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Cherno Alpha’s right arm is cold. Vander twists and presses the control dynamos wrapped around his big hands but the arm won’t move. The runes projected from the controls go dark. The CAT2 Kaiju has vomited some kind of acidic spray all over the rig and it’s crippled the limb and is eating through the hull. Beside him in the conn-pod, Silco is throwing the switch to charge the Hex cannon. Vander reaches to him in the drift.
“Wait! Horizon Brave is too close. They’re disabled, too. Hold off,” Vander’s voice is in Silco’s ear and Silco’s finger is on the trigger. He sighs, anxious and rushed and worried, but speaks into the comm.
“Horizon Brave, status? Charging Hex cannon. Can you get clear of the Kaiju?”
“Negative, Cherno. The rig is disabled. We’re elbow deep in axle grease but so far, she won’t budge,” Felicia’s voice is calm, despite the circumstances. The sea is angry tonight, and the waves are battering the inert Jaeger. Horizon Brave sways unnaturally, dangerously tilted this way and that as the ocean churns around it.
“Copy that, Horizon,” Vander again. “We’ll get to you, sit tight.” The copilots pump the pedals and the Jaeger groans as it slowly stomps through the waves toward the paralyzed rig. It stands helplessly, 50 meters away, the Kaiju circling it threateningly under the water. Silco slides his bony finger away from the trigger. Cherno’s left arm extends and the rig approaches the other half of the team. The great hand of the Jaeger comes to rest on the shoulder of Horizon Brave, stabilizing it in the roiling sea.
“We lookin’ at an eject, Horizon?” Vander’s voice is steady but Silco feels his anxiety simmering in the drift.
“Not just yet, Cherno. Tryna reset systems over here. Might still have some fight left in us for this one–” Connol’s voice is interrupted and the comm fuzzes loudly in all ears as the Kaiju explodes from the water, its slathering jaws locked onto Cherno’s stretched metal arm.
“Godsdammit!” Vander and Silco struggle to keep the rig on its feet as the Kaiju rolls itself over the arm, twisting them backward and away from Horizon Brave, which lurches violently as the great hand gripping it tears loose. The copilots reel inside the conn-pod and the rune displays flash wildly as they fight to keep the machine — nearly 30 storeys high — upright while the monster continues its deathroll. Its endless rows of razor sharp fangs drip with that same caustic ichor tearing through the arm and primary hull of the Jaeger. Silco cries out, the damage to the machine registering through the drift as real pain in his own scrawny forearm.
Beside him, Vander is hurting too, his right arm throbbing and burning in time with the disintegrating machine arm outside. They manage to keep the rig on its feet, but now both arms have gone cold. The K’s teeth finally meet and the Jaeg’s left arm shatters apart just below the elbow. Silco hisses, the pain so real, and the drift flashes red with the beginnings of panic… or rage. A whistle and a flashing of red runes indicate that damage has reached intolerable levels. The smell of brine and fish permeates the filtered air the rebreathers are pumping into their masks. Cherno Alpha is taking on water.
“We’re in a bad way, Marshal,” Vander sends an SOS through the comm, not knowing whether Shatterdome reads. Fifty miles away, Tendo Choi is on hands and knees, switching out vacuum tubes and duct taping sparking wires while the Marshal looms over him, her burly bare arms crossed impatiently over her chest.
“One more sec, Marshal, I’ve got this!” and he turns to his work, anxious sweat polluted with pomade dripping from his brow which is furrowed below his unctuous pompadour.
Ambessa Medarda can only roll her eyes. One thick finger taps at the round bicep it rests on. The rear base in Noxus can’t go online soon enough. The Marshal’s pending promotion comes with a state-of-the-art facility and a trio of Mark 3 Jaeger’s to do with as she sees fit. Bilgewater and its sorry excuse for a forward base can go on corroding into the K-blue sea for all she cares, as can its suite of Mark 1 sumpbuckets and their commoner co-pilot teams. The glittering new marvel of Noxian engineering and its triple threat of Enforcer-class Jaegers await her, the rear base due to go online in just over a week’s time. Ambessa eyes the clock on the wall. If these sorry excuses for Jaeger copilots can wrap this up in the next hour, she’s sure to be transferred out of this backwater before the countdown resumes following the next movement at the breach. It’s only been four years since the breach opened up and began vomiting 250ft abominations into the world but Ambessa is career military and has a sense for these things. This war won’t be a short one. She’s eager to be done with all of the improvised nonsense of this cobbled together excuse for a forward operating base known as Shatterdome. She’s happy to leave it in the hands of the sister cities that threw it together during year one and take her children back to their home country for good.
A sharp– pop!– accompanies a dramatic yellow spark and Tendo leaps to the controls, pulling his headset to his left ear. “Control to Cherno–say again…”
H…izo…–ave disa... K’s… aci…–tin…thr…th hulls…–ystem…shot… Ri…–nd lef…cold. Weapons ac… –th Jae… obili…’re ab… t… sw…–min….
Tendo pushes the crackling bud deeper into his ear canal and plies his trade, replaying the message at double speed twice before turning to Ambessa with his report.
“K’s got an acid attack that’s breached the hulls of both units. Horizon Brave is disabled. Both arms cold on Cherno Alpha and the rig is taking on water. Weapons and Hex lattices active on both Jaegs.”
The Marshal’s lips curl into a grimace and her thick arms unfold as she leans with both hands onto the control cabinet. She lowers her mouth to Tendo’s naked right ear. The scarred lips, painted with a shimmering gold line — the mark of the matron of House Medarda — part to deliver her orders. “ Warwick Protocol. ”
Inside Cherno’s flickering conn-pod, a skinny paper tape ticks from its port, curling around Vander’s thick finger. Long range voice comm is offline so their orders come through by wireless wire. He unfurls the ticker tape, reading:
W A R W I C K P R O T O C O L
“By Janna…” Vander’s voice comes low. Silco just rolls his eyes.
“Expendable as ever,” the skinny man rasps and the two men share a sideways smile under the shadow of oblivion.
Across the angry surface of the stormy sea, Horizon Brave is dark except for the glowing visor of the comparatively tiny head housing the conn-pod at the very top of the 240ft Jaeger. Lucky break the two Jaegs are facing each other across all this cold water. Cherno winks its signal lamp: 1 million lumens shoot in a heavenly white beam from the shoulder of the rig. The cone of light sparkles with the driving rain. A thick glittering chain of flawlessly twinkling diamonds that falls on the face of the other machine. The signal lamp flashes.
COMMAND ORDERS OP WARWICK. CHARGE AND PREPARE EVAC. AIRSHIPS INBOUND.
A beat and Horizon Brave is winking back, her yellow light flickering on the chest of Cherno Alpha where the conn-pod is suspended inside its gyroscope seven stories below the blue glow engine of the Hex lattice. The co-pilots read the signal of their teammates and their stomachs ice over.
NEGATIVE ON EVAC. SYSTEMS COLD. HB ALL STOP. MAN OVERRIDE INOP. BB.
“No!” Even as Vander’s hands come up, instinctively reaching protectively toward his friends hundreds of feet away over deadly ocean, the Kaiju again springs from the deep. It latches to Horizon’s hull and spews steaming black acid over the metal casing housing its Hex lattice heart. Silco’s finger twists the dial charging the Hex cannon. Vander looks at him in disbelief. “Silco, they’re dead in the water. No manual override for their eject protocol. This is a rescue op now.”
Silco just leans forward in his tether, not looking at his partner. Vander’s hand moves to the signal lamp. The burst of white light catches on the nightshine of the monster’s bulging eyes where it's clinging to the torso of the disabled rig which is coming apart in globs of liquified metal across the water. The rising tone of the charging cannon overhead screams in both men’s ears. The reek of raw ocean is everywhere as Cherno continues to slowly fill with heavy, corrosive seawater. Vander rages at Silco.
“Belay command’s order! We’ve got to get to them! There’s time!”
“We’re up to our waist in water inside and out. We can’t hope to reach them before the lattice overloads. Better to shoot from here. They’re not stupid. They’ll find a way out!” Silco still won’t look at Vander.
“If you fire with that thing perched on their godsdamn rig, it won’t matter if they find a way out! Silco! Think about what you’re doing!” Vander feels the rage born of the caustic pain of Silco’s injury as it boils in him through the drift. “Silco! It’s a K! It doesn’t think! It’s not personal! We don’t have to do this doomsday fucking protocol if we can still save them!”
The charging scream reaches a fever pitch, shattering into an earsplitting trio of alarms and while Vander still pleads, his heart open and panicked inside the drift, Silco throws the switch that fires the Hex cannon.
The false eye of Cherno Alpha glows a brilliant blue. A queasy tone vibrates the great dome of its dummy head and a beautiful ring scrawled with runes and sigils draws itself before the expressionless face of the helmeted machine. At the center of this, the will of the Arcane is twisted by force of science. Hextech draws the orders and the power of magic is forced to obey. A thin straight line of raw power bursts blue from the core of the Hex lattice powering Cherno Alpha. It travels in no time at all across the water, bridging the relatively humble distance and making contact with the oily flesh of the blue monster from below the bedrock.
Cherno Alpha’s conn-pod fills with pure white light, swallowing every shadow. The two men bury their eyes in the crooked elbows of each of their uninjured arms. The starbirth flash lasts less than a second, but they feel the heat of it from this distance and through a 40ft layer of radiation shielding. The light of Hex blast meeting Hex lattice one final signal from Horizon Brave and her copilots, Connol and Felicia Kane. The message’s meaning is unmistakable.
Something sick is polluting the drift. Vander feels ill with it. Some part of both of them just cracked open into the interface and the neural handshake has become more of a neural arm wrestling match. The towering machine groans, losing ballast under the influence of the water flooding in. It rocks, pitching forward into the waves and Cherno Alpha is swimming. The gyroscope keeps the conn-pod level, but the two men are on the floor of it, struggling. The larger man has his hands wrapped around the long neck of the smaller man. Vander’s hands are so big, his fingers interlace at the back of Silco’s neck and his thick thumbs are stacked and pushing into the bulging Adam’s apple like the crushing bit of a hydraulic press. Silco’s eye bleeds, torn and ruined where Vander’s angry hands had ripped away the helmet and visual interface mask of Silco’s Shimmer Kit.
Horizontal now at the bottom of the polluted Guardian’s Sea, bone-chilling water arcs into the conn-pod from this or that control panel seam or broken steampipe. It’s sloshing deep in no time, and Silco — on his back under Vander — feels the cold needles of it stabbing into his ears, then he snuffles the first salty splashes of it into his narrow nostrils. Choking, flailing. Now it’s covering his face. Drowning.
The electrical systems flicker-flash then the lights go out. Only the blue glow of the cooling Hex lattice darkly lights the circular chamber of the co-pilots’ shared command. The drift makes all of it so much worse. There’s no reason they should still be connected. They’re out of alignment, both half chasing rabbits. And yet, the connection holds. Something hateful trying to prove something mean to something else… a loving thing that they shared here, but that’s retreating from both of them now. Vander bears down, feeling Silco’s naked self preservation like an insult. Silco thrashes, feeling Vander’s lust for his blood like a sure thing. The seawater burns then scours his wrecked eye. Replete with diffused Kaiju Blue, the waters of the Guardian’s Sea are already twisting his damaged mortal flesh into something more profane. The influence of the alien DNA on the human cells is profound and very painful.
A knife wound through both their minds as, flailing, Silco’s hand comes up with a jagged angle of the machine’s inner hull, slicing clean to the bone of Vander’s already hurting right arm. The shock of the blade followed by the infecting bite of the foul water is enough to loosen the hands and Silco flies free. He shoulders into his tether and pulls at the lever. The eject protocol trues his his angle and he’s swallowed into a steam-powered port that spirals shut behind him. Another painful jolt as Silco’s pod clears Cherno and, at last, the drift crackles and goes dark as the neural connection is severed.
Vander roars, red blood clouding the swirling waters now waist deep on the big man. There’s nothing left to do. He wades to his station and sinks into his tether. A bloody hand finds the lever and he’s bobbing at the surface of the hateful sea, his beacon flashing pure white straight into the low ceiling of stormclouds between him and the sky.
His eyes are closed when the yellow lights of the recovery airships stop to hover above him.
Lower the rescue hook.
Collect the second of Cherno Alpha’s two pilots: the only survivors following the elimination of CAT2 Kaiju codename: Molotov.