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  “Left hemisphere linked and ready,” he said. “Gipsy Danger ready to deploy.”

  They each raised one arm, and Gipsy Danger did the same, confirming the hundred-percent link between the gargantuan Jaeger and the twinned human minds controlling it.

  “Gentlemen,” Pentecost said, “your orders are to hold the Miracle Mile off Anchorage. Copy?”

  The Miracle Mile was the last-ditch perimeter, so named because if a kaiju got through the ten-mile cordon, it was usually a miracle if a Jaeger could keep it from coming ashore.

  “Copy that,” Yancy said. Then he hesitated as their heads-up display showed a new signal. “Sir,” he went on. “There’s still a civilian vessel in the Gulf—”

  Pentecost cut him off.

  “You’re protecting a city of two million people. You will not risk those lives for a boat that holds ten. Am I clear?”

  He was clear, but something else was also clear: if Gipsy Danger engaged the kaiju anywhere near that boat, the waves generated by the clash would tear it to pieces. Raleigh hadn’t joined the Jaeger program to create collateral damage. He’d joined up to prevent it.

  Raleigh looked at Yancy, who was already looking at him. Raleigh turned off the comm.

  “You know what I’m thinking?” Raleigh said.

  “I’m in your brain,” Yancy said.

  They grinned at each other.

  “Let’s go fishing,” Raleigh said.

  Simultaneously they hit the switches that engaged Gipsy Danger’s motor controls. The Jaeger roared to life, spouting a column of fire into the stormy night. Its warning horn cut through the storm and the Jaeger strode forward away from the LOCCENT bay doors, a phalanx of helicopters peeling away from it and returning to base as it disappeared into the snow and spray and the steam of its passage.

  OP-ED

  Is the Jaeger Program Worth It?

  We’ve all seen the pictures, and yes, they are inspiring. Coyote Tango bravely finishing off Onibaba with one conscious pilot. The flash and crackle of Cherno Alpha’s SparkFist. Lucky Seven standing toe-to-toe with a two-hundred-foot monster in Hong Kong Bay. (What names!)

  Does your kid want to be a Ranger? Mine does. She’s nine years old and doesn’t remember a time when the word kaiju didn’t occur a dozen times in every news report. The Rangers are heroes to her, the way... well, there’s where I lose the thread. Because there has never been anything like the Rangers: a group of maybe one hundred people who hold the entire fate of the human race in their hands.

  But hold on a minute. Is that really true?

  What if the Rangers are really just holding us back? What if we’re being programed into believing that it’s okay to lose slowly rather than take a shot at winning once and for all?

  What if our reliance on Jaegers, and on the visceral thrill of watching one of them beat a kaiju into hamburger, is distracting us from something that might actually work? Because let’s face it, folks. The Jaeger program isn’t working. The kaiju keep coming, faster and faster, and there’s no way we can build Jaegers fast enough to keep up. Not forever.

  Kaiju are big. They move slowly. Let’s just get the hell out of the way. Build the Walls, pick up all those millions of people from Shanghai to San Francisco and move them inland. and spend those trillions of dollars currently rusting away in Oblivion Bay on something that might actually work.

  The Rangers are heroes. But like all heroes, they’re bound to find that time has passed them by

  2

  SEVEN MILES OFF ANCHORAGE, GIPSY DANGER’S scanners picked up the conversation on the bridge of the fishing vessel identified as Saltchuck. The captain and his first mate, it sounded like, worried about the storm and which way they could run the fastest to shelter.

  “We won’t even make it past the shallows,” the first mate was saying.

  “What about that island?” the captain asked. “It’s three miles—”

  Then he caught himself. Raleigh could almost hear him thinking: There’s no island on the chart there.

  “It’s two miles, sir,” the mate said. A moment later, in a voice grown tight with awe and fear, he said, “One.”

  On Gipsy Danger’s primary heads-up, Raleigh and Yancy saw Saltchuck, and closing swiftly, inexorably, on it they saw, the size of a landmass, the kaiju bogey.

  “Good thing we can’t hear Pentecost right about now,” Yancy said.

  Knifehead rose from the ocean off Saltchuck’s port side, standing a hundred feet and more out of the water. Four arms ended in webbed claws, each big enough to crush Saltchuck like a beer can. Its head was a blade, with one edge narrowing from its upper jaw to a point and the other defining the top of its skull. Active sonar outlined the rest of its body under the water, revealing it to be a biped with a powerful tail. Like a dinosaur, kind of, only an order of magnitude larger than any dinosaur that ever lived.

  Do not confuse them with any terrestrial life forms, Raleigh remembered some egghead saying in a briefing. They are built on a template of silicon, not carbon. Whatever is on the other side of the Breach, it is a stranger place than we can imagine.

  “Kaiju,” Raleigh heard the captain say, the man’s voice tinny and small over the roar of the elements and the tectonic sounds coming from the creature itself.

  “Better close it up,” Yancy said.

  And Gipsy Danger surged forward through the water, covering the remaining distance to the Saltchuck. On the other side of the boat, Knifehead reared up.

  It was big, Tendo had been right about that. Its open mouth would have fit Saltchuck comfortably, and each of its teeth was as tall as a person. A large person. The wave of its emergence crested over Gipsy Danger’s exhaust ports and steam exploded up, swirling away almost at once in the wind.

  “Aaaaaaand, showtime,” Yancy said.

  Gipsy Danger had stayed low, swimming as necessary across the deeper waters of the Gulf of Alaska. Now with solid footing available in shallower water, Raleigh and Yancy planted the Jaeger’s feet and stood up, exploding through the surface of the ocean in a two-hundred-foot geyser lit by spotlights and booming with rescue horns. Raleigh loved the horns. He privately had a theory that they scared the kaiju, but he didn’t really care. They just sounded badass, was all.

  “First things first,” Raleigh said.

  And Gipsy Danger scooped Saltchuck up in the palm of one hand.

  Then, as one, the brothers ducked, and Gipsy Danger did the same, avoiding a decapitating swipe from Knifehead’s triple claws.

  “Time to burn,” Yancy said.

  Gipsy Danger’s right fist rearranged itself into a barrel housing with four symmetrically amplifier lens arrays around a circular gap that extended up inside the Jaeger’s forearm. Flanges rotated on the wrist and locked the plasma-cannon assembly into place. Steam and static flares crackled around it as it powered up.

  Knifehead swiped again, advancing through the water where Saltchuck had been, and Gipsy Danger ducked again, holding the boat out behind it and away from the kaiju. Over the scanner came the confused cries of the ship’s crew. In the back of his mind, Raleigh was thinking that he hoped Pentecost could hear.

  “Yup,” Yancy said, which was his way of saying that the plasma cannon was ready.

  The first shot hit Knifehead square in the midsection, right about where a human’s solar plexus would be. The kaiju staggered and the second shot knocked it further backward, twin charred craters in its torso. Its arms flailed and it screamed.

  “Stay on it,” Raleigh said. The plasma cannon was recharging.

  Didn’t look like they’d need it, though. The kaiju lost its footing and toppled sideways into the ocean, which boiled around the wounds, reacting to the mixture of salt water and the kaiju’s corrosive blood. The motions of its arms grew less coordinated and it sank slowly.

  The last thing to disappear was the bridge of its bladed skull.

  “I like this cannon,” Raleigh said.

  “I know you do,” Yancy said. “M
e too.”

  “Better fire up the comm and tell Pentecost.”

  “He already knows.”.

  “Sure, but he hasn’t heard us say it. You know how he is about following protocols.”

  Raleigh toggled the comm back on, and the interior of Gipsy Danger’s Conn-Pod filled with Pentecost’s glowering face.

  “Gipsy!” he barked. “What the hell is going on?”

  Raleigh racked the plasma cannon back into its harness inside Gipsy Danger’s forearm. Turning to face the shoreline a few miles distant, he set Saltchuck down in the water and gave it a gentle push in the direction of dry land.

  “Job’s done, sir. Lit it up twice and bagged our fifth kill.”

  “You disobeyed direct orders, Ranger!”

  Before Raleigh could say something wiseass and get them in trouble, Yancy cut in.

  “Sir, we intercepted the kaiju, and... you know... saved everyone. Before the Miracle Mile and everything.”

  “Plus nobody can get Kaiju Blue if it’s at the bottom of the ocean, right?” Raleigh added. Kaiju Blue was bad news, a kind of shock reaction the human body suffered when recently dead kaiju started to off-gas toxins in the hours after they died. It killed a lot of people when kaiju went down in populated areas. Today it would only kill fish, and who knew if they got Kaiju Blue, anyway?

  Pentecost couldn’t contest the results, they knew that. But they also knew that he wouldn’t stand for the way they’d gotten there.

  “Get back to your post,” Pentecost growled. “Now—”

  It looked like he was about to say something else, probably along the lines of how he was going to have them busted down to permanent Boneslum latrine duty if they ever did something like that again, when Tendo Choi’s face appeared on an inset display. An alarm blared both back at LOCCENT and inside Gipsy Danger.

  “Kaiju signature!” Tendo called out. “It’s rising!”

  Raleigh swiped the LOCCENT feed off the HUD and spawned an area view. He and Yancy scanned and spun. Where was it? All they were seeing was open water and an iceberg.

  Over the comm, Pentecost’s voice wasn’t angry anymore.

  “Rangers, get out of there!” he commanded.

  They felt it first, as the wave of its approach crashed into Gipsy Danger from behind. The Jaeger reeled. Before they could get their balance, Yancy’s side of the Conn-Pod collapsed inward.

  Sparks shot from damaged wiring and water poured in through a ten-foot gap torn into Gipsy Danger’s head. Looking with his own eyes, no sensors necessary, Raleigh saw Knifehead swing around and down, severing Gipsy Danger’s left arm in a spray of hydraulic fluid and arcing showers of sparks.

  Warning sirens went off at the same time as Raleigh registered that his brother was in crippling pain. It radiated through Raleigh, too, courtesy of the neural handshake that gave them the combined processing power to control Gipsy Danger. Emergency lights strobed in the Conn-Pod, cutting through the flickering images of the heads-up displays that still functioned.

  “Arm’s gone cold,” Yancy said through gritted teeth. He was panting, trying to stay on top of the pain.

  “Overriding now,” Raleigh said. He racked the plasma cannon and started to power it up again. It wasn’t supposed to fire this fast. They were going to be in a world of hurt either way.

  He pivoted away from Knifehead as the wave from Gipsy Danger’s falling arm crashed over Saltchuck. The boat’s stern disappeared under the water but it righted itself and stayed afloat, tossed in the violent waves. Its fishing gear snapped off and was gone. Just like my arm, Raleigh thought. No, Yancy’s arm. The damage to Gipsy Danger was like damage to him. He was having a hard time thinking straight.

  Raleigh put everything Gipsy Danger had into an uppercut that staggered the kaiju long enough for him to pull the arm back and lock in the plasma cannon... but not long enough to fire it!

  Knifehead closed its jaws around the cannon itself and gnawed as it leaned forward, driving the weakened Gipsy Danger back. With an impact that momentarily blacked out all internal systems, Gipsy Danger slammed into the iceberg.

  Raleigh exhaled in a whoof as if he’d had the wind knocked out of him. Before he could react, the kaiju put its head down and impaled Gipsy Danger, driving the point of its skull straight through the Jaeger’s torso and into the million tons of ice behind. Cascading failure alarms sounded as Gipsy Danger’s liquid-circuit neural pathways were interrupted.

  The plasma cannon’s barrel glowed, still functioning despite Knifehead’s attempt to chew through it. They would only get to fire it once. Raleigh raised the arm high and bent at the elbow so the cannon was aimed back down at the kaiju’s head, just behind where its skull disappeared into Gipsy Danger.

  It wouldn’t fire. Even overloading, it wouldn’t fire yet.

  Knifehead reared up and smashed a single claw through the gap in Gipsy Danger’s Conn-Pod. The claw dug around, shredding metal and blacking out all electronics on that side.

  It found Yancy.

  “No,” Raleigh said quietly

  There was no need to scream, Yancy could hear him. Yancy was looking at him, the raw terror of the moment cutting through the shock of the damage he had already suffered through Gipsy Danger...

  “Raleigh, listen to me, you—”

  And then Yancy was gone, torn away into the storm along with that entire side of Gipsy Danger’s head. Freezing rain slashed in through the hole and the Jaeger froze as the neural handshake was broken.

  Raleigh hammered at a bank of manual switches, trying to engage the Crisis Command Matrix.

  Yancy, man, no, don’t be gone, he was saying, or thought he was saying.

  The CCM came online. Raleigh gave it a single command:

  PLASMA CANNON OVERLOAD

  All of Gipsy Danger’s remaining control systems rededicated themselves to the single task of lifting and angling the Jaeger’s arm. Knifehead tore another piece from Gipsy Danger’s skull frame. Raleigh looked it right in the eye, and it looked back.

  It knew we were in here, he thought. How did it know? When did they figure that out?

  Knifehead roared, long and triumphant. It saw the plasma cannon pointed at it, and swiveled to bite down on Gipsy Danger’s arm, tearing at the cannon’s barrel housing and still roaring.

  Raleigh roared back, and fired.

  ***

  Dawn was breaking. Raleigh had never been cold like this. He moved Gipsy Danger step by step. He could hear random snatches of incoming comm traffic, morning news radio out of Anchorage, amplified sounds of surf and wind from the shore just ahead. Another step. Yancy was gone. He could not feel Yancy.

  Gipsy Danger stepped onto dry land. Someone somewhere was shouting for recovery teams. Closer by he heard voices, too; chatter over Saltchuck’s radio. The boat had survived.

  Gipsy Danger stumbled on the shoreline. Raleigh bent, and Gipsy Danger bent, within sight of the Anchorage skyline. He saw two figures, an old man and a boy, gaping at his approach. Sensors picked up the beep of a metal detector.

  Raleigh had nothing left. He couldn’t feel his arm because it had been cut off. No, that was Gipsy Danger’s arm. The Jaeger’s joints squealed and began to freeze up from loss of lubricant through the holes Knifehead had torn in it. Its liquid-circuit neural architecture was misfiring like crazy. Raleigh’s head hurt and he also couldn’t really feel parts of his mind. Something was burning on his skin but if he looked down at it he would lose control of Gipsy Danger and the Jaeger would fall on the old man and the boy. He couldn’t stand upright again.

  Gipsy Danger dropped to its knees and fell forward. Raleigh barely got his arm up and out to stop from going face first into the beach. The Jaeger’s hand was ten feet deep in the frozen sand. Snow blew across the beach, settling in the scalloped patterns carved by the winter wind. Gipsy Danger’s sensors picked up the beep of the metal detector again, faster.

  Shut up, he thought.

  Raleigh disengaged from the motion rig and blacked
out for a moment. When he knew where he was again, he was standing on the sand and could hear the sound of approaching helicopters. He looked up. How had he gotten out onto the beach?

  Climbed out. He realized that he’d climbed out through the shattered cranial viewport, climbed out the same hole Yancy had disappeared through. Cold stung his skin, blood was slick under his suit. The old man with his metal detector caught Raleigh as he started to fall and shouted something at the boy, who ran away down the beach.

  Raleigh stared up into the sky.

  There was blood in Raleigh’s eyes and a hole the shape of his brother in his soul.

  “Yancy?” he said. His drivesuit was shredded. It was cold. The blood in his eyes felt cold. He blacked out again.

  17 APRIL 2020

  FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

  UNITED NATIONS TO SUNSET JAEGER PROGRAM; PAN-PACIFIC DEFENSE PRIORITIES SHIFT TO COASTAL DEFENSE, RESETTLEMENT

  Effective immediately, the United Nations Subcommittee on Kaiju Defense and Security, Pan-Pacific Breach Working Group, is reassigning funding from the Jaeger program.

  The costs of the Jaeger program have proven unsustainable in view of the limited returns the program offers. In the last three years we have spent trillions on Jaegers. A number of those Jaegers have been destroyed and losses to life and property are devastating.

  It could be argued, and has ably been argued by Marshal Pentecost, that our situation would be much worse were it not for the Jaegers. Perhaps so. Yet this is a hypothetical argument, and we are faced with the real-world problem of bankrupting the economies of the developed nations to continue a program whose successes—however notable—no longer justify such an outlay.

  We will sunset the Jaeger program in a manner that continues to prioritize the safety and security of the people of the Pacific Rim nations. While we do this, we will redirect funding toward the following initiatives:

  COASTAL BARRIERS

  No kaiju has attacked a currently standing Wall. The building of these fortifications is the simplest and most cost-effective tool humanity has to combat the kaiju threat.