Work Text
In the beginning, going into the Drift felt like someone was hacking up your brain with a meat cleaver, while coming out of the Drift was like someone dumping a bucket of molten metal on the shards of your brain and cackling as the remaining pieces melted into a puddle of goo.
In the beginning, the Drift sucked.
But Drifting successfully was different, so that entering the Drift was like inhaling the fresh air of a spring morning, so that you could enjoy the clean, crisp air that was a new perspective melding with your own, and exiting the Drift was like the exhale, peace spreading through your body and filling you with the knowledge that the single breath you just took would be with you for the rest of your life.
The Drift was peace, was everything right about the world, because in the Drift, you didn’t have to be afraid anymore.
And Mako had been afraid for a very long time.
They’re laying on Raleigh’s escape pod, waiting.
For all that it’s the height of summer in the northern hemisphere, it’s cold on the water; “It’s called the albedo effect,” Mako tells him when he thinks it. “Water reflects much more sunlight than land, and so many fewer particles are warmed, leaving the water cooler and as well the air above it.” She would cuddle deeper into his side, but they’re both wearing their drive suits, and that’s just no good for cuddling.
In lieu of aid, they talk, and try to ignore the likelihood that the radiation from both Striker
and
Lady is working its way into their cells and causing irreparable damage.
“You still haven’t told me your story,” Raleigh says as he stares at the horizon. He’s got an arm around Mako’s shoulders, and it’s somehow still comfortable despite the drive suits. “Where’d you come from?”
So Mako talks; “I was born in Tangeshima,” she tells him, and thinks about the white sand beaches and crystal water of her childhood. “It is a small island, and one that was spared from the kaiju.”
Too small
, they both think.
Mako tells him about her father, a sword-maker, and her mother, an engineer at the space station; she tells him what he already knows - tells him about Onibaba, about how Masao’s cancer took them to Tokyo for a specialist, and how he and Sumako brought her shopping to cheer her up, and how she carried her bright red shoe through the abandoned streets, right up until
Sensei
stepped out of that half-broken Jaeger with his half-dead copilot at his side.
She tells him about Tamsin Sevier, who was like an aunt to her until cancer took her away from them. “She was a terrifying woman,” she says, and Raleigh laughs.
“Yeah, met her at the Academy. Five feet, two inches. Spoke like someone with God on their side.” He pauses. “She scared the shit out of me.”
She finishes by telling him about Lady’s sword,
“I made my first sword when I was six years old, with my father’s help. A wakizashi with a dulled blade, and a wooden handle wrapped in blue cloth.” She grins at the memory, of the bright blue
tsuka
on her very own sword. “My father was not one for tradition. He was the one who taught me to fight with a
bo
. He wanted me to continue our family’s sword making, but agreed to take my cousin Takaya as another apprentice, so as to appease his parents. When they died, I made myself a promise, that I would one day avenge them.
Sensei
taught me to fight, the Academy taught me to kill kaiju, and my parents taught me to forge a sword.”
They’re both quiet for a few moments. “That sword saved our lives. He would be proud of you.”
“I know.”
They lay in silence for a little longer.
“Seriously, where is everyone?” Raleigh bursts out.
Two hours after he floated to the surface, nearly dead, Raleigh starts vomiting.
Which
could
be a really good sign, or it could mean nothing at all; there’s a direct correlation between the time when vomiting begins after the exposure to radiation compared to the amount of rads the person was exposed to. Anything greater than 400 rads has a likelihood of fatality greater than 50%, but 400 rads could have a person vomiting half an hour after exposure, or three hours later.
At the very least, it means that Raleigh probably got a dose lower than 300 rads, which isn’t fatal.
(it
also
means that he could have gotten up to around 800 rads, but that is very unlikely. It would mean that Raleigh would be dead in just a few weeks.)
After he finishes vomiting, he says, “This fucking sucks,” and Mako has to agree.
Seriously. It’s been two hours since they detonated, and it would only take
one
hour for a ‘copter to arrive from the PPDC base in Guam, and that’s ignoring the spotters that
dropped them
on the Breach and were
supposed
to stay in the case that there were any survivors (which there were, clearly.)
Three hours after Pitfall’s end, Mako starts vomiting. Even better news than Raleigh’s two hours, but it could still mean anything from 50 rads (non-fatal, easily) to 800 rads (fatal. Very fatal).
Mako curls up on her side groaning, Raleigh at her back, and if Tendo were on the comms with them - seriously, where did everyone go? - he would be shouting at them to stay awake, but the comms have gone silent.
They lie there, and Mako asks Raleigh, “You know where I came from, now, so why don’t you tell me where you came from,” because Mako knows who he is and where he came from, but she does not know who Raleigh thinks he is, and where Raleigh thinks he came from.
He heaves an immense sigh, the sigh of a man who has lost everything.
“My mother was a French native, and my father was from Texas. He joined the military, met my mom the aids worker, and when he decided to go to college after serving, she came along too. My dad,” Richard, Mako knows his name was, “became a hydraulics engineer, and by the time Yance was born, they were following his work around to whatever dam was hiring. Jazz, Jazmine, she came next - she’s a year older than me, give or take - and then when I was eight, we moved to Anchorage and stopped, for whatever reason.”
Raleigh, Mako notices, doesn’t mention how much his parents hated Alaska, how they could never see the barren landscape as beautiful or the mountains as elegant, how they only stayed for the money, and for their children.
“We will go there, and you will show me,” Mako says instead.
“Not sure I can go back.” Raleigh keeps talking; he describes their first winter and the first time he saw the northern lights, how he and Yancy used to go to war with Jazz in the backyard with hastily constructed snow forts.
Somehow, he skips over Trespasser entirely.
(Mako had been ten, and remembered her parents sitting in front of the TV for five whole days, while Mako played with their Shiba Inu, not understanding the tragedy on the television screen.)
His mom had cancer, he says. His dad had chronic doesn’t-give-a-shit.
Yancy had neither, because Yancy was some sort of a saint. He was like glue. He held his family together, held himself together, held Raleigh together, held Jazz together.
“I was fifteen. Jazz was seventeen. Yancy had just turned nineteen.” For over a year and a half had Yancy kept them afloat, until Raleigh was sixteen-turning-seventeen and close enough to adult to follow Yancy and Jazz to the PPDC. Yancy had graduated high school. Jazz had graduated high school. Raleigh had not.
No, he went straight to the Academy with two older siblings watching over him, and a year later launched Lady Danger, named for the Becket working with K-Science. As it turned out, three heads were not better than two.
“Knifehead was no one’s fault,” Raleigh says, and Mako knows that he’s telling the truth from every perspective but his own. He says it like its verbatim, like he had repeated
Mitosis is the process by which cells divide. It has four phases: prophase, metaphase, anaphase, telophase. Mitosis is the process…
when he was taking high school biology.
Even with Mako at his side, he still feels like he might dissolve into nothing at a moment’s notice.
If I had been faster, better, less reckless
, his brain whispers.
Mako’s whispers back;
If we knew the future, if Knifehead had died when you killed it, if you had had backup.
But we didn’t
.
He lets it go. “After they let me go-” Mako frowns, because they did not ‘let him go,’ they kicked him out with a dishonourable discharge “-I chased shifts on the wall. Knew it was useless, but I had nowhere else to go.”
No one had anywhere to go.
Around them, the skies were darkening. So close to the equator, the sun set fast.
Raleigh stared up at the sky. “We better hope the choppers get here soon,” he commented. “It’ll be rough for the choppers to pick us up if it’s dark.”
“It’s been a little over four and a half hours since you came up, and we have heard nothing. Assuming that both of our comms are not functioning for whatever reason - perhaps the radiation from the Throat? - then Hong Kong is a little over five hours away by chopper. If we then assume that the choppers that dropped us returned to Hong Kong for whatever reason, then in an hour or two, the choppers will arrive.”
“It’s about seven, local time; give it, ehh, an hour before darkness, and we could be in trouble,” Raleigh commented. He shoved a pocket on the side of his escape pod, and out popped a flare gun alongside a few spare flares. He sat up and looked around. “Your pod has disappeared, so we’re drifting. Only one flare gun, anyways.”
Mako nodded. “There are tracking devices in our suits, so they should be able to find us,”
She sat up too, and they both sat there, staring in different directions, until something appeared on the horizon. She jammed an elbow into Raleigh’s ribs. “There’s something coming.”
Raleigh turned to squint at it. His face looked rather odd all squinted up. It was cute.
They waited a few more minutes, and the shapes became clear; there were choppers only a moments away.
An instant later, the choppers arrived, two of them, and the amphibious one set down in the water at shouting distance. Nonetheless, the copilot leaned out the door with a megaphone. Helicopters had a tendency to change shouting distance from 10-20 metres away to within 50 centimetres.
“This is Libulan Dalawa -” Mako’s scant Tagalog was good enough to recognize the number, but thank God the pilot is speaking English “- of the PPDC.”
Raleigh waved one arm, the one not holding the flare gun. “Ranger Raleigh Becket. This is Ranger Mako Mori. Good to see you!”
Libulan was the helicopter call-sign belonging to the sixteen choppers that were assigned to Eagle Swoop, the Philippine’s Mark III Jaeger, which had been destroyed alongside most other Jaegers in the events of both 2024 and 2025.
As far as Mako knew, Libulan had been decommissioned by the Philippine government, sold off to gather funds for the Wall when the last of the Philippine Jaegers was destroyed. Unlike most countries, they had actually wanted to continue with the Jaeger Program. The building and upkeep of a wall around the seven thousand islands would have been even more expensive than maintaining a Shatterdome with three Jaegers inside, and even less effective.
“Raleigh,” she said, confident that the roar of chopper blades would drown out her voice, “Libulan was decommissioned after Eagle fell.”
He just frowned back at her, face twisted in confusion as his eyes flicked from Mako to the chopper. “The Philippines was always fond of the PPDC,” he commented. “Maybe they loaned them back to us?”
For whatever reason Libulan Isa and Dalawa were there, they were both glad.
By the time they got to wherever the hell they were going - Pilots Reyna Gonzalez and Angelo Sicat were refusing to tell them for whatever reason, though it may have been related to the frequency of vomiting - Raleigh had vomited five times and Mako wasn’t far behind. The twelve crew members of the Rescue & Recovery vehicle were less than pleased, no doubt partially because of the actual vomit, and partially because they both had some amount of radiation poisoning.
None of the medics seemed to know what had happened with Lady and Striker and Operation Pitfall, but that was not all that surprising, since the PPDC liked to play its cards
very
close to its chest.
As a result, the medic that whipped out a geiger counter was horrified by the doses they had received. Even for Jaeger pilots, 300 rads was a lot (Mako got luckier, closer to 200 rads than Raleigh’s 325).
They both took metharocin, they told the medics. There were eight of them, and not one of them seemed to know what they were talking about. They both got a healthy dose of potassium iodide, and some drug with an unpronounceable name, both of which were supposed to held with the radiation poisoning.
They landed somewhere, and Mako and Raleigh were escorted inside - through hot, muggy air - and more or less shoved into separate hyperbaric chambers to make sure that there were no bubbles in their blood. It was also helpful for radiation-related injuries, yippee.
Fuck
, Raleigh grumbled through the Ghost Drift,
I hate hospital gowns.
Mako sighed.
Me too.
They scratched against her flesh, and she shifted in the chamber, growling.
What do you think is going on, Mako? This is all weird.
And what was going on?
We’re in a Shatterdome, and not the Hong Kong ‘Dome. I have lived in Tokyo, in Anchorage, in Lima, in Hong Kong, but this one is unfamiliar to me. That leaves Vancouver, Los -
I’ve lived in both of those, Sydney, and Anchorage, and visited all save for Jeju, Vladivostok, and Manila. We can’t be in either Jeju or Vladivostok, obviously. Manila’s what, 2000 kilometres from the Breach?
Mako hummed, and considered;
A little more, I think. But that is the right distance for the time our travel took.
The Manila Shatterdome had opened in 2017, and spent eight years deploying Jaegers; Eagle Swoop, Storm Komodo, and February Reckoner had called it home for the entirety of their active time. It had only closed at the beginning of 2025 when February Reckoner - the last of the Filipino Jaegers - was destroyed in combat.
And yet the ‘Dome that they had entered was bustling with life, the corridors filled with J-Techs and LOCCENT officers and Conn Pod crews, all of them going about their daily tasks, all of them people who had either left or been left behind when Manila closed.
They were out of the hyperbaric chambers and curled up in a hospital bed, half-asleep, and Marshal Evangelico Mallari walked into the room like he owned it, which he kind of did.
(he had an in with Rodrigo Duterte, which was how he got the job of Marshal, and also bore a striking resemblance to the man in personality. It was not a compliment.)
Aside from Marshal Mallari’s distasteful personality - which consisted largely of sexism, Philippine nationalism, and a side of serial killer and the only reason the PPDC had ever been willing to work with the man was the population of over a hundred million people in high risk areas and the bit where no one had ever been able to prove that Mallari had raped or killed anyone - was the fact that he suffered a stroke in 2023 and died.
Died.
Dead.
Six feet under.
At room temperature.
Counting worms.
He got his reward - probably hell given his personality and actions.
He. Was. Dead.
Mako stared at him, because Mallari was very clearly not dead. He was standing, and breathing, and there was probably brain activity happening in that empty bucket of a skull, and he was very clearly
alive
.
She does the only logical thing; jammed her elbow in Raleigh’s side (because he was staring as well, and his mouth was hanging a little open) and tried to start talking, except that she couldn’t find the words to describe her horror.
Raleigh fell out of the bed.
“You,” one of them said.
“You should be dead,” said the other.
Mallari kind of blinked at them, and then said, “Are you threatening me?”
Raleigh said, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” and kept repeating the word under his breath.
Mako said, “We’re hallucinating, aren’t we.”
A doctor walked in, saw Raleigh on the floor, saw Mako’s panic, saw Mallari’s bemusement, and said, “Marshal, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
She introduced himself as Dr. Aquino and sat Raleigh in a separate bed from Mako - not a terrible idea, seeing as he
fell out
of their shared bed, but annoying nonetheless.
Necessary, though; she hooked them both up to transfusions, because acute radiation syndrome kills blood cells like nobody’s business, and gave them antibiotics, because with a mass die-off of white blood cells the body becomes particularly vulnerable to disease.
Raleigh was sweating with fever, his pale skin flushed as if with a sunburn. “I’m gonna pass out now,” he murmured. “It’s like ‘ve got the flu, th’ worst flu ever.”
“Given the rads you’ve gotten, that’s normal,” Dr. Aquino told him. “You should both get some rest. In the morning, someone will be by to debrief you and figure out what’s going on. If you need anything, you’ve both got call buttons. Have a good night.”
Raleigh shot her a thumbs up from where he lay curled on one side around his nauseous stomach.
Mako nodded. “Thank you, Dr. Aquino.”
It’s a long night, for the both of them. Raleigh empties his guts until there’s nothing left to be emptied; Mako wakes with panicked breathing no less than four times.
It’s a sleepless night for the both of them.
Come morning, they both eat what’s given and pass the time in silence, waiting. There’s an aged TV at the other end of the room, and Mako flicks it onto the news, just so that the silence is not all consuming. It’s an American channel, talking about Rodrigo Duterte’s latest scandal.
“ . . . Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte told the press that he would, and this is a direct quote, ‘give a pass to Malakas for raping a girl.’ He went on to say that he had a problem with children being raped, but thought that adult women are ‘fair game.’ Malakas Sleiman, the twenty-year-old pilot of Philippine Jaeger February Reckoner went on record to state that rape is rape no matter who the victim is, and went as far as to imply that President Duterte should have gone to prison in 2019 after he confessed to sexually assaulting a maid in his teenage years. The PPDC has made no formal comment . . .”
“Holy shit!” Raleigh exclaims. “I remember this! It was right before Bindlestiff! There was a big email to all the Rangers asking us to avoid commenting if possible but that if we had to, to say that the PPDC took women’s rights seriously and that sexual assault is deplorable no matter what the circumstances. Yancy had already tweeted about it though - Malakas’ brother Karim sent him a message, they were good friends. Marshal Bouchard was
pissed
about it, but couldn’t do anything.”
Mako nods. “He said something about how Duterte needs to reexamine his moral principles and resign from office, did he not?”
“Yeah, just about. I said that he should go have a heart attack already, but Yance overruled me. Fuck, Mako, I think we need to talk about the possibility of time travel.”
Sure enough, the television shows a screenshot of Yancy’s tweet;
President Duterte needs to take a close look at his morals, to see if he is fit to hold office
.
“We
can’t
be time traveling,” Mako replies, serious-faced. “Raleigh, what’s the first thing you would do if you had the chance to go back in time?”
“Knifehead. I’d find a way to get back up, and be more prepared once we got out there.”
She nods; “Precisely. Assume that time traveling is like in
The Prisoner of Azkaban
- that’s the time travel that makes the most sense. You do something while time traveling, and it is like it always happened.”
“As past-you moves around, future-you’s actions are already happening,” Raleigh agrees. “It’s the most realistic. So?”
“So you go back in time, and you make Yancy survive.”
“Except he didn’t. Fuck.” Raleigh rubs at his eyes. “My head hurts way too much for a discussion about the possibility of time travel and whether or not we’re in the past.” It would likely be days before the nausea, dizziness, soreness, fever, and exhaustion wares off.
“So either this happened in the past, except we are kept very quiet, or we are experiencing an alternate timeline.”
Raleigh makes a vague noise in the back of his throat. “Libulan Isa and Dalawa know about us. That’s twenty-four people. By now, they’ve told their Rangers and other members of Eagle’s crew. Keeping that quiet will be almost impossible.”
“But not impossible. We’re in Manila-”
-which means that we are, theoretically, at the mercy of Marshal Mallari
. She halts her verbal words, and presses the thought across the Ghost Drift.
Okay, Mallari probably won’t kill them. But he
was
part of the administration whose leader had confessed to killing criminals, and which had begun the ‘Philippine Drug War.’ Duterte had been elected with the promise of killing thousands of criminals, in particular drug dealers, and had the backing of numerous wealthy and influential people across the country. Only a month and a half into his crusade, the UN called for Duterte to put a halt to the murders, with Philippine citizens having been given license to kill suspected drug dealers. Within a year of Duterte’s election, 54 children had been killed, some as young as four years old. In 2018, Duterte called human rights activists the “unwitting tools of drug lords” for their protests of the state-sanctioned murder, and upwards of 30,000 thousand people were killed by 2020.
If Mallari wanted them dead, all he would have to do would be to plant packets of
shabu
(what Filipinos call meth) on them, and then say that they had been American tourists who broke into the Shatterdome while high. There would be no investigation, and with no one looking for them, no hope of justice.
Three hours later, the klaxons sounded; loud, grating, designed to wake everyone in every corner of the Shatterdome barring the comatose. Then, a voice comes over the system, automated.
“Movement in the Breach. Movement in the Breach. Movement began at: 1110 hours local time. Category: three. Estimated weight: 2250 tonnes. Codename: Bindlestiff.”
On the far wall, a huge LED light blinked yellow.
“Fuck!” Raleigh said. Then, “My head hurts like hell.” He closed his eyes, and curled up so that his body was facing to his left, towards Mako, and away from the flashing yellow lights. A wave of nausea overwhelmed them both, and Raleigh puked into a standby bucket. “Fuck.” He kept repeating the word, and Mako couldn’t help but to agree with them.
“Well,” she murmured, because what else does one do? “At least now we know. We only have to prove it to the others.”
Dr. Aquino came a few minutes later, found Mako stroking Raleigh’s shoulders as he vomited again, saw misery and pain and fear. “I can get you some good anti-nausea meds soon. In the meantime, I’ve been asked to ask you two a very long list of questions, which you are expected to answer to the best of your abilities.” She pulled a dictaphone out of one pocket.
Mako looked at Raleigh, who looked back at her, and they nodded.
“Alright. I’ve been asked to record this - couldn’t tell you why exactly, but that’s that. You two ready to start?”
They nodded again, and settled back onto Raleigh’s hospital bed.
Dr. Aquino clicked on the dictaphone, cursing when it started to play a different recording. “This thing
should
be running now. First order of business. Please state your names, dates of birth, and occupations for the record.”
“Mako Mori, born April 23, 2003. I am presently twenty-two years old. I am a Jaeger pilot, but previous to this I was the engineer in charge of the restoration of Lady Danger.”
When Mako looked at Dr. Aquino, she could see the gears spinning in the woman’s head, could hear her whisper of
but that would make you sixteen
and
Lady Danger doesn’t need restoration
, because like every person on the Pacific coast, Dr. Aquino no doubt kept careful track of the Jaegers, sure to be aware of the risks in any given area.
“Raleigh Becket, December 11, 1998. I am twenty-six. From 2016 to 2020, I was a Jaeger pilot, and I worked in construction from 2020 to mid July, 2025, when I rejoined the PPDC as a pilot once ago.”
And no one told the poor woman who Raleigh had said he was, because she stared at him like he was green and from Mars.
“I’m sorry,” she said, breath labouring. “I seem to have misunderstood. Ranger Raleigh Becket is in Anchorage right now. No doubt they are preparing for this alert as we are here in Manila. Can you please confirm?”
Raleigh sighed. “I don’t pretend to understand how we got here, but yes, I would seem to be that Raleigh Becket. Mako and I appear to have travelled back in time.”
Dr. Aquino stared at him. “Of course you are. Alright. Please detail the events which led up to you,” she fumbled over the words, “
travelling back in time
.”
Neither of them spoke for a few long minutes.
Finally, Raleigh ventured, “How far back would you like us to begin?”
“I’m really not qualified for this,” Aquino mutered, and sighed. “Wherever you feel the relevant information begins.”
“On August the third, 2025, Dr. Newton Geiszler Drifted with a kaiju.”
Aquino jerked in her chair, but waved for Raleigh to continue.
As her copilot talked, Mako pressed closer to his side. This story was the end of it all, she knew. This story was the end of the Jaeger Program, of the PPDC, of the war, of a brash twenty-one year old boy in the Conn Pod of Striker Eureka, and of Stacker Pentecost who knew that getting into the Conn Pod would kill him. She was already crying, and how Raleigh wasn’t, she was not sure. His mind whispered back to hers;
I’ve never been much of a crier
, and it was true. He had been empty after Knifehead, not crying.
“Geiszler discovered a group that he calls the Precursors, who are the primary species on the other side of the Breach. He said that the kaiju were foot soldiers, designed to take out major population centres, before the exterminators moved in and the new tenants could take up residence. Marshal told him to do it again, he said that he needed another brain because he had burned out the one from Mutavore.” He tok a long, shaken breath. “His chance would come the next day. Leatherback and Otachi emerged on August 3, and arrived in Hong Kong four days later, detouring to stomp on the Babuyan Islands.”
“We lost Crimson Typhoon first,” Mako said in a small voice. She had been friends with all three of the triplets; when off duty, they would keep her company whilst she prepared the candidates for Raleigh, or worked to finish the refits and repairs to Lady Danger. “If it had been only Otachi, we could have dealt. But Leatherback ripped Crimson’s Conn Pod out within ninety minutes of first engaging it. Cherno Alpha was gone a half hour later, too quickly for Striker Eureka to be of aid. That was when we were deployed, in Lady Danger.”
“Leatherback,” Raleigh told Aquino, “was armed with some form of EMP. It shut Striker down, but Lady was analogue, the last functioning machine we had left. We got to Leatherback first, but Otachi nearly killed us. It had wings. We got pretty high up. It was… early morning of August eight when we killed Otachi. The secondary brain was damaged, too damaged for Newt to Drift with, but Otachi had also been pregnant.”
And hadn’t that been a surprise. And likely a mistake on the part of the Precursors.
“Newt Drifted with the fetus on August 10. At the time, we were dropped alongside Striker Eureka onto the Breach, and into the arms of two waiting kaiju; Raiju and Slattern. Newt procured for us vital information on Operation Pitfall, and Striker-” her voice broke before she can finish, and she turned away from Aquino, and into Raleigh’s chest.
“Striker detonated the bomb so that we could take Lady to the Breach.”
Even Raleigh’s voice was failing him.
“They detonated right next to Slattern and Scunner -”
“Wait,” Aquino interrupted him. “Scunner. Clarify.”
“Shit, we forgot about Scunner. Category V. It emerged after Raiju took our right arm and Slattern took Striker’s… everything, more or less. Anyways, Slattern died, but Scunner didn’t. We managed to carry Raiju’s corpse with us into the Breach, but Mako’s oxygen lines were failing, so I activated her escape pod. Then I set Lady to detonate, and activated my own. We came up and Mako swam to my pod, and then we waited for a pick up.”
“Mhmm,” Aquino said. “Can you please explain how you think time travel is possible?”
“Right,” Raleigh says, but he doesn’t keep talking.
Mako dragged herself away from his warmth. “Theoretically, the time between Breach events should have been consistent, because the production of new kaiju should have always taken the same amount of time. They were not. We - Dr. Gottlieb, mostly - theorized that time fluctuated between their universe and ours, at a rate that was speeding up. Assuming that this was accurate, it is theoretically possible for time to move both backwards and forwards between the two dimensions. But… this is not just time travel. Such is impossible. If we were in our own timeline… this would have always happened, and it would create a paradox. Therefore, we believe that the portal between dimensions put us into the wrong dimension at the wrong time. Therefore, we are in what we perceive to be the past, but with a future that can theoretically be molded around our actions.”
Dr. Aquino looked torn between throwing her hands in the air in exasperation and hope. “Can you provide any evidence for this?”
Raleigh shrugged. “DNA test? I’m in the PPDC system, obviously. Aside from that…” He glanced slyly at Mako, and then turned back to Aquino. “We have information on the upcoming Bindlestiff engagement. We have been in here since the Klaxons sounded. No one has spoken to us, and we could not possibly know any details of Bindlestiff before it has left the Breach, unless we have time traveled.”
“Alright. Have at it.”
With a nod, Raleigh rushed into the details.
Bindlestiff had been a cross between an eel, an alligator, and a lionfish. It’s body was shaped like an eels, long and sinuous and slimy, with two notable additions: first were four stubby legs that allowed Bindlestiff to move on land, albeit slowly; second were the dorsal fin, which was not only extremely sharp, but also possessing some sort of acidic venom that had melted through the hull of a vessel unfortunate enough to encounter the disgusting creature.
“In places,” he recalled, “it had leopard spots and some stripes.”
Then he gave the more useful details: deployments.
At the time of Bindlestiff, Mako had been only sixteen years old, still a student at a boarding school in New England, though she would receive her high school diploma in 2020, only a few short months after the Knifehead disaster.
“It ran north and made it most of the way to the Bering Sea before veering east along the Aleutians. We deployed in a combination of pairs and solo teams. Solas Aurora and Hydra Corinthian were dropped in Kodiak in case he did go for Anchorage, while the northerners - Cherno, Chrome, you know - dropped in the Aleutians and Fox Islands. Yancy and I deployed to Tigalda Island, some 500 kilometres west-southwest of Kodiak; Cherno was at, fuck, what was it called? Chugatick, no Chugundack?” He leaned back for a moment, chewing on his lower lip.
“Chuginadak,” Mako offered.
“Yes! Chuginadak Island. Fire Soul deployed to Unimak Island, and Chrome Brutus was off Amlia Island. We made intercept on the fourteenth, and the kill was ultimately awarded to Fire Soul. Everyone west of Kodiak engaged, but they got the kill.”
Four days later, Mako and Raleigh watched the first intercept on the television.
Amlia Island with Chrome Brutus. They got a few shots off, but Bindlestiff kept heading west, right to Cherno, who in turn passed Bindlestiff off to Lady Danger.
She was brilliant, silhouetted by the early morning sun. Her huge, broad shoulders tapered to a thin, flexible waist and over her shoulders are almost wings, designed to protect her from attacks from behind.
Her hands - five fingered and humanoid - were clenched into fists. Ready for battle.
They stutter stepped along the coastlines, shadowing the behemoth only a few hundred metres away, keeping its body almost entirely submerged.
A younger version of Raleigh is in that Conn Pod, fists clenched tight.
Bindlestiff ends up charging them, and Lady scraped her huge hands down the kaiju’s sinuous sides. They got off a shot with the plasma cannon, but Bindlestiff dove.
And when Lady pursued underwater, the kaiju lose them in minutes.
“Bindlestiff was a good time,” Raleigh murmured to Mako. “Frustrating as hell, but no one got hurt and only Chrome Brutus and Fire Soul came out with damage.
The fourth intercept was different from the past three. Fire Soul cornered Bindlestiff against land, and its crocodile legs proved useless for running on land.
Umky and Anka-ny Rytkheu took it down after a few more hours, and raised their right fist in victory.
The Chukchi brother-sister team had grown up in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, on the Chamkatsky Peninsula, and were the only of the four Russian teams to have come from the country’s rural far east, the area that they were protecting.
Cherno’s pair were from Moscow and St. Petersberg, while Eden Assassin’s Mykola Petraszko and Ana Voloshyn were Ukrainian; Alya and Fyolka Volkov of Trinity Bold had grown up in Vladivostok, where the Russian Shatterdome is based.
Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy had not come under assault until two weeks before Operation Pitfall. Cherno Alpha had deployed alongside her fellow Mark I, Fire Soul. And while Cherno had made it back, Fire Soul had been lost in the shadow of Mount Mishennaya, only a few short miles from where they had grown up. Neither Anka-ny nor Umky were saved from the radioactive wreckage.
“I liked them,” Raleigh commented. “We shared a ‘Dome for a couple of years, right up until…”
Mako got the message. “Until Knifehead,” she whispered.
Sir. Sir! I have shown you the DNA tests and the recordings from the debrief. I have no doubt that they are not lying.
What are you expecting me to do about it?!
Use them! They’ve got five years of data on the kaiju, and from what I got out of them, this war is not going to go well.
All the better reason to be rid of them!
Sir! Our government is desperate for the Jaeger Program to continue going well. We are a nation of thousands of individual islands populated by over a hundred million individuals. We’re already taking shit for the drug war, and our president cannot afford to have more bad press. If you take them out, you will be taken out. Because they could hold the secrets to the success of the Jaeger Program.
Why should I believe you?
You don’t have to. I sent the data to the other commanding officers once I was finished with the DNA test. I would assume that you’ll be getting a video call quite soon.
I should have you put on report for insubordination!
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
In the late hours of the evening of October 14, the Rangers came by.
At first, it was just Malakas and Karim Sleiman, the pilots of February Reckoner.
Ever bold, Malakas opened the conversation. “So the Marshal says that you are Raleigh Becket from the future.”
“That is accurate,” Mako told him. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Rangers Sleiman. My partner thinks very highly of you.”
“Right,” Malakas said. “Who are you again?” Karim elbowed him.
“Mako Mori. I am an engineer, but as of a few weeks ago, Raleigh and I became the pilots of a refitted Lady Danger. As of right now, my past self is at a boarding school in New England. My adopted father is PPDC.” She offered a small smile. “We never met… before.”
They sat in awkward silence for several minutes, with Raleigh watching Malakas and Karim, who watched him right back.
Mako broke the awkwardness again; “I’m sorry, this amount of male posturing is a little bit much. Are there presently any female pilots assigned to the Manila Shatterdome?”
Raleigh shot her a brief smile, his lips twitching upwards. “I would imagine that Hosna Iskandar and Mika Guinta are here. And… Kaia Paewai? Ascension Falcon spent some time here, I recall.”
Karim nodded. For Team Reckoner, he was the equivalent of Yancy, a level-headed pilot capable of thought before action, but who still possessed a fun-loving nature. “Hosna and Muhammad have taken leave to visit their family. Mika and Ray are here, yes, and as are Kaia and Tai.”
Four Jaegers in the Manila ‘Dome. The first three came as no surprise; Storm Komodo, Eagle Swoop, and February Reckoner were Philippine property, with some funding from a variety of countries in southeast Asia and Oceania. On the other hand, Ascension Falcon flew the flag of New Zealand.
“I never really knew them,” Raleigh murmured. For all that he was alert and glaring, his voice seemed to fail him.
“You never really knew us,” Karim pointed out. “We can take the chance now. You are a Ranger, and that means that you are one of us.”
Mako squeezed Raleigh’s hand. “We appreciate the sentiment, Ranger Karim.”
For some reason, Raleigh and Mako were still in the infirmary. Neither of them had vomited in the past twenty-four hours, or had any symptoms, but Dr. Aquino was taking caution to the next level; Raleigh had spent the previous afternoon in an MRI, so that they could figure out what sort of brain damage he had, if any.
There was some damage to his amygdala, which explained the past five years of his life and his time on the wall, and why he had such difficulty remembering things like Tendo’s bowtie, or one of the drivesuit tech’s stupid puns.
They chatted back and forth for a few minutes - Malakas mentioned Fire Soul’s dual butterfly swords, how they had sliced through Bindlestiff’s unarmored form with ease.
“I loved those swords,” Mako commented. “When I was refitting Lady, I thought about giving her a similar pair, but they take specific training to wield, and I was unsure that we would be able to find a team that could use them effectively.”
“But you still put swords in Lady Danger?”
“Yes. Dual-edged on her both arms, essentially two medieval broadswords. They fold into the armor plating when not in use, and were forged using traditional Japanese techniques. Only one is meant to be deployed at a time.”
Karim shot her an odd look, like
How the hell does this little Japanese woman know about sword making?
“Mako’s father was a traditional sword-maker before K-Day,” Raleigh told him. “Mako learned the art from him. God, that sword she made is amazing. Cut Raiju right in half, snout to tail.”
“No shit,” Karim murmured, clearly imagining it.
Mako grinned at him. “Whatever you are imagining, it was better. We had only one arm.”
“It was all Mako.”
“It was not. You were right there with me.”
“Mako, I didn’t even have an arm for there to be a sword on.” He paused for a moment. “Hang on, does this mean that my right arm is shot now too?”
Malakas butted in. “Hold up, you’ve lost
both
arms?! Dude, that’s pretty cool.”
“Nah, I still get phantom limb pain and it’s been five years since I lost the left one. There’s enough nerve damage that I couldn’t pilot left again. Hell, even if piloting again wouldn’t kill me, my right arm is probably shot now too.”
“Okay, there’s a big story here.”
Raleigh nodded at the television screen, which showed the cleanup from the previous day’s engagement. “They got smart,” he said miserably. “I remember thinking how messy Bindlestiff was, how much better it could have turned out. None of us got hurt, our Jaegers all came out in relatively good condition. But it wasn’t
perfect
. Now… It’s like I just watched a miracle. For seven straight months, the past seven months of our lives, people kept on dying. Our friends.”
He took a shuddering breath. “Three Jaegers made it to August. Four, but Lady had been decommissioned or in refits since the beginning of 2020. And
yeah
, those were always good crews. Highly drift compatible and all, but… God. They were only alive because they were lucky. If you can call it that.”
Mako looked at Karim and Malakas. The pair was, unusually, silent. “They all believed, in full, that they were going to die. In large part, they were correct.”
“This,” Karim said, his eyes flicking back and forth from Mako to Raleigh and back again, “is profoundly disturbing. Can we talk about something else?”
“I think your Marshal threatened to kill us,” Raleigh offered. “That’s not much better, but it is a current event.”
That
was when Mika and Ray Guinto walked in. Neither Mako nor Raleigh had ever met the pilots of Eagle Swoop, but they appeared in person as they often did to the press; both were unsmiling, a smidge shorter than the Sleimans, and tanned copper.
Mika nodded at Karim, saying something in rapid-fire Tagalog. Mako caught the word
opinyon
, but mostly because the Tagalog for
opinion
was near-identical to the English.
Whatever Karim said in response, neither of them caught, but from the way that Ray turned towards them, it was interrogation time.
The majority of Filipinos were comfortable with English, with children in upper class families often not speaking English as a first language rather than one of the numerous dialects. Ray’s English was excellent, far outweighing Mako’s abilities in any Filipino dialect. “Marshal Mallari has told us that you are time travelers.”
“For all intents and purposes,” Mako replied, “yes. But it is probably more accurate to say that we are time travelers in an alternate dimension.”
For some reason, Ray seemed satisfied by the answer.
“Yeah,” Raleigh said. “I don’t really understand it either.” He shot a polite smile at both Guintos. “Raleigh Becket. It’s a pleasure to meet you. This is my copilot, Mako Mori.”
“Kinagagalak kong makilala ka,” Mako told the couple in Tagalog, the full extent of her memorized lines being put to use. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Your accent is terrible,” Mika told her. “But we appreciate the effort. Mabuhay sa twenty-nineteen.”
“Hey,” Raleigh said. “Does Mallari
normally
seem like a serial killer, or was that just for us?”
Karim and Malakas grimaced as one. “He is…
extreme
to say the least. As to whether or not he has killed someone, none of us are sure. But it is likely, given his relationship to our president.”
“Don’t worry,” Mika added. “The other Rangers have been alerted to the circumstances, and ergo if he harms either of you, he will have the full force of the Rangers upon his head.”
Raleigh leaned back against the wall, careful of the full-body ache that he was still experiencing, and of the reddish radiation burn that was still peeling from his skin. “So how did y’alls find out? Was it distributed to Marshals and then Rangers were told in private, or was it just a mass email or something?”
“We heard it in our prep rooms. When you came through the Breach, all the systems picked it up as an alert, so everyone went running for prep rooms. We-” Ray gestured at his wife “-were watching the monitors when the beacon from your suits came in, right over the Breach. We all kind of panicked after that, but once they confirmed their was no kaiju, we got the stand down order.”
“They accounted for all Rangers,” Karim continued, “and most all of us were listening in when Libulan called back with news; it would have been a nightmare to try and keep this under the wraps.”
“Will the public be told?” Mako asked, ever practical.
“On top of kaiju, there are time travelers. No, I don’t think so. As long as this continues to be an isolated incident, and we can keep you two away from the public, we will keep it under the wraps.”
Raleigh nodded vigorously. “That sounds good. Very good.”
There had been a time when Raleigh himself had enjoyed public attention, but that had changed with Knifehead. Even a Raleigh pre-Knifehead - a man no doubt asleep on the other side of the ocean - would no doubt have some reservation about public attention born of a time traveling version of himself with brain damage. But if any of the Filipino Rangers found Raleigh’s reaction odd, they did not comment on it.
Instead, the conversation turned to Bindlestiff.
“Kind of reminds me of a lion fish,” remarked Malakas, his face twisting at the thought. “All those spines down its back? I shudder.” He did.
Mako elbowed Raleigh. “Show them the scars.”
He grumbled, but extracted his arms from the pile of blankets. “Those spines were coated with some sort of corrosive. When Yancy and I went to grapple with Bindlestiff, we got a handful of them.” He turned his palms so that the Filipino Rangers could see the web-like patterns dancing across his hands. “Blew out most of the fuses; we both ended up with these scars. It hurt like hell.”
Though neither Eagle Swoop nor February Reckoner had made contact with a kaiju (which was quite common. Some, like Lucky Seven, had ended up waiting over four years for their first shot), their pilots still bore the same drivesuit scars as Mako and Raleigh did. Eagle Swoop had the same plasma cannons and Lady Danger did, and so there were faint scars tracing the wrists and forearms of his crew, similar to the ones Mako and Raleigh had. February Reckoner was proto-Mark-IV, with a design that was completely foreign to Raleigh; instead of plasma cannons, she had heat-based weapons that shot blasts at hundreds of degrees Celsius, melting anything that got in their way.
Of all the pilots, Mako had the least scarring, and Raleigh the most. Having only ever been deployed twice, for either testing or a kaiju, her weapons-scarring was minimal, while Raleigh bore five combat deployments-worth of scarring even before Hong Kong and Operation Pitfall.
They compared their battle scars - or, Mako and Raleigh showed off their battle scars while the Guintos and Sleimans explained their Jaegers’ systems. Malakas was more than happy to poke at the thick, still-red scars of Raleigh’s left shoulder.
“Holy shit,” he murmured, awe clear in the deep tones of
his voice. “How did this happen?”
Though Mako tensed minutely, Raleigh just grinned. “We lost an arm.”
Even five years after Knifehead, Raleigh’s left shoulder bore the stark wounds of the fight. Though some of his scars - like the webs on his hands - would one day fade, Mako had no doubt that his shoulder would bear the scars of his brother’s death for the rest of his life. Since Pitfall, the scarring had become more balanced; they had lost their right arm to Raiju.
Mika was studying the scars on Raleigh’s other shoulder. “Just the one?”
“Different times,” Mako informed her, pulling her own shirt back so that the scars were visible. “We lost Lady’s right arm during Pitfall, after Raleigh and I began to pilot together.”
Ray managed to coax the full story out of them; “So you and the yet-unlaunched Striker Eureka were dropped on the Breach to two Category IVs, which promptly beat the shit out of you only to be joined by the first ever Category V, who broke Striker Eureka, who detonated a 1.2 megaton nuke, which the V survived, leaving you with a crippled leg and one arm alone against the V.”
“Yeah, pretty much,” Raleigh replied. “Holy shit, I am so surprised we didn’t die. Holy shit.”
Mako side-eyed him. “It was a suicide mission.”
“Yes, and we’re
alive
.”
“And I am very glad to be not-dead as well.”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
At the end of October, the PPDC sent Mako and Raleigh to Kodiak Island.
They’d been cleared by medical, after almost three weeks of waiting. Though Raleigh’s blood tests weren’t quite at normal yet, Dr. Aquino agreed that they were close enough, and steadily improving. Physical therapy for their damaged right arms had staved off any permanent damage, and would continue to do so, as long as they kept with their exercises.
It is drizzling when they step off the PPDC charter plane. Drizzling, and cold, and grey.
“Yokumowarukumo?” Raleigh asks. “Better or worse?”
Mako says, “Worse.”
They make a document of every kaiju event, best as they can remember.
It goes something like this at the beginning:
Knifehead: Feb 29, 2020; Cat III - fatality
Jiangshi: early May, 2020; Cat III
Tokoloshe: late July, 2020; Cat III
Fankle: December 1, 2020; Cat III
It goes something like this at the end:
Harpy: mid May, 2025; Cat IV - dual fatality
Spineridge: early June, 2025; Cat IV - quadruple fatality
Jackalope: mid June, 2025; Cat IV - quadruple fatality
Jiuweihu: late June, 2025; Cat IV - tri fatality
The end is much more depressing than the beginning.
They finish their list with:
Leatherback/Otachi: August 7, 2025; Cat IVs - quintuple fatality
Slattern/Raiju & Scunner: August 10, 2025; Cat IVs & V - dual fatality
And then they curl up in their shared quarters and cry.
Because Mako’s father is one of them, because Jin and Cheung and Hu were Raleigh’s age and would never play basketball again, because Yancy Becket’s body is somewhere in the ocean being eaten by fish, because Sasha Kaidanovsky was a terrifying woman who wanted to adopt a daughter when the war was over, because Ana Petraszko is survived by a husband and a daughter, because Chuck Hansen was twenty-one years old and scared, because Jayden Byrd and Zeke Amarok never got to list ‘x’ on their Canadian passports, because Maria and Rose Rojas are orphans who will never know their parents, because Trevin Gage died scared and alone with Bruce already gone, because Levi King and Linh Nguyen never got married, because not a single Jaeger pilot had died who yet had a reason to live.
Tactics came up with a roll of three-Jaeger strike teams, and so the 33 active Jaegers began drilling in their new teams.
They formed the teams based off rankings of each Jaeger in different categories and each Jaeger was classified either as a sharp-shooter or a brawler so that each team combined fire power, speed, and brute force.
On the western coast of the Pacific, the top team was Shaolin Rogue, Vulcan Specter, and Fire Soul. Shaolin Rogue was their sharp-shooter, armed with a combination of lasers and plasma cannons, while Vulcan Specter was the speed. The light Australian Jaeger had two blades, each as long as a forearm and superheated so as to cauterize the wounds and prevent Kaiju Blue. Fire Soul, the Russian Mark I, was the brute force; designed much in the same manner as Cherno Alpha, it was one of the heaviest Jaegers in the service, with the weight pushed into extra ‘muscle’ strength.
Raleigh’s home country had two Jaegers in the eastern top team; the Lady Danger herself was joined by Canada’s Sentinel Orca and the United States’ Romeo Blue. Lady was the brawler, Sentinel the sharp-shooter, and Romeo the brute force (much like Fire Soul, the Mark I was one of the heaviest in the service). The pilots of both Jaegers had helped to train Yancy and Raleigh in the early days of their time in active duty.
When tactics had suggested forming crossover teams, Raleigh had quietly shut them down. “Crossover teams will mean longer deployment times.”
As the scores for triads began to improve, Mako and Raleigh assisted tactics in a much bigger project: imitating future kaiju.
They started with Taconite. The first ever Category IV kaiju had been a massive creature; it reminded Raleigh of a stegosaurus, with an armored, spiny back and barbed tail.
The first time around, the western A-Triad had taken on Taconite in Hong Kong, but hadn’t been able to finish the fight. Instead, Taconite had run to Manila, where it was greeted by Lucky Seven, Memory Beijing, and Ascension Falcon. The engagement
probably
would have gone fine, except for Scott Hansen. Though no pilots had been killed by Taconite, Lucky Seven had been thoroughly beaten to a pulp before Memory and Falcon had pulled the kaiju away. Much like the Hansens’ Drift, Lucky Seven had not been salvageable.
While Raleigh considered the Manila disaster at length, the Jaeger pilots took to the latest simulation with gusto.
Throughout their careers, the sixty-odd pilots of the Jaeger Program had faced in the simulator, in exclusivity, kaiju who had already passed through the Breach; they already knew the tactics and capabilities of their virtual opponents.
“Yes, making this simulation is going to be difficult,” Mako had argued during one meeting. “But with this simulation, we will be able to test our pilots against their future opponents. We will be able to choose the best team for any given kaiju based on the simulations, something that could prove invaluable as the kaiju become both stronger and smarter.”
Marshal Tanaka of the Tokyo Shatterdome had considered Raleigh. “Ranger Becket, what is your opinion on this?”
Raleigh had considered his hands, crossed in front of him. “Back in 2024, Bonesquid made for North Korea, and only a few minutes after three Jaegers were deployed, they dropped a bomb on the city. It crippled the systems of all three Jaegers, so even though we had Jaegers that, objectively, could have handled it, we lost four pilots in a single day. Bonesquid was an ambush predator, then. We are extraordinarily lucky that we didn’t lose all six pilots. If we can prepare our pilots for that… don’t we have an obligation to try? We have a controlled situation, where no one can actually get hurt. We can do this without risk to pilots or personnel, and, as far as I’m concerned, that means that we have to.”
They rolled out the new simulation in early November. The Western B-Triad had the best first run, corralling Taconite so that Spirit Rain and Cherno Alpha had it squished between them while Eagle Swoop jammed plasma cannons into it and let loose a barrage that no kaiju - not even a Category IV - could withstand. Despite their success, the sim still received a low score; the three Jaegers had been unable to keep Taconite from the densely-packed residential areas.
By mid-November, everyone who knew about Raleigh and Mako had noticed that the new Ranger Becket was a world apart from his younger counterpart. No doubt, the jaded of the pilots had figured it out already.
Ilisapie Flint and Zeke Amarok - temporarily assigned to the Academy as mentors for the class of 2019-B, from which Berserker Rage’s pilots would graduate - commented on it to Mako. “Is he okay?”
“No,” Mako told them, and did not elaborate.
On occasion, the Canadian cousins joined her in efforts to get Raleigh engaged. If speaking with the older, quieter version of their friend was strange for them, they didn’t show it.
“I will probably never pilot again,” he told them once over dinner, poking at his Thanksgiving potatoes. “Too much brain damage, now. Too much brain damage before, probably.” He focused on Zeke, and said, “You should go for it.”
Zeke tipped their head. “Go for what?” They kept their voice neutral. Both they and Ilisapie had noticed that Raleigh was more responsive when people spoke calmly to him.
“The papers that say ‘ex’ instead of ‘em’. Those are important to you. You should go for it.”
“The Brass doesn’t want them to,” Ilisapie told Raleigh. “Bad publicity, they say.”
Raleigh shrugged. “Who cares what the Brass says? You’re your own person, Zeke, and you deserve to know that your government acknowledges you as the person that you have chosen to be.”
“Thanks, Raleigh,” Zeke said
around a bite of turkey. “I’ll think about it.”
On December 5, the PPDC sprung into action.
Taconite, one of the biggest kaiju ever, was just as vaguely stegosaurus shaped as Raleigh remembered.
Back in the (Raleigh wasn’t quite sure what to call his old-old life), Lady Danger had deployed to Manila alongside Memory Beijing, their old classmate from the Academy, and Lucky Seven. The whole thing had been a disaster, start to finish. As soon as they had dropped, Lucky Seven had been out of commission; for reasons that Herc Hansen had never been willing to explain, he had chased the rabbit spectacularly, and then beaten the everloving shit out of his brother. Whatever the reason, the official ruling had cleared Herc of all guilt, and Scott had been sent off to an undisclosed location. With only two Jaegers available, the whole thing had been a disaster. At the end of it, Lucky had been destroyed and Memory in need of some serious repair work.
“Don’t deploy the Western C-Triad,” Raleigh argued to Tactics. “That did not go so well last time. Cherno Alpha, Spirit Rain, and Eagle Swoop in Hong Kong, and have Shaolin Rogue, Vulcan Specter, and Fire Soul waiting in Manila. Have another team in Taiwan, and put Memory Beijing and Crimson Typhoon at Macau in case the B-Triad needs backup. With any luck, they’ll be able to finish Taconite without assistance.”
Mako nodded in agreement, and added, “Ensure that the C-Triad does not know that they have been temporarily benched. We will deal with the issues there after the engagement is finished.”
Four days later, they watched the engagement from the relative comfort of the Academy’s tactical headquarters. Taconite made Hong Kong at 1000 hours, local time, and early evening on Kodiak. The B-Triad had already been in place for close to an hour, with backup only a stone’s throw away.
Idle chatter on the comms dissipated as Taconite approached more closely.
With luck, they finished Taconite without assistance; it was a deadly dance.
Spirit Rain used one of her many blades to hack at Taconite’s barbed tail, just like they practiced in the sims. When the barbed monstrosity came loose, she used her flamethrower to cauterize the wound.
While Rain kept the kaiju’s tail from being a threat, Cherno Alpha grappled with it from the front.
Looking at the thing, Mako wondered if stegosaurus was really the best way to describe it. Perhaps ankylosaurus - with an armored back and mace-like tail - would be a more apt description of the kaiju. Neither dinosaur had had a giant, toothy mouth, but that was to be expected when it came to kaiju.
Cherno clambered to escape Taconite’s gaping maw, hitting the water with a fantastic splash, and Eagle Swoop moved in to cover; together, Rain and Eagle passed the kaiju back and forth. While Rain pummeled at Taconite’s face with her dagger-like wasp blades, Eagle used his lasers to trace the chinks in his armor.
When Taconite sent Rain flying - Raleigh winced internally; that had to have
hurt
- Cherno returned to pick up the slack, fists crashing against both sides of Taconite’s face in a repeat of the same maneuver that they would one day use on Leatherback.
Eagle finally found a big enough chink in Taconite’s armor, and slammed a fist through the armor plating. Then, he lit up the kaiju from the inside, plasma cannons firing once, twice, three times and the signature disappears.
Spirit, Mako mused, would be in need of some serious repairs; the strike from Taconite had caught her right across the middle (below the reactor, luckily) and left serious denting.
“Better than their first run,” Zeke commented, fiddling with a strand of their straight, dark hair. They looked towards Mako and Raleigh. “What are we prepping for next?”
Neither one of them answered.
Three days later, Herc and Scott Hansen get into the simulator.
Three days later, their Drift breaks.
Three days later, the crew up Lucky Seven pulls Herc Hansen away from his bloodied brother.
Three days later, Scott Hansen is arrested for an undisclosed crime.
Ilisapie Flint - just over five feet tall - beat the shit out of Raleigh in the Kwoon on a regular basis. Her military-trained instincts were keen, and she had an advantage in the form of fully responsive arms. Even before Raleigh had been injured, though, Ilisapie had beaten the shit out of him on a regular basis. It was part of her charm.
Most of the time, she went easy on Raleigh; if she wanted a hard spar, she’d spar with Zeke or Mako, or even the newbies in 2019-B. Their spars were more a warm up, or to stay spry, than anything else.
“Do you know what Hansen did?” She asked mid-spar, swinging her hanbo in a lazy arc.
Raleigh blocked, drew back and skittered sideways. “I have suspicions, but no confirmation. If I knew, I’d have turned him in earlier.”
They sparred in silence for a few minutes.
“So what did you tell Yancy?”
Ilisapie grimaced. “I’m s-” she began to say.
“Nah, nah, it’s cool. I figured he’d ask for updates. I’m just curious about what you’re telling him.”
She flipped her hanbo in a lazy arc, blocking where Raleigh attacked. For a second, they burst into lightning-fast motions - strike block strike strike dodge - before returning to their regular pattern. “He’s concerned that you haven’t reached out to him and other-you. I don’t blame him. I mean… Raleigh - other-you - was pretty hyped at the possibility of meeting you, and he figured that you would be, too.”
“Not that I’m not curious, but I just don’t think I could handle it.”
“He’s dead, isn’t he.” A note of resignation crept into her voice, bitterness leaching into the words.
“I was the last Mark III pilot.”
“I’m sorry.”
Raleigh shot her a wry grin. “Nothing you could have done about it.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m Canadian, Raleigh. We apologize because we are sympathetic towards you, not because we are responsible.”
“Well, it’s not going to happen this time.”
“You know how to close the Breach?”
“Yes.”
Ilisapie danced out of reach of his hanbo, and scored another point. “How?”
He skipped right over the how, and went straight to the why. “Why haven’t the oceans drained? I mean, I know that’s a lot of water and a small Breach, but after seven years of existence, you would think that water levels would have gone down, right?” Ilisapie nodded. “But they haven’t. It doesn’t make any sense, unless the Breach is closed most of the time, which would mean that everytime they send a kaiju, they basically make a new Breach in the same spot, except that we have cameras on it, and it’s always there and it always looks the same. It’s like - fuck, I don’t know, a cheesecloth. The liquid drains out, and leaves behind the cheese, except the opposite way. The cheese drains through and leaves behind the liquid.”
“So even if we had a direct hit, it would blow up on this side?”
“Yeah. It looks for kaiju DNA. There are markers in kaiju DNA that are probably quite specific. I don’t understand it; something about them being clones? Anyways, when something has those markers, it opens up to allow it to pass, hence how the kaiju get through. To blow it up, we need to carry a bomb and a kaiju body through together.”
“A suicide mission.”
“There were two Jaegers left,” Raleigh murmured as he slashed his hanbo at Ilisapie, meeting her own staff with a satisfying clash. “Us, in Lady Danger, and the Mark V. His younger pilot was twenty-one, had been piloting since he was sixteen or some shit like that. He and his copilot are both dead, now. They didn’t even make it the Breach, had to detonate the payload just a hundred metres away.”
“They let him into the Academy at sixteen?!”
“Mako would know more about it than me. That was… after.” He shook off the gloom. “Anyways, tell him whatever you want to. He’s going to worry regardless of what any of us do, so we might as well make worrying a little bit easier for him. Tell him that I’ll email them when I feel ready to.”
Mammoth Apostle transfered to Anchorage from Los Angeles.
Hydra Corinthian transfered to Anchorage from Vancouver.
Raleigh told the coders all about Knifehead. Big, four arms, two legs. Goblin shark head, but less gross. Weak neck. Strong back. Smart. Favours surprise attacks. Knows that Jaegers are a threat. Flighty, less so than Clawhook, but more so than Reprobate. Doesn’t want to die. Don’t assume it’s dead. They asked him questions. Raleigh answered them.
A week and a half later - just in time for Christmas - they rolled out the new simulation.
Mako and Raleigh stepped into that false Conn Pod, and spent four hours beating the shit out of Knifehead. They knew that Team Chrome was watching, but they didn’t care.
When fake-LOCCENT declared no signature, they jammed their plasma cannon into the beast’s maw, and lit it up three more times.
“I think this guy’s dead,” Mako said.
Knifehead had run east from the Breach, skittering past Hawaii to curve north.
With such severe storms, the currents of the entire north Pacific were changed, making Knifehead’s route difficult to predict. K-Watch had expected Knifehead to follow the North Equatorial Current before becoming caught in the North Pacific Gyre, which would have carried Knifehead straight to California or Baja California.
Knifehead did, following the Californian coast until it became the Washington coast, and after that the Canadian coast, where it caught the dramatically changed Alaska Current straight to Anchorage.
With such severe storms, helicopters could not launch, and so any Jaeger deployed as backup to Lady would have had to be dropped at the edge of the storm and walked the following hundred plus miles. It would have taken hours.
No, Lady was on her own.
At 0212 hours, the alert came in that Knifehead had entered the Alaskan Protection Zone, which spanned from Southeastern Alaska to Attu Station in the Bering Sea. An hour later, Yancy and Raleigh were in the Conn Pod. Thirty minutes after that, they launched into the most severe weather that a Jaeger had ever faced.
Along with hurricane force winds, Lady had faced freezing rain and hail that would make even an Alaskan shiver.
At 0658 hours, Lady Danger reached East Amatuli Island, and thirty minutes after that, noticed the tiny fishing vessel six miles farther out to sea. Against orders, Lady went to carry the small vessel to safety on the low-lying beach of northern East Amatuli Island.
They had never made it.
At 0800 hours, Knifehead had emerged from the depths.
Six hours later, Raleigh fell onto the snow-clad beach at Anchor Point.
There was blood in Raleigh’s eyes and a hole the shape of his brother in his soul.
In hindsight, Mako figured, she should have been expecting this.
In the golden days of the Jaeger Program, Yancy’s protectiveness had been legendary throughout the PPDC. The Wei Triplets - classmates of theirs from the Academy - had once described the pair as “a puppy protected by a dragon” to the delight of onlookers and huffed disapproval of one Y. Becket.
Once, he had even been reprimanded for what Herc Hansen had called “[reacting] appropriately to taunts” in an official report.
Yancy Becket was shorter than Raleigh, though only by an inch or so. Throughout their teenaged years, it had been a source of constant quarrel, even after joining the PPDC. A scar on his left cheek spoke of the overly-aggressive cat that Raleigh had once attempted to nurse into health, and his bright eyes gleamed with a newly hatched plot.
Mako inclined her head at the other Ranger. “Mr. Becket. I should have expected that you would call. What does your brother have to say about this?”
“Only that you and my not-quite-brother are clearly an excellent pairing. We watched your sim run against that new kaiju. Very decisive. Lots of overkill.”
“My copilot prefers overkill to the possibility of a kaiju not being dead. In the situation where a scanner malfunctions or is off place to begin with, it is better to have destroyed organs than to be facing a still-living opponent. Has your brother joined you here on Kodiak?”
Yancy shook his head, hair ruffling. “He’s spending time with Team Mammoth and Team Hydra, getting to know our new sim partners. Officially, I am here to see Dr. Lightcap. Unofficially, my brother and I thought we should get to know our not-quite-Raleigh.”
“Is this going to be a repeat of 2016?”
“I hope not.”
“Too late.”
“Well,” he grimaced. “In that case, my apologies. It’s not proper, I’m aware, but I’ve come to ask you how my sort-of-brother is doing.”
Mako studied him. “Raleigh Becket will always be your brother, regardless of what year he has come from. Do you not already have Ilisapie and Zeke reporting back to you?”
“Lisa tells me things like, ‘Last night, he ate potatoes.’ Of course he ate potatoes! They’re delicious! And Zeke - don’t even get me started on them - Zeke just straight-up lies to me. Last week, he told me that not-quite-Raleigh -”
“Still Raleigh,” Mako interrupted.
“- was an excellent dancer.”
A tingle whispered in the back of Mako’s mind, an approaching presence and she turned the half circle just as the man walking beside her did.
“That’s ridiculous. I’m a terrible dancer,” Raleigh said from the doorway, still an inch taller than Yancy.
Their eyes met.
Will you be okay?
I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. I will join you shortly. We need to start working on funding for Horizon Brave.
You’re sure?
He needed only smile in response.
As she left, Mako heard over her shoulder, “You did always like them terrifying.”
Yancy looked just as he did in Raleigh’s memories. Officially off-duty, he was dressed in jeans and one of the wool sweaters that
Maman
had knit before she got sick. With his strong jawline and defined nose, he looked kind of like a younger, more athletic version of Matt Damon.
A grin spread across his warm features. “Hey kiddo.”
At twenty-four years old, this Yancy - who was only weeks away from being the same brother that Raleigh had last known - was younger than Raleigh. “Hey.”
Raleigh’s first memory was of his brother. Yancy - who had probably been five or six - reading to him, words slow and fumbled but still there, still understood. It was one of those
Learn to Read
books, with the characters whose names were all wrong. All Raleigh could remember thinking was that one of the characters - Mum, because it was a British series of books - was called the wrong thing.
Yancy had always been a caretaker. He took a step closer to Raleigh, and reached out as if to touch his shoulder, but never reaching, so that he hovered just a few inches away. “You’re skinny,” he commented, all light and teasing but in the ghost of a Ghost Drift, Raleigh heard something else.
You okay, Rals?
“Food got real shitty.” His voice was breaking. Yancy’s arm dropped away.
“We’ll get you fed back up.” Yancy had that look, the one where Raleigh always knew he was thinking about how to fix something. “Get some muscle back on you.”
By most terms, Raleigh was reasonably bulky, but compared to the muscle mass he had once possessed, he was tiny.
“Don’t say that when Mako’s around,” he warned. “She’s been trying, but it’s not working so well.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. My left arm’s kind of shot. My everything, actually.”
“Yeah, Ilisapie mentioned. Said you were good in the Kwoon, though.”
“She’s exaggerating, I guarantee it. I’m her warm up spar.”
Yancy snorted. “You could take her.”
“I have no muscle mass, a shot left arm, a right arm that needs daily stretching to function, and also brain damage.”
He turned his body so that Raleigh was trapped by his brother’s broad shoulders and the concrete wall. “Kiddo, are you okay?”
Raleigh grinned weakly, and knew his brother would see right through it. “Haven’t you heard? Getting in a Jaeger again will kill me.”
“God, you’re such an idiot,” Yancy grumbled. “Honestly, the both of you are the worst. Give me a fucking hug.” Before he even had the chance to respond, Raleigh was enveloped.
When they’d been kids, they had hugged from time to time. Mostly when
Maman
told them to, and on Christmas. It had always been awkward, stiff embraces that lasted for an awkward few seconds, because really; hugging?! Since Drifting, though, everything had been different. They’d started to wonder how they had never been so close before, and by all accounts they had been best friends for their entire lives. Hugging had no longer been parent mandated, but instead a cure. It had grounded them after rough Drifts, after rough fights, after everything right up until Knifehead.
For years had Raleigh felt like he might fall to pieces at a moment’s notice, or melt into nothingness. Mako’s presence had made it better, but still it persisted.
But enveloped in his brother’s embrace for the first time in almost six years, he felt whole.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
On February 25, Mako finds Raleigh in the corner of the Kwoon. It’s the middle of the night, and the several-dozen remaining recruits from the Class of 2020-A are no doubt asleep. It’s the only time that Raleigh can wander the Academy.
Outside, there is a storm brewing.
It’s a storm that Raleigh knows very well.
The Arctic Front is pushing farther south than it has in years, so that it reaches all the way to Anchorage. Ahead of it is the squall line, which comes bearing heavy rainfall, hail the size of golf balls, and lightning. In four days, it will be at its end, and the freezing Arctic air will be only -5
° Fahrenheit. If the water were calm and not salty, the water would freeze.
By the end of February 29, 2020, two things will happen: first, the storm will clear and leave behind a frozen, icy landscape; second, Yancy Becket will die.
No
, Mako tells herself.
Not this time.
The reaction to the PPDC’s latest protocol - which ordered Rangers to destroy the skull, spine, or vital organs of a kaiju regardless of what the scanners say - was hesitant at best.
“What about K-Science?” Asked a particularly curious reporter. “Will this not cause unnecessary harm to a kaiju that could reveal how to stop them?”
“If the eighteen kaiju that we’ve dissected haven’t been enough to tell us how to stop them, I doubt that any future kaiju will be enough.”
“What prompted this change to protocol?”
“A recent sim run resulted in the destruction of a simulated Jaeger when scanners malfunctioned and declared no signature when there was a signature. We are also investigating the possibility that the kaiju may be able to control the amount of radiation that they are putting out at any given time.”
“Why wouldn’t we have observed this from the beginning?”
“For the same reason a poker player has a poker place. So as to not reveal everything they have available until we reveal everything we have available.”
“I’m sorry, but are you implying that the kaiju are sentient?”
“We are investigating the possibility.”
On February 29, three Jaegers walked into the freezing rain.From the Academy’s KAITAC - Kaiju Tactical Response Centre - Mako called Anchorage LOCCENT.
“There is a shipping vessel still out there, several kilometres off the Amatuli Islands. A total of ten hands. If you send one Jaeger after them, you will lose that Jaeger. You must send all three.”
Raleigh was curled in an spinning chair a few feet from Mako, focusing on nothing and everything all at once. “Tell him it’ll be there.”
Mako relayed such to LOCCENT on the other end, and instead of agreeing, they put Marshal Stacker Pentecost on the line. “KAITAC, explain.”
From his chair, Raleigh propelled himself to the microphone, and Mako shot him a glance.
“There’s a shipping vessel named the Saltchuk still on the gulf, several kilometres from the Amatuli Islands. Ten hands total. Knifehead
will
go after them, so we should have Lady, Hydra, and Mammoth ready to intercept it there. One Jaeger can carry the Saltchuk away while two engage.”
“You’re certain?”
“Sir, I met it there. I have seen what Knifehead can do to a single Jaeger. We cannot send one Jaeger against it.”
“I will take that into account, Mr. Becket.”
With only five months of active duty, Mammoth Apostle had the least experience of the three Jaegers. Hydra Corinthian clocked in at fourteen months, and Lady Danger had launched all the way back in 2017. As such, Mammoth landed the job of carrying the Saltchuk from harm’s path as Knifehead rose from the frigid Pacific waters.
Hydra - a sharpshooter armed with a pressurized cannon - let Knifehead have it.
She sank into the mud, steadied herself, and sent a pulse of pressure so powerful that it sent Knifehead flying in the opposite direction. Hydra gained them time, and Lady caught up to stand at her shoulder and--
Mako is standing in LOCCENT.
It is quiet.
It is like Tokyo.
Silence where there should be an explosion.
It is like the Drift.
Raleigh at her side, comforting as much as comforted.
It is like a memory of Tokyo.
The silence broken only by the exhale of breath in a confined space.
She takes his hand.
Lady Danger charged the kaiju.
“Plasma cannon, charging
.
”
They lit it up. Three times, close range. They did not let their guard down.
Mammoth rejoined the scene, the Saltchuk deposited half a mile from away, and the three Jaegers turned and paced like caged tigers. Even over the comms, Mako could hear their snarling. Snarling, and pacing, and waiting.
“Kaiju signature rising!” Tendo Choi shouted, and all three braced for impact.
It hit Lady. Of course it hit Lady.
A flash of teeth in a blue maw.
Panting, snarling, Yancy and Raleigh Becket threw the kaiju off, and directly into the waiting arms of Mammoth Apostle.
-like lightning down its sides-
-a storm-
-the wind-
“Empty the clip!”
Hydra Corinthian armed her chest mortars, and fired. Direct hit.
Knifehead sank into the waves.
Mammoth Apostle yanked the carcass up, and Lady Danger fired into its organs.
Mammoth Apostle dropped a semi-incinerated carcass.
“No signature!” Shouted Tendo Choi.
In the beginning, going into the Drift felt like someone was hacking up your brain with a meat cleaver, while coming out of the Drift was like someone dumping a bucket of molten metal on the shards of your brain and cackling as the remaining pieces melted into a puddle of goo.
In the beginning, the Drift sucked.
But Drifting successfully was different, so that entering the Drift was like inhaling the fresh air of a spring morning, so that you could enjoy the clean, crisp air that was a new perspective melding with your own, and exiting the Drift was like the exhale, peace spreading through your body and filling you with the knowledge that the single breath you just took would be with you for the rest of your life.
The Drift was peace, was everything right about the world, because in the Drift, you didn’t have to be afraid anymore.
And Raleigh had been afraid for a very long time.
“Marshal,” Raleigh said. “I think it’s time we discussed Operation Pitfall.”