The Mammoth Book of Kaiju

by Sean Wallace

  Even the footage of the impact—Erebus, glowing red-hot as it hit the North Atlantic—and the scenes of devastation from the East Coast and Africa; the blast wave and the huge swell of water that had followed, had filled him with nothing but a sense of unreality.

  This was different.

  Now he would see Erebus with his own eyes.

  He would see what came of his failure.

  They were flying over the strange, almost desert-like surface under a dark brooding sky. The only sign of the sun was a slight lessening of the oppressive dark near the zenith; otherwise they were obliged to run under lights, as though it were a night-time operation. The dust kicked into the upper atmosphere by the impact of Erebus would take years to drop out. Meanwhile the globe had been divided into hemispheres of Night and Gloom.

  “We are coming up to Erebus now, sir.”

  Mat felt a chill on his back, even though the stuffy cabin was heated against the frigid air outside.

  He had returned from China five weeks ago. As soon as he reappeared in the US he was promptly put under guard, then shuffled through an obscure string of underground military installations that no taxpayer had ever heard of. Not a single person he had seen had been inclined to listen to Tein’s plan for setting up a self-supporting asteroid colony—and Mat had to admit the further he was away from it, the more absurd the whole thing seemed. It was also impossible the US could take a lead role in the enterprise, since all its major space assets had been destroyed by the Erebus tidal wave. Reports were showing a steady stream of lifts from Jiuquan. Madness or not, the Chinese and their partners were going.

  The initial blast wave had been weaker than they’d feared. By the time it reached the West Coast, it was little more than a hot, biting wind that gave third-degree burns to those exposed to it. Apart from the devastated East Coast, most of the US infrastructure was intact. The Midwest was fighting fires and a flood of saltwater, surging down along the major drainage lines.

  The world had been expecting Armageddon, but aside from the North American continent and the west coast of Africa, it had survived the impact with little more than a scrape. In fact the panic had caused as much destruction as Erebus itself.

  The long-term effects of the climate disruption would be harder to gauge. In the developed world at least measures were being taken to stockpile and preserve foodstocks, protect water supplies from contamination, even grow under artificial lights powered by nuclear, coal, and gas.

  “Here it is,” said the pilot.

  “Dear God,” whispered Mat.

  Well of Darkness.

  Erebus had grown from a thickening across the horizon to a vast, black wall that rose more than three kilometers above them, reaching from the dry bed of the Atlantic into the upper atmosphere.

  The pilot positioned the helicopter three hundred meters away and swiveled the bank of powerful halogens toward it.

  The skin was dark, the whole structure composed of cells about a hundred meters across. These individual bubble-like cells were crowded together to form a compact lattice.

  “It looks biological,” said Mat, still amazed that Erebus had survived impact.

  “It’s grown exponentially over the last five weeks,” said Hari quietly, his voice almost at a whisper, as though Erebus itself would hear him if he spoke too loudly. “It’s absorbed most of the North Atlantic; the sheer mass of it now stretches from Newfoundland to the Straights of Gibraltar and from Brazil to Angola.

  “Northern Europe is freezing solid. The poor bastards. First the dust cloud, then the loss of the Gulf Stream . . . ”

  “But it’s halted its expansion at the land surface, hasn’t it?”

  Hari looked intently at Mat, his face drawn and pale. “For now. But its mass is still growing at the same rate.”

  For the first time the implications hit him. For it to have experienced that sort of growth in only five weeks . . .

  “We have less than a month before it takes the whole planet,” said Mat. The mathematics of it was chilling.

  As they watched, Erebus began to bulge outward. New cells appeared, pushing apart their neighbors. Then more.

  “Damn. I’ve never seen this sort of growth,” said Hari.

  The wall quivered, then began to expand, faster and faster.

  “Oh, shit!” cried Hari.

  The pilot did not need an order. He turned the helicopter and accelerated back towards the mainland. Behind them the whole jostling mass was accelerating, outpacing them.

  “Turn the lights back towards it!” yelled Mat.

  The co-pilot swiveled the lights back towards Erebus.

  The cells were looming closer. Each one was bigger than their helicopter, and there was thousands upon thousands of them. In one moment of horrifying clarity, Mat truly understood how massive Erebus had become.

  A whole section of the cells began to outpace the others, reaching out from the main body of Erebus towards them. The cells changed as they drew near, the heavy skin rolling back to reveal a curved, glistening surface beneath. Mat saw his own reflection in hundreds of these lenses, as though they were being chased back towards the mainland by the vast faceted eye of some gigantic insect.

  “It’s still coming! It’s still coming!” yelled Phom, their co-pilot. She had turned in her chair, like Mat and Hari, and was watching the mass of cells close on them. Her hands were held out toward Erebus as though to ward it off.

  Eyes.

  Coming for them.

  Thousands. Thousands of them. Mat was lost inside them, shrinking like a microbe falling backwards into a drop of water. He had no doubt now. It was alive. A single huge entity come to take them all.

  Those eyes were chilling in their blank intensity, charged with purpose, power and merciless intent. And the most frightening thing of all: it did not see them.

  To Erebus they were nothing.

  Never had Mat felt so utterly insignificant. His very existence was dissolving like an aspirin tablet in the vast ocean of Erebus’s being.

  “It’s coming down!” screamed Hari.

  Mat looked up and saw he was right. Erebus was flattening out, reaching toward them. Closer.

  One enormous eye was so close he could have reached out to touch it. Opalescent, dull silver with no pupil or iris.

  Closer.

  The helicopter shuddered then spun out of control. Eyes and darkness swept around them like a whirlpool.

  Mat was aware of someone screaming, and looked over to see Hari yelling, his eyes wide, unfocused. Only then did he realize he was screaming, too.

  Mat gripped the chair and bit his lip until it bled.

  “Shit, this is it!” screamed Hari.

  “I can’t hold it!” yelled Stephenson.

  Even Mat could hear the panic in the pilot’s voice. That was bad. If the pilot lost it, they were all doomed.

  Hari was screaming something incomprehensible, tears squeezed from his eyes as he screwed his lids shut.

  “Stephenson!” yelled Mat.

  The pilot looked around, his eyes were wild, flitting from point to point.

  “You have to focus! You have to get us back.” Mat thought desperately for a way to reach him, then he saw the printing on the US Army jacket’s name tape: Captain Stephenson. Military. Just push the right button.

  The whole craft seemed to be surrounded by those huge bulbous eyes. Empty. Implacable.

  Mat projected his voice with as much authority as he could muster. “Do your job, soldier! Now! Get us out of here!”

  Clarity flowed back into Stephenson’s eyes. His training took over.

  Like a miracle the helicopter slowed its hurtling flight and stabilized. Mat could see a thousand tiny reflections of the chopper. He looked closer into the eyes. Beneath the tough outer cover they were perfectly smooth, reflective, yet there was a long line through the middle of each round surface. Perhaps a second eyelid? They glistened wetly, and stank of salt—the rank, rotting smell of the sea.

&n
bsp; “We’re gaining,” yelled Phom with relieved elation.

  Mat let out a long breath, conscious for the first time of the throbbing pain in his lip and the taste of blood in his mouth. He forced himself to let go of the seat arms.

  Phom was right. They were leaving Erebus behind. The acceleration caused by the collapse of the wall was slowing. One by one the lids were closing over the eyes. The whole thing was becoming a featureless expanse once again, nothing more than the bumpy wall of darkness they had first observed.

  “Hari . . . ” Mat looked across at his former boss. The man was still crying, yet he was wiping the tears away from his face as though they were acid, burning his skin.

  “What?” snapped Hari.

  “Hari, we have got to stop that thing.” Mat’s voice sounded weak, at least to himself, and he cleared his throat.

  “The president has authorized a full-out nuclear strike. No other nuclear power is joining us. Even with the growth, no one else wants to risk adding a nuclear winter to the climate disruption.”

  “A strike!’ said Mat, his heart hammering. “A nuclear strike could not destroy it in space, how do you think that will help now?”

  “What the hell else can we do? What can we do?” said Hari.

  “There has got to be some other way. Nerve agents. Viruses. Attack it biologically. Analyze its structure.”

  “We’ve tried, Mat. We have tried it all. It’s not like anything we’ve ever seen. It’s got nothing like DNA. The whole thing is some sort of distributed nervous system. Parallel processing across the whole structure. Anything vulnerable is buried under a trillion tonnes of flesh and water. We took samples straight away. But it does not respond like Earth-bound life.”

  Mat suddenly knew what he had to do. After all, Tein and his associates, including his beautiful Athy, had been right. There was no way they could have known about the real threat Erebus represented, yet they had embarked on the only course that would save them. It was not a matter of saving civilization, but of saving Mankind itself.

  “Take me to President Yerry, Hari. I know what we need to do.”

  Hari looked at Mat suspiciously.

  “What? If you have any ideas, you tell me. I will take it to the Erebus Panel.”

  Mat shook his head. He might have bowed to Kones, letting that military jerk bombard Erebus with nukes in space, but never again would he stand by while idiocy was given free rein.

  “I need to see Yerry. Straight away. In person.”

  Mat looked straight into Hari’s eyes, saw the fear and uncertainty there, and held his ground.

  “Okay, Mat. You win. But you’d better not be wasting everyone’s time. In case you haven’t noticed, we have more than fifty million dead and a whole country in ruins.”

  Mat said nothing. Instead he looked out across the dry, dark expanse of the ocean floor, back at the dark line of Erebus.

  Time truly was running out.

  “This is your plan? This is your plan?”

  Mat was deep inside the Nevada presidential bunker. They had taken his blindfold off a few minutes ago. It was Cold War paranoia at its best. He could hardly believe it; after all, it was not the Russians who had flooded the Eastern Seaboard from the Great Lakes to Florida, and who was slowly expanding over the bulk of mainland USA.

  “Mr. President. We need to help Director Tein. We need to get our best people off this planet. We need to move our key resources while we can. Get everything into orbit with whatever we have, then get away from Earth.”

  “To go where? To live in space? With the little green men?” screamed Yerry. Mat have never seen the man so livid. He had put on weight since he’d last seen him, the rotund belly held back by the stretched buttons of his fine Italian suit. His round fleshy face, topped with short, gray hair—so familiar from a thousand broadcasts—was bright red.

  “Mr. President, I think we need to consider hard options. Tein at least has the infrastructure in place . . . ”

  “I am minutes away from sending a nuclear strike into that thing out there. I am trying to defend what is left of this country. And you are telling me to forget that? To let it just keep expanding across the Midwest?”

  Yerry, almost a foot shorter than Mat, was literally jumping up and down on the spot, using his finger like a skewer to punctuate his points.

  “Yes. That’s exactly what I am saying. Those ICBM boosters could shift valuable material into low-Earth orbit for Tein’s project. We could lift maybe another hundred of our people—people who will otherwise die.” Mat was beyond any worry about offending Yerry. He could not let them waste their last chance.

  “We want to kill the fucking thing,” screamed Yerry. “That will save millions. Thousands of millions.”

  Mat shook his head, retaining his calm.

  “Yes, Mr. President, I know your intentions. But the strike will have no effect. Those weapons could not destroy Erebus in space, and now it has thousands of times its starting mass.”

  Yerry rubbed his eyes with his fingers then took his hands away, shaking his head sharply, as though to clear it. He turned away from Mat and motioned to his men.

  “Get him out of here,” he snapped.

  Two aides shuffled Mat out of the office, under the implacable gaze of four secret service agents. Linten, who had watched the whole exchange, followed Mat out.

  As the door shut with an angry thud, Mat heard Linten’s Texas drawl behind him.

  “It’s too late for a change of policy now. Everyone from the Joint Chiefs down is pressuring Yerry to act. This was unavoidable.”

  Mat and Linten were alone in the corridor. The vice-president motioned for Mat to follow him and they walked down the hallway into a deserted conference room that smelt of old coffee and faint solvents from the hasty construction.

  “Take a seat,” said Linten.

  Mat was exhausted. He had not slept in almost two days. His mind had been working feverishly throughout his journey and the interminable delays as he waited again, and again, for Yerry. He’d known he would have only one chance to sway him, and yet there had seemed little he could construct in the way of an argument, little he could add to what Yerry’s own advisors had already presented to him. Each appointment had been rescheduled without notice. Today he had been given one minute.

  “Yerry has never been a supporter of the space program. He was elected on other issues.”

  Mat smiled at that. Everyone knew Yerry had been elected on a strong ethical ticket. Moral Revival. The Bible Belt had put him in office. The space program had been on his hit list for cutbacks, and Linten had backed him all the way.

  “But there are other people inside and outside the administration who want to be involved in Tein’s program,” Linten continued.

  This sparked Mat’s interest.

  “We have been in communication with Tein and the consortium in China, and I have been coordinating a group of wealthy industrialists who want to take part. It may not be government support, but resources are resources. Tein needs everything from high-tech alloys and electronics to seed-stocks and rocket fuel.” Linten took a breath; his eyes were serious. “I can not leave the president, or his team, but I need someone to represent the US in Tein’s group. I want you to be that man.”

  Mat felt his heart accelerate. He nodded slowly, his mind suddenly full of possibilities. This was more than he had hoped for. The fact that Linten had made the offer in an empty conference room meant that it was off the record, but this was no time to quibble.

  “Yerry wants you locked down with Hari and his team of advisors, but I can get you to Jiuquan in a few hours.”

  Linten leaned forward. His face was pale, his hands shaking slightly as he pressed them together. A small muscle ticked beneath his right eye.

  “Something of us must remain,” said Linten.

  “I’ll do my best, sir,” said Mat.

  Oh, the joy of the feast!

  Sweet, sweet waters—deliciously warm—nothing like the f
rozen, dusty drink I am used to, with its taste of sulfur and metal.

  Wonderfully digestible organics! How I swell with this carbon, but I need heat. I must dig deep to reach the hot, precious fluids of this tiny world. It is these I need to warm my inner segments, to truly gain the power I need to grow.

  At last I shall reach my prime. A fully realized Vendeth of heroic proportions. My call shall reach to the dark centers of galaxies. My lovers shall come, and I shall take them into me.

  But the taste of this world! It is as sweet as nectar.

  Mmmmm . . .

  Something approaches.

  I open eyes across vast sections of my Westward length.

  Tiny lights. I know these. The bringers of fire. The hot weapons of the parasites.

  In my desiccated, starved form I feared them, but these cannot harm me now; I have grown too vast on sweet water, methane hydrates and the bounties of gravity-bound life.

  What I need now, they bring.

  The compound surrounding Jiuquan had become a huge, complex city of tents, portable offices and hastily erected industrial buildings, their zinc coatings gleaming dully under the heavy sky.

  A mass of power cables threaded through the site and emergency power had been channeled from the local grid. Huge lights illuminated every inch of ground. The nearby airstrip had been expanded, and everything from rocket-planes and passenger jets to huge, prop-driven transports were touching down and lifting off every few minutes. The pace had become frantic since the failure of the nuclear strike on Erebus.

  Mat had been here a week. Tein had set aside one precinct for the American contingent, but so far they had done little but stockpile a hopelessly uncoordinated flood of raw materials, technology and fuel in the vast network of storehouses.

  He was on his way back from a briefing with Tein. Many of the components were already in orbit, but they needed more, so much more, before they even stood a chance of surviving. He turned into the narrow alley formed by two towering industrial buildings and pushed through the busy mass of people, carefully stepping over a mass of cables.