Chapter Text
Maverick leaned back in the chair, and smiled at the cop, real slow.
Doing it split his lip a little worse than it was already split, made him taste the blood between his teeth. But he didn't mind.
He knew how this went. It had gone the same way every time so far. He got dragged in here, drunk and disorderly. The cops gave him a hard time for his attitude, no matter what he did, no matter how respectful he was. They were like commanding officers, they could smell it on him—something fundamental, something brash and raw that was too desperate to prove itself to care about following the rules. Something they didn't like; something they wanted to make sure to break before they could reassure themselves he was going to stay in line.
And then, eventually, somebody actually ran his ID, and got back a PPDC file. And once they all knew he was Corps, a mech pilot, a hero who was helping save humanity from the kaiju—they backed off. Just a little, just enough. Settled for giving him a stern warning, and then let him go.
Granted, it was taking a little longer than usual, this time. The cop sat there and gave him a stern flat look, uncompromising, and the door still hadn't opened or anything, nobody else coming in to whisper in her ear.
But Maverick didn't waver. He waited, kept the whole line of his body relaxed like he couldn't be more at ease. He was cuffed to the metal table in between them, but not so tight that he couldn't rest his hands against the edge of it—not so tight that he couldn't tap his fingers on the flat of it, idle.
And finally, after another couple minutes, the cop's radio crackled a little.
She lifted it up out of the clip on the shoulder of her uniform, clicked a button and then listened for a few seconds. Maverick couldn't quite catch the transmission; it was too quiet, a little staticky, and even if you set aside the slow throb of his head where it had been slammed into the pavement, he was completely hammered.
But this had to be it, the ID coming through. And, sure enough, the cop gave him a flicker of a glance, clicked the radio off again, and then stood and left the holding cell.
He waited. Wasn't going to be long now. He let himself look up when the door opened again, ready to rub it in, grin, make the cop wish she'd taken the opportunity to punch him in the face back when she'd been helping wrestle him into the back of the police car—but it wasn't her.
"Charlie," he said, blank.
Charlie met his eyes, stepped inside the holding cell and shut the door behind her, and her expression was gentle, steady, unwavering, a quiet rueful curve to her mouth that wasn't quite a smile.
"Lieutenant Mitchell," she said, and then, more softly, "Hi, Maverick."
She looked the same, he thought distantly. Her hair was longer, maybe; not much, not in a way that said she was changing it on purpose, just in a way that said she'd been too busy to bother getting it cut for a little while. But her face, her eyes, the way she held herself—that leather jacket, a bit more beat-up than Maverick remembered it, with the cuffs pushed absently up to her elbows.
It was like getting kicked in the gut. Maverick didn't feel drunk in the good way anymore, the way that let him pretend he couldn't feel anything; sweat was breaking out across the back of his neck, and his face was cold, and his gut was lurching. Almost enough to make a guy wish he was sober, blinking across a metal table at Charlie Blackwood and trying to get his shit together.
"How—how are you doing?"
It was a stupid fucking question, and he grimaced the second it was out of his mouth. Granted, he'd probably sounded just as stupid to her the night they'd met, in the pilots' club; but he hadn't felt stupid. He'd felt cool, smooth, invincible. He'd been invincible, back then, because he hadn't known he wasn't. He hadn't known how close the edge was, that you could just get ripped the fuck apart and it didn't have to take more than a split second—
He squeezed his eyes shut. Charlie was going to know what he was thinking. He was too drunk to do anything about it. Charlie was going to know what he was thinking, and he didn't want to look at her.
"I'm doing okay," she said, and at least her voice didn't sound sorry for him, didn't sound anything except calm and clear and frank.
And then she stopped, and she let the silence stretch, because she'd never been afraid to let anybody stew in her life.
Maverick bit his lip, snorted a little through his nose. His eyes felt kind of hot, but he could handle that, he decided. He wasn't going to break down sobbing, not now. It had been too long; there wasn't enough left for that.
So he blinked, took a quick breath and then tilted his head at her, angled his mouth into a hard sharp slant that wasn't really a smile either. "What, not going to ask me how I've been?"
"I don't need to," she said. "I wouldn't need to even if I hadn't been shown the incident reports from the last six times you've been detained by the police."
"And what exactly makes that your business?" Maverick shot back. "I'm on leave, last I checked."
"Leave," Charlie agreed. "Leave that's already been extended twice because nobody wants to mark you down as AWOL and drag you back in, not after—"
She stopped. It didn't help. They both knew how that sentence ended.
"Not my problem," Maverick bit out, when the tightness in his throat eased enough to let him.
Charlie pressed her mouth into a line. "Don't bullshit me, Maverick," she said, and she crossed the room to the table, sat down in the chair where the cop had been and set her elbows on the table, leaning in over it, sharp gray-blue eyes intent and serious.
He really should've thought twice before starting things up with her. Not because she was an instructor; because she was smart, and the last fucking thing he'd ever needed was somebody smart getting a good long look at him.
"And don't bullshit yourself," she was saying. "You know this won't last forever. It can't. You aren't going to keep getting off with a warning. You're going to hit the ground sooner or later, and when you do, you're not going to get up again."
"Still not seeing where that's your business," Maverick said.
Charlie sighed through her nose. "It's my business because we need good mech pilots. It's my business because nobody else with a rank high enough to do something about this was going to drag their ass all the way out to a police station at two in the morning." And that was good, that was fine; Maverick could hold himself at a distance from that, could twist his mouth at it and scoff at it and not let it touch him at all. But then her face softened just a little, and she said, more quietly, "It's my business because I still give a shit about you, Maverick, and you can't stop me."
Maverick swallowed. "Want to bet?" he said, but it came out all wrong, hoarse and wavering, even though it shouldn't have.
It was true, after all. He could stop her; he could make sure she walked out of here and didn't look back, and never cared about a single fucking thing that happened to him after that.
But she didn't take the bait. She just looked at him, for a long moment.
And then she said, "You're one of the best pilots in the PPDC, and you know it. This doesn't have to be the end of you. It shouldn't be the end of you. That's all I meant. And Goose—"
Maverick flinched, jerked away from the table with a clang; he was still cuffed to it, and he hadn't cared before, but now it felt like a trap, a cage. "Charlie—"
"—Goose wouldn't have wanted it to be the end of you, either," she said over him, sharp. "He wouldn't have wanted you to die, too."
As if she could know. As if Goose got to have an opinion about anything anymore, when it had sure as fuck been the end of him.
"I'm not dead," Maverick bit out, fingers clenched tight around the cuffs in the dim hope that that would help keep Charlie from noticing how bad his hands were shaking.
"Aren't you?" Charlie said quietly.
Fuck. Maverick set his jaw, looked away and didn't answer.
After a moment, Charlie sighed through her nose again. "Listen, Maverick, I'm not here to give you a lecture, as much fun as that is."
"Yeah, yeah," Maverick said, "you're here to tell me the PPDC is done bailing me out, I get it."
"No," Charlie said, and then paused. "Well, I guess that's part of it," she allowed, "but I'm also here to ask you to come back to Miramar."
Maverick was almost ready for it, this time; he took it on the chin, bore the awful sick jolt of it and held himself together until it had passed. "So on the one hand," he said, when he could, "they're done covering my ass, but on the other hand, they want me back? Getting mixed messages here, Charlie."
"Not them," she agreed. "Me," and she set her forearms against the table, leaned in closer still. "I got reassigned, Maverick. I'm working on something new—weapons development, top-secret program. I told them they need you. And they're willing to listen, willing to sweep everything you've done since you left under the rug and forget about it, if you come back."
"Sure," Maverick said. "A carrot-stick thing. I get it."
Charlie gave him a flat look. And then, ten thousand times worse, she reached across the table and touched the back of his wrist. "I know," she said. "I know it won't be easy for you, coming back to the shatterdome. It's never going to be easy. But it's never going to let go of you, either. You're going to have to come back someday, because you won't be able to stay away. Might as well be now."
And god, Maverick wanted to tell her she was wrong. Maverick wanted to laugh at her, wanted to tell her where she could stick the entire fucking Miramar Shatterdome. But—
But the thing was, he did miss it.
He didn't want to miss it. Sometimes he even hated himself for it, a little bit. How could he miss it? How could he want to be back there, to suit up and throw himself in a mech again, after—after Goose?
Except he didn't need Charlie to tell him he'd been chasing it, in his own way. Bar fights, getting smashed and then picking the biggest guy in the room and getting in his face—it was nothing, it was the palest fucking imitation of the way it felt. The adrenaline, the rush; the clenching of his fists, the swing, and the mech responding as if it was him, as if he was it, hammering into the side of a kaiju with earthshaking force, feeling the bellow of it in his bones—
"You need this as much as the PPDC needs you," Charlie was saying. "And I mean it, Maverick: they do need you. This is—this is nothing that's ever been done before. We don't even know whether we can do it."
Maverick shut his eyes. "Oh, you asshole," he told her, because she was one, she was one and she knew it, and she'd probably take it as a compliment. She was doing it on purpose, dangling the challenge of it, the dare, in front of him like this. And the worst part was, knowing that was what was happening wasn't going to stop it from working.
"Yeah, that's right," she agreed, and squeezed his wrist a little. "The best of the best. That's the only chance we're going to have to make this work. And besides—"
She paused.
Goddammit. Maverick opened his eyes and looked at her.
And she raised an eyebrow, tilted her head and said, "Besides, there's a limited number of spots in the program. Maybe you'll get knocked out early—maybe you'll get to come right back out here and finish drinking yourself into a discharge."
"As if," Maverick shot back instantly, and it felt—
It felt good. He was still a little off, a little rusty. But it was coming back to him, sitting here with her. It was coming back to him, what it had felt like to be himself.
Maybe she'd been wrong. Maybe he wasn't dead after all; not quite, not yet.
He could get there, he thought. He could keep on going the way he was, let himself fall the rest of the way apart. It would be easy enough. But this, whatever it was Charlie was talking about, whatever this top-secret weapons program meant—it was a risk, a gamble. And maybe it was going to wreck him. But if it did, at least it was going to do it hard. At least it was going to take him to the edge, even if it shoved him off it. That was the way he'd always meant to go out, if he was going to.
"Yeah," he said aloud. "Okay. I'm in."
Arranging to go back to Miramar was easier than it should've been.
Granted, he was pretty sure Charlie had pulled some strings, beyond just the deal she'd offered him, whichever higher-up she'd badgered about it until they'd finally agreed to let Maverick off the hook just to get her off their case. Sober and wishing he wasn't, in the cold cruel light of a bright, sunny California morning, he found himself staring at a letter, which calmly informed him that he'd been reactivated at his own request, that he'd been allocated quarters in the PPDC barracks at Miramar, that he'd be expected to report in at the shatterdome by 0900—which gave him about half an hour.
In a way, he was grateful for it. There wasn't time to think about it, to second-guess any of it. He took a two-minute shower, dug his cleanest, least-wrinkled uniform out of the closet of the motel room where he'd been staying, grabbed his duffel, and left. He'd be able to come back for the rest of his stuff, check out and settle the bill, later; but if he didn't report in somewhere approaching on time, then for all he knew, he might get scratched right off the bat. If he got kicked out of this program of Charlie's, he wanted it to be for something he'd done on purpose, and not just because he couldn't get his shit together. He'd never have made it as far in the PPDC as he had if he couldn't play by the rules when he wanted to.
So, yeah—arranging to go back to Miramar was pretty easy. It was actually doing it that was hard.
The shatterdome was huge; you could see it from a long way away, especially if you knew what you were looking at. That helped, maybe. Gave him time to get used to it, to wait out the raw tight thump of his heart in his chest, the sweat that broke out across his palms and the back of his neck. He kept his hands steady on the handlebars of his bike, set his shoulders and made himself focus on the rumble of the engine, the easy familiar vibration of the frame underneath him.
The weird part was, it was hard in more than one way, more than just the way he'd been expecting. He'd known it was going to suck to—to get close to it, to see the open ocean stretching out wide just beyond it, the glimmer of the water, and the closest equipment bay with a full complement of mechs lined up inside it, huge still figures, the glint of metal. But—
But it hurt somewhere else, too. A deep soft pang, looking at the shape of it against the sky, smelling the salt water as he came closer and closer to the shore. An ache, where he'd tried to cut something out of himself; but it hadn't worked, it never would've, and he probably should've known better.
Charlie had been wrong: he wasn't dead, and he was going to fucking prove it. But she'd been right, too. He'd never have been able to keep himself away from here forever. He'd have given in sooner or later, because there was nowhere else in the world that had ever been his the way Miramar had—there was nowhere else in the world that had ever been home.
The corpsman who checked his ID on the way in pointed him off to one side, not where he'd been expecting to go, and wouldn't tell him anything else, just stood at attention and waited him out. He had to go through two more security checks, but it seemed Charlie had already had his ID file updated with a notation that he was now officially part of—Operation Top Gun, apparently.
Weapons development, Maverick remembered. Right. Cute.
Whatever Top Gun was up to, they had what seemed to be at least a quarter of the shatterdome reserved for their use—including their own private barracks, rooms that were tiny but individual. And probably had pretty thick walls, which meant it was going to be the most quiet, the most privacy, Maverick had had in years, even counting the motel.
He already had one assigned to him. He went in and set his duffel bag down on the bed, took a quick look around. It was clean, unremarkable, impersonal, and he felt his shoulders drop a fraction of an inch. That was one of the things he'd always loved the most—about the Navy, and then about the PPDC. The way it stripped everything else away, all the crap that didn't matter, and the only thing he had to worry about was himself, was what he could and couldn't do inside the cockpit of a mech. Some people didn't like it, filled their space with all kinds of personal shit to try to make it feel more like themselves; but for Maverick, it always already had.
He let himself take a second. He stood there, and he set his hand against the wall, and he breathed.
And then he left, because it was go time.
The briefing went about how he'd expected.
The corpsman on the way in hadn't known who Maverick was, or if he had, he'd managed to keep it off his face, not even a flicker in his eyes when he'd checked Maverick's ID.
But the briefing—the briefing was full of actual PPDC pilots, and their tactical assessment officers. Charlie had said it, in the police station: the best of the best. And six months ago, maybe most of them wouldn't have known Maverick Mitchell from a hole in the ground. But news traveled fast, in a shatterdome, and rumors traveled even faster; and they'd both had five months and twenty-nine days to do it.
The briefing itself didn't really matter. Maverick tuned in for about the first three sentences, long enough to confirm they weren't actually getting read in on whatever it was that was making Operation Top Gun such a secret; the officer up front, a lieutenant commander who'd introduced himself with Jester as a callsign, was giving them a variation on the classic recruitment spiel instead. How this thing, whatever it was they were going to be part of here, was going to change the way humanity fought the kaiju forever—how they were going to save their families, their homes, the world.
Same old, same old. Maverick didn't need to hear it again. He sat there, and he kept his eyes forward, and he pretended he couldn't hear the murmuring. He pretended he couldn't follow the way it was circulating around the room, the ones who were closest to him passing it on to the ones further away, up into the back rows of chairs and then forward again, a slow insistent tide.
He cracked once. Some LTJG off to the side of him got loud enough, saying, "—and they let him come back?" that even Jester went briefly quiet, got steely-eyed and made them all agree that he had their undivided attention, sir; that they understood that there was nothing more important than what he was telling them right now, sir; yes, sir.
And after they got through it, after he was satisfied enough to get rolling again, Maverick turned his head and let himself look.
He could tell instantly who'd said it—the jackass was staring right back at him, brown hair and a long face, long nose, just narrow enough that his ears stuck out a little bit. LTJG; a TAO, Maverick understood, sitting there with his elbow up on the back of the chair where his pilot was sitting.
And then the pilot flicked his eyes sideways, looked at Maverick too.
But it was different. It felt different. He was different: built a little stockier, a little tougher, not as lanky as his TAO. His hair was lighter, the tips dyed even paler than the sun could ever have made them, frosted. And his eyes were pale, too, sharp.
The TAO's stare had had a dare in it: yeah, that's right, pal, I'm looking at you, and what the hell are you going to do about it, huh? But the pilot—
There was nothing in his face at all. His expression was cool, steady, unreadable. But Maverick was suddenly sure that he—that he understood, somehow. Because he was a pilot, maybe. Because he got what that meant, the responsibility of it; that when it came down to it, no matter what his TAO did or didn't do, he was the one in control of the mech. Because six months ago, Goose—that was his nightmare, too. He just hadn't lived through it like Maverick had, that was all.
Maverick jerked his eyes away, kept his face up front like he was listening to every word Jester had to say, and ignored the cold sweat that had broken out across the nape of his neck.
He didn't need that shit. He didn't need anybody thinking they fucking understood anything. He was here because he was the best, and that was the only thing that mattered. Anyone who'd decided they knew shit about him was going to find out they were wrong.
When the briefing was over, Maverick didn't rush to get out of the room. That was nothing but the quickest way to tell somebody they'd gotten to you, blood in the water.
Jester had ordered them off to the medical wing next; apparently they were going to have to get a whole bunch of tests, bloodwork, brain scans, the works. So nobody else was rushing either. Maverick kept his head up, his shoulders square, and managed not to meet anybody's eyes but in a way that made it seem like he wasn't trying for it, like it was just a coincidence of timing that he was glancing off into the middle distance and not back at anyone who was looking at him.
And that worked pretty well, until he was about ten feet away from the door.
"Hey—hey, Maverick!"
Somebody jostled his arm. He bit down on the inside of his cheek, and turned his head, kept his expression cool and casual.
"Maverick Mitchell, as I live and breathe."
"Willard," Maverick said evenly.
Willard kept smiling, clapping him on the shoulder. But Willard's eyes were hard, and there was a twist to his mouth, a bite in that smile.
Which wasn't a surprise. They'd been posted together at Miramar for a couple years already, and Willard had never liked Maverick much—had never liked Goose, either, back then, which had been a lot more unusual, had marked him out as a guy who really had a bug up his ass for no good reason. Goose had always shrugged it off, laughed and shaken his head and ignored Willard without blinking; it had been up to Maverick to make it clear to him that Maverick knew he was an asshole, and that he wasn't going to get away with being an asshole to Goose.
So, yeah, his callsign was Anvil, and Maverick knew it. But he never used it—just one of a dozen different ways he'd been in the habit of needling Willard.
"We were taking bets, around the shatterdome," Willard was saying. "Half the pool was sure you were going to get your ass discharged any day."
"Really," Maverick said.
"Oh, yeah. Me, though," Willard added, "I was hoping you'd be back," and it sounded normal, almost friendly, before he leaned in closer, and murmured, "See, I wasn't there, that day. Missed the chance to watch you crash and burn—looking forward to getting to see it for myself, next time."
Maverick didn't flinch, didn't blink. It was easy; he wasn't sure he even could. He felt cold, cold and quiet and empty. If Willard was looking for a show, a fiery crash, he was looking in the wrong place.
"Well," he said aloud. "In that case, you better be prepared for disappointment."
Willard scoffed, sharp. "Don't kid yourself, Mitchell. They brought you in for this because they had to, because somebody upstairs owed your dad one last favor and figured they'd use it up on you. But that doesn't mean you're going to make the cut, understand?"
Maverick gave him a level look. "And you think you are?"
And that was enough to knock the last of that slick fake smile off Willard's face, to turn his throat and cheeks blotchy red with the beginnings of anger. Maverick had always been pretty good at that kind of thing—it was Goose who'd been good at talking, laughing; at taking someone who was spoiling for a fight and making them forget they'd ever been pissed in the first place. Maverick, on the other hand, had always been able to get himself from zero to a punch in the face in less than two minutes.
"Somebody will."
And Willard turned—because it hadn't been him who'd said it.
It was the pilot, the one with those sharp pale eyes. And whether Maverick had been right or wrong about the way he'd been looking at Maverick before, about what had been in that look, it wasn't there anymore.
That quiet assessment, that close attentive understanding, was gone. And in its place, the guy was closed up tight, gaze hard, lip curling, disdainful.
"And I'm thinking he's right," the pilot was saying. "It's not going to be you."
Maverick lifted his chin, and didn't back off an inch. "Guess we'll see," he said.
And the pilot looked him up and down, a dismissive flicker that said he wasn't impressed with what he saw. "Guess we will," he murmured, and then he was pushing past Willard, his TAO on his heels—gone.
The next three days, it was almost all the fucking medical tests.
Maverick might've cut his losses then and there, and screw what anybody else thought about it, except that the fourth day, they finally got to start up with a few combat exercises, too.
It was standard stuff, hand-to-hand drills, staff drills—the same kind of routine all mech pilots went through, practicing the same kinds of maneuvers they were going to need to use in a piloting rig. Punching a kaiju wasn't the same as hitting somebody in the face, and using a mech blade to slash one across the side wasn't the same as smacking somebody in the ribs with a bo staff. But it was pretty close, and the reflexes you needed, the muscle memory for blocks and strikes and close-quarter work, all had to be trained, driven so deep into your bones that you didn't hesitate even when you were staring down a fucking sea monster from another dimension.
It wasn't thrilling stuff, but it was better than having to hold still through yet another MRI. And Maverick could admit he was a little bit rusty. Six months of bar fights had kept him in decent shape, but it hadn't exactly been great for his form or his precision.
Everybody in the Top Gun program was being kept together, too. They had their own mess hall, and they ate together, shut away, instead of with the rest of the shatterdome. Their quarters were all next to each other in the barracks, everybody in the same hallway, and they had one big locker room to shower after drills.
The program was top-secret; fair enough. But they hadn't even been told anything, not really. And if any of them was a suspected security risk for some reason, surely whoever was in charge of this whole thing should've been doing more about it. Maverick couldn't help but think it wasn't really about that at all—it was about them, the group of them, making them work with each other and live with each other, keeping them all shut up as close as possible. Maybe this was the whole experiment, hidden cameras in the walls and hallways and somebody taking notes, studying the group dynamic of a whole bunch of people who'd been told they were here to kick ass and weren't actually getting to do anything. Maybe they were waiting to see who'd snap first.
But it was fine. It wasn't that bad. He kept to himself, mostly. It was easy for him; he'd never really needed anybody anyway, had never been in the habit of it. The other pilots were still looking at him sideways a lot of the time, still muttering to each other and then falling silent a little too fast when he looked up or walked past. But it wasn't like it mattered, wasn't like it was his problem. He ignored it.
All told, he didn't mind any of it. But he couldn't figure out what the point was, either, why Charlie had been so insistent about the whole thing.
And he didn't get a clue until about a week in.
They'd just finished up another round of drills—and Maverick was almost sorry about it, because when he was moving, reacting, fighting, at least he wasn't thinking. He'd gotten lucky, too; he'd been partnered up with Sundown, who was one of the half-dozen pilots and TAOs in the program who didn't seem to care too much what they'd heard about him, or at least hid it pretty well if they did.
Sundown was taller than Maverick, a little stronger, and not as fast, but thoughtful, precise. They were a pretty decent matchup. So Maverick felt good, tired in that solidly worn-out way that he'd—he'd missed, six months doing nothing that had taken any real effort. And even the lukewarm water of the showers in the locker room, pounding down over his shoulders, felt fucking fantastic.
Everybody else was talking, laughing. He was only sort of listening, until somebody—Simkins, if he had to guess—raised her voice over the rest of them just a little too loud to ignore, saying, "But they've got to be planning to put us back in a mech sooner or later, right?"
"Sure," said somebody else. Hollywood, maybe. And if that had been Hollywood, then it had to be Wolfman who scoffed next, quick, call-and-response; they were always right next to each other, always playing off each other. "What? Come on, it's weapons development, right? That's the only thing everybody's ever told us about what the hell we're all doing here. And if it's a weapon, then it must go on a mech. They just need to finish making it, or testing it, or whatever the fuck they're doing with it. And then they're going to teach us how to use it."
"Maybe they're building new ones," Sundown offered.
"New mechs? For all of us?" Hollywood sounded skeptical. "That would be a pretty hefty chunk of change, even for the PPDC."
"Yeah, but they're not keeping all of us," Simkins said. "Remember? Another week, and they're cutting half of us—"
But Willard jumped in before she'd finished the sentence, with a laugh. "Yeah, and besides, they have to build at least one."
"Anvil," Sundown said, low, a little sharp; but Maverick could've told him to save it. That wasn't going to be enough to slow Willard down.
"Don't they, Maverick?" Willard called.
Maverick didn't turn around. He was rubbing shampoo through his hair, and with the eyes on him, the weight of them settling across his shoulders, he made sure to really take his time about it, even though he couldn't quite feel his fingers anymore.
"Yeah," he heard himself say, level. "I guess they do."
"Had to rip yours up for scrap," Willard said. "What did you call that thing?"
Maverick shut his eyes.
The whole codename had been, god, something stupid—Raptor Bolero, Maverick was pretty sure. Goose had thought it was hilarious, fate, him getting to be TAO in a mech that had a bird in its name, but it had been years since either of them had actually called her that. Goose had stuck to just Bolero, mostly, or honey, cupcake, muffin; every pet name under the sun, especially when they were in deep shit. Nobody ever sweet-talked like Goose when he was in deep shit.
And Maverick had fucking loved her. Every inch of her, every piston, every rivet. She'd been beautiful, stark and powerful and deadly, and the second he climbed into her cockpit rig, the second he'd connected to her, he could do anything. He'd—he'd always felt like he could do anything. But there, at the end, he couldn't—he didn't know.
He couldn't remember. He couldn't remember what had happened to her, whether Willard was full of shit, whether she'd been recoverable. He—he almost remembered being aware of it, the wreck of her in the water behind him, as he'd clung to the edge of Goose's ejection pod, as he'd stared down at the wet streaking splatters of blood—
"Rust Bucket, I'm guessing," Willard was adding, because apparently that was the best he could come up with.
"Doesn't matter what they give him."
And Maverick—Maverick felt jerked back into himself all at once, at that voice. He sucked in a breath, ribs tight like maybe he hadn't been doing it for a minute or two there, hadn't even noticed he wasn't; and as quick as that his heart was pounding hard in his chest. He rubbed his hands through his hair again, slow, sweeping the suds out; and then he opened his eyes, and he turned his head.
Because that had been Kazansky—the Iceman.
Maverick knew his name, now. Him, and his TAO Kerner; Slider. Kazansky hadn't been posted to Miramar before. He'd been assigned to another shatterdome up the coast, Oregon, and then he'd spent a few years in Alaska—it was something up there that had earned him the callsign, though Maverick had heard six different stories and counting about what it was he'd done, and they were all too badass, made Kazansky look too good, to be the truth. You could tell a real callsign by how embarrassing it had been to get saddled with it, no matter how cool it might sound the rest of the time.
And Kazansky, apparently, was some kind of legend, anywhere from the Pacific Northwest on up. Kazansky was a stone-cold motherfucker; Kazansky had taken on a kaiju without any backup, the other two mechs that should've gone out with him both hobbled with critical malfunctions at the same time; if you told Kazansky he was on-duty and then grounded his mech, he'd swim out with a KA-BAR and try to cut a kaiju's throat by hand.
And right now, he was just standing there. He wasn't like Willard, always trash-talking and gesturing, always trying to make himself look like he took up more space than he did—he took up plenty just with his face, the pressure of those hard pale eyes. He'd been waiting for Maverick to look at him, Maverick could tell, and it was like he could feel it, when Maverick did it: the way his gaze flicked up, as perfect as if he'd timed it, and met Maverick's head-on.
"Doesn't matter what they give him," he said again, and his voice was quieter than Willard's, but it didn't matter. Maverick could hear every word clear as a bell. "It's not about the mech, and it's not about his piloting. It's his attitude." And then, finally, Kazansky let the pretense slide, stopped acting like he was talking to anybody but Maverick. "You don't give a shit about anything but yourself. And that's more dangerous to anybody who goes out there with you than any kaiju could ever be." He tilted his head. "So they must be pretty fucking desperate, if they're planning to put you back in a cockpit."
And god, Maverick wanted to cross the room and shove him backwards into the lockers, punch him in his dismissive fucking face, except then Simkins said, "Well, yeah."
Half the locker room turned to look at her, and she raised her eyebrows like she didn't know why they were surprised.
"Yeah," she said again, "they're fucking desperate. Of course they are. That's why we're all here. That's why there is a top-secret weapons development program in the first place. Haven't any of you been paying attention?"
"What are you talking about?" Willard said.
"She's talking about how if you laid off Maverick for ten seconds and used your fucking brain," Sundown said, "you might've noticed he's far from the only pilot who's lost a mech the last couple of years."
"Half a dozen I know of, since Maverick," Wolfman said after a moment, slowly.
"They lost three at once just last month," somebody else added, from the corner of the room, "up at the Athabaska Shatterdome."
"Exactly," Simkins said, grim. "The kaiju are getting bigger and bigger, and nobody knows why. The mechs we've got aren't enough anymore. I heard two of the geeks talking about it the other day, when we were in there for another round of blood tests—they were saying the higher-ups are thinking about categories. That almost everything we've seen so far is going to be Category I, and they're predicting we're going to start getting a lot more of Category II."
"Jesus," Hollywood muttered. "As if those fucking things weren't big enough already."
But Simkins wasn't wrong. Maverick could practically see it, trace the thought as it crossed everybody's faces at once: as they thought back over it, remembered getting called out for a kaiju that had taken four or five mechs to beat, remembered a breach alarm going off sooner than anybody had thought it would. Hell, Maverick wouldn't ever have thought about it like that, wouldn't have connected the dots, but—he could remember the first year he'd served with the PPDC. Back then, it had been months between breaches; and even six months ago, that had been down to weeks instead.
The whole room had gone quiet, now. Because even fucking Willard couldn't figure out how to laugh about that.
At the two-week mark, Maverick finally saw Charlie again.
That morning had been the first round of eliminations. Everybody'd known they were coming, and the weird part was—it wasn't like the PPDC was protecting anyone's feelings. They'd been ordered back into the briefing room, and Jester had given them a rundown he actually seemed to mean: that elimination, at this point in the Top Gun program, didn't have anything to do with their skills, their capability or competence as mech pilots. It was a matter of screening for potential complications; it was like he meant physical complications, physiological, even though that made no sense at all. As if any of them would've made it into PPDC service with any kind of previously-unknown medical problem serious enough to get them booted out.
Except at the same time that it made no sense, it was also hard not to believe it. Because it couldn't be about their competence as mech pilots, when they hadn't even been put inside a mech yet, not once. Which, Mav had started out dimly grateful for that, relieved that he wasn't going to have to figure out how to survive climbing into a cockpit again—but the longer the program had stretched on without any sign of a mech drill coming up, the weirder it all seemed.
So the pilots, the TAOs, who'd gotten dropped mostly hadn't looked upset about it so much as they'd looked vaguely confused. Wasn't like it was going to be a black mark on their PPDC records, though, and they weren't going to have to put up with any more MRIs, either, Maybe they were the lucky ones, in a way.
And then, once everybody who'd been eliminated had left the room, to head back to their quarters and pick up their shit, move back into the main shatterdome—that was when Charlie came in.
She got right to the point, stepped up beside Jester and said, "Guessing you've all been starting to wonder why you're here. I'm the one who's going to tell you. My name is Charlotte Blackwood, and I'm a civilian contractor with the Miramar Shatterdome. I was asked to supervise the civilian specialists who are working on the other half of this program—the half you haven't seen yet.
"Whether you're a pilot or a tactical assessment officer, you're familiar with the current class of mechs, used at shatterdomes all across the Pacific Rim to contain kaiju incursions. One pilot, neurally linked to the mech in order to control it through physical movement inside a piloting rig, and one TAO, to handle technical and tactical readouts and supplement the pilot's situational awareness.
"There's always been a hard limit on the size and power of the equipment available to you. Past a given point, the neural load of the connection simply gets too high for a pilot's brain to handle. No attempt to bypass this limit has ever been successful."
Maverick grimaced reflexively; pretty much everybody else in the room did, too. Even Jester's mouth kind of twisted a little.
There was a variation on this explanation in every orientation for new PPDC recruits—and it came with pictures, plus a stark warning to alert the tech engineers if you ever felt so much as a flicker of the beginnings of neural overload. Maverick could take or leave a lot of guidelines; but even he hadn't been all that tempted to test that one.
Charlie allowed a deliberate beat, watching their faces. "Yeah," she said. "Exactly. However, our team here at the Miramar Shatterdome has developed a way to exceed that limit—and do it safely."
"We're talking two-pilot mechs," Jester said.
Maverick blinked. A wave of murmurs swept through the room.
Two-pilot mechs—nobody had ever done something like that. How could you? How could you ever get two different people coordinated enough to pilot a single mech without them tripping over each other, trying to go two separate directions? Maybe if they practiced enough, if they had a single set of maneuvers and they did them the same way every time—but that was only going to work in drills. In the field, actually fighting a fucking kaiju, you had to be able to react spontaneously, reflexively, on the spot.
It had probably seemed pretty simple to the civilians in the labs; splitting up the neural load, spreading it across two brains instead of one, was the obvious solution to the problem. But on a practical level, how the hell was that supposed to work?
He wanted to say it, wanted to point it out. Except there was no way Charlie hadn't thought of that, wasn't well aware of it—and then he took a closer look at her face, and kept his mouth shut. Because yeah, that expression said there was an answer, and anyone who asked the question like they thought she didn't know what she was talking about was going to get that answer explained to them using very small words.
"Jaegers," Charlie said, once the murmuring had died down again. "We're calling them jaegers. Up to eight times as large as any previous mech the PPDC has been able to design, with the neural load split across two minds. Two minds that have been connected by a bridge of their own. That's the weapon we're developing with Top Gun: two pilots, linked not only to their jaeger but to each other. The drift.
"That's the purpose behind every assessment you've been put through so far, every medical test. Your work during your physical drills has been observed very closely—we needed to establish baselines for each of you, detailed workups that we hope will allow us to figure out how to evaluate your potential for synchronicity, your drift compatibility, with accuracy.
"The next phase of the Top Gun program begins now. You will be introduced to the drift; you'll learn what it feels like and how it works; and each of you will be tested, separately and together, until we're able to assign you the strongest possible match—a co-pilot who can connect to you in the drift, better than anyone else."
She wasn't kidding. She wrapped it up, short and sweet, and then they all filed out and Jester marched them straight off to the medical wing—not to the main floor, which they'd all been in at least a dozen times, but up to the second floor instead.
There were sets of prototypes laid out up there; almost familiar, the same kinds of helmets and the same kinds of connections Maverick was used to seeing in the cockpit of a mech, except there were a few new wires, and each of the helmets was hooked up to a second one instead of to the big blinking stack of lights and switches that was the main control center of a PPDC mech.
There were computers next to them, too, huge heavy boxes stacked up, and some kind of readout monitors attached to them—black screens with sharp green letters, and ones that looked like heart monitors, wavering lines piled up on each other, blinking and shivering.
Charlie handed them off to one of the scientists, who was clearly so fucking excited about getting a whole pile of guinea pigs brought in here that he kept interrupting himself, going a hundred miles an hour and about ten times more technical than anything any of them actually needed to know to test this shit out. Engineering, Maverick could get a handle on, especially the kind mechs were made out of: three-quarters analog, something you could put your hands inside, something where you could feel how the pieces were supposed to fit together. But this, the drift, was all neurology, the parameters of the human brain, nothing Maverick ever really wanted to have to think about.
Besides, he had bigger problems.
They hadn't been brought up here to look at this shit. They were supposed to put these helmets on, to try this out—and Maverick didn't need to know how it worked to understand that if this thing, this neural bridge, was supposed to run deep enough to let two people move a giant mech like they were one—
He didn't want Willard in his head. He didn't even want Jester in his head, not like that. He didn't know what the fuck he was going to do.
Ahead of him, the first batch of pilots was already putting the prototype helmets on. Somebody he'd only sparred with a couple of times—Patterson, maybe?—immediately folded up and vomited all over the floor; a couple of the med techs hustled over, and made reassuring noises about how it happened, it wasn't anything to worry about.
Three TAOs and another pilot had been eliminated, by the time Maverick was next up. A couple of them had passed out, and one apparently just hadn't been able to stabilize their neural pattern enough, whatever the fuck that meant. It looked like the scientists weren't especially surprised by it; they'd been predicting that some people just weren't going to be physically capable of handling the sensation of a neural bridge, and one that went not to the simplistic control system of a mech, but to another person's mind.
Fantastic.
And then, as he was standing there staring down the barrel of it, struggling to think past the ringing in his ears—Charlie stepped up and took an empty helmet in her hands, and met his eyes.
"It's okay, Maverick," she said quietly. "It'll just be for a few seconds. Just long enough for you to feel what it's like to try to establish a handshake."
Maverick wet his lips. Charlie was—Charlie wasn't a good idea, exactly, but she was definitely the least bad idea. She already knew him, knew what he was like. She'd been there for all of it, and they'd been fucking through half of it, and then she'd—she'd seen him come apart, tried to talk him out of it, tried to make him face it, and watched him leave anyway. Whatever it was she was going to get out of this—handshake, it wouldn't surprise her, and she'd know what to edit out, if she was supposed to write up a report on him later.
"The first level of the connection," she was adding, "is memory. Things you've done, things you've experienced. We'll be accessing each other's memories involuntarily, and you have to let it happen. You can't try to hold anything back, or hide anything. It won't work, and focusing on a memory, reliving it, is only going to destabilize the neural bridge. Our brains need to be processing the same input, the same reality, in order to synchronize. So if I'm here in this room, in the medical wing, feeling and seeing and smelling it, and you're—"
She stopped. And Maverick looked at her, saw her expression, and understood the shape of the thing she wasn't saying, as she pressed her mouth into a line.
"Listen, there are—the scientists have been calling them random access brain impulse triggers. RABITs," she said at last. "Memories so powerful, ones you've replayed so often in your own head, that your brain reacts to them in ways that are hard to control. But you can't chase them. You've got to try to stay with me, okay?"
Oh. That was why. He'd known that expression meant it was about what had happened, about Goose; he just hadn't known how the hell it could possibly be more relevant than it already was, considering she was about to get a first-row seat to his brain.
He swallowed.
"Okay," he said.
It didn't really mean shit, considering he had no idea what this was actually going to be like. But she probably knew that, so there wasn't much point in telling her so.
He picked up the helmet. Even that was—was hard, the shape of it, the weight of it in his hands, the thick articulated cables that hooked up to it. It was just like in a mech cockpit, a piloting rig.
But this wasn't a mech cockpit. He turned it around the right way in his hands, and he put it on his head. In the corner of his eye, Charlie was doing the same; and then she turned and gestured to somebody else, and buttons got hit, switches got flipped. There was a noise that wasn't really a noise, a shifting unsteady feeling somewhere in his head, and someone said, "All right, calibration complete," and then—
—for a second, it was fine.
For a second, it was just him and Charlie. It was—he could understand, almost, why they'd decided to call it a handshake, because it wasn't a handshake but it was even less like anything else. Something that was usually a wall had turned into a mirror, and then into glass; and then the glass was gone, too, and it was Charlie, right there, touching him even though he knew she was standing three feet away and wasn't actually touching him at all. He could feel her, her mind, the quick sharp blue-white sparks of the part of her that had earned that engineering degree, the scientist that knew exactly how these helmets worked and why; and the blend of warmth, concern, and frustration that was everything she felt for him, too—because she'd been in love with him once, for a little while, or at least she was pretty sure she had been, hoped she had been. He'd started out as a challenge, the coolest car in the parking lot
—and wow, okay, Charlie also knew how to hotwire cars, had borrowed a few from rich strangers who didn't know how to drive them just to take them for joyrides in college; how had he not known about that?—
but then it had turned into something else, something more, deeper than she'd expected it to go, more powerful. She'd cared about him more than she'd thought she would, and she still did, and she'd been so angry with him for wasting himself, for driving that cool fucking car she kind of fucking loved off a cliff for no good reason, when it hadn't even been his fault
—and that was enough.
In here, in the drift, it didn't take more than that. Just the thought crossing her mind was enough to make him think of it, too, and thinking it was doing it, it was—he couldn't stop it, he was skidding straight into the maw of it, and there was nothing he could do about it.
He was there. He lurched sideways, because the rig was lurching, Bolero was lurching, and that meant he was, too. The kaiju was bellowing, and Jesus fucking Christ, it was so fucking huge; he felt disoriented for a split second, because he loved it when they got sent out against one of the real monsters, when he was living by the skin of his teeth, when he got to yank victory out of the wide-open, tripled, kaiju-blue jaws of defeat. But somewhere in him
—the real him knew what this was, knew when this was and what was coming next, and god, he couldn't do this, he couldn't survive it, not again—
there was something cold and clenched up tight, unfamiliar.
The kaiju roared again, swung around. This one had three tails, long and snaking, and Goose shouted, "Jesus, better duck, Mav!" a second before Maverick did duck, Bolero crouching down so close to the waves Maverick was sure he ought to be able to feel the spray on his own face, the chop splashing up at the plating of Bolero's chest and shoulders.
He dodged two of them. But the third one was too fast, too low. It wrapped around Bolero's leg just under the surface of the water, ground down and then wrenched, and Maverick shouted, because it was almost like pain: the sudden surge of damage alerts, red lights across the console, and the stiffening of the rig around his own leg, limiting the movement so he couldn't push Bolero into a maneuver she could never make—couldn't get them both killed because he'd forgotten how bad the damage was and used that leg without thinking.
The kaiju bellowed, and then—god, it was so fucking fast, it was—it felt like a rollercoaster, a bodyslam, the tail jerking Bolero's legs out from under Maverick at the same moment that the kaiju swung around and struck the side of the cockpit, like getting T-boned at a red light by a freight train.
Bolero landed in the water. Maverick landed in the water, that was what it felt like, and he was—he fumbled, grappled, gasping, because he wasn't drowning but he felt like he was going to, and then the kaiju was there, coming down on him with its massive clawed feet. He gritted his teeth, jabbed his arm up with the arm blade activated and stabbed the fucking monster right in its fucking guts, and he was going to get cited for it, the spray of that noxious blue blood flooding out, spilling over Bolero, but at least
—god, he hadn't even noticed, had he? He didn't even know exactly when it was that Goose had gone quiet, whether it was before or after he'd triggered the ejection sequence—
"Maverick!"
Charlie.
Maverick blinked, shook his head a little, made himself focus on driving the blade up into the kaiju, twisting, shoving. He was going to cut the fucking thing in half, if he could.
"Maverick, stop. Stay with me. Let it go, goddammit. Just let go—"
Charlie again. But she wasn't here, there was no way she could be on his radio, she was
—next to him, she was right next to him in the other helmet, and she'd known this was going to be the trigger, the RABIT. How the fuck had she ever thought for a second he was going to be able to just watch it slide past him? God, he couldn't do this—
He squeezed his eyes shut. His real eyes, he was—he had real eyes, and he shut them; and he fumbled his hands up, clutched unsteadily at the edges of the helmet and shoved it up and off his head.
"—okay, you're okay," Charlie was saying in his ear. "It's okay. That's normal. It's normal not to be able to hold the first handshake for more than a few seconds. You're fine."
"Yeah," he said, hoarse. "Right."
And then he pushed the helmet at her, jerked his hands away and shoved them into his pockets. His legs were stiff, they didn't want to move, but he couldn't—he couldn't be there anymore.
Because maybe Charlie wasn't lying, maybe it was normal to drop a handshake that fast. But that didn't mean she was right. That wasn't a RABIT he was ever going to be able to escape, because it was in him, it was him.
He'd wanted to come back because he'd missed Miramar, missed the shatterdome. And he'd wanted to stay, to stick it out, just to—just to prove that he could, some shadow of the desperate defiant thing that had always driven him forward, his whole life. He'd had some second thoughts about—getting into a mech again, one that wasn't Bolero, one that wouldn't have Goose.
But right then, feeling the ghost of the weight of the helmet against his hands, forcing himself to walk away one step at a time on shuddering legs, was the first time he'd ever thought maybe he couldn't do this, any of this, after all.