Project Hyperion

by Jeremy Robinson

  Neither Hawkins nor Lilly could speak Japanese, but from what they got from the U.S. Military in the area, it sounded like the mass exodus of Tokyo had already begun. A counteroffensive from the U.S. Navy and Air Force—jointly operating with the Japanese Defense Force—would begin in the next ten minutes.

  Hawkins glanced back at their passenger and noticed the man’s attention fully on Lilly. “Hey.”

  The man blinked and turned to Hawkins. “Sorry. She fascinates me.”

  “She,” Lilly said from the cockpit, glancing back, “is sitting right here.” She raised and flexed her hand, extending her retractable claws. “And she isn’t above skewering your nuts.”

  Alicio Brice leaned back in his seat, grimacing, and he kept his eyes turned toward Hawkins. “Did you need something?”

  “You speak Japanese?” Hawkins asked.

  Brice shook his head. “Some of my predecessors did.”

  Hawkins knew Brice was talking about earlier clones, men who had lived and worked on Island 731. They had performed human experimentation on countless people since World War II. Their creations had killed many of his friends and nearly killed him and Joliet, not to mention decimating Los Angeles, Salt Lake City and a line of cities between and around them. Everything he knew about the man sitting in the cargo bay, hands and ankles bound, said that he was a monster.

  The father of monsters.

  And he didn’t deny it. But he also claimed to be different from those who had come before him. He had the same interests and mental agility—his words—but he lacked their ruthless ambition. He also claimed that he was the one who had set Maigo free. Lilly couldn’t confirm it, but she had seen Maigo captured, and soon after, seen her walk out of the Russian prefab base with the ease of someone set free. But that didn’t mean Brice was telling the truth. He was still an employee of GOD, and that made him dangerous.

  “Do you know what’s happening in Tokyo?” Hawkins asked.

  “Only what you know,” Brice said. “As one of the younger versions of me, I have yet to earn my seat at the inner table.”

  “Yet?” Hawkins said.

  Brice frowned. “It’s not a table I have any desire to sit at. But the alternative is death, and despite the seeming immortality of my...selves, I have no desire to die.”

  “They would kill you?” Lilly asked.

  “I’m as expendable as a Dixie cup.” Brice leaned his head back against the now opaque wall of the X-35.

  Hawkins thought the man seemed genuinely disheartened, but he wasn’t about to set him free or trust him.

  “What are the reports saying?” Brice asked. “Are there any descriptions? Anything familiar?”

  “You mean like Nemesis?” Lilly asked.

  “Nemesis.” He shrugged. “Like Nemesis. Either. Both.”

  “It’s not Nemesis,” Hawkins said, feeling certain Brice knew more about what was happening, or at least what might be happening, than he was saying. “Now is not a good time to hold back information.”

  Brice met Hawkins’s eyes. “If I talk to you, they’ll find out.”

  “And he’s a Dixie cup,” Lilly said.

  Brice laughed, but then looked saddened.

  “And if you don’t go back?” Hawkins asked.

  “If I don’t... There isn’t a reality where Cole lets me leave. Not alive, anyway.”

  “Unless you’re already dead,” Hawkins said. “A lot of men died on Big Diomede. Who’s to say you weren’t one of them. No one saw us pick you up. No one saw you leave. If you can help us, really help us, the FC-P can hide you.”

  Brice sat up, looking eager, but cautious. “You’re lying.”

  “I don’t lie,” Hawkins said.

  “He doesn’t even cheat at Monopoly,” Lilly said. “Everyone cheats at Monopoly.”

  Brice sat still for a moment, eyes on the floor. Then he took a deep breath and started talking. “If the creature in Tokyo isn’t Nemesis and bears no resemblance to her, then the event we have long feared has already begun.”

  “The Aeros,” Hawkins said.

  Brice nodded.

  “But there are only two Kaiju,” Hawkins said. “One in Boston, one in Tokyo. They can’t possibly plan to destroy—”

  “Harbingers,” Brice said. “Advance troops. Scouts. A first strike. To test our defensive capabilities. There is any number of reasons they would send just two Kaiju first—they call them Gestorumque, by the way. The first of their kind sent here—”

  “Nemesis Prime,” Hawkins said.

  “I heard that’s what you called her, yes. She was sent here for the Atlantide. Atlanteans to you. At first, the people she killed were simply in her way, but when the Atlanteans started interbreeding... Well, that all stopped when she was killed, and I think we all now know what killed her.”

  “Hyperion,” Lilly said.

  “An adequate name,” Brice said.

  Lilly glanced back. “You can take that up with Maigo.”

  “Was she...”

  “Inside,” Lilly said, but before she could offer more, Hawkins put his hand on her shoulder. She understood the message and clamped her mouth shut. At the moment, the flow of information needed to go in one direction.

  Lilly pointed through the windshield. “Tokyo Bay is just ah— Holy shit.”

  The Bay was still miles ahead, but they could easily see the massive creature darting back and forth, raking its tail across buildings and snapping its fearsome jaws at the air. The water around it frothed white and swirled with the remains of countless ships. The creature’s four arms scratched at the air like a cat in a fight, but there was nothing there.

  “It’s going nuts,” Lilly said.

  Brice hopped his way toward the cockpit and clung to the back of Hawkins’s seat with his bound hands. “Fascinating.”

  Lilly raised a single eyebrow at the man. “Really? You’re going to put me and that thing under the same verbal umbrella?”

  “Different kinds of fascinating,” he said, and then he offered the uncomfortable grin of a man who passed gas in an elevator. “There can be no doubt. This creature is not terrestrial. The Aeros are here.”

  “Their harbingers, anyway,” Hawkins said.

  Brice nodded.

  Lilly took them in for a closer look, but kept a safe distance. The creature didn’t seem to notice them, but was looking for something.

  “Why is it here?” Hawkins asked. “Why Tokyo?”

  “Are there any foreign nations offering assistance?” Brice asked.

  Hawkins eyed him for a moment, but then put on a headset and listened to the nearly chaotic communication between military forces. After a moment, he heard a distinctly Russian accent. “The Russians.”

  “It will be an aircraft carrier,” Brice said. “No support vessels.”

  “But why would the Russians—”

  “It’s not the Russians,” Lilly said. “Not really, right?”

  “GOD,” Hawkins grumbled.

  “They have research centers in many countries,” Brice said, “but have also learned that mobility has its advantages.”

  “The aircraft carrier is a laboratory?” Hawkins felt sick to his stomach. It was bad enough that GOD had taken over an island and filled it with monsters, but an aircraft carrier could take those monsters anywhere in the world. “What’s on it?”

  “Among other things,” Brice said. “The Prime.”

  “And in Tokyo?”

  Brice motioned to the windshield with his head. At first, Hawkins couldn’t see what the man was motioning toward. The writhing, twitching Kaiju held his attention. But then he saw the ocean parting, and a head emerging. For a moment, he thought it was Nemesis, but they had already confirmed that Nemesis was outside of Boston. So what was this?

  The answer rose out of the water, looking just as massive and callous as he remembered. The glowing orange eyes were followed by a deeply frowning mouth that Hawkins knew could spring open like a bobbit worm. As it rose higher out of t
he water, the luminous orange membranes came into view, leaving no doubt about the monster’s identity: Typhon.

  “What did you people do?” Hawkins asked, the horror he felt reducing his normally powerful voice to a whisper. When two more heads rose from the ocean behind Typhon, Hawkins just watched in silence.

  The first head was broad, like a hammerhead shark, the wide-set eyes glowing bright orange, the mouth hung open, revealing lines of long, curved, needle-like teeth.

  “There’s Scylla,” Lilly said, pointing. Then her finger moved to the right, where a third creature was rising, effectively blocking the mouth of the bay and the alien Kaiju’s watery escape route. Two massive spines rose from the water first, followed by a powerful body with large glowing membranes and a face that looked like a cross between Nemesis and a dragon. A tail whipped out of the water behind it, thrashing and agitated. “And Karkinos.”

  Hawkins had no idea what was about to play out, but he thought there was at least one guaranteed outcome: Tokyo was screwed.

  26

  Maigo couldn’t see Nemesis coming, but she could feel the monster, surging closer with each passing second. She lacked the direct mental connection that existed with Hudson, but the Kaiju’s emotions reached out to her, the familiar violence of them making her stomach knot.

  You’re angry, she thought, trying to reach out to the monster with her mind. With her father, it was easy, but with Nemesis...that was a connection she had worked hard to sever. You remember Hyperion. But it’s just a shell. I am its Voice now.

  She felt nothing in return other than her own growing apprehension. Hyperion had defeated Nemesis Prime, but under the guidance of an experienced Voice, who knew what he was up against. He had trained for the battle, and was a ten-foot-tall Atlantean named Kaa Tunis. After vanquishing Prime and burying her carcass in the remote wilderness of Alaska, he had stored Hyperion on Big Diomede, where he lived out his days keeping watch over the planet, spending long stretches of time in suspended animation. He had died alone, of old age in the 1500s, believing that the Aeros had lost interest in the planet, and that his brethren, scattered to the wind, would survive either alongside humanity, or as a part of it.

  Hyperion’s AI was preprogrammed with a variety of combat strategies and maneuvers, but it relied on the Voice for instinctual responses that the system couldn’t replicate. On one hand, Maigo’s experience with Nemesis gave them an advantage, and she had some hand-to-hand combat training, including lessons from Lilly on fighting dirty. But Nemesis’s Voice was Endo, who Hudson frequently called a sociopathic ninja. He meant it in the nicest way possible, of course. They had a complicated relationship that ranged from sarcastic bromance to outright hatred. But what really irked her father was that he now owed the man for taking Maigo’s place as Nemesis’s Voice.

  None of them believed it was a true sacrifice. The man was obsessed with Kaiju, and even Alessi believed Endo was exactly where he wanted to be. But still, his actions had kept Maigo from reliving her nightmares, and kept her new family together. She owed him. They all did. And in a very real way, despite the death and destruction wrought by Nemesis, they owed her, too.

  No one would ever forget the number of people she’d killed during her growth spurt, or those she’d killed while fighting other Kaiju, but how many lives had she saved by defeating the five Prime offspring, and the Tsuchi? Probably more than she’d killed herself. A lot more.

  Given all of that, Maigo had no desire to fight Nemesis. But she also didn’t want to die.

  I have to reach her, she thought. Get through to her. Or to Endo.

  But how could she do that while contained in a giant robot whose face was etched in her and Nemesis’s memories as their killer? The rage Nemesis felt toward the ancient robot was akin to what it felt toward her biological father and murderer, Alexander Tilly, while Maigo had been the Kaiju’s Voice.

  What chance did she stand in the face of such rage?

  Hudson had no real way to help her.

  The U.S. military, currently ordered to stand down, wouldn’t be any help, even if they tried.

  Right now, she was the only thing that stood between Nemesis and Boston, which historically was a bad combination, and something no one else wanted to see again.

  So I’ll fight.

  And probably die.

  But she wasn’t convinced she had the nerve to kill Nemesis, and Endo, even if she found she had the ability.

  Thinking about Endo again triggered a chain of thought that slowly unraveled a revelation. Hyperion has a Voice. As does Nemesis, but only because we shared our DNA. The Prime offspring—Typhon, Karkinos, Drakon, Scylla and Scrion hadn’t had Voices. That could have been part of why Nemesis was able to defeat them all, though she had had a little help from the FC-P. That meant the two new Kaiju probably had pilots, too. But what about Nemesis Prime?

  Before she could think about it any further, the ocean rose up and parted. A black shadow rose up. Nemesis burst from the water and unleashed a roar that Hyperion’s AI quickly muffled, sparing Maigo from the discomfort its volume should have created.

  Nemesis looked a little larger than her previous three-hundred-fifty-foot height, but she moved with a new swiftness and coordination. Her eyes, once brown like Maigo’s, blazed orange like the membranes on her neck, chest and torso. Her armor was as thick and dark as ever, gleaming as the morning sun reflected off the water coating her body. Nemesis charged, seamlessly switched from swimming to running, rising higher as the ground beneath her feet rose toward the ruins of Graves Light.

  Maigo’s gut twisted in fear. She had seen Nemesis’s rage before. She had felt it. She had partaken of it, and fueled it. But she had never been on the receiving end of it. She took up a defensive position, ready to grapple Nemesis, but the monster, like Lilly, didn’t fight fair.

  Lost in bloodlust, Nemesis plunged the long claws on the ends of her massive hands into the orange membrane of her chest. Hudson called the technique Self-Immolation. Nemesis had used the attack in the past, sometimes involuntarily, sometimes inflicting the damage on herself. But the result and every self-immolation event was the same—a very big boom.

  Nemesis withdrew her claws, sending gouts of luminous liquid spraying out in twin arcs, filling the space between her and Hyperion.

  Maigo drew Hyperion’s thick forearms up as a shield and braced herself for a violent death.

  The AI responded to her fears. Hyperion is designed to—

  Bright orange light filled Maigo’s vision, searing for a moment before dulling.

  Maigo screamed, but the sound was just in her mind. Her body was encased inside Hyperion, unable to move or speak.

  When the orange light faded, Maigo saw a flash of blue sky, which was quickly distorted by roiling water. She was alive, and she knew, unharmed. Despite the vast amount of energy unleashed upon Hyperion, and the fact that the robot had been flung back into the ocean, she had felt nothing. No pain. Her body had been spared from the heat, and the violent impact. And Hyperion had survived almost completely unscathed, having an epidermis even stronger than Nemesis herself.

  Sensing her shift in confidence, Hyperion said, Energy systems at Level Two. Maigo knew, suddenly, what this meant. Level One weapons were essentially melee, and all the robot was capable of after teleporting. How it did that, she still didn’t know. There hadn’t been time to question it. But she did know it sucked most of the robot’s power away. Hyperion had been nearly drained when they had arrived, and it had had just enough energy to momentarily repel Lovecraft and extend the wrist blades. Level Two allowed her to use a voltage amplifier weapon, which was basically a massive taser capable of stunning an enemy—or frying its brain—depending on the charge and placement. It was the closest thing the robot had to a non-lethal weapon. Then there was Level Three, which Hudson would appreciate, but Hyperion took things to a level her father could never imagine.

  Maigo willed Hyperion to get back to its feet, and the AI did it in the fastest,
most efficient way possible. Back on her feet, Maigo looked down at her robotic body, which was surreal in part because it was a robot, but also because it had a masculine build. The surface was charred, but still in one piece. She also noticed that the ancient claw marks across the chest were gone.

  Hyperion is capable of nano-cell regeneration, the AI informed her. We have been ‘healing’ since you were established as our new Voice.

  “But why was the damage still there? After thousands of years?”

  Kaa Tunis desired it remain as a reminder. Of what he faced, and of his near defeat. But a damaged chassis serves no purpose in battle.

  “Works for me,” she thought, and she turned her attention to an explosion of water a half mile away. Off balance when she’d self-immolated, Nemesis had been tossed back by the blast, which had incinerated The Graves along with the rest of the islands in the Harbor. It looked like Boston had been spared a repeat performance, but the coast was hard to see past all of the steam generated by the heat.

  Nemesis thrashed in the ocean and got her feet under her. When she stood and saw Hyperion already standing and waiting, she leaned forward, splayed her arms wide and let out a spittle flinging roar. The Kaiju, who looked no more damaged than Hyperion, charged again, feinting one direction and then the other in a very human attempt to throw Hyperion off balance. But the AI compensated for Nemesis’s speed with its own. When the Kaiju lunged forward, jaws open wide, angled to bite down on the robot’s neck, Maigo reached out and caught her by the shoulders. The powerful robotic arms kept Nemesis at bay, but couldn’t stop the Kaiju from reaching up with her massive claws and punching them into Hyperion’s sides.

  Maigo didn’t feel pain, but she knew the damage was severe. Survivable, the AI assured her, but not if they slid much deeper, or were plunged in again, higher, where they risked striking the mech’s power source—what it called a Suun Czuar, which translated to Rift Engine.

  It’s me! Maigo thought at Nemesis, but she detected no response, mental or physical. The monster’s rage-fueled strength was starting to overpower Hyperion.