Kaiju Wars

by Eric S. Brown

  Samurai One moved so fast it seemed to blur as it waded into the ranks of the remaining kaiju. Its blade claimed the head of one in a shower of steaming black blood. Spinning its sword around, Samurai One impaled another before the great beasts were even able to start moving. One of the kaiju, a truly reptilian creature, raked at the mech with its claws. The kaiju’s claws broke as they met the metal of Samurai One’s armor. The great beast squealed in pain for a fraction of a second before the blade of Samurai One’s sword split its skull in half along the middle of its head. Already yanking the blade free of the great beast’s mangled head, Samurai One spun about as the last three kaiju charged it at once. Colonel Jaeger managed to punch the fastest of the kaiju in the face with Samurai One’s clenched left fist. The great beast stumbled backwards, spitting blood and teeth as the engines on the mech’s back spat flames and launched Samurai One upwards into the sky. The kaiju leaking blood from its lips, flattened nose, and the dent inward middle of its forehead collapsed to thrash about in its death throes. The other two kaiju charged through the spot where it had been, ramming into one another. One of the beasts fell to smash its snout into the ground but the other jerked about making a grab for the mech’s leg. The clawed fingers of its right hand closed around Samurai One’s left ankle. With all its strength, the kaiju roared, emptying its massive lungs of air as it yanked the flying mech from the air and smashed it down to land on its side. Samurai One’s sword was knocked from the mech’s grasp and went bouncing away from it. The kaiju hurled itself on top of the mech before Colonel Jaeger could get it back on its feet. The impact rocked the colonel in Samurai One’s pilot compartment so fiercely that the motion broke the colonel’s neck. The lights of Samurai One’s eyes flickered out as her pilot died. She slumped beneath the raging kaiju on top of her.

  Campbell was there though. He had brought Ragnarok Valkyrie up behind the kaiju and took its head with both of the giant mech’s hand. With a sharp twist and the whine of servo motors, Ragnarok Valkyrie ripped the monster’s head from its shoulders.

  Captain Merrick’s command tank and the other hover tanks had engaged the thing that was Denkirch. Their main guns were emptying their magazines of shells at the man. None of the shells were reaching their target though. Denkirch had flung up some kind of mental shield that stopped them before reached him. They exploded, lethal fireworks flashing red, yellow, and orange against the invisible barrier he had created.

  Denkirch retaliated with a pulse of telekinetic energy that blew three of the tanks apart with a single swipe of his hand.

  “Campbell!” Captain Merrick shouted over the battlegroup’s shared comlink.

  He hoped that Captain Merrick and his tankers could hold on because Ragnarok Valkyrie found herself locked in combat with the last two of the great kaiju. Releasing one of the mech’s long, chain maces again, Campbell slashed one through the air at the side of the closest kaiju’s head. The beast avoided the mace’s head only to have its chain wrap around its neck like a bola. Using the chain to drag the beast to it, Ragnarok Valkyrie took hold of the chain with both hands and used it strangle the beast to death.

  Campbell wondered why the last of the kaiju hadn’t attacked during his struggle with the creature he had just choked to death. He scanned Ragnarok Valkyrie’s tactical display for the beast’s location to see that the kaiju was dead. One of the hover tanks had scored a lucky shot on it. The great beast’s corpse lay on the ground, black tendrils of smoke rising from the mangled remnants its right eye socket.

  “Campbell!” Captain Merrick cried again over the comm.

  Ragnarok Valkyrie turned towards where the hover tanks were going head to head Denkirch. Only Captain Merrick’s command tank and two others were still in the battle. The rest were destroyed. Their burnt-out and crushed hulls littered the battlefield. As Campbell watched, the three tanks fired in unison at Denkirch. Their shells detonated short of their target, striking a nearly invisible shield composed of psychic energy. Campbell knew he had to take Denkirch out. The question was how. The man had just slaughtered almost all of Battlegroup Alpha’s tanks by himself. He had to try though. If he didn’t, Captain Merrick and the others were dead. Ragnarok Valkyrie slung one of its chain maces over its head, building up speed and power with the weapon. The head of the mace swung downward in a mighty arc at the fifteen-foot-tall, glowing man named Denkirch. The mace hit Denkirch’s protective shield with enough force to shatter the skull of a kaiju. The shockwave of the impact rocked the nearby tanks. Denkirch’s shield held if only barely. The man dropped to his knees, weakened, his glowing eyes turning to look upwards at Ragnarok Valkyrie.

  Campbell cursed as Denkirch raised a hand towards Ragnarok Valkyrie. Energy bolts rippled outward from the man’s fingertips. They tore Ragnarok Valkyrie’s right leg. Jagged bits of half melted armor flew from where the energy bolts. Cursing, Campbell set into action a desperate plan.

  “Captain Merrick!” Campbell yelled. “Get your tanks out of here.”

  Campbell watched as the tanks started moving, speeding away from Denkirch and the Greenery’s capital. The attack on Denkirch’s shield and the bolts he had fired that ripped up Ragnarok Valkyrie’s right leg below the knee appeared to take a lot out of him. Campbell gave Captain Merrick a moment to get his tanks clear as Denkirch took a moment to recover.

  Keying in the code that sent Ragnarok Valkyrie’s reactor into a critical overload, Campbell did his best to make peace with God. If his plan worked, neither he nor Denkirch was going to live longer than another few seconds.

  Ragnarok Valkyrie flung herself at Denkirch like a soldier leaping onto a grenade to save his friends only Ragnarok Valkyrie was the grenade. Campbell died instantly as the mech landed on top of Denkirch and her reactor blew in a blast as hot, bright, and powerful as a small-scale nuclear detonation.

  ****

  “Frag me!” Captain Merrick cried out as the giant mech exploded several miles behind his fleeing command tank. Its driver had been pushing the heavy vehicle’s fans to their limit in an attempt to get away from the battle between the mech and the mutated man who seemed to have the power of a demi-god. The shockwave of the blast jarred Captain Merrick forward in his command seat. The command tank’s systems flickered, threatening to shut down, and then crackled back to life.

  Alpha Tango 23 died in the shockwave but Alpha Tango 16 continued to match the speed of Captain Merrick’s own tank. The two hover tanks kept moving at max speed on a course that took them out of Greenery territory.

  Captain Merrick counted himself lucky to be alive. There were no giant kaiju left to pursue his command tank and Alpha Tango 16. After reaching what he felt was a safe distance, Captain Merrick calmed enough to dispatch a recon drone. It streaked across the sky back towards the Greenery capital.

  The data streaming in from the drone confirmed that both Ragnarok Valkyrie and the man named Denkirch were no more. The walls of the Greenery’s capital were scorched and caved in at several places along their length, but the city itself behind them was largely untouched by the explosion generated by the mech’s overloading reactor except for the buildings along its northern edge. That had struck a powerful blow against the Greenery but Captain Merrick knew it wasn’t enough.

  “It was all in vain,” Captain Merrick muttered, shaking his head.

  “What’s that, sir?” the driver of his command tank asked.

  “Nothing,” Captain Merrick lied, attempting to mask the utter defeat he was feeling. “Just get us home as quickly as you can.”

  “Yes, sir!” his driver answered eagerly.

  Captain Merrick removed his helmet and ran a finger through his sweat-slicked hair. The war between the Greenery and Steel Heart, it seemed, was far from over.

  END

  Read on for a free sample of Dargolla: A Kaiju Nightmare

  Eric S Brown is the author of numerous book series including the Bigfoot War series, the Kaiju Apocalypse series (with Jason Cordova), the Crypto-Squad series (with
Jason Brannon), the Homeworld series (With Tony Faville and Jason Cordova), the Jack Bunny Bam series, and the A Pack of Wolves series. Some of his stand alone books include War of the Worlds plus Blood Guts and Zombies, World War of the Dead, Last Stand in a Dead Land, Sasquatch Lake, Kaiju Armageddon, Megalodon, Megalodon Apocalypse, Kraken, Alien Battalion, The Last Fleet, and From the Snow They Came to name only a few. His short fiction has been published hundreds of times in the small press in beyond including markets like the Onward Drake and Black Tide Rising anthologies from Baen Books, the Grantville Gazette, the SNAFU Military horror anthology series, and Walmart World magazine. He has done the novelizations for such films as Boggy Creek: The Legend is True (Studio 3 Entertainment) and The Bloody Rage of Bigfoot (Great Lake films). The first book of his Bigfoot War series was adapted into a feature film by Origin Releasing in 2014. Werewolf Massacre at Hell’s Gate was the second of his books to be adapted into film in 2015. Major Japanese publisher, Takeshobo, recently bought the reprint rights to his Kaiju Apocalypse series (with Jason Cordova) and it is slated for 2018 release in Japan. Ring of Fire Press will be releasing a collected edition of his Monster Society stories (set in the New York Times Best-selling world of Eric Flint’s 1632) later this year. In addition to his fiction, Eric also writes an award winning comic book news column entitled “Comics in a Flash.” Eric lives in North Carolina with his wife and two children where he continues to write tales of the hungry dead, blazing guns, and the things that lurk in the woods.

  Prologue: Prelude to a Nightmare

  Colin Wilson had spent the entirety of his young life both fascinated and terrified by the monstrous entities known throughout the world as daikaiju… or simply “kaiju” as an acceptable abbreviation. The Japanese word means “mysterious beast,” but was interpreted in English as “giant monster.” These creatures live up to both variants of the term quite well whenever they invade humanity’s world to duly challenge the latter’s hegemony in the global food chain.

  These animals of titanic size and tremendous destructive power had begun appearing intermittently across the globe following the atomic bomb tests conducted by the United States during and immediately following World War II. The radiation released into the Pacific Ocean was believed to be the main culprit behind their genesis. This is because many of the kaiju rose from the expanses of that huge body of water, including the first to ever strike a large city: the devastating incursion of Megadron into Tokyo circa 1954.

  Others of Megadron’s ilk, however, seemed to emerge from beneath the surface of the earth, and others still appeared to be released from volcanic chasms following a major eruption. More turned up unexpectedly on remote and uncharted islands happened upon by various crews of explorers, both in the Pacific and off the coast of Sumatra; whereas others seemed to arise from sparsely populated areas on the African and Asian continents, with one emerging from the wilds of Siberia.

  At least one of them, Rhidrah, is confirmed to have fallen from deep space while encased in a slab of ferrous rock circa 1964. The strangest of them all, Sonkora, is alleged to have materialized out of waves of ultrasonic sound produced by an experimental transducer that was said to be powered by human psionic energy. Needless to say, the inventor of the psychotron, Prof. Jules Caulder, was subsequently arrested and indicted for criminal negligence and hundreds of counts of involuntary manslaughter.

  These mighty giants have come in a variety of shapes and sizes through the decades, some bipedal in stance and locomotion, others being quadrupedal; while still others displayed equal comfort using both forms of locomotion. Many were distinctly reptilian in physiognomy, with others having markedly mammalian, avian, entomolian, or piscean characteristics, and a few even bearing a semi-humanoid phenotype. A few other rare specimens appeared to be composed of animate mineral, including some form of semi-organic crystal in one case, and (reputedly) a magma shell in another.

  Other large mutant beasts — much bigger than most normal species of animal and often quite dangerous to humans, but usually considerably smaller than true kaiju despite being theorized to have similar origins — have also appeared from time to time through the years. These creatures are often simply referred to as megafauna, or as Prof. Dendo Valdrona has called them, “false kaiju.” True kaiju often prey on them as often as they do humans, but a few megafauna species have reportedly developed a communalistic or parasitic relationship with certain true kaiju. A few have even reportedly turned the table on the far larger true kaiju by attacking one of the latter in large numbers.

  ***

  There is likewise reputed to be a connection between the genesis of these kaiju and the mutant sub-species of the human race – humans born with mysterious powers – who began appearing at the same time as the kaiju. The majority began spontaneously manifesting their mutant powers roughly around the onset of puberty, with others developing powers after exposure to unusual frequencies of radiation or even sound waves. In some cases, exposure to certain exotic combinations of chemicals appeared to be the catalyst.

  Notably, in a minority of reported but unsubstantiated cases, superhumans claimed to have been given their powers involuntarily during an encounter with otherworldly beings. Some of these strange power-conferring entities appeared as sentient spheres of multi-colored light who communicated with humans and each other telepathically; others manifested as illuminated and unusually tall humanoids of attractive appearance who may have communicated either psychically or verbally.

  A noteworthy paucity of mutants claim to have gained their powers voluntarily, either with the use of magickal spells, or by using magickal or technological means to summon and negotiate “deals” with strange alien beings of interdimensional origin (possibly the same as those who reportedly conferred power onto other people involuntarily).

  Clearly, those who truly qualify for the proper scientific definition of mutant have been popularly conflated with mutates, individuals who were genetically altered by external means following their births. This isn’t surprising, as human language outside of the scientific and academic community tends towards simplifying matters for the layperson. Nevertheless, humans with such powers have sometimes been given the umbrella labels metahumans or posthumans.

  Additionally, a few metahumans have been known to use technological means to simulate superhuman powers, e.g., Mischa Ivanov, who created a belt connected to a computerized generator in his lab that enabled him to teleport short distances; and Goro Takiguichi, who constructed a suit of exo-armor that greatly enhances his strength and enables him to fly by means of a small but powerful jet propulsion system built into its shoulder area. These technological augments may constitute an entirely separate class of “mutant,” or metahuman, as some have chosen to generically refer to them for the sake of linguistic simplification. Others have preferred more specific terms such as hi-teks.

  A large number of people with various psychic abilities, referred to as espers, also began appearing around the same time as the kaiju and the mutants, and they are sometimes simply considered a distinct category of mutants from those with physically based powers. And yes, there are instances of a few hi-teks using technological means to simulate or enhance latent to lower-level esper abilities.

  Some of these mutants and hi-teks have gone to work for the government agencies of their respective countries, while others have offered the services of their superhuman abilities for profit; others still have become explorers, and yet others became either maverick crime fighters or dangerous criminals (in both cases often costumed or at least masked). One is said to have used his powers to leave the planet to conduct a bold solo exploration of either outer or inner space (there are conflicting accounts as to which), though this has never been fully substantiated.

  ***

  When Colin Wilson began researching kaiju and mutants courtesy of his local library, he found out that despite radiation and mutagenic chemicals being held responsible for both of these natural anomalies, there have been reco
rded reports of both in eras of human history long before the 20th century. In fact, many apparent megafauna, mutants, and kaiju play important roles in world mythology, folklore, and legend. Some may have been born purely out of human imagination, but the similarities of many to the kaiju and mutants of today are unmistakable. Hence, these entities may hail from diverse sources, which in turn may or may not be interconnected. These antique sources have also described what may be considered ancient equivalents of hi-teks, human geniuses of engineering who constructed unusual armors or elaborate working devices/weaponry from what would today be considered impressive but crude primitive means. And stories of humans utilizing mystically empowered weapons and armors are abundant in these antediluvian texts (Yamato Takeru and King Arthur Pendragon come immediately to mind).

  Colin’s focus of study was disproportionately focused on the kaiju, however. This was because the havoc they wreaked on entire major cities when they appeared was far more substantial than anything mutants could do even while working in large groups. On the occasions where more than one kaiju appeared in a certain area, they would battle each other fiercely for control of the territory, thus creating even greater degrees of destruction than one typically accomplished alone (which was usually more than catastrophic in its own right).

  Worst of all, the might of the international Armed Forces seemed unable to inflict any serious harm on these beasts, and not a single kaiju was ever reported to have been destroyed. Some were successfully driven or lured from areas of human habitation, but very few ever became a proven permanent casualty of any nation’s military defense force, even with several such agencies working in concert.

  These creatures simply emerged from whichever environment they appeared in, invaded human cities as they pleased, fed on whatever sources of energy or nourishment they preferred, usually successfully resisted all attempts by human police and military forces — and sometimes local superhuman mutants — to destroy them, and then usually departed of their own accord once they were satiated.