Chapter Text
"Don't be ridiculous, Dr. Geiszler," Hilda said. Her straight mousy hair was a little greasy, which went perfectly with her once-pink, round-collared oxford shirt, fuzzy grey sweater vest, wool trousers and puffy anorak. It was another afternoon in the emergency lab underground, another afternoon of using chalkboards instead of smart boards for Hilda Gottlieb. Her fatigue from all the climbing around on ladders showed in her pallor and the grey color of the bags under her eyes.
She was beautiful. Newton was a little in love with her.
"Oh, call me Newton," she reminded her lab mate for the n+1th time, "or if you're really feeling oppositional, call me Leibniz," Newt said. She couldn’t help teasing, "I mean, call me Frau Doktor Doktor Doktor Doktor…" She lost count. At least she made herself laugh.
"You're wearing only a tank top to work in the lab. It's not professional."
"Under a lab coat. I'm not cold," she said absently. Her shirt was hanging on a hook across the room. Sometimes she thought Hilda didn't like her tats. "It's not as though any of the kaiju parts are spilling onto your side."
Newt had been preparing a slide to view under the scope. She had a special solution for the silicone-based cells. "It's amazing, so amazing," she sang to an old song. "I'm a problem that'll never ever be solved…"
Hilda cleared her throat.
"I'm a monster, I'm a maven," Newt sang in full voice.
"That's enough," Hilda said. "Some of us are trying to work here."
"Natürlich, Frau Doktor Passiv-aggressiv."
"Don't call me that. Speak English, for heaven's sake. Your German is puerile."
"Your English is pretentious."
Newt's workspace was clear of all the usual hardcopies of papers, little notebooks and so forth, so that she could dig into her samples. She put a slide with a piece of brain tissue into the tiny MRI machine she built last week.
Hilda moved her boards around, consulting the tablet she was using to transfer data. "You're still humming."
By this point, Newt didn’t even bother to apologize. She'd always sub-vocalized at work. Most of her previous colleagues had just put on headphones and got down to business. She had a nice singing voice. For fuck's sake, her mom was an opera singer. Most people wouldn't mind being treated to a little—what was she humming now? Cole Porter. "Night and Day, you are the one."
Poor Hilda. She was stuck with Newton night and day. As if she could hear Newt's thoughts, she rolled her eyes. "I can go to work in my room," she said pointedly.
She had a willowy waist, and she was tall, or taller than Newton, anyway. Most people were, but Hilda Gottlieb was just the right amount taller. It would be so nice to slide an arm around her some time. She had this nice downy hair on her neck where the barber shaved her a little tail under her severe bob. She used apple shampoo on her soft oily hair, a cheap brand that smelled so good and musky on her.
Not that Newt was going to interrupt her while she was putting new variables into her mighty, mighty equations. Newt pushed her glasses up onto her forehead to see whether myopia was an advantage in looking at this slide under greater magnification.
Oh wait. Oh wow. Look at this.
"There's still brain activity even in this tiny sample," Newt said out loud. Hilda looked up. "Imagine how much there must be in the big remnant I have in the tank."
"Und?" Hilda said quietly.
"Und ... wer weiss ... vielleicht kann man da ... die Verbindung ... er, bestellen?"
"That's not how one says," Hilda began to correct her. Her eyes widened. "No. Newton! You cannot Drift with the kaiju."
"I didn't say Drift."
"I know you," she said, getting up. Newt stepped back. "I am not joking, Newton. We are scientists. You have to follow some kind of procedure. Anyway, it's essentially impossible."
"How do you know I'm going to do something that's essentially impossible?"
"I've worked with you for a decade. I can see the wheels turning in your head."
"Don't you think it's interesting, just for its own sake?"
"You fool no one," Gottlieb said, slamming down her cane and stalking out of the lab.
It was a great idea. Newt had a pretty good grasp of the PONS technology. Hell, she spent three nights awake reading everything she could get her hands on when the first Jaeger pilots started to use it.
If you could Drift with a primate like a chimpanzee or an orangutan, why couldn't you Drift with a kaiju? Though the fact that the kaiju tissue even formed identifiable organs was pretty crazy. Newt was becoming increasingly sure that they were cloned. They couldn't all be twins, right? Their DNA wasn't close—it was identical. Now that she finally had access to a whole database of research on their genetics, she could say that with near certainty.
By the time Hilda came back, Newton had another slide assembled, this one with the so-called second brain tissue. It wasn’t really a second brain, she thought. Just some ganglion cells. They didn’t even know whether these guys thought.
It would be kind of risky to strap in with one.
"I'm not going to help you," Hilda announced. She put an energy bar down on Newt's desk emphatically. The subtext was clear: you are only forming these theories because your blood sugar is too low. "You have said yourself that these creatures are barely sentient."
"No, dude, I said that their sentience was unproven."
"Stop calling me that," Hilda said in dangerously low tones. "You cannot take valuable resources away from the pilots to experiment on yourself."
"Entschuldigen Sie, bitte," Newt said, failing to suppress her sarcasm. "I'm terribly sorry to have dropped appropriate levels of formality as we argue through the end of the world."
Hilda clenched her jaw, making her wide, gentle brown eyes look murderous. "This is not the end of the world, you overly dramatic idiot."
"Dude! We're in an underground bunker, trying to figure out how to kill giant sea monsters from space. Our funding is nearly gone. We're the last people trying to fight the kaiju. The only other plan anyone has to stop the destruction of major cities is to build walls around them. You gotta pull up your big girl panties and face the facts."
"I," Hilda Gottlieb said, "am not a dude, and neither are you. We are researchers, not cowboys. It's not a bunker. It's a laboratory."
"You're working equations on a chalkboard, dude, trying to predict kaiju like they're weather."
"Don't call me that," Hilda said with furious precision. "Tell me more of what you think of my predictions."
"They're the best thing we've got so far," Newt acknowledged. "But they fail, and you know they fail, and they fail because of lack of data. We need more data, dude!"
"There are some things for which one doesn't need additional data. The physics of closing the Breach are the same, no matter what the nature of the kaiju is."
"Then why hasn't it worked so far?"
"They didn't know where to plant the bomb."
"You don't think there's anything to learn from the nature of these twenty-ton alien monsters? Not anything? Since they're what's causing the trouble, you know."
"We have to close the Breach and close it now. Their nature won't matter if we can stop them."
"Dude, I think you're wrong. I think learning about them will tell us everything."
Hilda swore under her breath and threw some of her chalk at Newt's head. "You are a kaiju groupie. "
Her carefully cultivated Oxford drawl had given way to a rich vein of rolled Rs. She sounded a bit like one of Newt's parents' friends.
"Pflaumen," Newt said, imitating the way they used to talk. This was a mistake. The only thing that pissed off Gottlieb more than Newt's misgendering slang was her bizarre, self-referential free association.
"Mein Gott, shut up!" Hilda Gottlieb struck the table with her hand, her teeth bared as though about to bite. She gave an actual throaty scream of indignation and swept the papers in front of her out of the way before she stomped out of the lab.
As she worked into the night, Newt's mood swung between elation and absorption and despair. She knew she was muttering to herself. "A girl's best friend is her mutter," she quoted to herself for the fortieth time, groping through her toolkit for the hex wrench set. She'd scavenged parts from the Jaeger maintenance hangar, and was putting together the coolest PONS unit since Caitlin Lightcap.
It was true that Dr. Gottlieb hadn't helped her. Hilda. Jesus. She wasn't required to refer to her by her last name to herself. Just because she had this stick up her ass about formality. And sexism. (And maybe ableism. Probably Newt was being an asshole about this. She did call her Dr. Gottlieb to her face. Most of the time.)
Hilda had not helped her. Newt had had to do a lot of hacking to find the codes that Hilda herself had written to enhance the Drift compatibility of pilots back at their old labs in Honolulu. She'd managed, though. She'd rigged up a PONS that could let you Drift with a, with a, with a ficus. If anyone ever wanted to know what a tree was thinking, and could figure out what to use to attach her interface with it, that was. The brain remnant was in a big tank of yellow goo, looking scary and moving around of its own volition.
She was humming again. Where was that recorder? The batteries were charged.
"Kaiju-human Drift experiment one," she said. "The brain segment is the front lobe. Chances are, the brain segment is far too damaged to Drift with. Unscientific aside: Hilda," because what the fuck, "Hilda, if you're listening to this, well, I'm either alive, and I've proven what I've just done works, in which case, ha ha, I won"—she continued affixing the helmet to her head—"or I'm dead, and I'd like you to know that it's all your fault. It really is." She assembled the remote control with a click. "You drove me to this, in which case, ha, I also won. Sort of."
She could die, huh. Oh well. "Going in, in three, two, one."
First she was flooded with her own memories—a moment with her uncle, as they got a firework assembled, and then another, of herself about to do a medical procedure, back when she was working on the physics of the eye—surrounded by hospital ducklings in white coats. Why those things?
Her own eye ached and everything was surrounded by a white ring, and then she realized that she was INSIDE A KAIJU holy shit, seeing them in a line, they were being assembled, they shared each other's thought, oh shit, oh shit, they knew she was there, this fragment was like an interface with their whole—
They were all one being, that was why she was seeing herself doing an operation to put a piece of machinery into a person's body. This piece of kaiju could be recycled into another kaiju body, because—oh God oh God—
"Newton! Newton! What have you done?" Hilda's voice was around her. She was roughly removing the PONS; she was holding Newton. She smelled so good, old shampoo and her sweat and chalk. Newt's nose was stuck against her breast for a second as she dragged her into a desk chair.
Hilda was nearly in tears. "Wake up—you're seizing! Oh! Du Idiot! Wenn du jetzt abkratzst, werd ich dir das nie verzeihen!"
"I'm not dead, all right?" Newton finally gasped. She was still shaking, though. "Could I have some water, please?"
Hilda miraculously had a glass, or maybe it was a beaker? She didn't care; she grasped it in two still-shaking hands and tried not to spill it on herself.
"I must go and get Marshal Pentecost," Hilda said. Newt couldn't focus her eyes to see Hilda running away, but she could hear, and it broke her heart a little. Hilda, so much on her dignity at all times, had to look odd, running on her turned-out leg.
But it was urgent. Newt had to tell Pentecost what she'd seen. She drank, dimly aware that the vibration of the water was coming from her body. Her breath whistled a little with the dampness of the bleeding from her nose. Shit.
Stacker Pentecost was there, calm and solid, the last man standing between her and chaos, as usual, and commanding her to tell him what she'd seen.
She knew when Hilda interrupted her that it was out of fear, but she didn't care. Her voice rose to a scream. "Well, you try Drifting with a kaiju next time!" she shrieked. Fuck, she was out of control. How could Hilda say anything when—
Pentecost of course reacted like someone's strict dad. He pointed at each of them in turn. "YOU! Be quiet. YOU! Talk."
Newton could hear, "and don't freak out," even though he didn't say it, would never say that. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes from the yelling and the shaking, and maybe from the nagging pain in her head, like the ghost of a headache after you finally gave in and took a pill.
Marshal Pentecost had a contact in the bone slums, a gangster who had access to kaiju parts. She thought his name was familiar, which was a bad sign: Hannibal Chau. She'd need a black light to follow the signs through Kowloon.
"There has to be someone else who can—" Hilda began.
"We need everyone at their stations. We need you up with Choi in control," Pentecost said. Hilda saluted, again. Dork.
Pentecost turned back to Newt. She was groping around for her jacket. "We need this intelligence," he said quietly.
She drew herself up. "I know," she blurted, instead of "Yes sir," or "I won't fail you," or "Count on me."
Stacker Pentecost nodded sharply, as though he'd heard all of those things she should have said, and turned on his heel.
In order to get her kaiju brain, she had to face a Kowloon gangster who thought she was a moron but wanted to get into her pants anyway, a crowd of strangers in a public kaiju shelter who wanted to see the kaiju eat her so it would leave, and a scratched-up lens on her eyeglasses.
Oh, yeah, and a kaiju. She saw a kaiju, up close.
If she ever stops shaking, she's going to have to record her impressions.
If she hadn't been totally dehydrated, she would certainly have wet herself.
When they got down to the site where the corpse had fallen, in some kind of dump, Hannibal Chau was open, friendly, and probably flirting with her a little. Newt was wound tight as a drum. "You know I could have been eaten down there," she said.
"That was the plan." He patted her arm. "Glad it didn't become necessary."
"Thank you for your inestimable kindness."
He smirked some more, not allowing his gold teeth to show. He was still patting. It was a little closer to her chest than she would have liked. Since he'd cut the buttons off her oxford with a butterfly knife in a display of dominance when they'd met, her breasts were only covered by an old concert t-shirt.
"What's the procedure with getting the brain?"
"You mean what's taking so long?"
She grimaced. "Yes. Sorry if it interferes with your scheduled profit-taking, but I'm hoping to save some human lives."
"As in any laproscopic surgery, you flood the cavity with carbon dioxide."
"The CO2 is going to delay the acidic reaction, yes."
"But the boys harvesting the parts have to have oxygen in their suits. They move slow." He got on his phone; he had one of the obnoxious new retro ones that looked like a walkie-talkie from the old movies. Geez, with the suits and the shoes and the knife. Was she really judging him on his style on the eve of the kaiju taking over the earth?
He reached out and gave her breast a little tweak. Yes, she was judging him. Pig. She stepped away.
"Boys," he rasped. "What's the story?"
They heard a second heartbeat! A second heartbeat? What the fuck? Giant, cloned, alien, silicon-based, lizard-like, genetically-engineered monsters could get pregnant?
That had to be the weirdest thing she'd ever heard.
She thought so for all of twenty seconds, when the kaiju baby began tearing its way from its mother's dead body. That sound was emphatically the weirdest she'd ever heard, and the most frightening.
Don't think of it as a baby with a mother. It's not a baby. It's a giant monster that was hosted in the body of another, still larger monster, and it's coming to eat you. Get up. Get up!
Paralyzed with fascination and terror, she crawled away from the monster, creeping with the kind of speed she'd only experienced in nightmares. Some sort of umbilicus had attached it to the corpse of the other kaiju, and it could only crawl out as far as the cord would reach. The cord was anyway wrapped around the creature's neck. It roared and stuck out its terrifying, glowing tongue, while Newt, just out of reach, cowered. She had no energy left to move.
Then the kaiju stopped, apparently dead.
"I knew it," Chau boasted.
As Newt crouched panting on the pavement, Chau came out to brag. His superior knowledge of the kaiju had told him that the infant would not survive. After all, it had the umbilical cord wrapped around its neck, and its lungs must not be fully developed.
In her relief, Newt did not voice her doubts. After all, the kaiju weren't goats or sheep. How could they give birth? How could we know when a kaiju was carried to term?
In the middle of Chau's monologue, he stabbed the baby and the creature roared back to life. Newt shrieked in terror and managed to get to her feet to run.
Opening her gargantuan maw, the smaller kaiju grabbed Hannibal Chau, tossed him in the air, and swallowed him. Then she flipped over and died, again.
"Okay," Newt said to herself. "Okay, okay. I just watched that guy get eaten. Shit. Shit." She was actually crying and kind of wringing her hands. She had to calm the fuck down. She had to Drift with the kaiju baby brain, and she had to do it now, even though this man who'd been feeling her up all evening was in its belly.
"Big girl panties, big girl panties," she gasped.
Then the cavalry rode in. It was Hilda and two guys from maintenance, and all her stuff from the lab, on a truck.
"Oh, thank God you're here!" Newt said. She started grabbing the equipment off the truck that Hilda and the rest of the crew had brought her. She only had a short time to set up before parts of the brain would die. She plunged her needle through the hard skull of the baby kaiju, pushing down with all her strength.
Hilda was blathering on about how many kaijus were coming out of the Drift. "There should be three!" she complained.
"Hilda, come on! I've got about five minutes here. So you're wrong, so what. Two kaijus isn't enough?"
"I'm not wrong. There is something here that we don't understand."
"OH MY FREAKING GOD!" Newt yelled. "That's why I'm doing this! To understand." Did Hilda think she was risking her life on a whim?
"I know," Hilda said. "I know. That's why I'm going to go with you. That's what the Jaeger pilots do—share the neural load."
"Are you serious? You would do that for me? Or, you would do that with me?"
"I hear the world is coming to an end," she said, smiling like it was a joke, and Newt wanted to kiss her. "Do I really have a choice?"
Newt threw her arms around Hilda. "Yes!" she said. "We're going to own this bad boy."
Hilda laughed, stiffening a little and awkwardly squeezing her back. "It's a dead certainty," she said. They separated and looked at each other for a moment.
"Here's a PONS unit," Newt said, and they each put it on and plugged it in. Hilda's eyes were wide and frightened, though she did not say anything to show that she was scared. "Ready?" Newt said. Hilda nodded, and they began the countdown.
Hilda's memories washed over Newt so quickly. She had to rush past their childhoods—Hilda's love of flight and her loneliness and her passion for math, beauty, order, beauty, order—Newt at the kitchen table at her apartment at Simon's Rock College—before they plunged into the hive mind.
"Hold it together, Hildy," she thought. "I need your eyes, I need you to see it all too."
Through the Drift she could feel Hilda, her visceral horror at the lives of these creatures who shared all their thoughts.
They only held it for a minute or two before the machine timed them out. Newt was afraid, after her last experience, of damage. As it was, the strength of the impressions was overwhelming. When they each came to, they were trembling, nearly seizing, with bloody noses and bloody irises.
Hilda bent over and discreetly vomited. Only Hilda would find a toilet in the middle of a garbage dump in which to toss her cookies. She had a handkerchief in her pocket. She wiped her mouth. She straightened.
"The Drift!" she said. "You saw it?"
"Yes! We have to warn them. The Jaegers, the Breach—"
"The plan is not going to work," Hilda said.
They didn't have to explain it to each other. They understood each other. It was Marshal Pentecost who needed to understand.
It could work though, Newt thought. It could work if they figured out a way to piggyback on a kaiju.
"I have to tell you something," Hilda said in the helicopter.
Newt smiled. "Really?" She thought that after the Drift, no one ever said that.
She put a hand on Newt's arm. "We lost two crews tonight."
"Oh," Newt said. She felt a return of their shared nausea. She didn't ask which crews. They knew them all, and thinking about the loss of any of their pilots was going to hurt.
"Which means that Mako Mori is probably going to be on this mission to the Breach. She was one of the pilots in GD when they took down that category 4."
Newt cleared her throat. "Our Mako?" A little bubble of panic rose in her.
Mako was the only kid she'd known from elementary school into young adulthood. She had cousins and stuff, but she hadn't watched them grow up. Mako was the person Newt thought of when she thought about the future, about her reasons for working in the Shatterdome. If Mako died, what was the point?
Hilda looked at her. She didn't say "Breathe," or "Chill out." That wasn't her way. She just looked, her eyes full of understanding, her hand still on Newt's arm.
"Big girl panties," Newt said, and for a change, Hilda didn't lose her temper. She nodded.
When they got to LOCCENT, Marshal Pentecost wasn't even there. It was Herc Hansen who was commanding the mission. That was bad. He was a strictly military guy and kind of anti-intellectual—and honestly, if she thought about it, kind of sexist. She pushed him out of the way and grabbed the mic from Tendo Choi.
"Listen, it's not going to work!"
Hilda took the mic. "The reason we haven't been able to drop any bombs in the Breach before is that the kaiju have identification on them that allows them to pass through, and everything else is blocked."
"Like a bar code in a supermarket," Newt said.
It was the Marshal who reacted from within one of the Jaegers. Stacker Pentecost was one of the pilots.
He was always going to be the one to stand between them and chaos.
Hilda had her arms around herself. Had she known that Pentecost was piloting a Jaeger into the Breach? It was a suicide mission.
In all their previous battles, Newt had had only one thing on her mind: that the pilots would leave her enough kaiju samples to be useful. She had never considered the absolute terror of facing the giant alien organisms. On some level, she'd hoped that she would unlock the secret of their language and could reason with them. It was a fantasy.
Chau was right. She was a goddamned moron.
Hilda caught her eye. "BGP," she said, and turned to help Tendo Choi at the console.
It was terrifying, watching the schematics of the Jaegers fighting the kaiju underwater. There were cameras mounted all over the robots, but the water interfered with the transmission, and they had to rely a lot on imaging from the submarines and helicopters above them.
Newt danced from foot to foot. She could see that Raleigh Becket had only minutes left to detonate his Jaeger. When she said it out loud, though, she realized that she was dooming him to die. Hurry up and sacrifice yourself, now that my Mako is all right.
No. None of them would ever be all right, but they might, if she and Hilda were right, manage to close the rift between the two worlds.
But he did it, and he even got out alive. Two little figures, bobbing in that big ocean, like Noah's ark.
Hilda sidled up to her and nudged her, and she snaked an arm around her and leaned her head on Hilda's shoulder. They were alive, and all they could hear were cheers.
"When's the last time you ate or slept?" Hilda asked her as they walked back down to their quarters.
"When's the last time I was even aware that I had a body, you mean," Newt said. "I just want to shower. After that, I can decide between eating and sleeping."
"Well, I'll leave you to it, then," Hilda said.
"No!" Newt grabbed her arm. "No. "
"All right," Hilda said. "I could use a shower as well." She waited in the doorway while Newt got her clothes. Newt ran back to her, and followed her across the hall into her tiny room. Hilda didn't say anything—she just took pajamas out of her bureau.
They got into two adjoining stalls, and the water came on. Newt scrubbed herself, as though she could remove the kaiju's tongue and breath, and Chau's big hand, and the image of him being eaten, with a bar of soap. She washed her hair, and noticed for the first time that touching her scalp hurt her head. She ached all over.
She turned off the water. Hilda was still rinsing.
"Hilda?" she said, standing in front of the shower curtain.
Hilda pulled the curtain. "All right," she said. There was a big surgical scar down the side of her leg, but she didn't cover it. Newt came in and got under the water with her, and Hilda held her, and kissed her forehead. "It's all right."
"You're so beautiful," Newt said. "I love you."
"Shh, come on," she said. "You're tired. It was a very hard day." She turned off the water and rubbed Newt down with her towel.
"I'm so lucky," Newt said. She was crying. "I'm so lucky."
"All right, all right, darling," Hilda said. "There's a good girl." She dried herself and put on her clothes, and then helped Newt into hers. "We're just going to have a bit of a lie-down now."
"You're coming with, right?"
"Yes, all right." She took them back to her room and bundled Newt into the bed in all her clothes. "You should have some water," she said. They shared the bottle that was on the desk next to Hilda's bed.
"I really love you," Newt said.
Hilda put her arms around Newt. It was nice that she was taller. Newt cupped a hand over Hilda's breast, and kissed her neck, and fell asleep.