by J. E. Gurley
A loud splat behind him drew his attention away from the scene of destruction. A dead Wasp lay on the roadway. Killed by a missile, he thought and dismissed it. Then another fell nearby. He looked up and saw dozens of Wasps flying awkwardly, milling about in confusion. Two more slammed into each other, fell from the sky, and did not get up.
“What’s happening?” Lands asked.
McKenzie shook his head and turned his attention back to the Kaiju. Its blows against the building had slowed. It lowered its fore section and stood on all twelve legs. Suddenly, it seemed to sit down on its rear end. It emitted a loud, mournful roar. He clamped his hands over his ears to drown out the sound. The tentacles around it mouth stretched straight into the air and whipped around like palm trees in a gale. The Kaiju was in pain. Had a lucky shot or a missile injured it?
It rose on all six pairs of legs, took a few wobbly steps, and collapsed again. Its body shuddered a few times, shaking bricks and chunks of masonry from the buildings still standing around it. It lifted its head and roared one more time, and then laid its head across the roof of a five-story building and ceased to move.
McKenzie would swear later that he had heard its death rattle. In reality, it had been the sound of all the blisters along its sides opening. He had to see the creature close up. He picked his way through the debris of fallen buildings, around gigantic divots of pavement yanked from the roadways by the creature’s legs, and the hulks of wrecked and burning automobiles, trucks, and the occasional tank. More Wasps emerged from the open blisters, but they flew erratically and fell from the sky in droves.
McKenzie wondered what had felled the behemoth. Certainly not the missiles, bombs, or artillery shells the ADF had flung at it for hours. It had shrugged them off as one might the irritating bites of mosquitoes. People began to spill from the ruins, miraculously surviving the carnage around them.
Lands hung back, curious but still afraid. He was more afraid to leave McKenzie’s presence than to face the Kaiju. “Look,” he yelled.
McKenzie followed Lands’ gaze to one of the open blisters. It was impossible, but a man stood in the opening, waving his arms, a big man wearing torn and dirty dark camo clothing. McKenzie strained to hear him.
His accent was American as he yelled, “Someone send me up some ketchup. I’ve had hell killing this thing. Now, I’m chowing down.”
26
Tuesday, December 25, 2:00 p.m. Aboard the USS Mississippi –
Talent had mixed feelings about being back aboard the Mississippi. On the one hand, he was alive and glad to be anywhere. The nuclear submarine was as close to a home as he had now. On the other hand, its tight confining space reminded him too much of the inside of the Kaiju, an experience he would very much like to forget. He knew he never would. The few hours inside the monster had fulfilled all his daydreams of being in a military action and tested his skills to their limits. It had also been the most horrifying experience he could ever have imagined.
Commander Murdock was dead, but by all accounts, he had successfully disarmed the alien gravity bomb. At the very least, it had not yet exploded. A U.S. Navy vessel had picked up the orca-camouflaged SDV with Captain McGregor, Corporal Hightower, and Specialist Perez aboard only an hour after he and Costas had left them to go search for Walker, and transferred them to the Mississippi. Perez had survived and was recovering from her wounds in the ship’s infirmary. Hightower was still aboard with her, but McGregor was not.
After filing his report and after a private word from Hightower, Chief Exec Dodd, now skipper of the sub, had him flown McGregor to Hawaii as soon as the sub docked in the Australian Naval Base in Hobart, Tasmania. No official reprimand would ever show on his file, but word had a way of spreading in military circles. If not over, his career was certainly on a fast track to nowhere.
Talent was not sure how he felt about that either. He would have much preferred to corner the captain in a dark corner of the missile room and beat him senseless, but to a soldier like McGregor, the shame that would follow him around like a dark, Kaiju-shaped cloud would probably hurt more than anything he could have done to him. The meticulously fastidious, egotistical captain had rubbed him the wrong way from the beginning. In all honesty, he had not given McGregor much of a chance, but then McGregor had not helped matters with his divisiveness. Talent did not expect he would lose much sleep over McGregor’s ultimate fate.
A photo of Costas’ triumphant emergence from the dead Kaiju Kiribati’s open blister had appeared on the front page of the Melbourne Sun Herald with the heading Mad GI Invades Australia the Hard Way. Now, wherever he went on the sub, people asked for his autograph. He still limped from his injury, but he still managed to make his way throughout the boat, especially any area where he might bump into the female Yeoman. No reporter had seemed interested in the second or third persons to emerge, as if it were a contest that Costas had won. It was just as well that Walker was content to maintain his anonymity, and that Talent did not much care for reporters.
True to form, Walker had refused a bed in the infirmary, choosing instead to bunk in the missile room with the sad remnants of Fire Team Bravo. He now sat up in bed, propped up by two pillows. His injured leg was in an ankle-to-hip cast. The doctor claimed the cast’s purpose was to relieve strain on the groin muscle he had pulled in his fall down the air duct. Walker alleged it was a ploy to keep him in bed.
Talent set a cold bottle of Coke on the table beside Walker’s cot. A piece of bright red ribbon and a bow hung around its neck
“Merry Christmas, Major. This is the last bottle of Coke on this sub. I had to trade my Stetson for it. Dodd didn’t want to remain in port long enough to resupply.”
Walker grinned. “He’s eager to take his new command for a spin. I’ll buy you one of those white Texas 10-gallon good guy hats to replace your Stetson. You earned it, Cowboy.”
Talent wiped his face with the palm of his hand. “Not you, too. Everyone on this boat thinks that’s my name now.” After a moment of embarrassing silence, he said, “I saw the K-2 leaking from the drum we lost during the fight in the hatchery. You saw it too. Did you know then that it was getting into the Kaiju’s bloodstream, was already killing it?”
“If you’re asking me if I continued the mission knowing we could have left then, the answer is yes. I came into this mission blind. I had no idea how effective the nanites were or how long it would take them to infect the Kaiju’s body. I couldn’t take the chance that it wasn’t enough. I still had a drum of K-2. I acted as if the first drum didn’t matter. Later, when I encountered a dead Wasp, I suspected what was happening, but by then I was too close to the brain to quit.”
“When Costas heard your signal over the com set, he went ape shit to go after you. I thought he was going to shoot McGregor.”
Walker frowned. “What signal? I lost my comm during Costas’ and my fight with the Squid. I couldn’t send any signal.”
Talent smiled. “Don’t ever tell Costas. He thinks he’s a hero for going after you.”
Walker grinned and crossed his arms behind his head. “Hell, we’re all heroes here.”
“Not enough of a hero for Dodd to let Costas smoke a cigar on his boat. He’s been bitching about it all day.”
“If you take a deep whiff, you’ll smell wisps of cigar smoke. Costas is smoking a stogie inside one of the missile tubes right now. He said he would get the skipper to fire a missile later to vent the smoke.”
“Sounds like him. Will he face any charges for refusing to obey McGregor’s order?”
“It’s not likely, nor will Hightower. There were extenuating circumstances. After all, he was only trying to complete the mission. Even McGregor didn’t press official charges.”
“Good. The big lug would probably start a brawl with the court martial panel if they convicted him.”
Walker became more serious. “What are your plans now, Talent?”
“The Australian Prime Minister learned I wanted to emigrate and said she woul
d be pleased to fast track the paperwork for citizenship.”
“That’s great.”
Talent glanced away to hide his embarrassment. “Yeah, I guess, but …”
Sensing his pensive mood, Walker pressed him. “But what?”
He was not sure how to phrase what he wanted to say. “I realized running away isn’t going to solve anything. I guess I’ll go back to Arizona and make a new start.”
“With your money you could buy Arizona.”
“Well, a nice chunk of it anyway. I’m going to start a volunteer militia, one designed to coordinate closely with the military but able to go it alone if the aliens ever do arrive in force.”
Walker nodded. “You’ll do well at it.”
“I could use your and Costas’ input; maybe teach a few classes in the beginning.”
“If Uncle Sam will let me, I’ll be there as soon as my leg heals, except …” He paused.
“Except what?”
“The Postmaster contacted me.” Noting Talent’s confusion, he explained, “He’s sort of my and Costas’ handler. He hinted about a special mission related to the Nazir. It piqued my interest.”
Talent smiled at Walker’s use of Costas’ name for the aliens. No one knew what the word he had discovered inside the Kaiju meant, if it was a word. For all he knew, it could be a number. However, the press had turned it into the name of the enemy. Now the aliens were no longer nameless and faceless. No one knew what they looked like, but they had a name. It was easier to hate a label than the unknown.
He tried to hide his disappointment at Walker’s news. “Good luck. Don’t do anything more stupid than normal. Are you riding this tub all the way back to Hawaii?”
“No, we’re rendezvousing with an aircraft carrier tomorrow. I’ll fly into Pearl for a stint in the base hospital until I’m back on my feet. From there, who knows?”
“They’re sending a seaplane out to pick me up when we get to New Caledonia. Maybe I’ll visit you in Pearl, if that’s how they route me home. How long do you think we’ve got?”
Walker knew what Talent meant. “Gate Rutherford tells me they can give us a week’s notice now. How long? Only Allah knows. They’ll sift through the data and re-evaluate their last sortie, redesign, and redeploy. They’re aliens, but they operate a lot like any military. We’ll just have to watch the skies.”
“I think maybe we made them mad this time. They won’t like that.”
“Good. It’s easier to exploit an angry enemy’s weakness. The madder the better.”
“Just send them Costas. That ought to piss them off.”
The nurse came in and shooed him out of the infirmary. Before he left, he took one last look at Walker, wondering if their paths would ever cross again. He hoped so. Walker had seen something in him and drawn him out of his shell. He was human again. He had Walker to thank for that. As he walked down the corridor to his bunk in the torpedo room, he smelled the air, caught a whiff of Costas’ pungent cigar, and smiled.
* * * *
Tuesday, December 24, 7:00 p.m. Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX –
No longer persona non grata at NASA, Doctor Gate Rutherford went over the latest data from the GEMS satellite. The space between Earth and Haumea was clear of gravity distortions, but a more detailed scan of the planetoid had revealed just how extensive the enemy base – He still refrained from calling them the Nazir – was. It was too large to be simply a biological facility for constructing Kaiju. Given their hostility toward humans, he suspected a military base preparing for invasion, but that was up to the military to determine.
The captain of the USS Mississippi had prevented the aliens from arming the gravity distortion bomb, at the cost of his life. There were U.S. Navy deep-sea salvage vessels on site already trying to recover it. The nanites had proven effective at killing Kaiju, but they were much too difficult to use to become an offensive weapon. He suspected the military had hopes of building their own gravity weapon. God help the planet when the aliens were eventually defeated. A new Cold War armaments race would begin.
He expected Walker’s phone call soon. He had sent him a short, simple message repeating what he had been unable to say before the satellite link failed – Where is Fire Team Alpha? It was merely conjecture, small bits of information here, a strange request there, the quiet relocation of military technicians, but his job as a catastrophist had entailed constructing a model based on scant information. It forced him to see the big picture and sometimes what lay beneath the canvas.
Walker’s team had not been the first fire team activated, but all mention of Fire Team Alpha had suddenly ceased. The military’s interest in gravity drives, their ability to deconstruct Kaiju armor and create weapons from it, the influx of launch personnel to key military launch sites, and the subtle realigning of telescopes to avoid a certain sector of space all became integral components of the overall mosaic. Most damning of all was the removal of the fleet of the Air Force’s new SR-80 Lance hybrid jets from Groom’s Lake, Nevada. Capable of flying in an atmosphere or in a vacuum, the SR-80 Lance was developed as a close orbit military fighter, but it didn’t take much stretch of the imagination to see them as the perfect weapon with which to attack the aliens. The only thing lacking was a way to get them there in a realistic timeframe. A gravity drive would solve that problem. He suspected that was what Syracuse University was working on.
Major Walker was the man of the hour. He would have the pull to ferret out what he wanted to know, and he wanted to know how to join Fire Team Alpha. If a fleet was going to attack the aliens on Haumea, he wanted to be at the forefront. He was just obstinate enough to do it.
Rutherford had had enough of the military. His encounter with them had left a bitter taste in his mouth. He would settle for watching the skies and providing Intel on the aliens. Soon, he wasn’t sure how soon, Earth would show the aliens, the Nazir, that they had picked on the wrong planet. If the aliens gave them a breathing space. Twice, they had failed. He feared the next assault would be an all out effort to wipe mankind from the face of the planet. It was just a matter of who made the first move.
Personally, he was betting on Walker.
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Prologue
The morning sky was a dim orange as Chris Myers shifted the controls forward to move the fifty meter tall robot known as Steel Samurai onto the beach of Coney Island. The robot was an imposing figure that literally had the appearance of a giant samurai, including a helmet, and a twenty meter long sword. In addition to the sword, the robot was armed to the teeth with a giant crossbow, rockets, and high powered machine guns. Behind Steel Samurai were two more giant robots, known as Iron Avenger, and Bronze Warrior. Both of the robots were equally as well armed as Steel Samurai. The robots were piloted by Chris’s best friend, Jeremy Draven, and Jeremy’s girlfriend, Laura Swan. Together the three giant robots, or mechs as the media had dubbed them, represented humanity’s best hope of preserving this last section of what was once the United States of America.
Chris was all too aware of the fact that the last hope which the mechs represented was a slim one. He seemed to recall an old song about living on a prayer, and as he stared at the Atlantic Ocean and the large swell of water approaching the beach, he wasn’t even sure that humanity had a prayer.
Chris closed his eyes, and he thought about the events that had brought him to this point. He couldn’t believe that in less than two years most of North America, and the rest of the world, had fallen under the control of the kaiju. It had all started with atomic tests taking place on a remote island in the Pacific Ocean. The world thought that the area tested on was only inhabited by sea birds and a few small mammals. The truth was that the governments of the world were all too eager to test their new weapons to check exactly what was on those islands. If someone had so much as flown over the island they would have noticed it was inhabited by a tribe of islan
ders and numerous prehistoric creatures.
Two months after the atomic bomb was detonated on the island, the first kaiju created by the blast attacked New Orleans. The monster was a huge turtle, nearly sixty meters long, whose saliva had been turned into a corrosive acid. The creature was given the name Tortiraus. There were reports that the monster was somehow able to fly and that it was seen splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico. Regardless of how Tortiraus arrived there, the kaiju quickly destroyed New Orleans. During his attack on the city, Tortiraus had proved nearly invulnerable to conventional weapons. The armed forces were simply unable to defeat the creature, and the entire Gulf of Mexico, as well as anything that was fifty kilometers inland from the Gulf, was declared Tortiraus’s territory. The government decided that more lives would be saved by simply leaving the creature alone and moving away from it rather than attacking it again.
A week later a second creature had attacked San Francisco. This time the kaiju appeared to be one of the natives from the island that had been mutated into a monster. The islander was now a fifty-five meter tall giant with a huge bloated gut. When the giant entered the city he began devouring everything thing that he encountered. The kaiju devoured any meat that he could find. Fish, horses, cows, dogs, even people were grabbed up by the giant and tossed into his mouth. Some idiot blogger had named the giant Yokozuna. Apparently the name means something like grand sumo champion in Japanese. Whatever the name meant it quickly stuck to the giant, and he was officially designated as Yokozuna. When it became clear that the armed forces were unable to defeat the creature, everything from Northern California to Canada was declared Yokozuna’s territory, and everyone who was still alive in the area was evacuated.
After Yokozuna, more reports started to come in from all over the world. Sightings of monsters in the oceans, and then reports of attacks on other countries began appearing up all over the internet. To further complicate matters, the radiation given off by Tortiraus and Yokozuna spread like a plague and created other giant mutations. For the most part, these mutations were lesser kaiju, like giant bugs or rodents. While the Army was able to destroy these creatures individually, the sheer number of giant mutants quickly became a problem.