by JE Gurley
“Too late. I have to go.”
Walker nodded his head. “I thought you’d say that.”
“How long will it take us to get to Efate?”
“About sixty-four hours, but the Kaiju will have moved on by then.”
“Sixty-four hours?” He was not expecting it to be that long. He did not know if he could handle the better part of three more days in the tight confines of the submarine with so many bodies pressing in around him, so many voices. It was worse than the ship. “Can we catch up with it?”
“Eventually.”
“You don’t seem concerned.”
A brief smiled flicked on Walker’s lips. “You’re wrong. I want to stop it before it kills more people, but we’re sailing as fast as we can. We had no idea it was capable of such speeds. On land, the Kaiju lumber along at a snail’s pace. It might reach the Australian mainland before we can catch up. We’ll have to play it by ear.”
Talent sighed. So much for getting off the submarine. “Is it always like this, your missions I mean?”
“Flexibility is rule number one for a sniper or a fire team. No mission ever goes quite as planned.”
“There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask. Just what is a fire team?”
“A fire team stands by to put out fires anywhere they’re needed, usually by force of arms. Some are sniper teams, some are search and recover teams, some are black ops, and some, like Fire Team Bravo, are special mission.”
Talent glanced over at McGregor and caught him staring at him. McGregor averted his gaze and forked a mouthful of bacon into his mouth, chewing it savagely. “I don’t think the captain likes me.”
Walker chuckled. “No, but after the stunt with the knife he sure as hell respects you.”
“He rubbed me the wrong way.” It was as close to an apology as he was willing to make to Walker. His attack on McGregor had been an impetuous act, one that he had immediately regretted. McGregor reminded him of too many people with whom he had butted heads over the years. One had been a snobbish IRS agent who refused to allow his deductions for his gun business. Another was a Pima County deputy who pulled him over for no reason and then proceeded to read him the riot act for wasting his time. The very worst was one of his very liberal professors who thought America had no business policing the world, calling America an Imperialist nation. Talent’s rebuttal had earned a smattering of applause from the class, but the professor had failed him on principal.
He looked up at the television screen. The drone now swept lower over the city, showing Wasps dragging people from the ruins of buildings.
“That’s something new,” Costas said.
He peered at the spot Costas indicated and saw hundreds of small creatures hopping in and out of buildings like a warren of rabid jackrabbits. Their small size made distinguishing details difficult. Their angular bodies were about three feet long, ending in a point at either end. Their elongated rear legs made them appear much larger. The cricket-like legs propelled them high into the air with each powerful hop. He watched as three of the creatures took down a woman trying to take refuge in an automobile. They piled on top of her, stabbing her with their long proboscises, and then waited patiently until a Wasp came along to collect the corpse. To Talent’s amazement, the hoppers attached themselves to the Wasp’s abdomen and flew away with it.
“They’re like goddamned airborne shock troops,” Costas sputtered. “They ride the Wasps like fleas on a hound.”
“Whatever those Fleas are, they’re deadly,” Walker said.
McGregor’s eyes were wide as he watched the Fleas in action. “We didn’t count on them.”
“Squid, Wasps, Fleas, Ticks, and Pancakes – the Kaiju’s infested with the little critters.” Costas banged his fist on the table. “I say we delouse the bastard and send it back to hell.”
Costas’ bravado did not sway McGregor. “What other surprises does it have waiting for us?” He directed his question at Walker.
Talent waited for Walker to slap the captain down. Instead, he nodded his head. “Yes, this one is different. The aliens are getting smarter. That makes it imperative that we learn all we can about this one to prepare for the next one, and there will be more of them. You can bet on it. Until we can stop the aliens cold, they’ll keep trying.” He paused. “We volunteered because we’ve all been inside a Kaiju. We are among the chosen few who can claim that honor. If we don’t do it, no one else will. If the K-2 works, we’ll have a weapon against them. That’s our job, delivering the weapon. Everything else is secondary. The welfare of the entire world depends on us completing our mission. Our lives aren’t worth more than anyone else’s. I intend to spend mine dearly.”
No one spoke until Costas said, “Here, here.”
Walker’s speech had summed up what Talent had been feeling. Maybe it was survivor’s guilt, a strange malady for a survivalist, but he felt he needed to make amends somehow with the ghosts of the dead on the Radiant Princess. They weren’t his responsibility, but they needed someone to account for them. Like Walker had said. If he didn’t do it, no one would.
He watched as long as he could, but when the conversation dropped into military technical jargon, he left.
Two hours later, they rendezvoused with the Amata Maru. He joined the line of survivors snaking their way to the hatch. Most seemed eager to leave the submarine, to get on with their lives. A heart wrenching few of the faces in the line still wore the empty haunted look they had when rescued. They stood silent, moved when directed to do so, as devoid of emotion as a store mannequin. They were the real victims of the Kaiju. He could not look upon them without feeling a twinge of empathy.
An ensign with a clipboard called out names. Talent answered when he got to his. The closer he got to the hatch, the more he knew he could not go with them. What would he do on the freighter? Get off at the nearest port and hop a plane for Australia? He could go anywhere he chose. He had the money. No place would be safe as long as the aliens kept sending their deadly Kaiju to Earth. He looked up at the patch sunlight shining down through the hatch, longing to feel it on his skin. Then, he cursed himself for a fool, and ducked through the nearest hatch.
Stowing away on a submarine was not easy. The close quarters of a submarine presented its own challenges to avoiding detection. His first task was removing his conspicuous cowboy hat and boots to blend in with the other sailors. He grabbed a pair of canvas deck shoes and a white ‘Dixie cup’ sailor’s cap from an unlocked locker and stashed his boots and hat on a shelf. He tucked his long hair up under the cap, hoping he looked less like a six-foot-tall Indian and more like a sailor. At the last minute, he remembered his bola tie and slipped it beneath the overalls. Finally, he decided on the safest spot he could think of – the library.
He acknowledged the klaxon signaling the sub to dive with both relief and a touch of trepidation. Foolish or not, he had sealed his fate. He would either find a way to join Walker’s team or spend the remainder of the voyage locked in the brig. He had spent time in jail before, a weekend in Maricopa County’s finest lockup. A submarine brig couldn’t be worse than that. At least he wouldn’t share a cell with a meth-head junkie.
For five hours, he beat the odds. People came and went in the library, paying him little heed. With his cap pushed down over his eyes and a book across his lap, he looked like any other sailor killing time between duty rotations. The rumbling in his belly was his undoing. He hoped to make a quick run to the galley, grab a couple of sandwiches from the stack near the door, and return to his lair – a quick five minute trip. Unfortunately, he did not count on encountering Executive Officer Dobbs in the corridor outside the library. Dobbs, intimately familiar with every face on the boat, knew immediately that Talent was not one of the crew. In fact, to Talent’s surprise, Dobbs knew who he was.
“Mister Talent, why didn’t you transfer with the others?” he demanded.
For a brief moment, Talent considered running, but brushed the thought away as futile.
He had nowhere to run.
“Sorry, I missed the bus.”
Dobbs frowned. “Did Major Walker have anything to do with this?”
Talent removed his cap and let his hair fall down over his shoulders. “No. It was all my idea. I want to get in this fight.”
Talent saw a brief flash of sympathy in the XO’s eyes, but any hope of clemency faded as Dobbs keyed the intercom. “Security, please send two men to the library to escort a stowaway to the brig.”
Talent held out his hands in mock surrender. “You got me, sheriff. When’s the hanging?”
“We don’t hang stowaways, Mister Talent, but we do make their stay with us … memorable.”
They stared at each other in silence for the two minutes it took for the security detail to get there. Talent quickly learned he was wrong about the brig. They shoved him inside a small room the size of a broom closet and dogged the hatch shut behind him. Sitting on a hard metal bench covered by a paper-thin mattress, he barely had room to stretch out his legs. The only feature that made it better than jail was not sharing it with a crack head.
“Well, this worked out well,” he said aloud to himself.
16
Sunday, Dec. 17, 2:00 p.m. CST Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX –
Gate Rutherford’s office was crowded with Director Caruthers, two NASA technicians, and Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Harold Stiltson standing around his desk as he received the latest data from the GEMS satellite. There was now no doubt that the gravity anomaly they had detected between Earth and Haumea was on a direct course for Earth. Three separate agencies had checked and corroborated his findings. All that remained was to determine the object’s size and speed.
The open video link with Goddard revealed that they too had a military presence – a pair of armed Air Force APs with serious expressions. The female technician with whom Rutherford had been working, Sara Truesdale, had summoned Sanjay Patangan, and Sam Ahern had joined them thirty minutes later, accompanied by Colonel Stiltson and the two APs. He had no doubt an identical pair guarded the hallway outside his office. The Johnson Space Center was on lockdown.
“Here it comes,” announced one of the technicians, a young man barely in his mid-twenties, freshly graduated from the University of Arizona. His voice betrayed his excitement. His infectious enthusiasm was shared by the second technician, several years his senior but equally pleased by the opportunity to work with new data. Rutherford feared that soon the magnitude of the new discovery and the jeopardy it would soon entail would settle in, and they would be as circumspect as he was.
Rutherford threaded his way across the room through the crowd and snatched the printout from the printer with a satisfying rip. Lack of sleep had only intensified his contempt for the presence of the military. Any intrusion by the military added layers of red tape and hours of delay as information filtered up and then back down the chain of command. It was time for a comprehensive policy and decisive, measured action, not a military boondoggle. He had no need to dwell on the string of numbers for long. They clearly indicated the object was moving. In fact, its speed was astounding.
“This can’t be right,” he said.
“What?” Colonel Stiltson asked, frowning as he looked at the page.
Rutherford ignored the colonel and directed his statement to Doctor Patangan. “The object is moving nearly .25 C.”
The colonel’s face projected his confusion.
“That’s a quarter of the speed of light – almost 167 million mph,” he explained for the colonel’s benefit.
“How is that possible?”
“It is using a form of controllable gravity as a power source,” Doctor Patangan spoke up over the video link. “Theoretically, it is possible. The aliens’ science of propulsion must be far in advance of ours.”
Rutherford added, “At that speed, the object will be here in 24 hours, but I suspect it will shed velocity as it approaches Earth, say another eight hours. This explains why we had so little warning of the first Kaiju.”
“Is it another Kaiju?” the colonel asked.
Rutherford shook his head. “No, the object is less than fifty meters in diameter.”
“Another communications pod?” Caruthers asked.
By its size, that would be the logical answer, but Rutherford did not think that was the case. “Possibly,” he conceded, “but why would the aliens send a communications pod after the Kaiju arrives? So far, the Kaiju in the South Pacific has acted autonomously.”
“Then what is it?” the colonel asked.
“We’ll know more by tomorrow night when we can swing the Hubble around for a better view,” Rutherford answered.
His evasive answer did not satisfy the colonel. He dealt in absolutes. “We need answers now,” the colonel said. His firm voice shaped the statement into a command. “We need to devise a plan of attack.”
“We’ll work to pinpoint its likely landfall coordinates, but we can’t be certain until a few hours before it strikes, Colonel. The object’s speed is too variable. At this point, we would simply be guessing.”
“That’s not good enough.”
The colonel’s insistence on a definitive answer irritated Rutherford. Stiltson’s heavy-handed military approach might work on his subordinates, but civilians, especially scientists who seldom ventured guesses, chaffed at someone breathing down their necks. Rutherford, who had dealt with the military for months after the three Kaiju were stopped, was especially resentful. “You can’t stop it, Colonel, not with anything you have. Not even your revamped Janus,” he added.
The colonel glared at him, and Caruthers silently cautioned Rutherford to shut up. It was too late. “What do you know about Janus?” the colonel demanded.
“I know no nuclear missile will come close to the object. It would be like throwing a baseball at a bolt of lightning.”
“You don’t have much faith in the military, do you?”
“I watched a Kaiju wade through our ground and air forces as if they weren’t there. If not for Colonel Langston’s sacrifice, we would still be fighting them. I also butted heads with a few of your ilk during my debriefings. They thought the threat was over and wouldn’t listen to me. They took my data, filed it away, and shut me out. Forgive me for not jumping to attention and saluting when you bark.”
“You don’t know all our secrets, Doctor Rutherford,” Stiltson said with a sneer. “We haven’t been sitting on our asses these past months.”
“Unless you’ve solved the artificial gravity equation using what’s left of a Kaiju propulsion system, we’re out of the aliens’ league.” To his surprise, the colonel had no snappy comeback. It seemed out of character for him. Rutherford stared at him, noticing the small uptick in the corner of his mouth, as if he was trying to smother a smirk. “You haven’t solved it, have you?” he pushed.
The hard military shell snapped back into place. “That’s classified information.”
“Well, if you have solved it, you had better hope you’re prepared, because whatever is headed this way is going to be different from anything else we’ve seen.”
“Why do you say that?”
“The aliens are learning from their mistakes. They’re not months away or even years. They’re only light hours away. Using gravity wave communications, they have almost real-time access to whatever data the Kaiju transmit. From what we’ve seen, they can tailor a Kaiju to meet any new threat and get it here in months.”
“What do you think the object is?”
Caruthers’ eyes begged him not to answer, but he was tired of smug military self-assurance. They were essentially clueless but projected an air of preparedness that fooled no one. They faced each new threat exactly like the previous one. It was a foolish way to fight an alien threat.
“It’s a super weapon,” he said.
Caruthers swore under his breath. The colonel was equally stunned. He leaned in closer to Rutherford. “The Kaiju are weapons platforms. Why do you think this object is di
fferent?”
“The Kaiju are too slow. I think the aliens are growing impatient with their progress. They intend to wipe humanity off the face of the planet once and for all.”
Colonel Stiltson glared at him. Caruthers covered his face with his hand. “Do you propose to incite panic, Doctor Rutherford?”
He shrugged. “I’m not proposing anything, Colonel. You asked me for my best guess. Personally, I’m panicking big time. You would be too if you had a clue as to what we’re facing.”
Stiltson walked to the door, opened it, and spoke briefly to someone just outside the door. Seconds later, two uniformed Air Police strode in. “These two gentlemen will see you off the premises, doctor. I believe Doctors Ahern and Patangan are quite capable of continuing from here.”
Rutherford was incensed. “You can’t shut me out, Colonel. I’m the one who discovered the aliens. Without me —”
“Precisely, doctor. From now on, we will proceed without you. You’re still too . . . unstable from your distressing mission inside the Kaiju. We need cooler heads to prevail. This is not the time for panic.”
“The hell it isn’t.” He turned to Caruthers, but the director’s face was impassive. “I warned you, Gate. It’s out of my hands.”
One of the APs grabbed his arm. He tried to shrug him off, but the AP’s grip was too tight. “Please come with us, Doctor Rutherford.”
“You’re making a mistake, Colonel. This isn’t another Kaiju or a communications pod. If you continue to think of it as such, you’ll be playing into the aliens’ hands.”
“That will be all, Doctor Rutherford,” Stiltson said, as the guard closed the door behind them. “Please leave military matters in the hands of the military.”
Rutherford turned to the guard who had spoken. “He’s wrong, Sergeant.”
“He’s my superior, sir. I will obey his order, as will you.”
Rutherford fumed. “Do you have a family, Sergeant?”
“A wife and son in Toledo.”