PACIFIC RIM UPRISING ASCENSION

by Greg Keyes

  “They’ve vanished,” Quan said. “Eventually it will become known. It will also become known that we admitted two cadets who committed sabotage and at least two murders. Then we will be accused of covering up, and it will be true. It could endanger the whole program.”

  That wasn’t likely, Mori thought, but it could well endanger Quan’s position as Marshal, and her own credibility would be called into question. Neither of those things, in her opinion, really mattered. What mattered were the cadets and crimes in question.

  “I do not believe the two cadets are guilty,” Mako said.

  “There is a great deal of evidence that they are,” Quan said. “Including their DNA on Sokk’s clothes.”

  “Which could have been planted there,” she said. “It is all far too convenient for me. Whether they fled or were abducted, it is the first few hours and days which matter most in investigations like this. I would like to continue the investigation unhampered by the press and parents for at least that long. I will take the responsibility for any unpleasantness that may result.”

  Quan’s lips pressed together. Then he nodded curtly.

  “I respect your judgment, Secretary General,” he said. “For the time being, we will continue the search as quietly as possible. But if this goes on for much longer, it will be out of my hands. People talk – even my people.”

  Mako watched Quan leave the room, ran her hand over her forehead, and then returned to her investigation with renewed urgency. She feared that if Vik and Jinhai weren’t found in the next few days, they would never be.

  * * *

  It was not unusual for Dr. Gottlieb to be agitated. But when Lambert and Mako arrived in his lab, he seemed unusually so; pacing, muttering, scribbling at his chalkboards and then blotting things out with the sleeve of his white coat. In fact, it took him a few moments to become aware that they had arrived.

  “Yes, what is it?” he asked, once he did notice them.

  “You asked for me, Dr. Gottlieb,” Mori said. “You said you had further analysis concerning Sokk’s autopsy.”

  He stared at them blankly for a moment.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “I had forgotten. Well, it’s just as Aubrey surmised. Sokk ingested a fatal dose of a toxin derived from Kaiju blood.”

  “Purposefully?” Lambert asked.

  “Well, there’s no sign he was forced to take it. But it might have been introduced into his system in food or drink. It is very nearly without taste, and what taste it does have is easily disguised.”

  “This poison,” Mori asked. “Does it act quickly?”

  “Not particularly,” Gottlieb said. “You wouldn’t know anything was wrong for a number of hours, maybe even up to a day depending on the dosage. By the time you did notice it, however, it would be too late. Catastrophic kidney and liver failure, accompanied by internal hemorrhaging, followed rather quickly by heart and lung failure.”

  “It seems a strange way to commit suicide,” Lambert said.

  “It is used for suicide,” Gottlieb said, “but usually with a great deal of accompanying ritual, and often in the company of other Kaiju worshippers. They believe in the victim’s last moments they become one with the Anteverse, and possess the ability to communicate with their gods. Sokk, however, was in his work clothes. And his body was moved, yes? So in this case, I rather doubt suicide.”

  “This would lead us to consider murder,” Mako said. “But by whom? Jinhai or Vik or one of the other cadets? Where would they get the poison? No, I think we’re looking for someone else. Is there any way to trace the source of the toxin?”

  “I have its chemical signature,” Gottlieb replied. “If you were to find another sample that shared that signature, we could probably say they were produced in the same batch. Although I’m not sure how that would help.”

  “Anything else?” Mori asked.

  “Well, not concerning any of that,” Gottlieb said. “I’ve got a rather knotty problem here, though. I shan’t worry you with it, however.”

  “This concerns the deep-sea trenches?” she asked. “The possibility of a new breach?”

  “The data I got from Dr. Morales, yes,” he said.

  “I remember you were very concerned with it.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Very. The more I worked with it, the more certain I became that a new breach is imminent, if not something of an even greater magnitude. But the data from K-Watch not only doesn’t corroborate anything in my data set, in many instances it flatly contradicts it. I find it impossible to reconcile the two. It’s like quantum and Einsteinian physics, but actually worse.”

  “Maybe it was some sort of collection error, bad instrumentation, or something on that first set of numbers,” Lambert said.

  “I find that hard to credit,” Gottlieb said. “It came to me from Dr. Morales. I’m sure she vetted the collection methods before handing it off to me. It would be unthinkably unprofessional if she didn’t, and truly I don’t think she’s capable of such behavior. It would be just as likely if she…” he trailed off and stalked back over to his chalkboards.

  “What, Doctor?” Mori asked.

  “Well, I just – it’s ridiculous – but it’s almost as if she faked the data. But why would she do that?”

  “Are you telling me she sent you on a wild goose chase?” Lambert said.

  “No,” Mori said, slowly. “Not a wild goose chase. Kunsei nishin no kyogi. In English, I think this is ‘smoked herring fallacy’.”

  “You mean a red herring?” Lambert asked.

  “Red herring,” Mako said. “Yes. Misdirection. Morales – when did you meet with her?”

  “Just a day or two after she arrived,” Gottlieb said. “She sent me a message that she wanted to come by for a visit. So I cleared her through security. In fact, it was the same day as the incident with Chronos Berserker.”

  “The same day?” Lambert asked. “Are you sure?”

  “Quite sure,” he said. “We were in here, and we were talking, and then I heard the commotion in the bays. And of course, I rushed to see what was the matter.”

  “Did she come with you?” Lambert asked.

  It was dawning on Gottlieb now. Lambert could see it on his face.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

  He was instantly in motion, moving from this workstation to that, frowning, looking for something, obviously.

  “No,” he muttered. “Not that, not that either…” He kept going, and little by little he began to seem more relieved. But then something seemed to occur to him, and he walked briskly across the lab, away from his calculations and holographic models and toward the preservation receptacles, K-scanners, and autopsy chambers, the stuff they had once used to preserve and analyze Kaiju tissue and organs – which, for the most part, now stood empty and unused.

  He bent over a terminal there, and his face quickly soured.

  “What’s wrong?” Mori asked.

  “It’s Newton’s – Dr. Geiszler’s – database,” he said. “Someone logged into it.” He looked up. “It could not have been done remotely. This isn’t connected to anything outside of the room – it was his personal hard storage.”

  “You think Morales broke into it?”

  “The time-mark matches up,” said Gottlieb. “The same day, the very hour. When I left the lab, she must have stayed behind.”

  “She knew no one would be paying attention to her,” Mori said.

  “Because she created the distraction. Or used Sokk to,” Lambert finished.

  “And then kept me sidetracked with this bloody fake data, so that it didn’t occur to me to check up on anything.”

  “Dr. Morales,” Mori said. “Where is she now?”

  “Her contract job finished yesterday,” Gottlieb said. “She’s already gone home.”

  27

  2029

  SAKHALIN ISLAND

  RUSSIA

  VIK

  VIK GRUNTED AS SHE TRIED TO GET THE DRILL TO the rig
ht angle, not easy to do in the cramped space, but absolute precision wasn’t necessary either. She pressed the switch and the little engine whined to life, cutting into the Kaiju bone with a combination of a diamond tip, solvent, and high heat. It took almost ten minutes to drill the twenty-centimeter hole.

  “Got it,” she said, when she was done.

  “It’s on the line,”

  Mina’s voice came up from below. Mina was fifteen, and too big to crawl around even the larger nacelles. Vik almost was, and she certainly couldn’t make into the dense, deep mass they were attempting to tunnel into at the moment. They were burrowing their way up the equivalent of a femur, nearing one of the hip joints of the Kaiju. She had two other kids, farther along where everything got denser and tighter – they were also drilling holes.

  She pulled the line up, which had a shaped-charge explosive at the end, and tamped it carefully into the hole. She knew intellectually it wouldn’t explode no matter how roughly it was treated – it needed an electrical charge to set it off – but knowing what it could do, it was hard not to treat the thing with respect.

  “How’s it going up there, Anna?” Vik asked.

  “Good,” the girl called down from above. “I’ve got three set up.”

  “Great. Pull up your charges.”

  They got done about an hour before quitting time and made the long trek back down to the belly of the beast. They were about halfway there when Vik felt the charges detonate by the way the floor quivered under their feet. She frowned, but didn’t say anything. Protocol was to make sure everyone was accounted for before setting off explosives, but less and less did Andrei seem worried about protocol. They had lost more diggers to injury and death in the last year than in the other three she had been working for him. He seemed in a hurry to mine as much of the Kaiju as he could, as quickly as possible.

  When they reached the outside, Andrei was there, having an animated discussion with Chandra, one of the few real scientific types that worked for him. Uncharacteristically, his excitement seemed motivated by cheerfulness rather than his more typical anger or disappointment. The two were staring at the screen of a scanner.

  Andrei noticed them after a moment.

  “Good work,” he said. “You get a little extra today. But I need you back here an hour early tomorrow, yes?”

  They went into the chemical shower, still in their suits, and when they came out, Andrei was gone.

  She went over to Chandra, who was a pretty decent guy. He was new, so that would probably change.

  “What’s all of the excitement about?” she asked.

  He smiled, and tapped up an image.

  “This,” he said. “I suspected from some of the earlier readings, but that last round of charges you set enabled us to get our best resonance image of the hip yet. You see that?”

  Vik examined the image. She could see the leg bone they had been digging, and then a massive shadow which must be the pelvis. But inside of the pelvis was a largish, irregular light spot.

  “It’s hollow?” she guessed.

  “I think it’s an auxiliary heart,” he said. “Most Kaiju have them – they’re far too big for a single heart, no matter how massive, to keep blood moving up and down more than two hundred feet. Different Kaiju have different solutions for the problem. In some, the major arteries also contracted and relaxed to accelerate the blue fluid on its journey. Others had a sequence of smaller, heart-like muscles that acted like pumping substations. This one – well, this pelvis is larger than the other, larger than it needed to be, but there weren’t extra muscle attachments to the outside to suggest it needed to be. So I guessed it might be doing double duty as a hip and as a vault, protecting something. In this case, I believe a heart. It will be long dead, of course, but that doesn’t matter to the people who think Kaiju heart will promote longer life and… ah… virility. An ounce of dried heart will fetch more than a hundred pounds of bone powder. Imagine the bonus you’ll get.”

  She was trying to. If Andrei stuck with his usual percentage, that could be something. But he probably wouldn’t. He had always paid as little as possible, and she didn’t see that changing just because he got a windfall.

  She shucked off the Dig suit, hung it back with the rest, and started home. Anna was waiting for her, as she had been for the last several days. She was nine, with mussy red hair and big dark eyes. She lived in one of Andrei’s “accommodations”, an old hotel that was so dilapidated it was almost as dangerous as the Dig.

  Why she had latched onto Vik, she had no idea. She hadn’t gone out of her way to be friendly with her, or with anyone else, for that matter.

  As they were walking along, she actually heard the girl’s stomach growl. Anna looked embarrassed.

  “I notice you didn’t have much lunch,” Vik said.

  “No,” Anna said, “rent was due this week, so Andrei just took it out of my pay.”

  It was a neat trap Andrei had a lot of his workers in. He gave them money which they had to give right back to him. He made sure they never earned enough to save anything. Workers with savings might leave, try to find a job somewhere else. If you were always about a meal behind, that wasn’t possible.

  Vik wasn’t in that trap at least. Not yet. She and Babulya still had their place, and Andrei didn’t own it. But if grandmother lost her job, they could very well end up like Anna.

  After another couple of blocks, she saw a woman selling pyanse from a cart on the street corner.

  “Hang on,” she told Anna, and bought two of them and offered Anna one.

  “Don’t get used to it,” she said.

  Anna looked like she didn’t understand at first, but then took the steamed bun and bit into it, closing her eyes as she chewed the filling of pork and cabbage.

  “That’s so good,” she said.

  Vik agreed. She didn’t usually buy anything from street vendors. It was too expensive. But sometimes a small extravagance was called for.

  * * *

  When she approached the Dig the next day, Kaiju worshippers were there, blocking the road in. It wasn’t the first time; they gathered periodically, sometimes just a few of them sometimes a lot of them, like today. Andrei didn’t tolerate them on the site, of course, but they were a nuisance anyway. Vik kept her gaze down, trying not to make eye contact. Some of them were chanting a song in a language she didn’t know. Many of them had tattoos of Kaiju, and despite the chill that still lingered in May, were half-undressed to show them off. Others were burning incense; the smoke smelled a lot like burnt Kaiju, and probably was.

  She shouldered her way through half of the crowd, but then someone grabbed her by the shoulders and spun her around, bringing her face-to-face with an old woman. For a second Vik thought she had four eyes, but then she saw that two of them were tattooed in dark blue, and didn’t have pupils. The rest of her face was tattooed as well, and she came to the sickening realization the markings and the weird headdress she wore were meant to make her resemble a Kaiju, probably Karloff.

  “You have been within the Sea Angel,” the woman said.

  “Yeah,” Vik said. “Let go of me.”

  “They came for us. They came to rid the Earth of inequity. To save us and make us one. And yet look what they did! Killed this beautiful, worshipful god so you can crawl around in it like a maggot. But your days are soon to end, little worm. Righteous justice will not be delayed forever!”

  “Let me go!” Vik said, bringing her hands up and out, breaking the woman’s hold. She felt unaccountably frightened; they were all around her, chanting, some yelling almost in her ears.

  “You will die and become dust and never know their embrace!” the woman shrieked.

  That was more than enough for Vik. She fought her way clear of the crowd and ran for the Dig.

  They were just idiots, she knew. Losers. Crazy. She knew she shouldn’t be scared of anything the old lady said.

  But she found it hard to shake off her words, for some reason. The horrible, lov
ing tone of her voice when she talked about Kaiju had rattled her more than any of it.

  But there was work to do, and despite having a generally bad feeling, she got to it, climbing back up into the monstrous body and planting more charges in the bone. The night crews had been cleaning out the shards liberated by the previous explosions. Chandra figured it was going to take another two sets of blasts to reach the heart cavity.

  After donning her suit, she saw Andrei and went over to him.

  “Someone set the charges off early yesterday,” she told him. “Before we were clear.”

  “You’re in one piece, aren’t you?” he said. “So obviously you were clear.”

  “Well, but the charges aren’t supposed to blow until we’re completely out of there, right? That’s the rules.”

  “Who do you think makes the rules?” he asked, angrily. “Don’t worry about it. You’ll be safe. Go do your job and stop thinking you can tell me how to do mine.”

  She knew better than to push him any farther. At least he’d heard out her complaint.

  Once more, they set the charges, then started back down. The warning klaxons began, and soon diggers from other parts of their section began filtering into the thoroughfare behind them.

  They were just about halfway there when she noticed a streak of blue on Anna’s protective suit.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  Anna glanced at it, then lifted her hands. The fingers of her gloves were also blue.

  “I dunno,” she said. “It was kind of wet up there.”

  “Wet?” Vik said. “But – oh, crap. Anna, run.” She turned to shout back at the other crews coming out, some of which were pretty far behind them. “Everybody!” she shouted at the top of her lungs. “Run!”

  Anna had taken her at her words, and was already twenty yards ahead of her. Vik ran after.

  Don’t set off the charges early, Andrei, she thought. Just once, let him listen to her, to anyone but himself.