Alex Irvine: Pacific Rim

We always thought alien life would come from the stars… but it came from beneath the sea.

A fissure between two tectonic plates in the Pacific Ocean. A portal between dimensions, one we would come to know simply as The Breach.

I was fifteen when the first kaiju made land in San Francisco. It came through the Breach on August 11, 2013, at oh seven hundred hours. A beast as big as a skyscraper.

By the time tanks, jets, and missiles took it down, six days and thirty-five miles later, three cities were destroyed and tens of thousands of lives were lost.

Some of those missiles were tactical nukes. The kaiju, which got the code name Trespasser, survived the first two. The third finally took it down, but there are places in the Bay Area where people won’t be able to live for centuries. You’ve heard of Oblivion Bay? That’s how Oblivion Bay happened.

But the monster was dead. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

Then the Breach puked out another kaiju, five months later. It headed for Hong Kong, and when they nuked it they created the Exclusion Zone. The third came a little less than eight months after that. It almost destroyed Sydney before it too was nuked to cinders. Every time, tactical nukes eventually took the kaiju down, but large swathes of the world’s great Pacific cities were being destroyed and rendered uninhabitable.

We couldn’t keep nuking them, or pretty soon the Earth was going to be destroyed while we were trying to save it. And no conventional military could handle them. They didn’t even notice tank shells. Hellfire missiles hurt them, a little, but couldn’t take them down. They were the closest thing to invincible that our world had ever seen.

But that was where humanity started to show its best. The world came together, pooling its resources and throwing aside old rivalries for the sake of the greater good: the survival of the human race. The Jaeger Project created a way for two human beings to merge their brains into a single organic supercomputer more powerful than anything you could make out of silicon. Why? Because in Germany and Australia and Japan, the best roboticists and engineers and military minds in the world were putting their heads together to create the only thing that could stop something the size of a kaiju without resorting to nukes: Robots.

Thirty stories tall, bristling with weaponry and wired to respond to their pilots’ commands as if they were extensions of the pilots’ own brains… it was time for the kaiju to pick on something their own size.

The Jaeger program was born.

In a way, I was, too.

NAMEGipsy Danger

GENERATIONMark III

DATE OF SERVICEJuly 10, 2017

DATE OF TERMINATIONn/a

RANGER TEAM ASSIGNED

Yancy Becket, Raleigh Becket

Current base of operations: Anchorage Shatterdome

MISSION HISTORY

Gipsy Danger is credited with four kaiju kills: LA-17 “Yamarashi,” Los Angeles, October 17, 2017; PSJ-18, Puerto San José, May 20, 2018; SD-19 “Clawhook,” San Diego, July 22, 2019; MN-19, Manila, December 16, 2019.

OPERATING SYSTEM

BLPK 4.1 with liquid circuitry neural pathways

POWER SYSTEM

Nuclear vortex turbine

ARMAMENTS

• I-19 particle dispersal cannon, biology-aware plasma weapon, forearm mounted (retractable)

• S-11 dark matter pulse launcher (internal mount)

NOTES

Improved reactor shielding installed post-rollout. All Rangers who have deployed in pre-Mark IV Jaegers are required to maintain a daily dose of Metharocin for the duration of their service in the Pan-Pacific Defense Corps.

“BOGIE ADVANCING FAST IN SECTOR SEVEN,”Tendo Choi said.

“Signature and category…”

Tendo scanned and synthesized the data from the array of hundreds of remote sensors that dotted the Pacific Ocean centered on the Breach south of Guam. He could get solid information on a kaiju’s mass, speed, and physical form within seconds of it emerging from the Marianas Trench.

“Jesus,” Tendo said. “Eight thousand seven hundred metric tons displacement, sir. Pegging the meter of Category III.”

“Tactics and trajectory.” The voice belonged to Stacker Pentecost. Quiet, authoritative, British.

Tendo scanned the deployment pings of the other Jaeger bases around the Pacific Rim.

“California sent Romeo Blue… but it slipped by without breaking the ten-mile line.” That was the Jaegers’ target distance for intercepting kaiju. If you let them get inside ten miles, it was hard as hell to stop them before they got their feet on land… and their teeth into the unfortunate people who had not yet evacuated that land.

Even though observing the kaiju was a piece of cake at first—they always came from the same place, so Tendo was guaranteed to get a good look at them right off the bat—keeping track of them in the open ocean was a lot harder. They were fast and their silicon-based anatomy meant they didn’t have a thermal signature that showed up against the deep-ocean background. Radar worked well at closer range, but the Pacific Ocean was big enough that nobody could get complete real-time radar coverage at the depths the kaiju occupied.

That meant defensive action had to take place along the continental shelves and inward, where the kaiju were a little easier to spot… but by then, they were also dangerously close to land. Jaeger deploys happened on a knife edge of timing and luck.

“Get California on the comm,” Pentecost said. “I want the satellite reading on-screen. And get Gipsy Danger on deck. Now.”

Raleigh Becket heard the alarm and was moving before he was completely awake, swinging out of the bottom bunk in the Alaska Shatterdome’s officers’ quarters and talking before his feet had hit the ground.

“Yancy, get up! Movement in the Breach!”

He got his shirt on. Yancy didn’t move.

“Let’s go, bro!” Raleigh kicked the edge of his brother’s bunk. They had divvied up opposite personal qualities the way siblings close in age often did. Raleigh snapped one-hundred-percent awake right away; Yancy was lucky to reach full awareness before it was time to go to bed again. “We’re being deployed!”

“Great. Good morning,” Yancy grumbled.

It sometimes seemed to Raleigh that his brother would sleep his life away, but man, not Raleigh. There was too much out there.

Including, at this moment, a kaiju to be killed.

“This one’s a Category III, biggest yet,” Raleigh said, checking the deployment monitor while he finished dressing. “Codename: Knifehead.”

Yancy muttered something incomprehensible. At least he was out of bed and moving. Raleigh was already at the door, bouncing on the balls of his feet while Yancy finished stretching and pried his eyes open.