesn't mean there's brain damage, it's just some kind of nasty side effect."

At the call from Bruce and Trevin, Vic and Gunnar dropped what they were doing and came to meet them in sickbay, taking over the tag-teaming of Yancy's frantic brother. "Vic's had it once, I've had it twice," said Gunnar. "It's about twelve hours of hell, but the docs have already developed some good drugs. There's a dark room in every Shatterdome sickbay now."

"Dark room?"

"Exactly how it sounds. Interior room that they keep pitch black and sound proof. Really strong painkillers, ice, pressure points, and it wears off in about a day."

Raleigh went ashen as he watched the medics getting Yancy into the MRI. The poor guy couldn't even stand. They had a mask over his eyes. "This doesn't look like just a headache," Raleigh whispered.

"Well, believe us, it's not 'just a headache.' Neither of us could move on our own either. Pete Lepp thought he was dying," said Vic. "First time somebody came down with it, the medics thought it was a brain hemorrhage."

Trevin nodded. "Five of the Mark II pilots have come down with it now, and a couple of really unlucky bastards have had it more than once."

"Including me," Gunnar confirmed. "Second time, I told the docs to just nuke me from orbit."

The four Rangers stood watch over their stricken comrades as Dr. Tán finished his scans and diagnosed that it was "only" Jaeger-head. "So the good news is that he's not injured. The bad news is that he's in for a very rough day. We'll try and make it as easy on him as possible." He smiled wryly as Raleigh immediately got up to follow them to the hastily-emptied interior store room they'd commandeered. "I'd tell you to go get some rest, but you won't. If you're going to stay, you'll need these."

He proffered a set of night vision goggles, and for the first time since emerging from the conn-pod, the younger Becket cracked a grin.

The hours oozed by in a haze of misery for Yancy. Once he was out of light and noise, it got a little better, but he still wished he could muster the coherence to ask somebody to just shoot him and be done with it. He felt like he was in the center of a giant echo chamber, or maybe a pressure cooker.

Every sound thundered and ricocheted through his skull. Every movement made his brain slam into his sinuses. Every flicker of light, even through his eyelids and the mask somebody had put on him, was like a spear made out of Gipsy's plasma straight into his eyes. The only reason he didn't scream then was because he knew that would hurt more. It was all he could do not to sob.

Somebody injected him with some kind of narcotic. That eased it a little, or at least made him care a little less. Above the eye mask, there were cold compresses on his forehead. That was wonderful, as were the fingertips massaging his temples and scalp and points around his neck and jaw.

He drifted in and out of awareness, but a few times, a nagging urgency seized him, and he twitched to life, forcing himself through the blinding pain. "Ral-eigh?" he mumbled. "He - okay?"

"I'm fine, Yance," whispered a familiar voice.

"Your brother's fine. He doesn't have it. Try and rest."

Well, that was all right. As long as Raleigh wasn't in pain too, then yes, he could rest.

A long time later, he came back out of the haze and no longer felt like his skull was being pried apart. He still hurt, but he could think again. He must've made a sound, because someone moved nearby, then the compress on his forehead was changed out for a colder one. "Wha' time is it?"

"'Bout one a.m."

Shit, it had been almost fourteen hours. Yancy frowned to himself. "Rals?"

"Yeah. Feeling better?"

"Little bit. What're you doing here?"

There was a long pause, then Raleigh asked slowly, "Where else would I be?" He sounded confused.

A few days later, they could joke about it. "You scared the shit out of me," Raleigh grumbled.

"It's lucky you people didn't warn us about this at recruiting. I'd have scrubbed out for sure," Yancy told the Tunaris. "I didn't know it was possible to hurt that bad."

"What happens if it hits you during a fight?!" Suze Hassan demanded.

Dr. Tán knocked on wood. "So far, that hasn't happened. One of our theories is that the adrenaline prevents it, which is consistent with a lot of pain reactions and injuries. We're working on trying to prevent it, but so much of our research has to focus on not killing our pilots with the neural loads or causing brain bleeds and seizures. I have a got a cocktail of stimulants that I think would hold it off in an emergency, but then you'd get a rebound."

"Good God. As long as we get the choice to opt out after the engagement by a bullet to the head," Yancy growled. The Tunaris nodded; Yancy was only half-joking, and he had a feeling they were on board with that too.

"What was it you said?" Raleigh asked Gunnar. "Nuke you from orbit?"

Yancy nodded gravely. "It's the only way to be sure." All the nerds in the vicinity laughed.

Suze and Devi exchanged dry smiles. "I never thought I would be glad to be a migraine sufferer," Devi remarked. "Strange that we don't get Jaeger-head."

"That we know of," Dr. Tán pointed out. Now everyone knocked on wood. "Consider: we know the neural load of a Jaeger is intense even balanced between two pilots. And every Jaeger is different. Our theory is that although we've worked out the systems so that the strain doesn't cause brain damage, there's still a lot of pressure involved. Changing from one handshake to another could still be a shock to the system. Maybe migraine sufferers have already adapted to those stresses."

"Everyone who gets it trained in Brawler before switching to their own mech," Kennedy mused. "And Brawler's the oldest model. They literally go from the oldest to the newest."

"That's the theory."

AND... the facility alert sounded. Tán's tablet went flying, and he dove after it with a curse as Yancy clapped his hands over his ears. He was mostly over it, but still noise-sensitive, and those damn sirens made everyone's teeth hurt at the best of times.

"Attention. Attention. Yellow Alert. Movement in the Breach. All personnel to stations."

Everyone looked at the nearest calendar. "February 2nd. Four months and three days since the last one," observed Steph. "I'll say this for them, they're polite and punctual."

"Party time, boys and girls. See you later!" The Gages and Tunaris bolted for their bays, and the three pairs of fledglings headed for the war room in the Assembly Building.

To be continued...

Coming Soon: The newbie Rangers watch as their comrades go back into battle and put their skills and technology to the test. The Jaeger Program passes a grim milestone in Chapter Fifteen: Behind The Scenes!

PLEASE don't forget to review!

Original Character Guide

Devi and Susanti Hassan - First-generation daughters of Indonesian immigrants to Australia, ages 26 and 24. One of three teams including the Beckets to graduate Class 2016-B and become Jaeger pilots.

Priya Katwal - Senior Engineer of the Jaeger Program, mid-50s, Indian ancestry. Once designed space station living quarters for NASA, now she designs conn-pod life support systems (and gives Rangers hell).

Marshall Vincent Gagnon - Commanding Officer at the Jaeger Academy and Anchorage Shatterdome, Canadian Air Force, mid-50s, successor to Stacker Pentecost