Pacific Rim Uprising--Official Movie Novelization Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Also Available from Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

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  About the Author

  Available now from Titan Books

  Also available from Titan Books:

  Pacific Rim Uprising: Ascension

  The Official Movie Prequel

  FROM DIRECTOR

  STEVEN S. DEKNIGHT

  NOVELIZATION BY

  ALEX IRVINE

  TITAN BOOKS

  Pacific Rim Uprising: The Official Movie Novelization

  Print edition ISBN: 9781785657689

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781785657696

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: March 2018

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  © 2018 Legendary

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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  TO HARUO NAKAJIMA, THE MAN IN THE

  GODZILLA SUIT

  1

  EDITORIAL: THANKS, PPDC, AND SO LONG

  Look, the Breach has been closed for ten years. If the Kaiju were coming back, they would already have done it. You think they’re not spoiling for a chance to get back at us after we dropped a nuke straight through the Breach into their… world? Dimension? Whatever. It’s not going to happen. We’ve got a Pan Pacific Defense Corps that stands guard against a threat that doesn’t exist. There are how many Shatterdomes? How many Jaegers? How many Rangers and support staff? How much does all that cost?

  Shouldn’t we be spending that money to rebuild everything that was destroyed during the war? When I fly into Los Angeles now, all I can see from Long Beach all the way up to Santa Monica is ruins. Ten years later! Europe was rebuilt sooner than that after World War II! Why, you ask?

  Because everybody knew the war was over. They put their money into rebuilding. They didn’t waste it on more armies, more bases. No. They got on with their lives.

  We’re not doing that. We’re still staring out at the Pacific Ocean thinking it’s full of monsters, and it’s not.

  It’s time to move on. It’s time to demobilize the Pan Pacific Defense Corps. Mothball the Jaegers, shutter the Shatterdomes, and get on with the twenty-first century.

  The Pan Pacific Defense Corps scrapyard in Santa Monica, California spread over hundreds of acres that had once been prime beachfront. During the course of the Kaiju War, much of Santa Monica had been destroyed, and fallen Jaegers from up and down the West Coast now lay behind barbed wire. Around the scrapyard, what had once been one of the Los Angeles area’s most beautiful cities was now a ruin. Those who could get out were long since gone, and only the desperate remained.

  Jake Pentecost wasn’t exactly desperate, but he was in a bit of a bind. He’d gotten on the wrong side of one of the local crime bosses, by the name of Sonny, and now he had to buy his way out of the problem by finding Sonny some high-quality salvage that Sonny could move on the local black market. Ordinarily Jake would have steered clear of burgling a PPDC facility—the penalties were pretty stiff—but he knew the area around this Jaeger graveyard well enough to figure he could skip out before any trouble arose.

  Even so, it was risky, and Jake wouldn’t have been here if Sonny hadn’t made it clear that the alternative involved lots of pain and maybe death. Well, definitely death.

  He led Sonny and Sonny’s goons up to a part of the electrified fence surrounding the yard and pointed to the spot they should cut through. The goons were quick about it—this clearly wasn’t the first time they’d cut a fence—and a minute later Jake stepped through a nice big hole right next to a NO TRESPASSING sign that also bore the logo of the PPDC. Seeing it gave Jake a little spike of regret. He’d been a Jaeger pilot once.

  But that was the past. He couldn’t do anything about it, just like he couldn’t do anything about all the other bullshit that came along with being the son of Stacker Pentecost. When your father died saving the world, there was no way to live up to that. Jake had long since quit trying. He’d turned himself into a pretty good… well, some people would call him a thief. He thought of himself as more of a salvage expert.

  It was a good life if it didn’t get you killed. In this world you had to hustle. The coastal cities, most of them, were still relief zones, filled with people just trying to get by—rubbing up against Kaiju-worshipping cults that went around bemoaning the closure of the Breach like it was the Crucifixion. Then you had your homegrown gangsters doing what gangsters always did—only now they had another sideline in cobbling together homegrown junk Jaegers from salvaged parts. Anyone with money had moved inland, getting away from the chaos and the possibility that another Breach would open up and the Kaiju War would start all over again. But their fear was his opportunity, because they left behind empty mansions like the one Jake squatted in up in Malibu. He also had a little bit of experience of Jaegers, which meant he had a better nose for where to find Jaeger tech than the average person. That put him in a pretty good spot. Usually. He had gotten a reputation for delivering the goods, and then—okay, being honest here—he’d let it go to his head and he’d started bending the rules a little. Ignoring well-established informal boundaries between different gang lords. Getting your hands on good bits of Jaeger tech was usually worth the risk, since a good score could set you up for a year… but every once in a while it blew up in your face, which was why Jake was in Santa Monica instead of back in Malibu where he belonged.

  Once they were inside the yard, Jake got out a beat-up old plasma tracker. It detected the energy signatures of plasma components even through a Jaeger’s heavy shielding. Indispensable equipment for the ambitious salvage expert. As he was turning it on, Sonny started to walk ahead. Jake caught him and pulled him back behind the mangled remains of a Mark II Jaeger. When he was a little kid, he’d known them all by sight and talked about them the way kids of a previous generation had known all the
details about their favorite Pokémon or baseball players. Just as Jake yanked Sonny back, a searchlight swept over the spot where he’d just been. The PPDC patrolled the yard, but their timing never varied. Jake had done his research.

  Sonny glared at him, but he could hardly be mad that Jake had just saved the operation and kept them all out of jail. Jake led them around the first scrapped Jaeger, keeping an eye on the plasma tracker. It emitted a soft ping as they neared another Jaeger. This one wasn’t quite as messed up as the first, but it was missing one arm and its head was shattered. Jake recognized it, of course: Romeo Blue, the only tripedal Jaeger ever put into service. Three Kaiju kills, all in partnership with Gipsy Danger. Destroyed by Insidia in Panama City, 2020, with the loss of both pilots. Before that, Jake remembered seeing the parade after Romeo Blue had killed the Kaiju Takubus back in the early years after the opening of the Breach. It was huge, lumbering, slow, but seemingly invincible.

  Seemingly. To a little kid whose father was already a hero after Tokyo. But now Jake was all grown up.

  “This one,” he said.

  Sonny and his men followed Jake through a hatch and into the Jaeger’s immense interior. Other than Jake, none of them had ever been inside a Jaeger before, and they eyed the surroundings with awed expressions.

  “You sure it’s here?” Sonny asked.

  Jake found the access door he was looking for. On the other side of it would be Romeo Blue’s plasma chamber, where the Jaeger’s power core and associated hardware would have been collected and shielded. The door was jammed shut, but the control panel next to it would have an override. Jake got his fingers into the seam at the edge of the panel and wrenched it open.

  “Power cores are stripped before Jaegers get decommissioned,” he said as he felt around inside the panel. “But sometimes they miss the tertiary plasma capacitors. Hell of a score on the black market, if this one’s still holding a charge.”

  “You’d better hope so,” Sonny said.

  Something about his tone of voice made Jake look back over his shoulder. Sonny was holding a gun. “Okay,” Jake said. “Let’s not get all excited.”

  “Just playing the odds,” Sonny said. “You cheated Barada in Juarez, skipped out on Azimi in Hong Kong—”

  “They had it coming,” Jake said. Who wouldn’t take the chance to cheat Tony Azimi? That guy was a scumbag.

  “And stole from me in my own backyard,” Sonny added.

  That was a little harder to paper over. Jake had in fact pulled a job in Sonny’s territory without telling Sonny about it or cutting him in. From Sonny’s perspective, that was a problem. From Jake’s perspective, it had been a chance to make a quick score and maybe establish his bona fides as someone who knew where to find the good stuff in the ruins of Southern California. Sonny must have at least partially bought into that, because he was giving Jake a chance to make good by displaying those bona fides. “And now I’m stealing for you,” Jake said. “Circle of life. We good?”

  “You deliver, and yeah, we’re good.” Sonny’s expression didn’t change. Jake tried to gauge whether or not he was telling the truth. It didn’t really matter at the moment.

  His fingers found the emergency release lever behind the control panel. Jake grinned and pulled the release. A heavy thunk sounded from the door as its bolts disengaged. It opened with a low grinding noise. The Jaeger wasn’t powered anymore, but the backup battery systems on the old Mark I models held their power for a long time.

  Jake stood and noticed that Sonny hadn’t put the gun away. Not a good sign. But he put his best face on it, keeping up his grin and gesturing through the open door. “Let’s get rich,” he said.

  He went into the chamber first. These old Jaegers had big plasma chambers because PPDC techs hadn’t been able to optimize the plasma density before they had to get the Jaegers into service. The space was the size of several rooms in his mansion. Cables and conduits ran along the walls, converging on a central spot where the plasma capacitor was located.

  Or should have been.

  Jake stopped in the middle of the room, unable to believe the bad luck. The capacitor shunt cables were still sparking, which meant that someone had gotten there within the last few minutes. Any longer and the residual energy would have all bled out already. “No, no, it says it’s here,” Jake said. He glanced down at his tracker, which still said the capacitor was right there in front of him.

  He turned toward Sonny. “It should be right here—”

  Sonny smashed him across the face with the butt of his gun. Jake went down, landing on hands and knees. Blood dripped off his chin from a cut high on his cheek.

  “Somebody please kill this guy for me,” Sonny said. His goons drew guns and leveled them at Jake.

  “Wait, wait!” Jake gave the tracker a smack. The screen flickered and went dark… then came back on. Now it showed the capacitor on the move.

  But not too far away.

  “Someone else is in here!” he said, jumping up.

  “Someone what?” Sonny seemed to have forgotten about killing him for the moment.

  Jake scrambled over cable housings and big emplacements of dead machinery, aiming for an exit door halfway up the far wall. “They have the capacitor!” he said. “Come on! The signal’s close!”

  Sonny and the goons came after him. “Jake!” Sonny shouted. “Jake, you sonofa—”

  His voice was cut off as Jake pulled the release lever on the door and it slammed shut. Now all Jake had to do was keep track of the capacitor signal and get out of the Jaeger before Sonny’s goons caught up with him. He ran through the maze of maintenance corridors inside Romeo Blue’s torso, ducking into a tunnel lined with heavy power cables. Echoing through the Jaeger’s interior, he could hear Sonny shouting. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to beat them to one of the exits… but then again, maybe he didn’t have to. A plan started to form in his head. Like most of his best plans, it was half-assed and risky.

  The cable tunnel split and as Jake shoved some of the cables aside to make the turn, he came face to face with one of Sonny’s goons. The goon was pretty fast, getting his gun up… but Jake was that much faster, laying the guy out with a single punch before he could pull the trigger.

  Before the goon had hit the ground, bullets tore into the cables around him. Sonny had found him. He scrambled into the side tunnel, which angled down steeply enough that it was easier to slide to the bottom. When his feet hit level ground again, he was in a shunt room. A dead end. He ran to the far end of it, turning to face the mouth of the tunnel as Sonny and his other men caught up.

  “Nice try,” Sonny said with a cruel grin. This time he apparently didn’t want anyone else to shoot Jake, because he raised his own gun.

  And that’s when Jake’s plan paid off. He kicked out and his booted foot hit a lever on the floor. It cranked over and a maintenance door sprang open under Sonny and the goons, dropping them into a hold under the floor. They landed hard and Jake kicked the lever again, slamming the door shut.

  “Yeah,” Jake said. “We’re good.” Sometimes it paid to know odd details about old Jaegers.

  Then he took off running, following the signal on the tracker.

  He came out of Romeo Blue’s torso at the shoulder joint, maybe fifty feet off the ground. Below, a figure in a hoodie was sprinting across the open ground toward a motorcycle, a backpack in one hand.

  The capacitor was in that backpack. Jake made a jump for a cable hanging down from a crane near Romeo Blue’s head. He caught it and started to let himself down, hand over hand—then the mechanism let go and he was hanging on for dear life. It seized up again after he had dropped about twenty feet, and his momentum jerked him loose. He fell the rest of the way to the roof of a shipping container on the ground, landing flat on his back. The impact knocked the wind out of him, but he rolled off the container and started after the thief again. The motorcycle revved up and the hooded figure skidded off in a spray of gravel. Jake started in pursuit, hoping he cou
ld maybe get over the fence and out the access road before the motorcycle went around through the open gate… but he heard engines and froze.

  PPDC security vehicles tore past, following the motorcycle. Dammit, Jake thought. That’s what happens when you fire guns in a Jaeger scrapyard. If the thief was caught, he’d never get the capacitor. If the thief got away, though…

  He looked down at the tracker. The signal was strong, and it was still moving.

  2

  FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

  SHAO ANNOUNCES DRONE INITIATIVE

  SHANGHAI, 9 JUNE 2034

  Shao Liwen, founder and CEO of Shao Industries, announced today that her company had secured funding from the Pan Pacific Defense Corps to build a fleet of Drone Jaegers based on prototypes created by Shao and demonstrated at a PPDC Council closed session earlier this year. The potential impact on worldwide PPDC budget expenditures is significant, since current deployment models require the upkeep of Shatterdomes in every region of the Pacific Rim. Each Shatterdome must be staffed with Rangers and enormous support crews of technicians and engineers.

  Shao envisions a new PPDC, with fewer Shatterdomes and smaller crews. Drone Jaegers would be operated remotely from a single central PPDC facility, eliminating the operational expense of Ranger team stations at every Shatterdome. Further, Drones would not require the installation of expensive Conn-Pods and Drift cradles, reducing the unit cost of each Jaeger by as much as fifteen percent. Another benefit is reduced risk to the lives of Rangers, who suffer a regrettable number of training accidents and Drift-related maladies even apart from the combat dangers risked when they face Kaiju or other threats.

  If approved by the PPDC Council, the Drone fleet will be ready for initial deployments and field testing within the next calendar year.

  By the time Jake got going after the capacitor thief, the signal was all the way across town, headed south. He followed, going all night until dawn found him in the southern part of Santa Monica, which was even more of a ruin than the area around the Jaeger graveyard.