"The Wall of Life.

"That's what they called it, anyway. The fatcats in suits sitting in a skyscraper on America's east coast in a building meant to represent the nations of the world. The Wall of Life, that would protect people from the Kaiju menace. We couldn't stop them coming, they said. We can't build Jaegers fast enough to replace what we're losing, they said. Maintaining control of the pacific has simply become untenable, they said. Let the Kaiju roam the oceans. We will build a wall. #MakeThePacificGreatAgain.

"And for a while, the people bought it. Long enough that they didn't realise that anyone with a real clue what was going to happen was packing up and heading as far from the coast as he or she possibly could. They murmured to themselves that maybe they could stop the Kaiju from ever setting foot on their soil. I mean, it worked for the Chinese against the mongols, right?

"But some of us had read up on our history, and we knew what was coming. We tried to warn the people, and for our efforts we were called paranoid, conspiracy theorists, nutbags, fruitloops, quacks. They trotted out scientists who told us that, no no no, the wall would be MUCH more than so much wet tissue paper against the claws and bulk of a giant radioactive monster. That we could get by without fisheries, that the oceans would survive. And the people lapped it up. The economies of the world were strained to the point of breaking, and building the wall meant a few hundred thousand workers could feed their families and pay rent for a few more weeks. I can't tell you how many rotten vegetables I got thrown at me by people who thought I was being an "alarmist."

"And then Sydney happened.

"There'd been attacks on the wall before. Well, that might be overstating things...there had been attempted attacks on the wall before. But the Jaegers had always managed to stop the Kaiju from getting too close - ten miles out to sea, in brutal underwater fistfights, or along the last-ditch miracle mile, within plain sight of the people up on the wall.

"Sometimes I wonder if that was why the Jaeger Program lost its support. The wall meant people could no longer see just who was fighting and dying for them.

"But Sydney was the first time there had been no Jaegers. The big artillery pieces the politicos told us would turn around a category IV just...bounced off Mutavore. The fighter jets with missiles couldn't land a hit that hurt it. It leaned a shoulder against the big slab of concrete and steel or whatever they made it out of, and heaved, and every promise the fatcats made collapsed with it. By the time somebody arrived who could put the bugger down, it was already tearing into the city, and they were scrambling to find one of the old American tac-nukes that had brought down Scissure back in 2014.

"I mean, they knew it was going to happen someday. They had to have. By the time people realised they'd been conned, it was too late to get a hold of them, grab them by the lapels and throttle them while screaming how could you do this to us? They were long gone, nothing more than a reassuring video message promising the wall was safe.

"But as Coyote Tango, piloted by Herc Hanson and Stacker Pentecost, put down Mutavore with its bare fists, we all saw the truth.

"No matter how expensive they were, no matter the cost in manpower and lives, the Jaegers and their pilots were the only option we had. And they'd been sold up the river so that the wealthy elite could sit in their condominiums and wait for the end of the world to hit them, hoping it would take long enough to put us down that they'd be old and grey when the great big grim reapers came for them.

"Well. It may surprise them to learn this, but...we're still here.

"I don't just mean in a literal sense. New Zealand was never planned to be part of the Wall of Life. Not enough interior to justify the cost of walling off its extensive coastline, they said. They told us we'd be airlifted to Australia when they were walled off, but the choppers never came. They were never going to.

"Not when Pentecost's mission failed. Not when the EMP wave hit. Not when the skies turned grey, and the radios were filled with nothing but static. And not even when the Kaiju started pouring out of the Breach faster and in bigger numbers than ever. The double event that hit Hawai'i. The attack on Darwin. Not to mention the countless others since then that we just don't know about, because the radios don't work anymore.

"We didn't have a wall, we didn't have a Jaeger, and we were sitting ducks in the middle of a giant, shark-infested pond.

"But despite all that, we're still here.

"Pentecost was a smart man. I met with him, five months before he launched Operation Pitfall. He had a team of Jaegers, survivors who had clung to life despite all the bloody Kaiju had thrown at them, the best pilots and the best machines. But he knew they might not be enough. So when he came to the PPDC asking for more funding, I asked him for a favour. If this all goes south, I said, we're going to be on our own. The Australians had Striker Eureka, if it survived. China had Crimson Typhoon, Russia had Cherno Alpha. America still owned Coyote Tango. But we had nothing. We would be a nation of seven million people, in the middle of a Kaiju-infested ocean, without even the wall to protect us.

"He couldn't spare any of his own Jaegers, or the men to help us build one. But he did promise me, in exchange for helping him refit and modernise the Jaegers he had, he'd give us free reign of Oblivion Bay, pick any Jaeger and all the parts we needed to make one of our own.

"It's taken a lot of time, a lot of manpower, and a lot of desperately-needed resources to pull it off. Some of you said it couldn't be done. Some of you thought I was just going to use it to skip across the ditch with our own one-percenters. But we've done it. We've built ourselves a Jaeger.

"In the past, we've depended on the Sydney Shatterdome to protect us, to intercept the Kaiju before they reached us. Or, like in '24 and '26, to be the last line of defence when the Kaiju broke through their perimeter, ignored all the Australian coastal cities, and headed straight for us. Today, we don't even know if Sydney still exists. But today, I would like to welcome you all to the nerve centre of our defence, to the last bulwark against the Kaiju menace. Welcome to the home of Triton Renegade, and her pilots, Renee and Dirk Van Houten.

"Welcome to the Auckland Shatterdome.

"Welcome to our best, last, and only line of defence.

"Welcome to the future, ladies and gentlemen."

~ Prime Minister Rupert Darcy, 30 June 2026, addressing a crowd at the opening of the Auckland Shatterdome

The shatterdome was a hive of activity, as technicians and maintenance crews scrambled to detach coolant lines, fix seals, finish last-minute calibrations of the weapons system attached to the massive robot sitting in the deployment bay.

"It feels a bit weird being on the other side of this," Renee Greer muttered to her co-pilot. "Watching other people crawling over the Jaeger like a nest of ants on a corpse."

"Is that what they look like to you?" asked Scott McMurdoch in an amused tone. "Would you rather be back down there with the other brainiacs?"

She smiled at him nervously. "Not for all the world."

"Yeah, well, the world ain't such a valuable commodity as it used to be," Scott grunted, ducking his head down and slipping his helmet on, fixing it to the seals. He waited a second as the neuroconductive fluids drained from the visor, and waited for Renee to don her helmet.

She took a last-minute look out of the Jaeger's conn-pod visor.

It had been a hell of an achievement, she had to hand it to them. Not just to the men and women of the Auckland shatterdome, but the people of New Zealand as a whole for finding the resources to build one, for Prime Minister Darcy for managing to negotiate access to the infamous Jaeger wrecking yard of Oblivion Bay with Marshall Pentecost, for the greatest minds in the country for putting a two-kilometer high robot together on a shoestring budget and a deadline of weeks, not months, without the support of the Pan-Pacific Defence Corps or the UN, and of course to herself. It wasn't pride to acknowledge that she had been instrumental in getting all of this off the planning board and into the world of non-fiction - it was simply the truth.

But her sense of pride didn't stop a cold trickle of sweat from sliding down her cheek.

"Nervous?" asked McMurdoch.

She smiled at his cool, reassuring demeanour. The man had been an SAS soldier until recently, and had seen his fair share of action - he'd joined the Army when the most the human race had to worry about was terrorists hiding in caves, and now those zealots were a distant memory, replaced by the terror held by massive creatures that had poured out of the Challenger Deep and shown the world just how small and insignificant they truly were.

But humanity hadn't simply run away and hid, waiting for the monsters to come and get them. They'd decided to fight. They'd thrown every missile, tank shell, jet plane and, when those ran out, nuclear missile they could to stop the first one in San Francisco. They're repeated the dance in Manila. And by the time they'd bombed a third just outside Sydney, they'd already begun working on a weapon that could kill one of those monsters with the same force as a nuclear bomb but without levelling and irradiating a city.

Somewhere along the way, someone had called the creatures "Kaiju". It was a japanese term, but it had stuck. But the decision to name humanity's secret weapons "Jaegers" had been deliberate - the Jaegers would live up to their names, hunt the Kaiju down when they stepped foot outside of the Breach, and kill them in the ocean before they ever set foot on land.

And now she was piloting one.

"A bit."

"More than a bit, I reckon. Put yer damn helmet on woman, I can't wait all day."

She ducked her head and slipped her own helmet on, marvelling as light filtered through the yellow fluid in the double-layered glass before it drained, leaving a transparent visor.

"Two pilots ready to connect to neural bridge."

Ready was an overstatement. Renee's heart raced in excitement and fear as she braced herself. She'd drifted with Scott before - it had been a basic part of finding someone compatible to pilot the Jaeger with him - but never at the controls of the Jaeger. She was accutely aware of how she would look to an outsider - she'd always been short for her age, barely the height of a teenager, while McMurdoch was a veteral SAS officer, six foot four of solid muscle. She must look like a child next to him...

"Establishing neural handshake in three...two...one..."

The memories came hard and fast. A little girl, watching her daddy and aunty waving goodbye as they boarded a C-130 Hercules. The day she'd been called to the principals office, and told about the IED attack. Mum laying on the couch, a bottle of vodka in her limp hand. Watching the TV, seeing a cloud of dust rising from human wreckage, a pair of jet fighters flying past the camera and dipping low, throwing themselves in a last-ditch attempt to kill the Trespasser. And then the memories change. A little boy, sitting in his poppa and nanna's lounge, trying to block out the shouting with his ninja turtle action figures. Boot camp, being more tired than he'd ever been in his life and wondering if it had been worth it. His first medal, the swell of pride. Watching the Sydney attack in a pub, wondering "how the hell can we stop these fuckers?" More memories. A girl in school, the smartest in her class, asking the teacher questions he doesn't know the answers to. University, long hours and late nights. Passing through a shanty town in a humvee convoy, hoping the bloody cultists haven't buried mines for them. Raiding a cultist camp in West Papuan jungle, discovering just what they'd been doing to their hostages, having to be held back by his second in command while the fucker just smiled serenely. Standing up in front of the Minister of Defence and giving him a dire report on the national economy, and her outrageous plan. Oblivion Bay, where one is the scientist picking out the most intact parts that Stacker Pentecost hasn't already snapped up, and the other is riding in another humvee, manning the machine gun on its roof, watching out for the gangs of scavengers...

Their first drift. Her nervously looking at someone who seems larger than life, and reconciling it with the scared kid he feels like inside. Him stepping forward and giving the neural equivalent of a bearhug, letting her into his head, and seeing her for the first time, that iron core...

And then it's over. The whole process takes less than thirty seconds, but when it's over, and they've both got themselves back in their own heads, they flash each other a look. Scott gives her a thumbs up, and she can feel the pride radiating from him. He can feel the iron determination behind that slightly embarrassed, but mostly thrilled, smile.

"Neural uplink engaged. Activating Jaeger: Triton Renegade."

And then the Jaeger around them surged to life, as they were joined by a third, if not consciousness, then presence within the drift. The suits did their jobs well. Linked to thousands of pressure points beneath the Jaeger's hull, they felt like they were practically wearing Triton Renegade like a suit of armour, not just standing within its inertia-reducing conn-podd.

As one, they flexed their left arm. The raised a hand up over their face, and outside they saw the massive armature swing in front of them.

They raised the right hand. Slammed a fist into an open palm, feeling the satisfying impact of thousands of tonnes of metal collided, monitoring their systems as it took the strain with its massive artificial muscle strands.

And then they were being lifted up into the air, out of the Shatterdome's roof, by dozens of powerful helicopters, leaving behind thousands of cheering technicians, a room full of nervous command staff, and a Marshall who kept one eye on the neural readouts and another on the tactical map, tracking them as they swung out, away from Waiheke Island, and out into the Hauraki Gulf.

The old PPDC sonar buoy network had been trashed by the nuclear blast from Stacker's failed Operation Pitfall, but the Royal New Zealand Navy hadn't been idle in the days before the world went dark, setting up a sophisticated network of buoys of their own as far north as Norfolk Island. If they didn't need them, then they'd be recovered, no harm done...but if they did need them, they'd be invaluable. Relaying data back to the Waiheke LOCCENT through long and thickly protected fibreoptic cables, they provided a picture of the foe.

Marshall Jan Green thumbed the button of her mic headset. "LOCCENT to Triton Renegade, your target is a Category Two coming from the north, aiming for the Cradock Channel, codename Janus. Looks like a slippery son of a bitch. Take care of my niece, McMurdoch. And good luck out there."

On the other end of the radio connection (fuzzy from the electromagnetic activity that permeated the sky these days) McMurdoch gave an acknowledgement, all business, while Renee kept a careful watch on their own sonar readouts. Outside, a pair of lighter helicopters, old Vietnam-era Hueys pulled out of storage, peeled off, dropping their cargoes - a trio of highly sensitive sonar buoys, more expensive and with less range than the hard uplinks, but providing a higher resolution image, uplinked with the Jaeger's own sensor suite and processed by both pilots, and helicopter-recoverable.

There he is, McMurdoch (or was it Greer?) thought as they sighted the creature - an island in the distance, moving like no island should towards the mouth of the Cradock Channel, between Little Barrier Island and Great Barrier Island. Behind them, the Coromandel peninsula curved up, stretching north towards Great Barrier Island. To their left lay a long stretch of twinkling light shining in the dark, the city of Auckland.

If the Kaiju made it past them, it had a straight shot at the city. Or worse, it could head south into the Waikato, wrecking the nations already pushed-to-capacity-and-beyond agriculturural heartland. More than just lives were hanging on this moment - the very existence of a nation of eight million people, abandoned by the rest of the world, depended on it.

"No pressure," McMurdoch said, grinning wryly, though Renee could tell across the drift that he felt the weight of expectation on his shoulders too.

She keyed her mic. "Alpha Wing, drop us four klicks west of Great Barrier Island. We'll intercept him in the channel."

McMurdoch raised an eyebrow at her, but he could feel the confidence radiating off her.

"I hope you have a plan, rangers," Marshall Greer growled over the static in their headsetss.

"Marshall, the channel's going to funnel Janus into a small area, where we can intercept him," Renee reported. "Too far out, he can slip right past us. And I don't want to risk letting him slip in at all."

"Copy that. The Kahu can be there in ten minutes for artillery support."

"Negative Marshall," McMurdoch growled. "Keep the Kahu in the harbour. If we go down, that's all you've got to deal with Janus until the other frigates arrive."

They all knew that was a kindness. Though the PPDC had been able to develop devastating weapons to combat the kaiju, the vast majority of it was either earmarked for the Jaegers or had been too big to mount on a ship anyway. The Anzac-class frigate HMNZS Kahu carried an American-built railgun, and anti-Kaiju missiles, but would crumple like a tin can if the kaiju ever went after it. If they were lucky, they might only lose half their navy if Triton fell, and half of Auckland.

Both of their pilots made the same resolution, to themselves and to each other...we won't fall. We won't let it happen.

As far as Janus was concerned, he had simply been minding its own business, following its instinctual urge to swim to the place its creators had decided was next on their list, when he was rudely kicked by a foot hundreds of meters long, lifted up out of the water by the force. He flailed his serpentine body, tiny vestigial limbs wiggling almost comically, head thrown back in a screech of pain.

And then the tail swung around, aiming a razor-sharp stinger its attacker, where it knew without thinking the tiny little creatures moving it would be.

Triton's left arm came up, batting the stinger aside as it launched itself forward with its right, punching down in the creature's midsection. But instead of a massive fist, what impacted was an armature attached to the arm, which had split into three pointed spikes. One point skittered off against powerful scales but the other two had enough purchase and force behind them to stab deep, pinning the writhing thing still as its sinuous neck and tail writhed, trying to find its assailant.

The Jaeger didn't give it a chance, following it up with a left-hook to its jaw. At the massive fist impacted, a massive piston slid out of its arm-mounted sheath, propelled by internal magnets, slamming into its skull just below its eye with a crack that reverberated. The head lolled, dazed, as Triton unpinned it and went to grab its tail.

And that was when the second head erupted from the water, wrapping around Triton's left arm, and squeezed.

Scott had been on the left hemisphere of the Jaeger, and grit his teeth as the sensors simulated pain where the massive creature was trying to crush the piston. Renee felt it too, but distantly, enough to grimmace but not to distract her from retracting the prongs and smashing the right fist into the second head. It clung stubbornly, withstanding a second hit, then a third, but as the fourth punch made contact it had begun to recoil...and it was Renee's turn to stifle a yell of pain, as the first head wrapped its sinuous neck around the right leg and shook, hoping to topple it, get on top of it, tear at its vulnerable conn-pod.

Renee and Scott roared as they surged, the left leg coming up and the left elbow coming down, crushing both heads together. As both heads floated in the air, stunned, both of the Jaeger's arms reached out, grabbing each neck by the throat, and then stomping a foot down to catch the bladed stinger, lifting the writhing creature out of the water, artificial muscles creaking from the strain. For a moment, it looked like the Jaeger was going to try and tear it in half.

"Hip pods!"

The order had come from both of them as slots along Triton's midsection slid open, allowing two massive pods to spring out from each side. The targeting calibration was done mentally, laser-guided fury assigning the target. And then a rocket barrage roared out, exhaust lancing out behind the Jaeger, crashing into the creature's narrow chest, gauging out massive chunks of flesh. The barrage left a ragged hole, blue lifeblood spilling out from the wound, but the left head was alive enough to scream in agony as the right head was torn off, twitching in Triton's hands. With one hand suddenly free, the severed head unceremoniously tossed into the water, the mighty Jaeger pulled its fist back, and then plunged it forward again, railgun piston slamming into its head again, and again, and again, until finally the creature had gone limp in their hands, and even as the blood stopped pumping the merciless piston came down, just to finish the job.

And then the corpse fell from the metal titan's hands, crashing into the water, Triton Renegade stood triumphant, arms raised in exultation, its pilots cheering as sweat dripped down their faces, surrounded by a slowly expanding cloud of slick blue lifeblood.

"Good work, rangers. Come on home."

"Not bad for a first deployment," were the first words of out Marshall Greer's mouth as Renee and Scott emerged from the conn-pod, grinning.

"We did our best," Scott said modestly, shaking her outstretched hand.

"How's the cleanup operation going?" Renee asked, still panting slightly as the adrenaline flushed through her veins,

"The damage has been contained to Great Barrier's west coast. We should get most of it out of the water, but the beaches are going to be unusable for at least half a decade, even if we focus on them exclusively."

Renee's mood soured, though Scott just shrugged. "Can't be helped, I guess. Though most of that came from the rocket pods. Might wanna look into something we can load them with that won't let it dump a whole heap of Blue into the water, cauterise the wound if we can."

Marshall Jan Greer smiled serenely. "I'll take it up with General Van Houten at the next staff meeting. Now get to your bunks, you two. You're off the clock."

While he was technically a civilian now, McMurdoch snapped off a crisp military salute, while Renee ducked forward and have her aunt a massive hug, her tiny frame looking comical next to her tall, Amazonian body, and then they were both walking away, basking in the adulation of the Shatterdome's work crews.

While they would be pumped for the next few minutes, Greer knew from personal experience that the strain of piloting a Jaeger would have taken it out of them, and they would be crashing into their bunks in a deep sleep. She hoped the woke up feeling rested tomorrow, because she was going to put them through their paces - training simulations using the hard data her analysts had gathered, roundtable discussions with the design team about the performence of the piston and the triton and how they could work on minimising kaiju blue fallout and calibrations to the neural uplink to make the Jaeger more responsive, and then the mayor was probably going to try and stage some kind of awards ceremony, get a photo op with the Heroes of Hauraki to stave off the protestors demanding he resign over some scandal or such.

But in the meantime, she needed Triton Renegade up and running again, to help the cleanup crew by physically hauling the dead Kaiju out of the bay where their research team, and in case another Kaiju wandered past Australia to attack the Land of the Long White Cloud.

"Get Team Two suited up and deployed, have the rocket section reload the hip pods," she said to her second-in-command. "Do you think it's worth hooking them back up to the choppers, or do we let them wade on out?"

Jules Shannon shrugged. "They're not going to like missing the action, but getting to put Triton through his paces might make them a bit easier to manage."

Greer shook her head. Terrence Chang and Indira Kendall were talented pilots in their own right, but the two had an attitude when it came to being part of New Zealand's Jaeger team - namely, that they had decided early on that they should be Team One, the Jaeger optimally calibrated to their neural settings, and everyone else assigned as their backup crews.

"The only thing that'll make those two easier to handle is shoving poles up their arses and turning them into puppets," she growled.

"They can't be worse than Van Houten, at least," Shannon said.

"The General...has his moments," Greer said, smiling. "He's just not happy that the Shatterdome isn't completely under his thumb."

Shannon sent the call to Team Two, while Greer sat in the command centre, reviewing the data, replaying the footage. The idea behind playing combat footage of the Jaegers had been to show the public just what was involved in keeping them safe, to get them invested in their protectors, to give them an up-close look at just what was coming for them if they didn't pull together behind them. Which had worked fine up until the Category IIIs and IVs had started pouring through the Breach, and shredding the Jaegers faster than the PPDC could build them. And now it was just one Jaeger, Triton Renegade, vs the World.

She reviewed the footage, decided she didn't have to cut anything, and then sent it to the Shatterdome public relations department, who would cut it all together for the Ministry of Defence to broadcast for everyone who still had a working TV.

The Prime Minister had been right. Today was the beginning of the future...but Greer suspected it was going to be a lot harder, and a lot weirder, than any of them realised.

End of Week One

Note: as you can probably tell, this is an AU based on the premise that Stacker Pentecost's attack on the Breach failed and the world went down the drain. Specifically, it's based on the world of Cherno Alpha vs the World, an excellent roleplay game run by Open_Sketchbook.