Alex Irvine - Pacific Rim

Raleigh Becket didn’t believe it for a minute.

Maybe the rest of them did. Maybe they thought that concrete and rebars and I-beams could hold back a kaiju. But none of them had ever seen a kaiju. Raleigh Becket had seen five, up close and personal, and killed every one. With Yancy gone, though, he hadn’t seen the point in going on. Who else was he going to Drift with? Some random Ranger wannabe, deemed compatible by the eggheads after a bunch of tests? He was supposed to do that after sharing the Drift with his brother? No.

That was why Raleigh was standing in the crowd of Wall workers at the morning muster. A light snow was falling off and on, and it was cold. Typical Alaska, even the more temperate parts like Sitka, Raleigh’s current worksite. At least it wasn’t Nome. Also it was a hell of a lot colder in the shadow of the Wall, but since it was morning they were on the sunny side. When they came off shift that afternoon, they would be coming from the deep freeze of forty stories up to the deep freeze of late afternoon in the shadows. Raleigh preferred the mornings.

Usually the morning muster was a by-the-numbers harangue about which materials needed to get where, which parts of the Wall were due for what kind of work, et cetera and so on. Raleigh tuned it all out most mornings, but this morning the shift foreman, a disagreeable side of beef by the name of Miles, varied his schtick.

“I got good news and I got bad news, guys,” he said. “What do you want first?”

Near Miles but on the other side of the crowd from where Raleigh stood watching, a portly guy with a roll half-stuffed into his face called out, “The bad news.”

“Well,” Miles said, “three guys died yesterday working the top of the Wall.”

He let that sink in for a minute, as he always did when he announced fatalities. It wasn’t unusual; they were building the Wall fast, and nobody complained about workplace safety with the fate of the human race on the line.

“Jeez,” the guy with the roll said. “What about the good news?”

Miles held up three red ration cards, fanned out in one hand like he was about to do a card trick.

“I got three new openings… top of the Wall,” he said.

The guy with the roll took one immediately.

“I got no choice,” he said to whoever would listen. “Five mouths to feed.”

The second red ration card disappeared, but there didn’t appear to be much interest in the third. Duty on top of the Wall was about the most dangerous work you could do this side of kaiju dentistry. That was why you got the better ration cards, but dead men didn’t eat.

“No takers?” Miles called out.

There was a pause. Then Raleigh walked up to him and reached out.

“I’ll do it.”

Miles turned and held out the card before he’d registered who had spoken.

“Oh,” he said. “Flyboy. Still sticking around? You sure you got the cojones to work way up there?”

Raleigh didn’t take the bait.

“I’m comfortable with heights,” he said evenly

Miles didn’t give him the card.

“Is that right? Well shut up and make sure you don’t swan dive. I got nobody left to mop you up. Comprende?”

Raleigh took the card and followed the rest of the up-top crew to the elevator. He could feel Miles staring at him as he walked.

Feet spaced across two parallel beams fifty feet above the framed part of the Wall and a hell of a lot farther from the ground, Raleigh welded the last angle brace from those parallel beams to a vertical one that stood another thirty feet above them. It was the highest point of the Wall. If you looked south, you could see the same thing all the way to the horizon: the Wall, different parts of it in various stages of completion depending on terrain and crew availability.

If you looked north, the same, all the way to Nome and the North Slope. No kaiju had ever appeared that far north, but it didn’t do any good to only build part of a wall. If it had been up to the brain trust behind the Wall project, it would have extended across the Arctic coast all the way to Newfoundland.

Raleigh finished the weld and waited for it to cool so he could get a look at it. Solid. He kicked the brace, just out of superstition, and clipped himself into a safety harness.

He jumped off the edge of the Wall and enjoyed the view for the fifty-foot drop down to the main up-top materials staging area, a steel platform bristling with crane arms. There, the chatty guy who liked rolls was trimming the edge of a beam. His name, Raleigh had discovered unwillingly, was Tommy.

“You’re Raleigh, right?” Tommy said as Raleigh unclipped and came over to help prep the beam so it could finish its trip to the top.

Here it comes, Raleigh thought. He nodded.

“Is it true what they say, that you used to ride a Jaeger?”

Not ride exactly, Raleigh thought. But he didn’t contest the point. He nodded again.

“And then you crashed one?” Tommy went on.

For the third time Raleigh nodded.

Tommy whistled. “Don’t those things cost something like sixty billion dollars each?”

Because he couldn’t stand to just keep nodding, Raleigh said, “Never got the bill.”

Tommy stared at him like he wasn’t sure whether Raleigh was joking. For a while they worked together in silence. They got the beam lashed to a crane and as it lifted away to the highest reach of the Wall.

“So how’d you end up in a hole like this?” Tommy asked.

Raleigh had been hoping that Tommy would shut up. He looked over at him and said, “I love the hours. And the silence.”

Nodding and completely missing the point, Tommy said, “Oh, me too. Love it. Some people just don’t get it. They yap and yap and they don’t know when to stop…”

Then he started talking about his kids. Raleigh sighed and flipped down his safety visor. He wouldn’t be able to hear Tommy over the sound of the welding torch… he hoped.

That night they did what they always did, and stopped by the commissary to pick up the day’s rations. Raleigh was walking away from the booth where a bored functionary stamped cards when he heard the word “kaiju”. He looked up.

The preferred dining area for the Wall crew was a tent with a bunch of tables in it, where the crew drank beer, ate bad food, and watched the world slowly come to an end on screens around them. Now, Raleigh’s food was slightly less bad because of the red ration card.

He ducked into the tent, as usual the TV was on, and a chirpy talking head was saying, “Less than an hour ago, a Category III kaiju breached the Sydney barrier.” In the middle of the sentence, shaky cell-phone footage of the event replaced the image of the reporter. A scrolling feed along the bottom of the screen identified the kaiju as Mutavore.

Raleigh stopped and watched. The kaiju tore through the wall built around the perimeter of Sydney Bay, hopscotching islands along an artificial archipelago that had been built in order to keep kaiju out. Aircraft fired missiles at it, as they always did, and Mutavore ignored them, as kaiju always did. It slogged through the harbor, swamping ferries and pleasure boats on its way to the city.

“That thing…” said a voice. Raleigh looked over and saw that even here, he couldn’t avoid Tommy. “It went through the Wall like it was nothing.”

Just like Stacker Pentecost had always said, Raleigh thought. Pentecost hadn’t crossed his mind in a long time. Raleigh lived in the moment. What other choice did he have? In the past, there was mourning. In the future, an endless stretch of the Wall.

The TV reporter kept talking.

“This is the third such attack in less than two months. Two more Jaegers were destroyed.”