Raleigh's out of the chopper before it even fully settles to a landing. Kensie follows him out on shaky legs; she just barely managed to not throw up when they started the descent.
"Is this how the Drop feels?" she croaks, swallowing with difficulty.
"Sorta." Raleigh isn't paying much attention to her. He needs to see Mako. All McTavish will tell him is vague. Very little he didn't already know. Something went wrong when they engaged a Kaiju at the Breach. Mako is still comatose, although Jake has woken up and shown so far no side effects of the issue. There's been no change in Mako's condition.
McTavish follows them into the infirmary, and he starts talking to a nurse who is blustering about regulations and immediate family and clearance. Raleigh's on the point of using one of Mako's less damaging floor throws and walking past anyway when someone steps out into the hall. For a minute Raleigh flinches, blinks, because it looks like that's Stacker Pentecost under the glare of cold fluorescent lights. But that's far too young to be him.
"They're with me." Jake even sounds like his father. No one would ever dare contradict the Marshal. Well, except Raleigh those few times, and it had never been easy to go up against that man's cool calm. The same hold true for his son. The nurse nods and goes back to her station.
"McTavish, they need to be able to come and go as they choose." Jake has his arms relaxed at his sides, but he doesn't need to fold them to look commanding. It's in his nature.
"Of course." Raleigh wonders what's going on here. McTavish is known for having an iron hand with all his people. And Jake is giving the orders here.
Raleigh crosses the hall; Kensie trailing him nervously. Jake nods to him. "I'm glad you're here. Maybe it will help."
"What's going on?" He'll get a straight answer from Jake at least. It won't be in any of those medical mumbo-jumbo terms Raleigh doesn't understand, that the doctors use when they want to hide something. He learned that a long time ago, when they were losing Mom.
"She's still out. Lost connection mid-Drift, and the Jaeger went into a failsafe. She was afraid something like this could happen."
"She knew?"
"We had to install systems in hours. It's not meant to be that way. I could tell she was worried the whole time we were in."
Raleigh can't believe this. It's one thing for a new, untested Drift system to have a glitch. It's another for someone to be so worried about press and deadlines that they force the designer of said system, who knows it better than anyone else, to install it without the proper procedures or time. And he knows Mako wouldn't have gone ahead and done that without making a fuss.
"You knew she wasn't ready; she told you herself, and you sent them out there?" Raleigh turns back on McTavish, still standing in the hall, and pins the man to the wall, to hell with chain of command and regulations. He's pretty sure at this point he isn't even actually a Ranger anymore. "What the hell were you thinking?"
McTavish chokes, squirming, but he's not going anywhere. Years of training and working with his hands have made Raleigh someone you're not going to get away from until he decides he's done.
"If anything happens to her, you answer for it. I don't care what happens to me afterward. You got it?" McTavish nods, coughing. Raleigh releases him and the man backs off, rubbing his neck.
Kensie is staring. So is Jake. So are Newt Geisler and Hermann Gottleib, who've just come into the hall. Raleigh rubs his hands on his legs and tugs a bit self-consciously at the hem of his sweater. It's rare that he loses control like that, but this is Mako. And if McTavish is responsible for her dying…
"Newt? Hermann? What are you doing here?" Jake sounds as confused as Raleigh is.
"I helped design the Drift system for Gipsy Avenger. If something went bad it's as much my fault as anyone's." Newt's his normal loud, abrasive, nervous-energy self, but Raleigh can tell he's trying to tone it down. They step into the room and Newt stops. "Oh geez. This isn't supposed to happen." He's inspecting the monitors minutely, tapping the brain-scan one and talking too fast and in too much tech gibberish to Hermann for Raleigh to understand.
Apparently Jake can't figure it out either. "English, please, guys?"
"That's what we were speaking," Newt mutters.
Hermann is more cooperative. "She's stuck in the failsafe cycle. It's supposed to only last as long as she's in connection to the Jaeger."
"She dropped out of phase unexpectedly."
"She's probably caught in a feedback loop." It honestly takes Raleigh a minute to realize that wasn't Newt. It was Kensie. "Wouldn't you have to re-initiate Drift if she's in the wrong phase of the cycle? It's probably just incomplete."
"Possibly?" Newt adjusts his glasses and buries one hand in his spiky black hair. "But it would take a lot of work. You'd need her back in with the person she was with, and you'd need a way to stabilize because she and her co-pilot will be out of sync with each other until we break the loop."
"Could one more person in the Drift do that?" Raleigh isn't sure where that idea came from. But it might be crazy enough to work. Since when hasn't the PPDC, and even more so Raleigh himself, thrown everything on the risky hope of some long shot idea?
"You've set up a three-way Drift before. And the Wei triplets used one. It's not impossible." Kensie bounces on her toes.
"She's right. We did in in less than fifteen minutes on that dying baby Kaiju in Hong Kong." Hermann pushes some wires on the floor out of the way with his cane.
"I've never done it on a coma patient before!" Newt is more frazzled than Raleigh's seen him since the Battle of the Breach. His hair is standing on end, he's more jittery than Tendo after four cups of coffee, and his tie is wildly askew.
"We just need three rigs, a control module, and a central connection node."
"And a resonance modulator, and a bypass trigger, and a three-way failsafe."
"Those aren't actually necessary if you alter the connection frequencies right from the command module."
"That's incredibly precise tuning to do by hand."
"You Drifted with a Kaiju! With a system you made out of junk!"
"That was different. That was the last chance in a war, and only I was going to get hurt. Hermann volunteered himself."
"I'll do whatever it takes to get Mako back." It's not like any mistakes can turn Raleigh's brain into any worse mush. Maybe. At worst he'll just end up catatonic like her, and maybe everyone would be relieved.
"Same goes for me. She's all the family I have left." Jake squeezes Mako's hand.
"Help me out then, Aquamarine." Newt is already buzzing around the room.
"It's Kensie."
"We'll need to get the doctors to sign off. I'll handle them. Shouldn't be a problem after that little stunt you pulled in the hallway, Becket," Jake mutters. "I think half the Shatterdome's probably heard by now." Raleigh can't bring himself to care. As long as it gets Mako back, he'll gladly spend the rest of his life out of the PPDC, or even in jail, if McTavish decides that warranted assault charges.
It takes a few hours, during which Newt consumes approximately three more cups of coffee, Hermann starts five arguments with him and gives up in despair when he realizes the caffeine-high man will never listen to him, resorting to jabbing Newt with his cane whenever he says something Hermann thinks is incredibly stupid, Jake falls asleep in his chair twice and each time asks why they didn't wake him up, Kensie commandeers two full neural bridges and a decent command board by flirting with the cute eighteen-year-old female cadet in charge of commissary, and Raleigh tries to avoid anyone he doesn't know. At the end of that time, there's a makeshift Drift apparatus crisscrossing the room (thank God it's one of the large private ones or they'd never have the space) and Newt looks tense but ready.
"Okay. Well, it's as good as it's gonna get. You ready?"
Raleigh nods. Jake mutters something that might be yes. Both of them slip the modified helmets on and adjust them. Hermann adjusts the controls. Newt and Kensie position the third gently over Mako's head. Two nurses are standing by with full crash kits, monitoring the vital readings carefully. Raleigh wonders if they're also prepared to deal with something happening to him or Jake.
"Engaging neural handshake in three, two, one…" Kensie's voice is the last thing Raleigh hears before the world falls away in shades of blue. Don't chase the R.A.B.I.T…