Commander Corben ran for the forward drop-chute. Skilling did not try to stop him. “Mr. President,” the general prompted, “I guess you know what this means.”
“Well, if that thing out there is the one they called Kungmin Horangi, then I guess it means we’re at war with North Korea, now, too. Don’t these damn Commies know when they’ve been licked? What the hell does that crazy name mean, anyhow?”
Skilling bit his lip. Half the intelligence community was listening in. “Those shitwits at the Pentagon say it means ‘People’s Tiger.’”
The President’s snorting, signal-distorting laugh turned heads throughout the command center. “A tiger? Is that what it’s supposed to be? Goddamn, those commies never get anything right…”
Commander Corben sprinted across the runway to the enormous old dirigible hangar where his support team lounged, lobbing a football and watching the news. Without a word, they took their positions to prepare for the launch. Corben zipped into his flight-suit and stepped into the shadowy, cathedral-sized space. In the center, an enormous American flag hung from the domed rafters, screening off most of the hangar.
Lt. Mullin walked alongside, briefing him on the pre-flight check. “The new armaments are loaded, the new Hellfires are quicker on lock-on like you wanted, but the blowback is worse, so don’t go punching anyone with them. The armor’s been overhauled again, but that fiberglass shit’s gotta go. It’s giving him a rash.”
“What about the approach?”
“They don’t want you to cross on foot. They say the Bay Bridge can’t take it.”
“Did you show them our numbers?”
“Sure, but the old gray mare is already falling apart, and they don’t want to risk an accident. He’s gotta go over in the harness.”
Corben cursed. “And the other… problem?”
“Electrolytes are bumped up to optimum, but he’s still running like a faucet. The doc says he’ll adjust to the new diet, but they don’t want to run antibiotics on him so soon before—”
“Another upgrade? He’s not a goddamned machine. He’s—”
“I know, Wes, we feel the same way, but to them he’s a weapon. They don’t even call him a ‘he,’ anymore. And you know what they keep saying—”
“I know, I know. ‘He volunteered for this.’ As if any of us knew what ‘this’ would be.”
“Oh, and I tried to get her out before you deployed, but—”
Corben stopped, fussing with the readouts on his helmet. “I’ll take care of it, Ben. She deserves better than to get thrown out by the guards.”
Lt. Mullin patted him on the shoulder, checked the optic jacks running from Corben’s helmet to the CPU on the back of the suit, gave him a thumbs up and went back to a safe distance.
Corben slipped behind the flag and stopped, as he always did, to offer a prayer for himself, and for Steve. Then he opened his eyes and ascended the stairs parked beside Steve’s head.
Steve lay on his back in the hangar. All the computers and gantries and medical equipment had been cleared out to give him room to get up.
At the top of the stairs, she waited, just like always, beside the open hatch bored into Steve’s right temple. The guards had orders to keep her out, but no one could look Steve’s widow in the eye and deny her.
She lifted her black lace veil and poured those wet red eyes all over him, now. “He’s afraid, Wes.”
“He’s not afraid, Laura. He’s—” a machine, a weapon, a meat puppet… “He was never afraid of anything in his life.”
Laura got closer, her perfume burning in his nose. “He loved his country, we all know that. He loved you, Wes. He loved me… a little bit less. He wasn’t afraid for himself, but now…”
“There’s nothing to worry about. It’s some mutt hunk of kaiju-shit from North Korea. It’s probably already dead. This is just another photo op.” He shook her off, but her real perfume—her sweat, her tears, made it hard to remember where he was.
“It’s not the fighting,” Laura tried to catch his eyes. “He’s afraid of what he’s becoming. He knew that this mission… doing this made him a symbol, like the astronauts. They’re changing him again, aren’t they?”
“They want him to win. That’s his job, now. He has to adapt. We all do…”
He brushed past her, but her arms caught him, running over the countless sockets that would bind him to her husband. He pulled away. He couldn’t make himself do it again, any more than he could forget that she wanted him for the same reason the Pentagon did.
“Try to get on with your life,” he told her.
“I thought we were trying,” she said, and he looked away. “The Army doesn’t consider him dead, but they don’t pay his salary. And—we’re… Steve was Catholic… I can’t even…”
Corben climbed in. “They’ll understand when you do, Laura. Try not to be here when we get back.”
“Give him my love, won’t you?”
Corben slammed the hatch and initiated the pre-wake checks. Steve’s EEG was a minimalist tundra of sub-limbic activity, with momentary temporal lobe storms, but nothing to worry about. Everything that was Steve Mancuso had been scooped out of the front of his skull to make room for the cockpit. Cables snaked out of the bulkhead and slotted into their respective ports on the suit, and Corben tingled as those cables shoehorned his brain into the sleeping giant.
“Commander, this is your eleven o’clock wake-up call. The Green Meanies are waiting outside, and Steve’s late for work.”
Corben nodded at the marching columns of status lights on his smart visor. The phantom sensations of godlike power swept all the garbage out of his mind, and he got into character.
“Roger that, Ben. Steve’s online in three… two…”
He hit the switch. Steve opened his eyes. The light burned until the visor calibrated his response and winched down Steve’s pupils. He sat up and rose, slowly like a dinosaur with a hangover, to his feet. Steve’s helmet brushed the hanging halogen lamps, and he had to hunch over double to get out onto the runway.
The night sky was clear, but an opaque canopy of fog enveloped San Francisco down to the double-decker Bay Bridge. In the heart of the fog, a sporadic paparazzi flash and dull, rolling pops of ordnance being expended in an all-out war. Colt was developing a two hundred-millimeter revolver for Steve to use, and a telephone pole-sized police baton that delivered a fifty thousand volt shock was on the drawing boards at the Pentagon, but for now, he was expected to beat whatever was raising hell over there with his hands and feet, and some Hellfire missiles salvaged from a junked Apache helicopter.
Steve checked the harness on his heavily armored torso, and hooked into the web of cables running back to two enormous cargo helicopters idling before him. At his thumb’s up, they lifted and spread out until the cables stood taut, rotors growling mutinously at the nine-ton payload.
Steve braced himself and rolled his shoulders, tried to scratch the rash on his back. At last, the cables twanged and the tarmac dropped away. The helicopters shrieked, lurching into the wind over Treasure Island and over the Bay Bridge, where thousands stuck in gridlock traffic honked and shouted his name. The wind pried at the seams of his Kevlar bodysuit, the battlements upon his shoulders and head, seeking any path to steal his strength.
Wes Corben dissolved like aspirin inside Steve, shivering at the wind and straining to see out of Steve’s eyes into the shroud over the battle. Even as his thermal overlays gave up on the blizzard of fire and smoke, his radiation scans fed him an outline of something larger than Steve, and faster, and—beyond that, he had no fucking idea what he was looking at.
“Have a nice day at the office, dear,” a chopper pilot chirped in his ear, and the cables cut loose high above the impossible, burning thing that even now looked up to watch him falling.
And then—and this always drove Corben batshit when it happened, but Mullin swore they couldn’t find the bug—Steve’s life flashed before his eyes.
When kaiju s
ynthesis technology disseminated to all the extremist nations of the world, it sparked a catastrophic renaissance of rogue state misbehavior. If plutonium and anthrax were effective means of asserting one’s will upon the world stage, then the revival of some sleeping monstrosity—or the creation of a new one—was a golden dream of random havoc for those with nothing left to lose.
Not to be left behind by kaiju-mongers in China and Africa, the United States embarked on its own Megamorphic Weaponization project. No renegade sauropods or lumbering cyborg chimerae could serve as a symbol of American military might, however—the people of the world’s last great superpower would never rally behind a monster. At least subconsciously grasping the subtext of atavistic pagan idolatry that lay at the roots of the kaiju arms race, they strove to create a hero; to, in their own well-spun words, “put a human face, an all-American face, on the kaiju crisis.” So they asked for volunteers.
Major Steve Mancuso stepped up, as they never tired of reminding his wife, and passed the rigorous screening process. They needed someone strong and fast, with excellent reflexes, with Golden Age astronaut looks that would translate into action figures, kid’s pajamas and beach towels and shit.
Using gene therapy and nanomites, they reprogrammed Steve’s mitochondrial DNA, and he grew. Within three agonizing months, he stood seventy-four feet tall.
His doctors pleaded with the Pentagon scientists to consider the potential for replication errors during his reckless growth, particularly in the brain, which stopped growing by age three in normal human development. To grow from three pounds to the volume of a Volkswagen Beetle is traumatic for any organism, and how much more so for the most complex aggregation of matter in the known universe, the human brain? Very soon after his treatments stopped, Steve went totally insane. He devolved to a bestial shell of the confident Navy pilot who volunteered for this project, and he left them no choice.
After escaping from the Florida island where he was interred, he destroyed Cape Canaveral and twelve helicopters and a company of infantry before a TOW missile lobotomy finally knocked him down. Incredibly, he survived, though in a coma. Wheels began spinning, and the catastrophic setback became an unprecedented opportunity.
Neurosurgeons, structural engineers and computer designers flew to the island and set about fixing him. The cavity in Steve’s forebrain was filled with a mainframe that routed all his nervous impulses to a cockpit just above his eyes. The man who controlled Steve would receive all the data of Steve’s experience as raw reality; his reactions drove Steve’s body as an amplified version of his own. That man would have to be an extraordinary pilot, as good as Steve himself had once been, for he would have to become Steve. Wes Corben did not want to volunteer for the project, but he did, because he could not bear the thought of a stranger inside his best friend’s head.
Steve hit the ground and sank up to his ankles on a grassy palisade overlooking the Bay. The street was seeded with burning cars and military debris, and a fusillade of tracers sprayed out of the nearest cross-street. Protestors swarmed the sidewalks around his feet, waving banners and throwing rocks and bottles as they sought shelter from the meta-Biblical conflict raging above their heads.
A chorus of spotters buzzed in his ears that the enemy was closing in on his position, but he just stood there. The thing had been right under him when he dropped. How did something so big move so fast?
The building in front of him, an eight-story office complex, sagged and spat glass as all its eastern-exposure windows shattered. Steve looked up at the titanic black shape perched on the roof just as it sprang at his face.
He tried to roll with the impact and throw the attacker over his head, but it slammed into his chest, crushing his lungs flat, and its talons got inside his arms and shredded his armor.
Pain whited out the scene. Corben almost blacked out before the dampers reduced Steve’s pain-incentive triggers and told him what was wrong. Steve was laid out on his back in the street, armor and bodysuit torn wide open, and the attacker straddled his chest like a dog burying a bone in his abdomen.
With a noisome trumpet blast that somehow cut through the din of war all around, Steve’s irritable, bacteria-infested bowel cramped up and sounded a chocolate war charge. The monster flinched and shrank away, as if offended by the outburst. Galvanized, Steve brought one leg up as hard as he could between its hind legs, hoping the kaiju specialists had striven for authenticity, and levered its mammoth bulk up and as far away as he could.
The creature flailed at the air, sailing over three waterfront blocks, smashing to earth on an unfortunate retro diner and plowing across the street into the deserted stalls of the farmer’s market in front of the Ferry Terminal. At last, Steve got a good look at it.
Even with its pelt burned off, Kungmin Horangi was clearly supposed to be a tiger, perhaps a new strain of the giant sabertooths the Chinese revived from fossils and turned loose in Tibet. But its hide was a sickening mass of polyps and blisters, with arrays of envenomed quills sprouting in radiating patterns down its spine from its head, or where it was supposed to have a head.
Nice try, North Korea.
Then it roared at him, and he understood that, blasphemy as it was, this was no mistake. It was the offspring of a fundamentally perverse union of land and sea fauna, but why? Why would anyone want to cross a tiger with a sea cucumber?
The head peeled open and splayed out like a banana, a thrashing mane of fanged tentacles around a gaping maw filled with busy mandibles. Its eyes, he saw, were everywhere, on the tentacles and all over its body like blood blisters. Even as it recovered from its impact, Kungmin Horangi lashed out at a tank parked behind it and stomped its turret in, kicked it through the lobby window of a Japanese bank. Then it charged.
Steve snatched up the nearest solid object—a tour bus chartered by BC/DC, Canada’s foremost AC/DC cover band—and hurled it at the oncoming monster. Kungmin Horangi changed course in midair, talons digging into the masonry façade of the old US Mint, vaulted off it as the bus smashed into the roof, silencing its vintage 8-track at the height of the final chorus of “Big Balls.” Steve barely dodged, reached out and gripped a tentacle as it hurtled by, and made ready to whip the monster around and smash it into the street.
The plan fell apart before the flaming messages of pain even reached the dazed synapses of Steve’s pilot. The thorny tentacle razored through Steve’s Kevlar mittens, into the muscle between the bones of his fingers, and out the other side as the monster tore past and took his hand with it, stripping off glove and flesh like cotton candy.
Steve stared at the naked bones of his hand and let out a yelp of confusion. The spotters screamed in his ears, but he heard only the sound of his own agony as it roared out of him and shattered the last intact windows on the avenue.
The Red Korean kaiju skidded to a halt a block away. The street buckled under it, brown sewage percolating up out of smashed pipes around its massive paws. The monstrous abortion relaxed, as if Steve was already dead and it could destroy the city at its leisure. It batted at the walls of a glass skyscraper and smashed something inside, a cat stalking a mouse through a dollhouse. Steve recognized the building, the Transamerica Pyramid, always a favorite with disaster movies.
Blood loss and encroaching shock made red warning lights blink all around the periphery of his vision, but Steve focused only on the enemy. “Weapons hot,” he growled, raising his intact arm to point at the thing now engaged in smashing open the Pyramid’s neighbors like an anteater ravaging termite mounds. “Fox one, fox two,” he said, and Hellfire missiles arced out of the gauntlet on his forearm.
Where they hit, the sun seemed to peek out of a hole in the night, and then the whole avenue was awash in fire that reduced the air itself to ash.
“Fox three, four…” Steve emptied his arsenal into the flaming mound, but he knew that no matter how hot he burned it, no matter how many pieces he blew it into, it would come back, and keep coming, and coming—
And now
, the news:
“In the wake of the disastrous San Francisco attack, the true extent of the damage is only now coming to light. While the kaiju invader Kungmin Horangi broke down the physical security systems of an undisclosed number of bank headquarters in the city’s Financial District, an army of hackers descended on the unprotected servers and deleted millions of financial records, credit reports and loan documents. An emergency meeting of the FDIC and SEC this morning was closed to the public, but critics predict that at least five major banks will be forced to freeze all holdings and declare bankruptcy, until such time as the records can be retrieved. While his press secretary delivered the painful news that the federal budget is already too tight to allow for more emergency aid, the President made this brief statement, while enjoying a round of golf with friends and campaign boosters at Cocoa Beach.”
“We are at war, and the enemy is within our borders, as well as all around us. People will have to make sacrifices. Real Americans won’t have to be told twice.”
“The President’s golf game was cut short by the approaching Hurricane Manuel, but he still got to fire the inaugural round at Florida’s first indoor duck hunting arena. The President and his party bagged fourteen mallards, and poked fun at his troubles by naming one of the two ducks he shot in a cage match Kungmin, and the other, Kim—”
It was hardly Kim Jong Il’s intention to initiate a sneak attack on the United States. The last thing he wanted was for posterity to associate North Korea with the conniving cowardice of the Nipponese devils at Pearl Harbor. If only the American President had taken his repeated warnings seriously…
At first his plan was only a frustrated whim—to turn a kaiju loose on his decadent cousins to the south, and force the Americans to show their impotence, or their insanity–– it mattered not, so long as something finally happened. A modest plan, but the Supreme Leader’s restless dreams of even a shabby reconstituted dinosaur were out of his poor nation’s reach. All this changed when he chanced to kidnap the inestimable Dr. Otaku and set him to work; the dream had become a symbol of North Korea’s adamantine resolve, an avatar of the Proletariat to shake the palaces of the world to dust. The notorious Nipponese kaijuologist only smiled and bowed and disappeared into his lab, saying, “I will hold a mirror up to your state, and give your reflection life.”
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