Kaiju Kiribati (Kaiju Deadfall Book 2)

by JE Gurley

“Start your engines and pick your targets.”

  As soon as the diesel engine of their lifeboat cranked, the Wasps homed in on the noise. Talent broke out the window beside him and laid the barrel of his Beretta on the sill. Owens took a window on the opposite side of the craft with his Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun. Costas chose the forward windows of the upper level. He stood with his .50 caliber SASR cradled in his arms and pointed at the windows. Walker covered one door with his 7.62 mm SCAR L-CQC, and Private Stimson covered the other door with his MP5/40 caliber.

  Specialist Perez stood in the middle of the boat ready to put out fires where needed. Talent was surprised when the S.E.A.L. unbuttoned the top buttons of her shirt to extract a tiny silver cross, revealing the cleft of her cleavage. He had heard of female soldiers but not S.E.A.L.S. Her sex did not change his opinion of her abilities. He had seen her in action. She gripped her MP5 in one hand, while she kissed the cross she held in the other. She muttered a quick prayer and shoved the cross back down her shirt. She glanced at Talent and winked at him. Then her face went grim as she stared out the window.

  Besides the armed S.E.A.L.S, him, and Owens, two passengers had fire axes and one had Owens’ .357 with only three shots left. Good enough for a gang fight, Talent thought, but a spit in the ocean against a swarm of Wasps.

  The lifeboat shuddered from the impact of a Wasp landing on the roof. Perez fired a short burst through the underside of the roof into the creature’s belly.

  “Place your shots carefully,” Walker yelled. “Conserve your ammo and aim for exposed flesh or the wings. Hit the eyes if you can.”

  When the same Wasp stuck its head over the side of the boat on his side, Talent placed the barrel of his pistol against one of its eyes and fired. The creature roared in pain at its shattered eye, but it had three more eyes with which to identify the source of its agony, and it focused all its energy into reaching Talent. It began ripping at the fiberglass hull around the window with two forelimbs, while thrusting the other pair through the opening at him. Their curved talons were twin deadly blades slicing the air. Talent leaped aside as one sharp talon slit open the seat cushion beside him, releasing a cloud of cotton batting that filled the air like snowflakes. Avoiding the slashing talons in the confined space was difficult. One wrong move could kill him.

  Walker slid open the lifeboat door, leaned outside, and fired into the base of one of the creature’s four wings. On his second burst, the wing blew away from the connecting musculature. The Wasp withdrew to the roof and began hissing a shrill, multi-timbred tone that pierced the air even over the sound of gunfire. The call summoned a second Wasp. It joined the first, scurrying along the side of the boat, slashing at the thin fiberglass hull in a mad frenzy. Suddenly, all hell broke loose on the lifeboat, as the two Wasps coordinated their attacks on one section of the hull. Talent did not have time to keep track of those around him. He was too busy firing, reloading, and firing again. He heard a scream and turned to see one of the passengers gasping for breath, a disbelieving stunned expression on his face, as he stared down at a Wasp talon thrust through the thin hull, skewering him. The man raised his arms and stared at Talent, silently pleading for help, but it was too late. The Wasp jerked the talon upward, splitting the man’s chest wide open.

  Infuriated, Perez yelled, leaped up on one of the benches, and fired her MP5 into the creature’s head. Most of the bullets bounced off the dense armor, but enough of them found flesh to force it back. Talent took careful aim at the spots where Perez’s bullets had penetrated, marked by splotches of yellow blood, adding his firepower to that of the S.E.A.L. specialist. It took his last clip of ammo, but their concentrated fire finally produced results. The Wasp bellowed in rage, pounding on the hull with its four front limbs, and then tried to fly away. Its wings fluttered once; then it fell into the water and slowly sank beneath the surface.

  Perez yelled, “Yeah! That’s how you do it.”

  Talent wanted to high-five her, but they had no time for end-zone celebrations. They had killed one Wasp, but more drawn by the gunfire swarmed in to join the attack, and he was out of ammo. He took a deep breath and pulled out his kukri. One of the passengers, the man who had left his wife behind, his face pale from fright, handed Talent the axe he held with trembling hands. He had been sitting next to the dead passenger, and the dead man’s blood splattered his face.

  “Y-y-you can handle this better than I can,” he gasped.

  Talent sheathed the kukri and reached for the axe. The man was so frightened his hands refused to release the handle. Talent gently peeled his fingers away from the wood. The man sat back down and lowered his face into his hands, sobbing.

  Gunfire erupted from the second lifeboat, as the M134 minigun and the MK46 SAW picked out flying targets. Even the combined firepower of the two heavy weapons was barely a deterrent. As soon as one Wasp died, another took its place. A woman’s terrified scream pierced the sound of gunfire as a Wasp dragged her through one of the windows. Corporal Hightower’s minigun made short work of the Wasp, but the Wasp and the woman, both now dead dropped into the water beside the boat.

  Talent didn’t have time for more observations. The remaining Wasp began digging at the top hatch of their lifeboat, ripping out chunks of fiberglass. Costas turned, and holding the heavy M107 in one hand, fired several rounds into the creature’s throat as it shoved its head down through the opening it had made. The .50 caliber opened a hole the size of a grapefruit in its neck, spraying the ceiling with its yellow blood, but still it refused to die. A passenger whose inquisitiveness got the better of him craned his neck to see what was happening. His curiosity was untimely. With a single swipe of one of its thrashing forelimbs, the Wasp decapitated him. His head rolled across the deck to land at Talent’s feet. Talent stared down at the man’s head, mouth open in stunned surprise and dead eyes staring up at him. He grimaced in disgust and kicked it out of the way.

  Wasps had completed their destruction of the decoy lifeboats. Now, they converged on the only two boats under power. Owens emptied the magazine of the 12-gauge shotgun at one Wasp hovering outside the window, cast the weapon aside, and began firing his Glock. As several of the creatures began shredding the lifeboat, peeling the thin fiberglass away in long strips, Talent cocked his fire axe above his shoulder. It appeared to him that his move to the Australian deserts would end on the sea.

  With a loud groan, one of the metal posts supporting the roof began to buckle under the weight of the Wasps on the roof. The weakened ceiling sagged, and then gave way. A Wasp fell through and landed among the passengers. Private Stimson turned his MP5 on the creature, which was almost as stunned as Stimson was by its sudden appearance inside the craft. The Wasp immediately began doing what Wasps do, attacking anything that moved. In the close confines of the boat, Stimson had nowhere to move and little room to fire his weapon without endangering passengers. The creature backed him into a corner. He began hammering the Wasp on the head with the butt of his weapon. Suddenly, the Wasp whirled, thrusting its three-foot-long stinger at Stimson. He dodged the first thrust, but the Wasp was too fast. The stinger stabbed into the left side of his abdomen and exited through his spine. Even before the stinger began pulsing venom, Stimson was dead.

  Owens was standing opposite Stimson. When the Wasp swung around to sting Stimson, its head now faced him. He emptied his Glock into the creature’s face. Almost at the same time it stung Stimson, it lunged at Owens. He ducked behind the partially collapsed metal pole to avoid the snapping jaws. Talent noticed Owens’ predicament and raced to help. His only weapon was the axe. He brought it down with all his might on one of the leg’s articulation points. To his surprise, he severed the leg. It fell away, shuddering on the deck. His attack produced the desired results. The Wasp turned away from Owens and faced him.

  When it whirled on him, it withdrew its stinger from Stimson. Stimson’s body slid from the stinger onto the deck. Talent threw the axe at the Wasp’s head and rolled under its body. He snatched u
p Stimson’s MP5, praying it wasn’t empty. Lying on his back staring up at the Wasp’s belly less than a foot above his face, he chose a narrow gap in the ebony armor that widened slightly as the creature breathed, and fired pointblank. As the .40 caliber slugs tore into unprotected flesh, the Wasp tried to trample him with a seven-legged shuffle. Then, it suddenly stopped moving. He rolled beneath a bench as the Wasp’s legs began splaying outward. Moments later, the dead Wasp thudded to the deck, splintering the bench above him, but the metal frame held.

  As Talent crawled from beneath the bench and rose to his feet, one of the windows behind Owens crashed inward. A Wasp dug two of its scimitar-tipped legs into the detective’s back. One of the talons protruded from his right chest near his shoulder. The second, more serious wound came from the second talon piercing his left lung. The Wasp dragged the stunned former detective backwards across the deck. He stared at Talent in shock, frothy blood dripping from the corner of his mouth. He moved his lips to speak, but was unable to force out the words.

  The dead Wasp’s body lay between Talent and Owens. He knew he would never reach Owens in time. His stomach tightened into a hard knot, as he raised the MP5 and aimed at Owens’ head. Owens, realizing Talent’s intent, nodded. Talent squeezed the trigger and placed one round into the detective’s forehead just before the creature jerked him through the window.

  Anger exploded inside him, a burning rage that coursed through his veins like molten lava, burning away all caution, all thought of protecting others. His consuming fury stripped away the thin veneer of civilization with which men draped themselves to disguise their love of violence, leaving only the primitive instincts of the hunter. He despised himself for what he had done to the closest thing to a friend he had, and he hated the Wasps for making him do it. The desire to lash out blindly, kill as many Wasps as he could before they killed him, drove away all thoughts of self-preservation. If necessary, he would rend their bodies with his bare hands, or gnaw on their alien flesh with his teeth.

  He searched for his next alien Wasp victim, and saw Walker staring at him. Walker’s face was grim as he recognized the madness overwhelming Talent. He yelled something, but the words were lost in the all-consuming roar of Talent’s berserker rage. Ignoring Walker, he slung the MP5 over his shoulder, and using the dead Wasp’s body, scrambled through the gaping hole onto the remains of the roof. It took him several moments to realize that the roaring was not his blood thundering in his ears. The sound grew louder as an object flashed by above the lifeboat. Expecting yet another alien terror, he raised the MP5 and waited. A loud whoop of delight from Sergeant Costas, who had followed him onto the roof, took him by surprise. Then, the object began firing at the Wasps.

  “Go get ‘em, sailor boys!” Costas yelled, dancing a jig the roof, heedless of the ragged hole inches from his size twelve boots.

  Talent looked up and saw several objects circling the area. He threw Costas a questioning look.

  “They’re Harpy MQ 1B Predators with 25 mm, swivel-mounted Gau-12 Gatling guns in their noses.”

  Slowly, the fog of the primitive hunter lifted from his mind. As his blood cooled and his faculties resumed control of his body, he recognized the drones’ V-shaped rear stabilizing fins and swept-back wings. “Where did they come from?”

  “From the Ortega, a U.S. by-God escort carrier about four hundred miles from here.”

  He recognized the name. The Ortega, one of the navy’s newest small escort carriers at just over four-hundred-feet in length, was the perfect delivery vessel for ferrying helicopters, V/STOL aircraft like the V2-Osprey and F-35 Lightning, and unmanned aerial drones into hot spots.

  Technicians safely ensconced in their video game-like air-conditioned consoles at Creech AFB, Nevada, five thousand miles away, controlled the five Harpies using satellite imagery and fast data links. They adroitly maneuvered the drones among the Wasps using their Rotax 914F turbocharged engines, spewing 25 mm death from their Gatling guns at 4,200 rounds per minute, in a carefully coordinated aerial ballet, avoiding both the lifeboats and each other with their crisscrossing lines of fire. The drones zeroed in on the Wasps, ripping them to shreds in a hail of lethal ordinance. To Talent, it was a sight worth savoring. He only wished they had arrived five minutes sooner.

  Seeing the Wasps dying or retreating, the passengers emitted cries of joy, hugging and kissing each other in enthusiastic shows of relief and gratitude. Talent didn’t feel like celebrating. His talent for luck had kept him alive one more day, but it had not extended to Owens. In the few hours he had known the detective, he had felt in him a kindred spirit, a man beaten down by life but fighting to remain above dirt one day longer than Death wanted. That he had been the one to end that life, even at Owens’ last request, did not sit well with him.

  He climbed back down into the lifeboat, avoiding the congratulatory hugs of the passengers, and leaned back on one of the benches, resting his head against the hull with his appropriated MP5 lying across his lap. He knew he should get up and strip Stimson of his extra ammunition in case the creatures returned, but he was too bone-weary to move. He had been operating on adrenalin and caffeine since dawn. Now that the danger was past and his berserker rage had subsided, he felt like he had been ridden hard and put away wet.

  Perez stood staring down at Stimson’s body for several minutes. Finally, she knelt beside him and closed his eyes with a tenderness that spoke of more than simple camaraderie. Her fingers lingered on his face for a moment; then, she sighed heavily and methodically removed his extra ammo and his dog tags. She stuck the dog tags in her breast pocket, walked around the Wasp corpse, and dropped the ammo onto the bench beside Talent. Then she walked away without saying a word.

  Slowly, as the drones forced the Wasps back toward the Kaiju, the two lifeboats slipped away from the scene of carnage. The machinegun fire of the Harpies faded into the distance. The passengers continued their celebration. Walker communicated briefly with Captain McGregor in the other lifeboat. Talent overheard him mention six dead passengers. Walker had lost three passengers and a member of his fire team, with one of the passengers being Owens. Despite the harsh taste of reality, they had been lucky.

  Talent hoped each one of the twenty-eight remaining survivors of the ill-fated Radiant Princess understood just how lucky they were. Over three thousand of their fellow passengers had not survived the alien attack. Hundreds of thousands more had died on the islands. He glanced at Costas lighting up one of the cigars he had liberated from the cruise ship. Let them all enjoy this brief respite, he thought. He was certain the alien Kaiju was just getting started.

  12

  Saturday, Dec. 16, 10:15 p.m. CST Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX –

  Director Caruthers had called in debts, made under the table deals, and possibly sold his soul to the devil, but by eight p.m., eight hours after their lunch meeting, Gate Rutherford had his first photos from the newly positioned NEOWISE satellite spread out across his desk. The images were fuzzy, even with computer enhancement, but the tiny dot more than 4.5 billion miles away and one-third the size of Pluto was clearly visible, as were its two moons, Hi’iaka and Namaka. Named after a Hawaiian goddess of fertility, Haumea, or more properly, 136 108 Haumea, was an ellipsoidal minor dwarf planet in a long trans-Neptunian orbit. Probes were planned for a closer survey, but Rutherford could not wait seven years until the proposed 2025-launch date or the sixteen years the journey would take using a Jupiter-assisted orbit. The NEOWISE Infrared photos would have to do.

  The images were interesting, but the accompanying data attached to each photo were what drew his attention. To a layman, the strings of numbers meant nothing. To Rutherford, even after years away from the telescope as a catastrophist, they told a compelling story. Haumea itself was icy cold, close to 500 on the Kelvin scale, slightly above Absolute Zero, 00 K, which converted to -2730 Celsius or -5230 Fahrenheit. That gave the tiny planetoid a surface temperature of -2250 C. Any water vapor or volatile gases became ice crystals
deposited on the frozen surface like fallen snow. It was a highly inhospitable environment. A low gravity world with vacuum for an atmosphere, but if he were right, he suspected the aliens had not chosen Haumea for its charm or beauty but for its ideal location. The nearby icy chunks of volatile compounds orbiting the planetoid, held in place by Haumea’s weak gravity, were a valuable source of power and organic building material.

  One small spike stood out on the IR wavelength graph. Its location was at the very edge of the planetoid, almost hidden behind an eclipsing Namaka. At 2890 K, it was much warmer than the rest of Haumea. The casual, trained observer could have easily dismissed it as a computer glitch or a photo anomaly, but the number struck a chord within Rutherford. Its resonant vibration dredged up a deep-seated fear that he had attempted to tamp down since the arrival of the first three Kaiju four months earlier. He quickly rifled through the data sheets seeking a different viewing angle, but the planetoid’s slow rotation precluded a better look for another six hours.

  2890 K equated to 160 on the Celsius scale, the average mean temperature of the Earth. The anomaly was too much for mere coincidence to explain. The aliens were there on Haumea, and they thrived at Earth temperatures. That explained their attack. They were not merely interested in Earth’s resources. They wanted the planet to colonize, and humans stood in their way.

  Hunger and dread brought on a dizzy spell. He grabbed onto the edge of his desk before he fell; then, sat down heavily in his chair. His hands shook so badly he could not dial the director’s number. After a few moments thought, he decided crying wolf now would not help his cause. He could see it, but others might see only a broken man’s desperate attempt to salvage his reputation.

  Was that what he was, a broken man? It was a certainty that he was not the same man he was before the Kaiju came. He sounded the same. For the most part, he looked the same. However, he did not feel the same inside. Witnessing so much death and destruction and crawling around inside a giant alien monster had done something to him, changed the core of his being. Before, he had been unemotionally detached, though not cold, content to calculate the impact of catastrophic events and live a simple life. Now, he hated. The barely contained rage that drove him was an uncomfortable growth, like a fiery cancer, burning away at all that had been Phillip Wingate Rutherford, leaving only a charred shell that thought of nothing but bringing the fight to the Kaiju’s alien masters.