I reached up to tap my coms unit to switch to a private channel with the TOC when I heard Doc Holliday yell in my ear.

“Outlaw, we’ve lost all video and—” Then the line went dead.

“What the hell?” growled Top. Suddenly a shot rang out and I heard a big wet cough directly behind me. Colonel Ho staggered as the entire front of his face mask exploded outward, spraying all of us with red and chunks of gray brain tissue. His body collapsed in an artless tangle of thrashing limbs.

“Sniper!” roared Belle and Top at the same time, and then the whole world seemed to disintegrate into a madness of gunfire.

...

I crouched and spun, but before I could take a step something smashed me sideways. It was Bunny. He had one arm hooked around Belle’s waist and had rammed me with his massive shoulder as automatic gunfire filled the air and bullets chewed up the ground where I’d been standing. We fell hard on the concrete beneath the tin roof overhang of a crab shack, then rolled apart. Belle came up on one knee, holstering her dart gun aside and swinging her rifle around from behind her back. She swept the rooftops, looking for targets, firing at anything that moved.

Bunny and I dodged to opposite sides of the crab shack, also swapping weapons. The gunfire was continuous and raining down from elevated positions. There was a lot of it, too. A barrage that chased Havoc Team behind cover. Ho lay on the ground, with his head torn apart but still impossibly—horribly—alive. He twitched and thrashed, caught inside an envelope of personal agony. The bullet had slung his blood seven feet high onto the wall behind which I hid.

Top, Andrea, and Major Mun had scrambled for the cover of parked cars, letting the metal vehicles soak up the rounds. Window glass exploded and the hood and fenders popped as if in a hailstorm. I saw Top looking at me and yelling, but there was no sound in my ear. The coms were dead. That’s what Bug had tried to tell me before things went to hell. Andrea was all but punching the keys of his wrist computer, but the machines were not answering to his call.

“So much for gadgets,” said Bunny, having to lean toward me and yell. “We need to go old school on these fuckers. But where the hell are they?”

The rounds were coming in so hot he wasn’t able to look around the corner. Splinters filled the air like hornets.

“Up there,” answered Belle, who had crabbed sideways behind a stack of big spools of electrical cable. “Count twelve. Maybe more.”

I took a small mirror on a stick and angled it to give me a quick peek around the corner. Thirty yards away was a one-story dockmaster’s office with a cinder block half-wall around the top. A big air conditioner unit and a radio tower dominated the roof, but all along that wall were figures silhouetted against the winter sky. I couldn’t make out any details except that there were at least a dozen of them, they were all in black Hammer Suits, and they were all firing down at us.

“Well, to hell with this crap,” complained Bunny. He had his big Atchisson AA-12 shotgun in his hands, with a big thirty-two-round drum magazine in place. I saw that the magazine was marked with a little red heart, which was Bunny’s way of indicating that it was loaded with explosive rounds instead of buckshot. He didn’t dare stick his head out and instead pointed the barrel around the corner, tilted it up, and began firing.

“Merry fucking Christmas, assholes!” Bunny thundered. He was loaded with modified FRAG-12 high-explosive rounds and had his weapon set to full-auto, which gave him a fire rate of three hundred rounds per minute. He burned through the full magazine in seconds, his huge frame braced for the continuous recoil. Each round was a fin-stabilized 19mm warhead that, once fired, arms itself as soon as it travels three meters from the muzzle and detonates on impact. The HE rounds are designed to punch a one-inch-diameter hole through quarter-inch steel plate. The cinder block wall had no chance at all. Neither did three of the shooters behind that wall. I saw bodies leap into the air trailing blood and debris. The other shooters scattered.

...

Andrea began firing at the dockmaster’s office, which was now actively burning. I was busy with the infected, using the Snellig to drop them as they came close, but there were a lot of them and they were moving fast. Ho lay between the infected and the rest of Havoc and, despite everything, he was still moving, clawing feebly at the ground with his fingers.

The situation, which at first had been terrible and heartbreaking, had gone through desperate and was about to set its next foot on empty air. The—and I had to assume they were the fake SEALs and Korean soldiers—were on the street level now, sending a new fusillade our way, while the street behind us was filling up with dozens of the infected.

...

“What’s the plan, boss?” asked Bunny.

I was not in a mood for niceties. I plucked two fragmentation grenades from my harness. “Plan? How about a nice big cup of fuck you?”

Bunny grinned and pulled two of his own. We pulled the pins and lobbed them in a tight arc over the wall of the crab shack. The second they blew I was moving, running low, firing into the smoke, Mun beside me, with Bunny and Belle flanking us. The bad guys had the numbers. We had one moment of utter confusion. That’s my kind of math.

I saw shapes reeling in the cloud of red-tinged dust and fired into it as I ran. Bullets punched through the air, but I didn’t care. This wasn’t a fight. This was murder. We took it to them, closing to zero distance as we hosed them with rounds. I heard Bunny cough out a cry of pain as bullets hit him, but he powered through the foot-pounds of impact, letting the body armor do its work and making the bad guys pay for the searing pain in his chest. One of the ROK soldiers, his weapon empty and no time to fish for a new magazine, swung his rifle stock at Belle but she shot him in the face and kicked him at the same time. He reeled back, his dead weight screening her as she closed on a second man and killed him, too.

Belle, small and wiry and fast, emptied an entire magazine into a pair of soldiers who were trying to shift away out of the smoke in order to get a better look at their targets. They wasted a second doing that, and she killed them for their stupidity.

On the other side of me, Mun was firing with a handgun, holding it in both hands as she walked forward, aiming, firing, killing, aiming. I thought I’d seen her hesitate for a moment at first, but now she was doing her job.

There were a total of eleven of the bad guys left after Bunny’s earlier barrage and my grenade. We could have hidden behind obstacles and spent all afternoon sniping at each other. This wasn’t that kind of fight. We had that moment of advantage and we took it.

And we killed them all.

-Rage pg. 286-296, Kindle Edition.

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

Cued by the change in topic, the feed cut to a Jaeger sinking in the coastal shallows, its torso ripped open and flames roaring in the open ruins of its head. Raleigh recognized it as Echo Saber. The broadcast cut again, to Mutavore hammering away at another fallen Jaeger, beating it into scrap with the Sydney Opera House in the background. Raleigh knew this doomed Jaeger, too: Vulcan Specter, a Mark III just like Gipsy Danger, launched the same year. He couldn’t suppress a shiver.

Then the news anchor’s tone brightened.

“But the Australian Jaeger, Striker Eureka, a Mark V piloted by father and son team Herc and Chuck Hansen, finally took the beast down.”

At the mention of the pilots, service portraits of the Hansens flashed across the screen, quickly replaced by a ground-level view of Striker Eureka and Mutavore going at it. Raleigh had never been inside a Mark V. None had existed when he was a Ranger. He couldn’t help being a little bit awed at Striker Eureka’s speed and power. It could have broken Gipsy Danger over its knee. Raleigh felt a little bit envious, but mostly what he felt was the anger and guilt he’d carried with him for the past five years. If he’d had one of those, Knifehead wouldn’t have lasted thirty seconds... and Yancy would still be alive.
He’d fought with Striker Eureka once, in Manila. Together they’d taken down a big Category 4. That was Gipsy Danger’s last engagement before Knifehead.

On the TV screen, Striker Eureka lit Mutavore up with a rocket barrage from short range. The rockets dug into the kaiju’s carapace and detonated inside it, blowing away huge chunks of flesh and shell. Mutavore staggered and Striker Eureka finished it off with some kind of bladed weapon. The dying kaiju slumped and then toppled over sideways at an angle from the Sydney waterfront deeper into the city, crushing an entire block of condos and tourist shops as it fell.

Before concrete dust and smoke obscured the monster, Raleigh saw it hit the ground hard enough that the impact bounced parked cars into the air—the feed was nearly overwhelmed with alarm sirens. The dying kaiju’s blood, bright blue and as corrosive as any substance found in nature, smoked and sizzled its way across the asphalt and concrete.

The feed cut to overhead footage, probably from a helicopter. Raleigh had seen similar shots before, but he was stunned every time by just how big the kaiju were. The immense carcass lay stretched out across three blocks. Between it and the water was nothing but rubble and fire.

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

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

Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization - Part 2, Chapter 4

Pentecost wasn’t surprised. Her country had just received an enormous windfall, billions of dollars to construct a barrier to the Pacific entrance of the Panama Canal. The kaiju had not found the Canal yet, but they had hit Guatemala and Ecuador. It was only a matter of time. The money for the Canal barrier had come straight out of the final-phase prototype funding for the Mark V-E Jaeger. The thought made Pentecost furious.

Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization - Part 1, Chapter 3

Pentecost had a savage dream of leading a force of Jaegers through the Breach to whatever lay on the other side, and doing to the kaiju exactly what they had done to humanity. He would need a hell of a lot more in the way of Jaeger tech and combat support if he was ever to make that dream a reality. There also didn’t seem to be any way to get into the Breach, but that was a matter of building tougher Jaegers that could withstand the electromagnetic storm it created.

Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization - Part 1, Chapter 3

But they needed it. They kaiju were getting bigger and stronger. The Jaegers needed to match them, hell, exceed them. Not only that, they needed to make a push toward the Breach.

Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization - Part 1, Chapter 3

“Plus nobody can get Kaiju Blue if it’s at the bottom of the ocean, right?” Raleigh added. Kaiju Blue was bad news, a kind of shock reaction the human body suffered when recently dead kaiju started to off-gas toxins in the hours after they died. It killed a lot of people when kaiju went down in populated areas. Today it would only kill fish, and who knew if they got Kaiju Blue, anyway

Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization - Part 1, Chapter 2

Didn’t look like they’d need it, though. The kaiju lost its footing and toppled sideways into the ocean, which boiled around the wounds, reacting to the mixture of salt water and the kaiju’s corrosive blood. The motions of its arms grew less coordinated and it sank slowly.

Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization - Part 1, Chapter 2

Do not confuse them with any terrestrial life forms, Raleigh remembered some egghead saying in a briefing. They are built on a template of silicon, not carbon. Whatever is on the other side of the Breach, it is a stranger place than we can imagine.

Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization - Part 1, Chapter 2

We’ve all seen the pictures, and yes, they are inspiring. Coyote Tango bravely finishing off Onibaba with one conscious pilot. The flash and crackle of Cherno Alpha’s SparkFist. Lucky Seven standing toe-to-toe with a two-hundred-foot monster in Hong Kong Bay. (What names!)

Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization - Part 1, Chapter 1

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

Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization - Part 1, Chapter 1

“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.

Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization - Part 1, Chapter 1

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

Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization - Part 1, Chapter 1

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.

Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization - Part 1

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.

Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization - Prologue

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.

Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization - Prologue

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.

Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization - Prologue

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.

Pacific Rim: The Official Movie Novelization - Prologue

My weapon is also one of the Curios of the space station. I don't know where it came from, but it must be important if it appeals to Madam Herta.

Trailblazer Dialogue

Genius Society #83, Madam Herta, resides deep within the Clock Tower at the edge of the cosmos, pursuing the ultimate mysteries of the universe as a sorceress.
Thanks to de-aging technology, she maintains the youthful appearance of her prime. Disliking mundane affairs, she typically delegates such tasks to her puppets

The Herta Character Detail

After becoming the Lead Researcher of the Herta space station [sic], Asta's life is now busier than ever before. She has to manage the researchers and their differing opinions, reply to the numerous correspondence meant for Herta, constantly negotiate with the IPC, and procure equipment from various different sources... But at the same time, she's experiencing the greatest freedom she'd ever known...

"Deploy the Nyul Iman telescope in the second equipment bay. Set it to 100× astronomical units, and begin observation of the pre-stellar core in front of us."
"Pay close attention to particle density. If you discover any super-dense structures, commence recording of the protostar fragmentation process at once."

In her spare time, Asta would sometimes consider how Madam Herta never seems to come around anymore after Asta arrived at the space station. She even made inquiries, but was told, "If there's no interesting new stuff, I won't bother coming in."

"...I'd rather listen to this girl debate with you."

She thought back to the words Herta had casually told her family on that day long age [sic].

The Herta of her memories seems to stand out amongst resplendent starlight, giving her the power to control the starry sky — and her own destiny.

Asta Character Story Part 4

"The stars follow their own orbits, but what about humans... Can we humans ever hope to control our own destiny?"

A wealthy family background grants Asta the power to explore the stars, but also become her personal shackles.

As she grows older, Asta's vow to become an astronomer was viewed as increasingly radical by her family. She begins to lose count of how many times she'd argue during family meetings about this very thing.

Until one day, after a family meeting, a puppet girl walks in, and one of the family members who were so domineering a moment ago suddenly changes into a yes-man.

"That's the girl."
"But she'd..."
"No buts. I didn't come all this way to listen to your garbage academic reports. I'd rather listen to this girl debate with you."
"..."
"I want to see her on the space station within three days."

And with that, the puppet girl walks straight out without looking back.

Asta Character Story Part 3

In the beginning, it had the exact same pose as the previous portrait.
Looking at the face identical to hers, she was convinced that this was not her.

"Impossible. How can two portraits be exactly the same?"

She tweaked its joints, opened its eyes, and made its fingers softer.
She looked happy when all the changes were done.

"Completely different from yesterday. This is more like who I am today."

Light Cone: The Birth of the Self

Madam Herta's manuscripts are extremely valuable assets.

Its core rarity is not in how Madam Herta rarely pens to paper, but because to a genius like her, nothing is ever worth recording.

Scientific research that would take normal researchers ten years — or even a lifetime — to achieve may be able to shed light on an entirely new domain of research, but they are to Herta as ordinary as turning on a LED light. Who would waste time trying to systematically record such trivial matters?

It's not just Madam Herta — any documentation written by a Genius Society member is a priceless treasure. However, Herta is more generous and more understanding toward normal people like us. She leaves her handwritten drafts behind in random places around the space station with as much generosity as she allows researchers to study the Curios she collected.

Of course, we all firmly understand that Madam Herta isn't being lazy and just discarding incomplete drafts around the place. It's so she can claim to investors with plausible deniability that "I've finished writing that paper, but can't find it anywhere."

Herta Character Story: Part 1

Herta space station's [sic] true master.
As the human with the highest IQ on the Blue, she only does what she's interested in, dropping projects the moment she loses interest — the best example being the space station.
She typically appears in the form of a remote-controlled puppet.
"It's about seventy percent similar to how I looked as a child." — Herta

Herta Character Detail