Alex Irvine - Pacific Rim

Newt’s face stung and he realized he had been scraped and cut in several places from flying debris, or the fall. He didn’t care. When he got to street level he saw that Otachi had driven Gipsy Danger straight through the lower part of a glass tower, leaving a hole he could see through. The view only lasted for a moment, however, because as Newt got both feet under him out on the street, the undermined skyscraper collapsed. A rolling storm of dust overwhelmed the refugees. They ran away from it, again getting as far away from Newt as possible, although this time he doubted that was their intention.

He went another way, doubling away around the broken edge of the hole torn in the street and cutting through side streets to follow the battle. Newt was running and out of breath, seeing the world through cracked lenses, giddy and terrified and utterly absorbed by what he was seeing and hearing and experiencing inside his head. The kaiju knew where and how to find him because they were connected .

Right now, the kaiju’s blood was up. It had destroyed one Jaeger today, and had another one nearly in its grip.

Newt skidded around a corner and saw Otachi charge into Gipsy Danger, snapping and raking its talons across Gipsy’s armored exterior. It spat and drooled constantly, splattering gobs of acidic saliva across the Jaeger and everything else in range.

Gipsy Danger wrestled free and leapt to the top of Hong Kong’s municipal palace. Otachi followed and the fight took on a strange neon glow from the saturating glare of Hong Kong’s downtown. Gipsy Danger ducked and counterpunched, dodged and weaved, barely staying free of the kaiju’s grip.

Otachi pivoted and swung its tail, spiked at the tip… Stegosaurus , Newt thought. Yes. Stegosaurus was a first draft of this. With a flash he realized that the Cat-4 from Manila in 2019 had been the second draft. It had also fought with a barbed tail. Whoever was creating the kaiju, they were iterating on them the way programmers iterated on code… or laboratory personnel iterated on experiments, always improving.

Gipsy Danger avoided the attack and caught the tail in both hands as it swung back.

Otachi thrashed and pulled, roaring its fury, but Gipsy Danger held tight… and then braced itself and heaved up with both hands balled around the kaiju’s tail.

Otachi screamed as Gipsy Danger ripped its tail off.

Losing its balance, the kaiju toppled onto the street. It recovered quickly and Newt saw that Gipsy Danger had another problem.

The tail had come to life.

It coiled around Gipsy Danger’s forearms and revealed itself to be a trilaterally symmetrical set of pincered jaws, which snapped and spat at Gipsy Danger’s face.

The second brain, Newt thought. Here’s one reason why an organism would need a second brain. Amazing. He could hear the sound of cracking and groaning metal as the tail squeezed more tightly on Gipsy Danger. Then it wriggled out of Gipsy Danger’s grip and the pincers bit deep into the Jaeger’s shoulder. Oil and lubricant spurted, taking on strange colors in the ambient wash of neon. Newt’s single brain ran away with him and he could almost envision the endless chain of incremental improvements that led from Stegosaurus through Otachi. Strands of kaiju DNA danced in his head.

While Gipsy Danger grappled with the tail, Otachi had gotten its balance back. It folded its arms tightly, tucked its head down, and Newt saw its throat start to heave. It made a sound like a dog about to puke—a three-hundred foot tall dog. Newt put two and two together: the kaiju’s corrosive interior fluids, the way this one constantly drooled…

It was about to spit.

And if Newt was any judge of kaiju, which he was, the gob of bile Otachi spat out would eat right through Gipsy Danger’s armor. Perhaps fatally.

Otachi kept heaving and gulping. The tail dug at Gipsy Danger’s shoulder. Gipsy Danger pulled with its other arm, keeping the tail from getting a better grip.

A hissing blast of white vapor from Gipsy Danger’s side momentarily obscured both Jaeger and—sentient?— tail. At first Newt thought something had gone wrong, that the tail had punctured a vital system. Then the plumes of vapor dissipated and Newt understood.

The tail was still, and glittering with ice.

The coolant tanks! Raleigh, or Mako, or whoever was piloting Gipsy Danger, had vented one of the flank coolant reservoirs. Good move, thought Newt… as long as the Jaeger didn’t have to stay in the field much longer, If it did, soon it would overheat. That was the downside to the old nuclear Jaegers. The fission reaction produced so much waste heat that practically the entire Mark III had to be engineered just around the problem of conducting and dissipating heat.

This time it had worked out, because like the irritating cowboy he was, Raleigh Becket had found a combat technique that wasn’t in any manual. Newt was sure it was Raleigh. None of the other Rangers knew Gipsy Danger well enough to even think of that maneuver.

Well, except Mako. Tendo Choi had taught her everything he knew about Mark IIIs, which was at least as much as Raleigh Becket knew…

The tail shattered and fell to the street in fragments as Gipsy Danger shook it off and stepped toward Otachi.

The kaiju gulped, heaved one last time, and unloaded a giant acidic loogie—that was the only way the dazed Newt could think of it. Spattering Gipsy Danger’s torso and legs, the bile quickly dissolved the exterior armor. In some places Newt could see the hyper-torque motor relays and liquid-synapse conduit shielding within seconds. For the moment they were holding their system integrity, it seemed.

But Otachi was heaving and gulping, ready to do it again.

Gipsy Danger lunged forward and grabbed the kaiju’s neck sac, squeezing off the bile supply. The flash-freezing of the tail had also sealed the wound in Gipsy Danger’s shoulder, enabling the Jaeger to get a chokehold on Otachi. The kaiju thrashed and clawed at Gipsy Danger. Twisting at the bile sac, which glowed bright blue in the falling dusk, Gipsy Danger tore it right out of Otachi’s throat and flung it away back toward the harbor, trailing gobbets of skin and glowing blue droplets of acidic bile.

Otachi roared in agonized fury and pounded Gipsy Danger down to the ground, using its superior size to overpower the Jaeger. It raised its arms, and Newt got another surprise as it unfolded its wings—they were much larger than the failed version he had seen in his Drift. That kaiju had looked like a child’s drawing of a flying kaiju, done with a child’s idea of things like lift and load-bearing balance. These wings spanned twice the kaiju’s height and when they began to beat, cars blew away underneath them. They beat slowly at first but quickly gathered speed until their motion was a blur. Newt found it uncanny how much the progression reminded him of Jumphawk rotors powering up.

Otachi even behaved like a Jumphawk, lifting away from the ground with Gipsy Danger gripped in its rear claws. Gipsy fought and pounded at the kaiju’s lower body, but couldn’t get any power behind its blows while dangling in space. Otachi rose above the Hong Kong skyline and disappeared into the low rain clouds, leaving no trace. Taking Gipsy Danger and its pilots with it.

Early engagements with kaiju have shown that the two primary dangers to Jaeger pilots are crushing/impact injuries and drowning. New iterations of the Jaeger incorporate improvements to address both of these dangers and lessen Ranger field mortality. They are as follows: