by Greg Keyes
Or rather, a shaft, one comfortably large enough for the Osprey, and which functioned as the central space of a vast underwater building. Every ten or fifteen meters they passed a railed-off floor, many of which were bustling with people going about their workdays. Pipes of various sizes ran up the sides of the shaft. What they carried he didn’t know, but he was now damn certain it wasn’t oil. Scaffolding, ladders, and elevators festooned the surfaces of the tunnel. He figured this whole thing must go down into the rocky core of the island he’d seen.
It was a big, busy place, and they were still going down.
“Well,” Mark said, “this is new.”
“Yeah,” Coleman said. The pride in his voice was unmistakable. “We call it Castle Bravo. Our new flagship facility, built to track and study Godzilla on his own turf.”
Godzilla? That brought Mark up short. Godzilla had popped up since San Francisco. A few months later, he’d taken off on another global romp, chasing another bug-thing, this time starting in Guam. He’d found out later that Emma had been involved in that, although thankfully Maddie hadn’t been along that time, at least not for the worst of it. Godzilla had been beaten up pretty badly, as he understood it. The glowing spines on his back had been completely shattered before he crawled back into the sea. Since then, there hadn’t been a public sighting.
“I thought he was missing,” Mark said.
“Well, only if you don’t know where to look,” Coleman replied.
That landed like a punch. He had hoped Godzilla was dead. He had almost believed it. At least then he would have some smidgen of justice. But no, the damn thing was still alive. And these people are okay with that. Studying him.
* * *
The Osprey continued on, slowing dramatically. Peering down, Mark saw the shaft ended in water, and what looked like a submarine or two. The Osprey came to a hover and then shifted horizontally, entering an impressively large Osprey bay. There the aircraft settled. Her engines went offline.
“This is our stop,” Sam said.
Mark debarked, keeping his head low. The props were slowing but not stopped, their chopping echoing in the hollows of the underwater fortress. He smelled salt water, and the new car smell of metal and plastic.
A group of men and women in camouflage were waiting for them. A greeting party, that was always nice, he thought.
Their leader was unmistakable, a tough-looking woman with a clean-shaven head and the birds of a colonel.
“Dr. Russell,” Sam said. “This is Colonel Foster. She heads up G-Team.”
“A pleasure,” Foster said, offering her hand. They shook.
“I take it you aren’t part of the scientific mission here,” Mark said.
“No,” a man with a black, close-cropped beard said. “We’re more the ass-kicking part of the situation.”
The Colonel nodded at the man. “Now you’ve met Chief Warrant Officer Barnes,” she said. “This is Master Sergeant Hendricks, Staff Sergeant Martinez, and First Lieutenant Griffin.”
He shook hands with each of them; it felt sort of like an audition. And maybe it was. When they found who had Emma and Maddie, it was going to be these people going in after them. He eyed them the way he would wolves, looking for clues to their character.
They tended toward young. Barnes looked the oldest, probably early thirties. Hendricks was a brown-eyed boy that didn’t look old enough to be in the military. Square-jawed Martinez seemed affable enough, but Mark sensed toughness below the surface. Griffin, dark-eyed and broad-cheeked, radiated competence, but maybe a little cockiness as well.
“Dr. Graham and I have some catching up to do with Colonel Foster,” Serizawa said.
“I’ll be okay,” Mark said.
“Sam, why don’t you give Dr. Russell a tour of Castle Bravo. I’d like him to be aware of our capabilities.”
Mark flinched. After all those months with just the wolves, he was having a hard time with so much company. And Coleman – he was hard to take even in little doses.
“I can just show myself around, if that’s okay,” Mark said.
“No, it’s no trouble,” Coleman said. “Give us some get-to-know-you time.”
“Awesome,” Mark said.
Jebel Barkal
Colonel Freer got in the next day. He was short, fit, red-headed, ten years her junior. He had her into the office for a sit-down.
“You’ve got an excellent record, Nez,” he said. “Almost too good. Anything I should know?”
“You should never play poker with me, sir,” she said. “Or horseshoes.”
“Solid information,” he said. “So, you met the troops?”
“Yes, sir. They seem like a good bunch. Although Weems—”
“Yeah,” Freer said. “We’ll talk about Weems later. I just want to make sure you understand our situation here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“As in any normal situation, you answer to me. And I answer to the Monarch chain of command. Until I don’t.”
“Sir?”
“I take orders from Dr. Kearns – we’re here for him. But if the brass says boo, we look for ghosts. Any civilian order is superseded by our upper command.”
“I understand that, sir.”
“Good. Then understand this. You saw that thing downstairs?”
“Yes, sir.”
“If anything goes wrong, anything – if it looks like it’s going to escape or even sneeze too hard – we terminate it. Period. Now, the civilians here aren’t aware of this command. And they will not be.”
“No, they will not, sir.”
“Okay,” he said. “Is there anything you need from me?”
“No, sir.”
“Good,” he said. “Let me know if you do.”
* * *
Nez woke around 0330 to a red alert. She got the Monarch briefing from Kearns about Yunnan, and immediately doubled the patrol, leading a squad herself on an inspection of the perimeter. By that time the sky was starting to gray in the east. Venus stood a little above the horizon.
She could tell the squad was nervous. One of them, Larson, finally spoke up.
“What’s going on, Sarge?”
“The Monarch site in Yunnan Province in China was compromised early this morning,” she said. “We just got word.”
“Compromised, Sarge?”
“Someone invaded the containment unit, kidnapped a Monarch scientist and her kid, killed everyone else and released the Titan,” she clarified.
“Oh, shit, Sarge,” Larson said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Oh, shit. Who are those people?”
She motioned toward an encampment near the mountain itself.
“Pilgrims, Ma’am,” Larson said. “Some big shot is buried over there by the rock. People come in little groups like that to pay their respects, or whatever.”
“Not today,” she said. “I want a new perimeter, half a klick out from the fence. Nobody in here except for us.”
“You think they’ll hit us, too?”
“We don’t who they are, Larson, or what they want, so we have no idea. But we’re going to be prepared.”
Castle Bravo
As Mark suspected, the base was mostly housed in the sunken bedrock of the island, but a good bit of it jutted out into the sea. Some of the corridors were stone on one wall, and reinforced glass on the other, allowing some spectacular views of the surrounding ocean.
But these views, he saw, weren’t always about observation for the sake of observation. As its name suggested, the underwater base was also a fortress, with good visibility of all approaches. There were portals in the stone with raised metal sleeves he was willing to bet contained guns or cannons of some kind.
The first stop on the tour was the submarine bay.
Well, that’s more than one or two submarines, Mark thought.
Coming down the shaft, it hadn’t been possible to see how big the submarine bay was, and even the better view from the Osprey pad hadn’t given a full appreciati
on. He counted seven submarines, a whole slew of smaller submersibles, and dock space for a lot more.
“You could stage a war from here,” he said.
“Most of these are research vessels,” Coleman said. “We’re still looking for Titans. Emma – I mean Dr. Russell – thinks there could be a dozen more, at least.”
“Yeah,” Mark said. “That’s just great.”
“If they’re out there, shouldn’t we know?” Coleman asked. “I mean, even if you think they’re all really just monsters, better to be prepared.”
“Monarch has been chasing these things since the forties,” Mark said. “As far as I can tell, nothing they learned prepared us in the slightest for what happened in 2014. The opposite, in fact.”
“Maybe. But we’re trying to change that. Emma’s trying to change that.”
“Emma is fooling with something she shouldn’t be.”
Sam looked suddenly more nervous. He coughed, and pointed out one of the subs.
“So that’s the Naglfar,” he said. “Fun fact about her—”
“What?” Mark said.
“Excuse me?”
“That look. When I said Emma doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing.”
“It’s just – I thought you probably knew.”
“Knew what?”
“Five years ago, when Jinshin-Mushi attacked. Emma used your prototype ORCA to beat her.”
“That’s not possible—” Mark began. But then he stopped. She’d told him she’d destroyed it. But he hadn’t actually seen her do it. When she started talking about building a new one, that was when the split between them became a chasm. But the cracks must have begun earlier.
Coleman was watching him, waiting for him to finish.
“No,” he said. “That wasn’t in the news, and she didn’t choose to tell me that.”
It had been right in the middle of their divorce proceedings. There hadn’t been much talk about anything between them at that point except custody issues.
“Anything else you know about my ex-wife that I don’t?” Mark said.
“Ah, no,” Coleman. “That’ll do. You want to see Level Two? That’s this way. Really interesting stuff there. You’re a zoologist, right?”
Coleman was right; Level Two was interesting, in a horrific way.
“What the hell is that?” Mark asked, staring at the nightmarish thing in front of him.
It looked reptilian, like Godzilla, but that’s where the resemblance ended. Instead of a protruding snout, its face was flat, eyes facing forward, like a human being, but the nostrils were set above its eyes, something like a whale, which it was roughly the size of. The skull continued back, forming a bony shield over its neck.
It was also undeniably dead. He couldn’t see the whole body, because all sorts of lifts and scaffolding had been placed around it, but what he could see of it looked – bad. Something had torn through its armored flesh, leaving a long, jagged rift from below its neck to its abdomen. Part of its skull was showing, where the scales looked as if they had been torched off.
“That’s Margygr,” he said. “She was dead when we found her in the Arctic. Some other Titan messed her up pretty good.”
Margygr wasn’t the only Titan in the room. As Sam led him through, he saw plenty of them. In some cases, there were just bones. Few of them were whole. The only ones he recognized were the remains of the MUTOs and Jinshin-Mushi.
“You’re dissecting them,” Mark said.
“That and lots of other things,” Coleman said. “You would really have to ask some of these guys. I’m a techie, not a biologist. But the mission is to understand them, how their ecosystem works, sequence their DNA—”
“Their DNA?” Mark said. “Are you planning on cloning the goddamn things?”
“Well not cloning, exactly. But there are a lot of useful traits that might be inserted into other sequences. I mean that’s in the future…” he trailed off as he saw Mark’s expression.
“Are you talking about genetically modifying animals with monster DNA? People?”
“Um… no?” Sam replied.
“Jesus,” Mark said.
“Okay, but look. What I’m saying is we have tons more information on these things than when you were around. Since Godzilla showed up five years ago, things have become really fascinating—”
“Just – shut up, okay?” Mark said. “Fascinating? Godzilla is not fascinating, he…” He stopped, took a deep breath, closed his eyes for a moment, opened them again.
“I don’t care about this,” he said, waving his hand at the room. “I want my daughter back, that’s it. Once that’s done, I’m washing my hands of all this – again. Forever. I am not and will not be a part of this. You can’t recruit me. Is that clear?”
Sam paused, then nodded.
“It is,” he said. “What do you want to see?”
“Emma’s office,” Mark replied.
“That’s on the same level as command,” Coleman said. “Where we’re headed now. I can show you after the meeting.”
“Meeting?”
“We’ve got ten minutes,” Coleman said. “I guess the tour is over.”
* * *
There was a time when Mark would have felt comfortable in a situation room crammed with strangers, even if it was in an underwater house of horrors. Not happy, maybe, just comfortable.
But now… this was a part of the life he’d left behind. The trap he had escaped. He wanted his cabin, his wolves, the freedom of the forest. Solitude.
But more than that, he wanted Maddie and Emma back, so he would deal. He tried to focus on the unfamiliar faces, to remember the hurried introductions. The members of G-Team he’d met in the hangar were all present, along with a lot more of them.
As Vivienne began the briefing the chatter in the room died away.
“As you know,” she said, “at approximately 0700 hours, our containment site in China’s Yunnan rainforest was raided.”
The master screen displayed a waterfall in a mountain rainforest. The scale fooled him for an instant. He saw what appeared to be a silkworm or some similar larva wrapping itself in otherworldly, iridescent thread. But then it all came into focus. It was the monster from the video he had seen earlier. The one his daughter had been reaching toward. The waterfall was enormous; the silk casing larger than a double-decker bus.
“The specimen, code-named Mothra, escaped, only to cocoon itself later under a nearby waterfall, while Dr. Russell and her daughter Madison were taken hostage.”
Emma’s file photo and personal data flashed across the screen, including her marital status, which was listed as “separated.”
An ache he thought he’d put away was suddenly there again, as bad as ever. Uninvited images flashed through his head – their first kiss, an argument about nothing, fingers lacing together, her in their bed, still asleep in the morning light.
All gone. Lost to him forever. Because the file wasn’t up to date. The separation was now legally permanent.
“This is the man responsible—”
Mark found himself staring at the face of the man who had taken his daughter. Older guy with gray hair and a hawk-nose. Looked like he had been eating nails every day for the last forty years. No one he knew, but his steely gaze was… not encouraging.
“Alan Jonah,” Vivienne said, “a former British army colonel turned ecoterrorist obsessed with restoring the natural order. And to fund his operations he began trafficking in a new and dangerous market – Titan DNA.”
“What the hell’s someone gonna do with a giant worm?” Staff Sergeant Martinez wanted to know.
Young. Cocky. Mark was willing to bet he had never seen a live Titan up close and personal. Maybe none of them had.
“You kidding, Martinez?”
That was Dr. Stanton, another new face for Mark. He was a biophysicist, and he sounded impatient. Mark guessed he thought the meeting was a waste of time he could be spending doing something more productive.
“What can’t you do with it?” Stanton continued. “Pharmaceuticals, bioweapons, food – hell, there isn’t a country or a company on the planet that doesn’t wanna get its hands on one of these suckers. I mean, remember, this one is just a larva. That’s a baby. After it cocoons? Something else is gonna crawl out. Something bigger. Meaner—”
“We don’t know that, Rick.”
Mark didn’t know her, either. She had dark, penetrating eyes and black hair cut in bangs. She wasn’t dressed like military, so probably another scientist.
“Oh yeah?” Stanton said. “Just wait for it, Chen.”
Chen, Mark thought. File that away, too.
Colonel Foster spoke into the following silence.
“Our Intel indicates Jonah wants to capture the specimen alive, which means he and his mercs won’t be far behind. At 0500, we’ll ship out to launch a joint military operation—”
This was idiotic, Mark thought, and it was time for someone to say so. It looked like it would have to be him. Hell, they really did need him.
“I wouldn’t bother,” he said.
That got their attention. Everyone shut up and stared at him.
“Excuse me?” Foster said.
“Sounds like a duck hunt to me,” he said.
“Mark,” Coleman said. “Why don’t we let Colonel Foster finish—”
“A decoy,” Mark said. “A diversion. Look, they’ve already got Emma and the ORCA. Why would they want just this one when they’ve got the keys to your entire magic kingdom of horrors back here? I think that they want you to go after this Mothra, so they can go after a real prize. Something bigger.”
“Mark,” Serizawa said, “this is not the first specimen they’ve captured. They know what they are doing—”
“That’s not just a specimen. I’ve got an ex-wife and a daughter out there. In case you forgot.”
“No, no one has forgotten that, Mark,” Coleman said. “But to remind you, you were brought on here to help track the ORCA and to advise—”
“I advise you to kill these things,” Mark snapped. “All of them.” He pointed at the screen, which now depicted Godzilla. “Especially him. You want to make sure these things don’t fall into the wrong hands? You kill them, and the ORCA is useless.”