The Mammoth Book of Kaiju

by Sean Wallace

“Think of the damage to the environment.” Short seemed honestly horrified. “We can’t just go blowing big holes in our own ecosystems. These are deterrents. The government would never actually use them.”

  “Then why test them at all?”

  Short paused for so long Will thought he finally had him stumped for an answer. “For the joy of it.” Short held up a hand, forestalling Will’s reply. “Because having dreamed the things up, figured them out, made the prototypes—how can I not want to see if they work?”

  Will turned in his seat to look at Short, reassessing his opinion of the man. “You actually design them? I thought you were military.”

  Short grimaced. “It’s an honorary rank. Couldn’t have a civilian in command, even up here.”

  When they reached the edge of the water, Will could practically see it ebbing away in front of him.

  “Shit,” he said. “Must be some kind of underground fissure.” He opened his door, letting in the stench of dying algae. When he stepped out, something squelched underfoot. He looked down. Dead and dying squid littered the slime-covered rock of the exposed lake-bed.

  Will tasted porridge at the back of his throat. He tried to hold his breath as he stacked pebbles to mark the current waterline. It didn’t work. He leaned forward, spewing the contents of his stomach into the water. Behind him, he heard Short losing his own breakfast. Will spat to clear his mouth, and walked back to the buggy.

  “Shouldn’t have had seconds on the eggs this morning.” Short slid behind the wheel.

  “You get eggs? Where from?”

  “Earth. Send them up dried. Army supplies.” Short swallowed between words, looking like he might spew again at any moment.

  “I think I should drive,” Will said.

  “You know why the water’s gone already?”

  “See there, where the fault line goes into the water?” Will pointed at the uneven seam the buggy had bounced over. “I think it opens up again under the lake. I’d have to dive to know for sure. You wouldn’t have deep-water equipment on hand, would you?”

  Short shook his head.

  “Damn. Of all the things not to bring—” Will thought longingly of his own hardsuit, gathering dust in his lab back on Earth. There was something else he had seen gathering dust lately . . . “Wait a minute. I know where I can get an old outdoor suit that might work, but I’d need some kind of propulsion unit.”

  “Suit jets?”

  “Yeah, if I had any.”

  “I might be able to help you out with that.”

  They detoured through Conglomerated Armories’ facility on the far side of the lake to pick up the jets, a slim, white-enameled backpack unit with bars reaching out at hip level for control. While they were there, Will had as much of a look around as he could. He was surprised to see a number of soldiers marching in drill, on a rectangle of ground so packed down their stamping boots raised no dust.

  “What’s all that about?” he asked Short. “Do you really believe you’ll be attacked up here?”

  “No.” Short glanced over as the drill sergeant shouted something. “But it keeps them busy.”

  Reddish dust coated what looked like a pile of junk in an old crate in the corner of Will’s Quonset hut. Some of the core samples had fallen into it, but the suit’s hard shell had taken no apparent damage. Will lifted out the top half of the suit and put it on the work table.

  “You sure about this?” Short wiped a finger across the suit’s shoulder, leaving a clean bronze-finished trail behind.

  “Looks all right to me. Soon find out if it’s not watertight.” Will grunted as he lifted the bottom half of the suit out of the crate.

  “What about air?”

  “Suit has an integral supply. About enough for four hours’ dive, I reckon. And it’s insulated, so the cold won’t be a problem.” The hard outer shell, meant to protect the wearer from windblown debris, ought to protect Will from the pressure of the depths. At least, so he hoped. He didn’t voice his doubts as Short helped him attach the maneuvering system to the suit with heavy webbing straps. As a final touch, Will glued a self-rewinding reel of nylon cord to the front, just under where the straps crossed.

  “What’s that for?” Short asked.

  “Guide-line. If there is a fissure under the lake, I’ll have to go in and see how deep it goes.”

  “You’re enjoying this. You want there to be a fissure.” Short pointed a finger at him.

  Will grinned. “Hell, yes. Think about it. The only unexplored territory on Mars, and I get to see it first. Imagine what it must have been like for the teams who came in before the terraformers. Every day, you’d get to see something no one had ever seen before. Now it’s all mapped and gridded, and every day we change it more.”

  They took Vern’s runabout back to the lake, towing the fishing boat. The algae along the exposed lake-bed crunched under the runabout’s wheels, already freeze-drying in the Martian wind. The new waterline lay a meter or so back from Will’s marker.

  “Looks like it’s slowing down. It may reach equilibrium soon.” Will hefted his helmet up. Just in case he was wrong, he wanted to dive while there was still some water left.

  Short finished winching the boat out from the trailer and cast off. The water parted viscously around it as they headed for the middle of the lake.

  Beneath the water the light quickly faded, obscured by floating particles of algae, so that Will swam through a tea-colored murk. He switched on his helmet light, thankful the terraformers had seen a need for night-time navigation. The light made a tunnel through which bits of detritus spun aimlessly. A squid jetted through the cone of light, emitting an ink cloud behind it. Its tentacles alone stretched a meter long.

  “Hey!” Will said, startled.

  “What is it?” The suit radio made Short sound a thousand miles away.

  “A squid nearly as big as me. I didn’t know they grew that size.”

  “Oh, sure. They come much bigger than that on Earth. Don’t worry, they didn’t seed any giant ones up here.”

  “You don’t call a two-meter squid a giant?”

  Will let the weight of the suit pull him down to the lake-bed, searching for the fault line. He grew used to seeing squid flit past, rippling bright red and white stripes at him, or shooting out ink.

  The terraformers had covered the lake-bed with a layer of finely ground Martian rock, mixed with chemicals and bacteria, which was supposed to simulate natural soil. It seemed to work better for growing seaweed than for growing wheat. Slimy green growths up to half a meter tall covered the bottom of the lake. Will poked a finger at a particularly bulbous one, meeting a jelly-like resistance. When he pulled his hand back, a small plume of green motes spun out into the water.

  It took him a while to locate the fault line, due to the limited range of his light. At last, his beam illuminated a ribbon of bare red rock slashed like a wound across the lake-bed. Will followed it, feeling the tug of a current speeding him along.

  Suddenly, the ground beneath him opened up into a dark slit, the gap widening to ten or fifteen meters across in the center. Will fought the current pulling him down towards it.

  “Shit.” He hovered above the fissure, his light failing to penetrate its depths.

  “What now?” Short asked.

  “I’ve found where all the water’s gone. There’s a bloody great hole in the rock here. I’m going down to take a look, see how deep it goes. Don’t worry if you lose radio contact with me for a while.”

  Will unreeled the end of his safety line from the chest of his suit, tying the thin white cord around a projection at the lip of the fissure. He double-checked the fastening before swimming downward, into the darkness.

  The fissure opened out into a cavern so huge Will’s light couldn’t reach the other side. He struck out from the fissure, using a slight push from the suit jets to move himself along until he came to a wall. Then he let himself sink down again, following the curve of the wall, noting red and yellow banding
in the rock. A few minutes later, he found a hole. The opening, and the tunnel beyond, had five sides, smooth and suspiciously regular.

  Will swam through the tunnel, his light glancing off rock close around him. It came as a relief when he finally emerged into another huge cavern.

  “Short? Can you hear me?” As Will expected, Short didn’t answer. The tunnel had sloped downward; the rock above him must now be thick enough to interfere with radio reception. Nonetheless, it made him uneasy to be cut off from all communication. One mistake down here, and no one would ever see him again. Will checked his guideline, took a deep breath, and went on. He had enough air for an hour’s exploration before turning back, and the feeling that an hour was not going to be enough.

  Will’s light reached further in the algae-free water of the new cavern. He saw more openings, low in the cavern walls. He checked the suit’s wrist-compass, and chose one to the northeast. He swam through several more linked caverns, one with a frozen waterfall of yellow flowstone ten meters high. From there, he entered a long tunnel. When the tunnel widened, he found himself floating in an almost spherical chamber, with tunnels leading out in all directions. Directly below him a huge tube plunged straight down. Will’s light caught odd shadows on the black rock of its sides. Peering closer, he saw ridges set in semicircles covering the rock. There seemed no purpose or pattern; perhaps they were the work of some rock-adhering creature like a Martian barnacle, æons ago when these caves had formed.

  Will swam down until he reached the largest cavern yet. A forest of thirty-centimeter-thick columns filled the chamber. Their surfaces exhibited the same sort of ridges as the tube above. Will jetted slowly forward, weaving his way in between them. Some distance in, he found a broken column. He searched the cavern floor for a small enough piece to take back as a sample, stirring up black sediment that glittered in his helmet light. At last, he found a fist-sized bit, one side showing the strange markings. Perhaps Maura could make some sense of them. The hardsuit had no pockets, but Will managed to wedge the rock between the crossed harness straps of his propulsion rig. The broken edges sawed at the straps as he pushed the rock under them. Odd. Will took a closer look at the stump sticking up from the floor. Conchoidal fractures. This rock looked glassy, like obsidian. What were pillars of volcanic rock doing in a clearly limestone-type cave?

  He looked back through the forest of columns. Their consistent size tempted him to believe they must be artificial, but their layout followed no pattern he could discern. Surely only natural formations would exhibit such a random placement. And besides—who could have built them? No evidence of ancient Martian life larger than nano-organisms had ever been found. His barnacle ridges could make Maura famous. Will grinned. If he could get her to analyze something so large.

  Will checked his guideline, making sure it had not fouled on any columns. He would need it to find his way out of this cavern, for sure. He gave it a sharp tug. The line went slack in his grip.

  Will’s stomach congealed into an icy lump. He knew he had tied the line securely, but what if it had caught on some sharp projection, and been cut? He forced himself to remain still; not to yank on the line again. He might still be able to follow it back to the exit from this cavern, at least. Will began backtracking along the line, swimming slowly so as not to disturb it more than necessary. He was directly underneath the hole in the ceiling when the line suddenly went taut.

  The pull strengthened, yanking him through the hole. He let out a yell as he rushed upwards, unable to figure out what the hell was happening. At the top of the tube, the line jerked him sideways, through a tunnel, out into a cavern, into another tunnel. In the next cavern, lacy cream-and-red-barred fans hung from the ceiling. Will had not seen those formations before. He had never been through this chamber. Whatever had hold of his line was pulling him deeper into the labyrinth of caves.

  He could see the guideline, the nylon rope glowing white ahead in the beam of his helmet lamp. It stretched across the unfamiliar cavern to a dark opening in the far side. As Will drew nearer, something moved within the darkness. Then his lamplight flashed into the tunnel, illuminating sinuous orange flesh. A tentacle at least ten meters long, and more behind, writhing in the shadows.

  Will tore frantically at the front of his suit. He had attached the guide-line mounting as securely as possible, with industrial adhesive. He had known his life might depend on not losing it. Now, his only chance of survival lay in getting rid of it. He pounded it with metal-gloved fists, but it didn’t budge.

  Will hit his propulsion jets, twisting around to face away from the tunnel and pushing the knob to maximum. The jets couldn’t out-pull the giant mutant waiting in the dark. He slowed, but the squid inexorably reeled him in. He wondered whether it would weaken before he ran out of propellant. If only he had a knife—he could cut the line. But he had not brought any extraneous attachments, except for the safety line and jet harness. The harness—suddenly, Will remembered his rock sample. The edges had been sharp enough to tear at the harness straps.

  Clumsy with haste, Will pulled at the straps. He fumbled the rock free, then felt it fall from his grasp, before he could close his fingers on it. He lunged towards it, his movements nightmarishly slowed by the suit and the water around him. With his change in attitude, the jets pushed him downward, faster than the rock could fall. He reached out, and it floated into his outstretched hand. But his move down had cost him; the creature reeled him in faster, temporarily unhindered by his jets.

  He sawed at the line, imagining writhing tentacles reaching to embrace him. Will never felt the line part; he only knew he had succeeded when his jets sent him shooting through the cavern, narrowly missing the fringe of rock formations overhead. He kept going, waiting for those tentacles to grab him and pull his suit apart at the joints to get at the soft, defenseless creature within, like a normal squid eating a crab. He didn’t stop until he ran smack into a wall of white stone.

  Will spun slowly around, shining his light. He had swum into a small chamber, a dead end. As he turned, he noticed something strange about the walls. Aside from the opening by which he had entered, they were all perfectly flat, meeting at regular angles. Ridges of shadow made patterns on the walls, as they had on the pillars. He stared at the back wall, concentrating on the pattern. Laid out flat, it looked strangely regular, exhibiting an odd sort of symmetry. As he stared at the walls, the patterns replicated outward, forming a lattice around him. Quasicrystalline symmetry. The whole damn chamber was a three-dimensional representation of a quasicrystal. Of course! The pillars had been arranged the same way, only down among them he couldn’t see it. He turned slowly, positioning himself at the center of the lattice, the point at which the pattern originated. From there, Will gazed into infinity. He felt he had only to slide a little further into the pattern, find the exact fit, and he would be able to see the future, or the past, his mind expanding until it could contain the universe.

  A shrill beeping jarred Will out of his trance. It took his sluggish mind several beep-filled minutes to recognize the suit’s air level warning. He had only an hour’s air left.

  He made himself jet along slowly, the need to go carefully, watching for any hint of a familiar tunnel warring with the knowledge that he had only an hour to find his way out. He took shallow breaths. Assuming he had jetted a fairly straight course fleeing from the giant squid, he used his wrist compass to move back in the opposite direction, praying he would find a cavern he recognized before he reached the one where the squid lurked.

  When he swam into the chamber with the bore down into the pillar room, his sense of relief was as great as if he had already reached the surface. From here, he need only head southwest to find his way out. He oriented himself with the compass, and found himself faced with a choice of two tunnels.

  Will floated, caught in an agony of indecision which held him as tight as any tentacles could. The wrong choice would cost him his life. He remembered all the horror stories about divers who never r
eturned, cautionary tales his instructor had used to drive home safety lectures. He might just end up as the most gruesome example yet.

  Something moved inside the right-hand tunnel. Will started, bowels clenching. A small squid, no more than twenty centimeters long, tumbled out into the chamber. Will started laughing, the sound echoing crazily inside his helmet. He knew he should try to stop, but he didn’t care. The squid had shown him the way out. Still giggling, he jetted into the tunnel.

  Somehow, in all his panic to escape, Will had managed to hang on to the lump of rock from the broken pillar. He showed it to Pete when he made his report on the size of the rift in the lake-bed. “There’s something very strange going on with the geology in those caves. Formations that just can’t be natural.”

  Pete turned to Short. “He was down there the full four hours?”

  “He was practically blue when I pulled him out,” Short said.

  “Is that so? And do you have any idea how deep you went?”

  “I couldn’t find a depth gauge,” Will admitted. He hadn’t been able to find a waterproof camera either, a lack he now regretted even more

  “And there’s another thing, a chamber, with carvings on the walls . . . ” Will let the sentence trail off as he saw the expression on Short’s face.

  “Raptures of the deep, Will. You came up laughing like a maniac and babbling about a giant mutant squid.”

  “The important thing is, you’re fairly sure the lake won’t drain much further?” Pete tried to change the subject, but Will ignored him.

  “You don’t get raptures in an atmosphere suit. I know what I saw.”

  “You saw a giant squid? How large?” Pete asked.

  “I’m not sure. Big enough to think I was lunch. Twenty meters?”

  “And you think it built pillars and carved things on them?”

  “No.” Will made an effort to keep his voice calm and even. “I don’t know what made the pillars. But you know as well as I do that the squid have been mutating in that lake. Who knows what’s going on down there in the depths? After all, I’m the first person who’s ever been down to see.”