Garage

[neverbelievedintheend]

The Milliways garage is stupidly large, and stupidly well-stocked, and a dozen other impossibilities. It makes Stacker's head hurt just to think about it. But it has two things going for it. One, unlike the front door, the door to the garage lets Stacker in and out every time. And two, it's got a Jaeger in it.

Where there is one Jaeger, there may very well be more. Even if, by all lights, one ought to be impossible.

Stacker doesn't much care about impossible at this point. If it gives him a chance of ensuring that the world survives Hansen's warning, he'll take it. The garage merits exploring.

But first he has a Ranger to check on. The fact that said Ranger is dead doesn't change anything.

Comments

[andinfluencepeople]

Chuck shrugs, swallowing and setting the sandwich down once he arrives. "Best I can tell, I've been here at least a year," he says, looking up at Tacit Ronin. "I'm not actually going to be able to get her into shape unless this wizard lady I met actually takes up nuclear engineering, but I figured... better than going crazy from boredom, right?"

He looks back at Stacker. "You still living, sir?"

[neverbelievedintheend]

"Fair hair, tattoos, large dog?" says Pentecost. "I met her. It'd be interesting to see what would happen if she did."

Pause.

"And yes. As a matter of fact, thanks to the vagaries of the Milliways door, I have about six and a half days left before the triple event you described. I was on my way to a meeting I'd called with Becket, Mori, your father, and- well, you- when I stepped through a Shatterdome door and found myself here instead. At which point the Bar door locked behind me."

It's not quite the level of irritation at being thwarted that Tendo Choi saw on his face eight months back, but it's up there.

[andinfluencepeople]

Chuck blinks, and breathes out a small "huh".

"What do you want to know?"

After a moment, he leaves aside the idea of earlier him. He never got a call to that meeting. Divergent timelines, or whatever the fuck Shostakova called them.

Isn't an excuse to not be of use.

[neverbelievedintheend]

"Anything you can tell me about the event," says Pentecost. "And anything you can tell me about the specific kaiju involved. I've been working on a number of possibilities since that door closed behind me and I'd like to have more information to go on before proceeding much further." He glances around and adds, "I realise it was a year and change ago. Whatever you can recall, I'll take."

[andinfluencepeople]

Chuck closes his eyes for a moment, thinking. "You're on Jan 5?"

[neverbelievedintheend]

Pentecost nods. "Early in the day."

[andinfluencepeople]

"Okay, well. For starters, even if Beckett is a fucking terrible partner -- sorry, sir -- somehow Mako manages to make it work once she gets her feet under her. Make sure Tendo takes the systems entirely offline -- manually, as well as digitally, during the test this afternoon; I don't know if you can stop Beckett from sending her into a RABIT but it'll at least keep tensions lower if she can't override the electronics and kick them back on."

Chuck rolls a shoulder back. "Kaiju sign on the 8th was -- early. 0400, maybe? You had my dad and I head out as backup to Cherno and Crimson. Two cat 4's – Leatherback who, I don’t mind telling you, is a bitch and half, and Otachi. Leatherback's not as fast, but fights on the outside and likes to jump on backs. Take your eyes off of it for long enough to rev itself up and it has this EMP attack that'll cripple anything big enough that's electronic. Took out the whole city's power, not to mention all of us – and the whole Shatterdome. Then, once they're stranded in the water and we can't fucking get to them, Otachi comes around with her acid spit. I'd suggest you ask Tendo or Mori if they can figure out a way to rig up a kill switch so the reactors can be taken off before the attack hits and kicked right back on after it. That way they'd at least be able to get in a few punches, and Striker could help out. Dad broke his arm, when we tried to distract them – Gipsy saved our arses there, the flare gun mostly just pissed it off.

"Anyway, 'cause Gipsy was offline she wasn't hurt. Mori swept the streets with the two of them. And Beckett, I guess. Otachi has wings, which would have been handy to know before it decided to grab Gipsy like a hawk, but they got out of it. Pregnant, too, Geiszler figured out later."

[neverbelievedintheend]

He steeples his fingers in front of his face, and listens, and considers.

"Pregnant," he finally says. "There was no sign of them being able to conventionally reproduce before this. That's... something I'll leave to Dr. Geiszler to analyze for the moment. The electromagnetic pulse is a new development, and a disturbing one."

Acid's no very unusual thing, really, not with the chemical hell that is Kaiju Blue already in these things' bodies. But EMP capability?

"All right. I can work with that."

[andinfluencepeople]

Chuck nods. "We were already on our way to the Rift when Geiszler -- uh, for lack of a better way of putting it, drifted with the damned thing. Talked Dr. Gottlieb into it, too, so he didn't fry himself. Worked out in our favor, in the long run -- we were fighting the two category 4s by the time they told us the Rift -- "

Chuck pauses, brow puckering. "Well, basically it's like a security pass. Members only. But it reads the DNA of the kaiju in order to let them back through, so you've got to ride one down. Otherwise you'll just bounce off of the surface. A living one, I imagine. Didn't exactly get that far.

"The category 4s – sorry, Marshall." Chuck's face is pained as he breaks off. "I can tell you what I remember, but I didn't have any debriefing or a/v recording or anything on this part, and a lot of it didn't make a fuckton of sense."

[neverbelievedintheend]

"That's quite all right. What you're telling me is infinitely more than what I had before this."

It isn't zero, after all.

"And to be frank I'm still more than a little stalled on the part where my science advisors somehow figured out how to Drift with what I can only assume was by then a dead abomination from another dimension."

[andinfluencepeople]

Chuck breathes something like a laugh. "Yeah, didn't really get a good explanation on that. The visibility down in the trench is crap, which we knew, but they sent out two cat 4s that are fast. And it... was like they knew we were coming."

He hesitates. "I don't know if that had something to do with Geiszler drifting with the damn things." He breathes out, cheeks puffing as he does so. "They're both heavily armored. One long and fishy, like a crocodile, I guess, was hell to monitor on the sensors. Would've been nice to have Cherno around." The Kaidonvskys have been piloting long enough with poor enough visibility, before the advanced sensing systems were developed, that they fight as much on feel as anything else. And they are terrifyingly effective.

"We," he says, tipping his hand at Pentecost, "got to deal with the cat 5 that plopped up when it really wasn't needed. 7 ton, I figure. Somewhere close to 200 meters, maybe a little less."

He flinches forward slightly, looping and arm around his knee. "Uh." He clears his throat, not looking at the Marshall. He takes a long breath. "Tore us up real good. I mean, Striker gave about as good as she got, but he ripped her up and down the ridges and vents before we could get our footing. Huge fucker. But she cut his throat and almost tore his arms right off even with half our system offline. Then he… called for help, I guess. Gipsy'd gotten herself lamed up killing the croc-y one. They weren't… doing so great, sir. Better than us, I figure, but not exactly by a long way."

[neverbelievedintheend]

Pentecost is silent, listening. And, as Chuck goes on, very, very still.

Eventually he says, "When you first came here, I seem to recall you saying Mori and Beckett were going to use Gipsy's reactor in the throat."

Operation Pitfall had not been designed to require the overload of a Jaeger's reactor. It had been constructed with Striker Eureka carrying a formerly Russian nuclear weapon in mind. One that would have to be either lost, or used, to make matters desperate enough for what Hansen's just described.

"I take it that that's the point you came in from. When you thought this was a RABIT of mine."

[andinfluencepeople]

Chuck shrugs. "We were going to die either way, and damn if Gipsy was going to fight her way through. Manual override, with the system busted."

No way out. He's quiet for a moment.

"She was well within our blast range, on land, and closer than we'd planned on any of the backup during detonation. But with the water she has a good chance of making it to the breach, at least. I hope we actually killed those fucks, but they should at least be able to use a corpse. The big one's going to be pretty impervious to exterior damage except from shrapnel."

And Striker was likely more vaporized than weaponized.

[neverbelievedintheend]

The thought that races through his head and vanishes in an instant is: there are worse fates.

He's not going to mention that.

"I see," he says. "It sounds like they have a solid chance."

But that's the trouble: it's a chance, and they'll only have the one, and he won't be able to see to it that they get any improvement at all to their odds if everything goes the way Hansen's told him.

Well.

"But I hope you'll understand if I say that I think I'm going to look into a few things to improve our odds before trying that front door again." There's something not too much unlike a grim smile to his expression as he adds, "Your find, here, gave me an idea."

[andinfluencepeople]

Chuck's pretty damn bemused. "Well, yeah. No offense, Marshall, but if you weren't using everything you had at hand to make sure at least one version of my world makes it out of this mess, I wouldn't be understanding at all."

[neverbelievedintheend]

"I was thinking specifically that a garage that held one Jaeger had no reason not to hold more," says Pentecost. "I'll worry about finding suitable pilots if that's the case. If it's not..."

He glances sidelong at the rest of the garage.

"I'll at least have learned what's keeping Tacit Ronin company, and whether or not it'll be useful."

[andinfluencepeople]

Chuck nods.

"I haven't seen anything, but this place is real weird. You'd think I could see the whole garage from the Conn-pod, but the view... changes."

He shrugs. "I guess offering my services isn't really plausible, but I can help you look. For Jaegers, or pilots, or whatever."

[neverbelievedintheend]

"It's like that down here, too?" says Pentecost. "I thought that was confined to the walls upstairs."

He shakes his head and looks out over the array of vehicles stretching into the distance.

"Let's see about finding other Jaegers first. Not much reason to look for pilot candidates otherwise. Especially since there's no guarantee of what condition they might be in if we do find them."

[andinfluencepeople]

"Yeeeeah," Chuck says. He hesitates, something rubbing at him wrong.

"Marshall," he says, and stops. "I don't mean this disrespectfully. But why Mori and Beckett, and not the Weis and Kaidonovskys? At your meeting."

He and his dad make sense. His dad's second in command, and he's one of the senior Rangers. But everyone left (except for Mori, and Beckett who doesn't really count) is a senior Ranger.

[neverbelievedintheend]

"Because, Hansen," says Pentecost, "I don't have to explain Milliways to them. I've encountered all three of them here at various points in the past. They're already aware of this place's ability to circumvent the usual restrictions on time and causality. Saying that I've had word from a week in the future of an impending double event followed by a triple event and intend to counteract it with whatever assistance I can muster from outside our usual channels won't leave them wondering if the Marshall's gone off his nut."

[andinfluencepeople]

"Yeah, but it's not like I'd," Chuck's voice suddenly cracks "-- my dad's been here?"

[neverbelievedintheend]

"Just once," says Pentecost, quietly. "Very briefly. I wasn't able to give him enough of an orientation to tell him you were here- I barely got it through to him that the place was real."

He doesn't apologize. Not out loud, anyway. But it's in his voice: I'd have sent him to you if I could.

[andinfluencepeople]

"Okay," Chuck says after a few moments, stunned.

He glances down at his sandwich as he casts about for what they were discussing.

"Jaegers," he murmurs. "I'll probably be here if you find any, or maybe up in the bar. Usually here."

[neverbelievedintheend]

Pentecost looks at him for a while. Then he nods.

"I'll come look for you," he says. "Whether or not I find any, since I'm stuck here. Someone needs to keep an eye on my people's status."

And this might be the wrong end of the universe, and Hansen might be dead, but he's still Pentecost's people.

[andinfluencepeople]

"Sure thing, Marshall," Chuck says, and grins at him despite his distraction. "Good hunting."

[neverbelievedintheend]

There's a brief flash of something almost like a smile.

"Thanks, Hansen," he says. "I'll see you around."

And off he goes.