Titan Wars: Rise of the Kaiju

by M. C. Norris

  “Engaging weapon.” Collin flipped the left switch on the handgrip. A red circle in the top-left corner of the viewfinder indicated that the dorsal cannons were armed.

  “Stand by for shooter mode,” Jill said.

  The view in his mind’s eye was constricted to bobbing crosshairs. Paralyzed beneath the surface, the dolphin’s body was being tossed by the waves. That was a situation that could make a pilot become seasick in a hurry.

  “Activating stabilizers.” Collin closed his eyes, as he flipped a toggle on the handset that closed eight circuits to mercury switches in the lining of the dolphin’s vest. Pneumatic valves came to life, and leveled the animal’s body with precisely timed jets of seawater. Collin opened his eyes and blinked. Up through the green curtain, atop the black wall of steel, perched a pirate high in a machine gunner’s nest. “Locking onto target.”

  The big difference between the NEWT program and anything preceding it was that the NEWT dolphins weren’t trained for combat. Hardly the living torpedoes of the old days, these guys enjoyed the better part of their lives swimming around in the wild, just being dolphins. Their training was limited to responding to coordinates beamed to receptors in the prefrontal lobes of their brains. If they obeyed, and followed a beacon to its destination, they earned some playtime with Collin, and a fish snack. They seemed to genuinely enjoy the human interaction. Highly intelligent creatures, they often towed Collin back to the boat by the little handles on the sides of their vests, as though they understood that boats were where human beings belonged, and not paddling around in the open sea.

  Collin twitched when a wet and velvety tongue began lapping at the knuckles of his left hand. Just a little bit distracting because, at the moment, Collin was pretending to be a dolphin. Dolphins didn’t have hands, nor did they have pet golden retrievers, beneath the sea. Collin released his controls for a moment to tousle his best buddy’s hair. Good dog, but very bad timing. “Could somebody please call the dog?”

  “You kidding me?” J.J. was not a fan of their furry mascot. “Hotspot, kennel! Now!”

  “Easy, J-man. He’s our good luck charm.” Collin couldn’t see the dog loping away, but he felt the swish of a tail against his arm, and he heard the chuffing breaths and jingling tags fading into the back of the hovercraft, where his kennel and a few favorite toys were stashed. Hotspot didn’t have much choice but to obey, because the dog knew that if he ignored an order, his phantom puppeteer would snatch hold of his strings, and override his doggy will. Hotspot was the team’s first test subject. The dog was equipped with the same cache of cerebral nanobots as the dolphins, not to mention a few bonus items.

  “One day, I’m going to hack into that dog’s head and walk him right off a pier,” J.J. said.

  “Don’t do it,” Collin replied. “Nobody hacks into Hotspot but me. You’ll be very sorry if you try. Trust and believe.”

  “Fine,” J.J. said. “I don’t even want to know.”

  “We’ve got a problem,” Takashi said, swiveling over to the main radar screen.

  “What is it?”

  “Got a blip coming in hard and fast, six o’clock.”

  J.J. seized the periscope controls, and swung the topside camera one-hundred-eighty degrees. “Looks like a Mark VII special ops craft,” J.J. said. “We’ve got SEALs on the scene.”

  “You’ve got to be joking,” Collin said.

  “Wish I was.”

  “What the heck are they doing out here?” Jill slammed her fists against her armrests. “This is our mission!”

  “Probably deployed from field command in Shanghai. Someone in the SWCC is losing confidence in us.”

  “Like they ever had any to begin with.”

  “We’ve got no order to abort,” J.J. said. “Carry on.”

  “We must be working cooperatively with the big dogs,” Takashi said.

  “Not cooperating,” J.J. replied, lowering his voice to a growl. “Competing.”

  “Then what the heck are we waiting around for?” Jill shouted. “Collin? Take your shot, dude.”

  Collin thumbed the zoom control until the face of the chain gunner filled his sights. He felt his breath catch in his throat, as though he’d just swallowed a bug. Pneumatic stabilizers kept adjusting until the deadly crosshairs were locked and floating on the target as a bright red dot, right between the girl’s eyes. Collin could see the sunlight in her eyelashes, the freckles on the bridge of her nose. She was maybe sixteen.

  “Collin? You good?”

  He heard J.J.’s question, but he wasn’t quite ready to answer. He needed a moment. Pirates were supposed to be grizzled men with missing limbs, scarred faces, and tangled beards. Not young girls with expressive eyes that stared right back into his soul.

  No matter how many hundreds of exercises he’d completed against inanimate targets, no amount of training could have prepared him for the moment when he’d have to pull the trigger on a living human being. Collin wasn’t a hardened soldier, after all. None of them were. They were a bunch of civilians—nerds, to be exact—with a government contract and a gamer’s enthusiasm for engaging one another in geeky battles. However, there was nothing the least bit redeeming about shooting a young girl right in the face.

  “Collin? Hello?”

  “I c—” Collin said, choking on what felt like the worst word in his vocabulary. He was in way over his head, and he realized that now. The NEWT program was better off in the hands of trained soldiers than privateering civilians, just as their opposition in the SWCC had been arguing, all along.

  “Alright, dolphin time’s over, buddy. Move over.”

  Collin felt J.J.’s hands snatch hold of his headset, as Jill yanked the plug on his out-of-body experience. His arms felt too weak to resist. The strong cocktail of blood and adrenaline that once filled his head had gushed down into the pit of his stomach, and he felt like he was going to be sick. When he opened his eyes, Collin found himself surrounded by a very disappointed team.

  J.J. hauled him out of the pilot’s seat. He pulled the Mindbender Rift over his own head, and adjusted the visor. “Jill, patch me in.”

  “It’s too late,” Takashi said. “SEALs beat us to the punch.”

  Collin staggered over to the periscope, and grabbed hold of the sweaty controls. He did so more for physical support than to be of any further assistance to the mission. However, what he saw in the viewfinder snapped him back into character. Through the spraying wake off the bow of the SEAL gunboat, there was a sneering face that he knew all too well. It was none other than the spearhead of their military opposition, a warrant officer and deep-sea specialist who harbored a special kind of hatred toward the NEWTs. He’d managed to block them from training anywhere near his jurisdiction, which was here, in the heart of the Yellow Sea. A bad situation had just gotten a whole lot worse.

  “Mad Hatter’s on board,” Collin said.

  “You serious?” Takashi gaped up from his radar screen.

  The foreboding presence of Miles Bent in Shanghai’s field command base was akin to a rolling thunderhead through that labyrinth of corridors. While Bent disliked civilians working for the military, he particularly despised the NEWTs, because their techy approach danced smartly around those primal confrontations that epitomized his more glorified and straightforward style of combat. Over the years, the so-called “Mad Hatter” had leveraged every ounce of his clout in the SWCC in an effort to crush the NEWT program out of existence. Rumor had it he’d earned his nickname by decorating his barracks walls with the hats of vanquished enemies, and rumor further had it that he’d cleared a spot on his trophy wall once he decided to make dismantling their program his pet project.

  “Topside, give me a visual,” J.J. said. “Dolphin’s moved out of position.”

  “I can’t see anything,” Collin replied. The Mark VII had swerved right into his line of sight. The gunboat fishtailed back and forth, as if the pilot’s intention was to block his view of the situation.

  “Jil
l, switch my feed. Rowdy’s gone too deep.”

  “Pepper’s in a good position,” Takashi said.

  “Switching feeds.”

  “Bingo. Pepper’s on. Got a visual on multiple targets. We’ve got pirates in the water, boys and girls. Arming cannons.”

  “They’ve spotted the SEAL gunboat.” Collin zoomed past the oscillating bow of the Mark VII to steal a glimpse of his teenaged girl, who was swiveling her roaring chain gun right onto the SEALs. No hesitation. Looked as though she’d been shredding people with flying lead for the better part of her young life. Collin began to feel a bit like a schmuck. It occurred to him that if any SEALs were wounded or killed in action on account of his failure to take her out, then that was going to be something rather sour to chew on for the rest of his life. The SEALs returned fire. Flames spewed from the Mark VII’s deadly armaments, chopping the corridor of seawater between the vessels into foam.

  “Something’s wrong,” J.J. shouted. “I can’t see!”

  Collin pulled away from the scope, and gawped at the view on the overhead monitor. Torrents of bubbles spiraled up through a swirling crimson cloud. Round and round, the camera spun. Round and round. The glowing orb of the sun waned faintly with every pass until the monitor faded into blackness.

  “Switch feeds!” J.J. gripped the sides of his pilot’s chair as though he’d actually felt the spray of bullets that had ripped through his dolphin’s body. His stricken reaction was shared by every member of the team. This situation had somehow been overlooked in all of their training exercises. They’d failed to ask themselves what would happen to a pilot, if a dolphin was killed while the two were cerebrally synched. “Hurry! God, I’m going down!”

  “You’re right here, buddy. Don’t believe it.”

  “Takashi? Which dolphins are still with us?” Jill’s voice was cracking.

  “I can’t tell. They’re all in there, but …”

  “Switch my feed!”

  “Switching to Moxie.”

  J.J. arched his back and screamed. He clawed at the visor of the Mindbender Rift headset, as though whatever sight was being streamed into his brain was actually burning his eyes. The overhead monitor was a cauldron of fire and foam. At the red heart of the inferno leered a hellish face, with lips peeled back in a joker’s grin. All the dolphins were smiling, too, even as they burned. That was the irony of dolphins. Like sad clowns, they always appeared to be smiling, and they were wearing those false smiles to the grave.

  “They thought those pirates in the water were us,” Collin said. He felt like he was going to be sick. “They thought it was time to play.”

  “They’re burning alive!” Jill began to cry. “Do something!”

  “There’s nothing we can do!” Ripping the headset away from his eyes, J.J. slammed the technology against the floor. He leapt up from the pilot’s seat, palms pressed to his forehead, and stormed off in the direction of the cabin. As big and intimidating as he was, the former boxer had one of the softest hearts on the team.

  Collin left the periscope. He strode up to the window, and stared in horror at the raging horizon. Swarms of drones spiraled like motes of ash over a flaming sea, where the submarine was slipping beneath the waves. Everything on the surface was left to burn. The bad guys had escaped. The dolphins were gone. The Mad Hatter had won.

  “It’s over. We blew it,” Takashi said, shutting down his hologram displays with a single wave of his hand. “The NEWTs are finished.”

  “They never saw us. No one did.” Jill thumbed tears from her eyes. “The world never even knew that we were here.”

  ****

  With the bag of precious canisters clenched in his teeth, he seized the baboons by their scruffs. The beasts screeched with indignation as they plunged together over the bulwarks, and down into the elemental fury. They didn’t linger long at the surface. He dove, dragging the hysterical apes with him, down into the deep. Bullets hacked at the water all around them, lancing past their swimming forms like pale spears. He took both of their chains in one hand, and used his free arm to thresh the water. Glancing back over his shoulder, he was amused to see how out of place baboons looked beneath the sea.

  He first encountered the hideous apes on the Burmese coast, just six days ago. They were tethered to the pole of a palm wine merchant’s tent, where they grubbed about in the dirt, grunting like hogs, and flashing their fangs at anyone who so much as glanced in their direction. He could hardly stop laughing at them. From the moment he’d first gazed upon those awful faces, he knew that those baboons were coming back to the submarine. They were special gifts for his employer, a man with an insatiable interest in deadly exotics, and in the terror that such monsters inspired in weaker men.

  One of the baboons pulled its way up the chain, and sank its fangs into his forearm. He gave both animals a smart shaking for their trouble. They would suffer this small inconvenience before beginning their pampered lives in their new owner’s compound, deep in the heart of Mongolia. Wrenching the pair of knuckleheads along by their chains, he scissor-kicked in the direction of the submarine.

  A staccato of dull impacts filled his ears. Another phalanx of white spears stabbed downward from the heavens. One struck him dead in the chest. The impact slammed the breath from his lungs in an eruption of silvery blobs that wobbled toward the burning surface. A frigid jettison of water blasting wildly against throbbing chest brought him back to his senses, and he realized that a can of moon juice had saved his life. One canister had taken the brunt of the bullet, and its steel skin had been punctured. He could feel it knocking around inside the sack, spinning and tumbling, as it released its pressurized contents into the sea.

  The sub looked so far away, and there was no chance for another breath of air. The surface world was a ceiling of moiling flames. When he’d first hatched the idea of raiding the patrol boat with a couple of chained monsters at his sides, it had seemed like a pretty wild gimmick. However, bringing them along had perhaps been a poor decision. They were only slowing him down. One of the baboons began to spasm in unnatural ways. Its eyes rolled skyward, and its fangs snapped at the salty torrent of fluid rushing into its lungs. A burst of bubbles escaped his nostrils. It was kind of funny to watch a baboon drown.

  Then, it came to him. Like the spirit of some fallen friend, it slid out of the gloom to quell even the baboons with a portentous moment of wonderment beneath the waves. Here, met different creatures who never in the whole of their lives should’ve chanced to look upon the other. Its laughing eyes, its toothy smile, it appeared barely able to contain its amusement over some darkly private joke.

  With his free hand, he snatched hold of the little handle on the side of the creature’s vest, because at once, he’d fallen in love with it. He would have this creature as well, or he’d drown with baboons clenched in one hand, and this thing in the other. There was some remarkable intelligence behind that dark eye that peered askew into his own, almost as though this creature knew of deeper shared connections than his human mind was able to grasp. Oh, but it was true, because as though his new friend had performed the same trick a hundred times, it knew just where to take him. With a powerful thrust of its flukes, they were off, rocketing toward the submarine.

  Chapter Two

  The journey was long and cold. Many did not survive. Those who saw release from their frigid prison were received by the warmest of green seas, but there was no celebration. These were microscopic entities, tiny things, whose whole universe was but a droplet of water. Aware, but hardly cognizant, they went on to perform the same tricks their kind had done since time’s beginning. However, something had gone wrong inside of them, or perhaps it had at last gone right, because genetic potential buried within this menagerie was unearthed in the favorable conditions of their rich, new world, and the sluggish arms race of a frozen moon was throttled up into overdrive, favoring the monstrous, and the grotesque. Strong slaked their appetites for the weak, big begat bigger, until after the first year, the enor
mity of the invaders was the wonder of the undersea world, and the numbers surpassed even the stars in the sky.

  One sort was a lover of light. Their fondness for luminescence was a relic from the old world, where light had been a scarce resource. Trapped beneath miles of dense ice, enveloped in utter blackness, their ancestors had learned to generate lights of their own. Flamboyant rituals became their new language of love, as well as a declaration of war. Dazzling displays came to fill those frigid seas, as males strove to outshine their competition. Coupled in courtship, and in clashes, their garish spectacles didn’t go unnoticed, and the flesh-eaters closed in.

  ***

  Her eyestalks broke the surface. Dilating in the radiance, her eyes seemed to absorb the shoreline spectacle with much the same dependence as petals spread before the sun. There were lights within lights. There were streams of light that flowed. There were flickering blips, roving tracers, and complex panels of flashing nuances that continually changed pattern, hue, and intensity. Tiny lights arranged in stacked columns formed twinkling reefs of organized structures that jutted to heights that rivaled her own. Having been allured by the distant glow of this place from hundreds of miles out to sea, she remained transfixed by its ethereal beauty. She was so enraptured, in fact, that she’d failed to notice that she’d been followed.

  The ocean behind her swelled. She turned, emitting a defensive rattle. A spiked carapace rose, clattering from the depths. It was a male, and a big one. Glimmering lights reflected in its expressionless eyes, eyes that possessed the same gaping awareness from the moment of its hatching until its death. The hue of bioluminescent striations that fluted his armor burned with the hellish color of a thermal vent. Hooked mandibles splayed at the light source rivalling his own display.