by Greg Keyes
* * *
Tingua Preserve, Brazil
Monarch Outpost 58
Titanus Behemoth
Mariko crawled through the hatch and into the access tunnel. The alarms were blaring, and everyone was running around like crazy.
Behemoth was awake.
He had been sleeping deep in a cave in the Tingua preserve not far from Rio de Janeiro. Mariko had been on the crew that discovered him, her first job with Monarch. First job, period. After the containment was set up, she had volunteered to stay on. It was actually a great gig. Behemoth was, to her, the most interesting of the Titans, and when free time came her way, Rio and its beaches were less than an hour away – quicker, if she could catch a helicopter ride. Her Portuguese had gotten pretty decent, she’d made friends. She was only twenty-five; the future had looked bright.
But now everything had changed.
She reached her destination, a panel on the wall of the tunnel. She did her job quickly, then continued down the tunnel, opened another panel, and dropped down into the room beyond. Mounted high in the cave, the room was shaped like a hockey puck. The wall of the circumference was transparent, giving her a good view of the giant below.
His legs were folded under him; his mighty tusks curving above him. As she watched, he struggled against the containment field, trying to stand up.
“Mariko? Why didn’t you just use the door?”
She turned and found Erik staring at her, his bespectacled eyes full of puzzlement.
“I was checking the wiring in the access tunnel,” she said. “The meter downstairs showed some resistance. It looks okay up here, though.”
“You could have sent a tech,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said. “But I wanted the view.”
“Are you crazy? He’s trying to break out. Like the others.”
“I know,” Mariko said. “What are you up here for?”
“Backup,” he said. “Dr. Singh has us on standby to use the kill switch.”
Not all kill switches were the same. Each was tailored to its Titan. And no one was sure if any of them would work. But Singh was pretty confident with their setup.
Behemoth roared, and pushed up hard, swinging his head through the containment field and shredding the equipment that powered it. The field vanished. Floodlights snapped on, everywhere. Toward the front of the cave, dozens of security personnel took positions.
“Erik?”
The voice came from the intercom built into a control panel that otherwise had a few indicators and a single switch, locked beneath a cover with a keypad entry.
“Dr. Singh,” Erik replied.
“We’ve had negative results here – we’re not sure why. Go ahead and enable the backup kill switch.”
“Will do, Doctor.”
He punched in a code and flipped up the cover.
“Enabled,” he said.
“Do it,” Singh said.
Erik reached out and flipped the switch.
Nothing happened.
He flipped it back, and then again.
“Nothing’s happening,” he reported. He checked the instruments.
“There’s no power!”
“No,” Mariko said. “There’s not.”
Erik looked at her, eyes wide, then glanced at the hatch to the access tunnel.
“You were in there. You cut the line that triggers the cascade.”
She nodded.
“Oh my God,” he said. “Are you one of them?”
“I’m Monarch,” she said. She nodded toward Behemoth.
“Look at him,” she said. “You think we have the right to just kill a god? He was here long before we were. There are cave paintings of him in here that are twelve thousand years old. That’s just after people got here. The indigenous people still have a name for him – Mapinguary. You heard Emma. We have to let him go.”
“You’re as crazy as she is. How long have you been working with her?”
“I’m not,” she said. “At least not the way you mean. You heard her speech. She’s right. Our seas are dying, the rainforests are nearly gone, thousands of species exterminated. I’m proud to help her.”
Behemoth rose to his full height. Or at least his full height on four legs. There was a running bet about whether he could go bipedal or not. She was in the “yes” camp. His tusks and thick hair made him look superficially like a mammoth, but he was really built more like a giant ground sloth; his forelimbs were longer than the back, and he rested on the knuckles of hands or paws with thick, sharp claws. The only way he could use those claws was to stand up on his stubbier hind limbs.
She saw muzzle flashes from small arms but couldn’t hear the gunshots.
“You’ve killed us all,” Erik said.
“Probably,” she said.
Behemoth leaned back, and his forelimbs came up from the floor. His tusks dug into the ceiling, and the entire cave shook. He swatted the soldiers shooting at him with his claws. It looked almost funny from this distance, like he was knocking over toy soldiers. She felt sorry for them, for everyone who had to die. But this was how it had to be.
“I was right,” she said.
“About what?”
“Bipedal,” she said.
“Goddamn it,” Erik yelled. He climbed into the crawlway.
It didn’t matter. There was no way he could fix it, not in time.
Blue-white flame jetted toward the Titan from somewhere near her. Behemoth screamed and turned around. He was facing her now; she could see his eyes, the eyes of a god. An angry god, whose sanctuary had been violated.
The fire spewed at him again. This time she saw where it came from, a nozzle protruding from the ceiling. She hadn’t known about that.
Behemoth saw it, too. He roared and lunged forward.
“Come on,” she whispered. “You know what to do.”
The ceiling of the cave was higher, here. This time when he rose up, he was nearly at his full standing height. His face was meters from her when his tusks smashed into the ceiling. Huge chunks of stone tore loose, followed by a tremendous explosion as the reservoir of napalm or whatever it was breached.
Behemoth turned back toward the cave entrance, covered in flame. The fire seemed to find no purchase on his fur, and quickly burned out. He didn’t look hurt at all.
The cave, however, was filling with fire, and rock was still falling. The observation room shook, wobbled crazily, and tore loose from the ceiling.
Mariko had one last sight of Behemoth, crashing through the barriers at the cave entrance.
* * *
Jebel Barkal, Sudan
Monarch Outpost 75
Titanus Mokele-Mbembe
The ground twitched beneath Nez’s feet. She almost didn’t notice, but then she saw that nearly everyone in the control room was looking around, puzzled.
Then the floor lurched, and people began screaming.
“Satellite?” Nez snapped.
“I’ve got nothing,” Connaught said.
She turned on her headset.
“Squads,” she said. “Everyone shout out, in order. What are you seeing out there?”
None of the helicopters had seen anything, nor had anyone on the ground. The desert was quiet. Nothing on radar, either.
“It’s M&M,” Keller said. “He’s moving.”
“Hit the kill switch,” she told Kearns.
He shook his head. “Turn on the containment field.”
“I’m way ahead of you,” Keller told him.
The floor kicked up, hard, overturning tables, sending people and equipment flying.
“What the hell is going on?” Kearns yelled.
“Radiation levels are rising,” Keller said. “And I’m getting something on the bio-sonar monitor.”
“Mokele?”
“Yes. His heartbeat is quickening. But there’s something else, something more distant. Sir, he’s pushing against the field.”
Nez keyed on the radio. “I want all cho
ppers back here, now,” she said. “Recon units, you too. Be ready to fight.”
She looked up at Kearns.
“He can’t get through the field,” the scientist said. “He can push all day. Mothra’s field was sabotaged. Ours is intact.”
“Sir, that’s bullshit,” Nez said. “He’s breaking free. You know what you have to do. If you don’t, I will.”
“Sergeant,” Lang said. “These creatures—”
“Jesus,” Keller swore. The lights dimmed.
“What?” Kearns snapped.
“The containment field just overloaded.”
“Evacuate the base,” Nez said. “Now.” Then she pushed him aside and ran toward the kill switch, only yards away. Before she got there the entire building abruptly flipped on its side. She flailed through space and hit the wall so hard it knocked half a ghost out of her.
Nez came to with the taste of blood in her mouth, a god-awful stench in her nostrils, and a sound like a rockslide that just went on and on. Bodies littered what used to be the wall of the building; the whole place was shaking. The power was out, but light poured in through splits in the metal of the prefab.
As she rose to her feet, the whole building dropped and tilted again, more slowly this time, until it was upright again.
She was two meters from the door. It burst open and sand and gravel began pouring in through the bottom third.
They were sinking.
“Everybody out, now!” she yelled.
Kearns was clearly dead, as were several others. Keller and Esmail were alive, but dazed.
“Out, I said!” Esmail nodded rapidly, scrambling up the mound of dirt and through the door. She managed to get Keller on his feet and dragged him through.
Outside, the once-level ground was now a slope. The three of them scrambled up it as the building behind dropped another few meters, burying the door.
She turned and stared.
It was like watching him being born. He emerged from beneath one of the pyramids. Control had been almost on top of his containment and was now falling into the hole Mokele-Mbembe was leaving behind. Most of the compound was still intact. Monarch personnel were pouring from the buildings, screaming to high heaven, flailing their arms, tripping over one another.
His back broke out first, gray, pebbled like some lizards she had seen. Enormous five-clawed forelimbs pulled at the edge of the pit, and then his long, curved horn knifed out of the sand, followed quickly by his head.
It looked something like an earless elephant, except that its tusks turned down, rather than up. His tail had unwound; it made up two-thirds of his body length.
His trunk flickered out like a snake striking, straight at them. She yanked out her sidearm, but she was already too late; it snatched Keller, pulled him back. The long, elephantine head opened like a crocodile’s, revealing thousands of teeth.
Then Keller was gone.
“Run,” she told Esmail.
An Osprey shrieked by overhead, and then another, jamming with their fifty-caliber guns, launching rockets. She looked back in time to see a missile explode against Mokele-Mbembe. It didn’t seem to bother him much. That trunk was fast, whipping around and snatching up people three and four at a time. It was completely out of the pit now, lurching forward on four thick legs. The front legs were a little taller than the rear. Its tail sliced through a pyramid and then flicked up to cut an Osprey in half.
It was as if the world was new again, she thought. The monsters had ruled in the beginning. Now they returned to rule again.
* * *
Skull Island
Monarch Outpost 33
Titanus Kong
Alone. Quiet. He sat on the mountain ridge and looked over his territory. The gleaming waters that held the sun in their waves, the shore where land and sea met.
The grassland and the jungle, all quiet. The heat of the sun warmed his fur. The last of his wounds was now merely just an itch along his ribs.
In time, he climbed down from the ridge; he walked his old paths, to the places where the world of both night and day crossed the paths of always-night, the hollows in the stone where the enemies lived. That was quiet too; the smell of the enemies was faint and old. His feet felt nothing in the stone. He went from valley to valley, searching. He went by the little things that spoke to him in voices like wind, but they had nothing to say.
He returned to the ridge and watched the colors in the sky, watched the sun burn behind the clouds, dim, vanish.
He watched the smaller sun appear above. A breeze came, from some distant place, a place he did not know, with strange scents on it.
He heard the call.
He had heard calls before. Not the enemies who killed his parents, the deep-dwellers. Others somehow more like him. When he was young, he did not hear them often. But in recent seasons the calls were more frequent. Once he had heard one of the others, near, very near the island. But it wanted nothing of him. So he did not care.
But this other wanted something. Wanted him to come. To hunt together.
And he heard responses. Many of them.
For a long time, each season was much like the next. The rains came and went. The animals of the island were born and died. And he went on as always.
But something had changed now. It made him restless. It made him a little angry. Change was not good.
Let them stay away from him, these others. He did not care about their places, their islands. Best they did not come for his.
He felt movement in the stone beneath him, and his anger grew brighter.
The deep dwellers heard the call, too. The crawlers with faces like bone that haunted his sleep. They were waking.
The quiet was over.
He scratched the itch on his ribs and began to hunt.
FOURTEEN
From Dr. Graham’s collected notes:
Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber’d and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
—The Kraken
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
On monitor after monitor the same thing was playing out. The monsters were all coming out to play. And people were dying, most in fear and panic, some fighting bravely, all outmatched by the return of the sleeping gods to the world.
One by one, the monitors went to static.
“I thought we were going to release them gradually,” Jonah said. “One at a time.”
He sounded as stunned as she felt.
“I’m not the one doing this,” she said.
Only one monitor still displayed an image. Monster Zero, on his throne of fire, all three heads shrieking in unison.
The bunker shook; lights flickered.
I’m no longer in control, she realized. It was Monster Zero. He was doing all this. This has gotten away from me.
Jonah got it too. He studied the screen.
“Long live the king,” he said. She thought she heard triumph, filtered through his accustomed sarcasm.
Then he left.
Something moved in the corner of Emma’s vision. She turned, and to her horror, saw Madison had been standing behind them, watching everything.
“Maddie—” she said.
“You’re a monster,” her daughter told her. Then she sprinted off, and Emma was alone.
* * *<
br />
Brooks woke up to a fair, coolish morning in the highlands of Yunnan. He took a Humvee, a science team, and a squadron of soldiers down to the old facility. The bodies had been removed, but rusty bloodstains still covered the floor. The techs confirmed what he’d already guessed, that the security and containment systems had been sabotaged, almost certainly with Emma’s help. He hoped to find some other clues. One team had already been through the data, but he thought he might notice something they hadn’t.
He’d only been there a couple of hours when he got the call from Hess, a Monarch communications officer.
“Brooks here,” he said.
“Dr. Brooks, things are developing. You should probably get back up here.”
* * *
Ling stood before the waterfall, staring through it at Mothra’s cocooned form. Feeling her.
She hadn’t told Brooks everything she knew. She felt a little bad about that, but she still wasn’t sure of all the facts herself. Only what her mother and aunt told her, and her grandmother. The stories collected not from indigenous peoples or ancient sources, but those passed down from mother to daughter.
We are connected to her, she’d been taught. Connected for numberless generations.
She had wondered if it was true, of course. How much of her matriline’s mythology was real, and how much fantasy created by time and imperfect transmission? Myths were like a game of Telephone, becoming less like the original every time a different teller learned it.
But Mothra was real. She had learned that at a very young age, and not by telling. Firsthand. It was so long ago, so strange, that at times in her adult life she wondered if she had dreamed it, if it was some sort of false memory.
But the connection was tangible. She’d felt it then, and she felt it now, growing stronger.
In the last few hours, something had changed. Mothra had shivered, as if she felt a jolt of some sort. Her transformation had quickened in response. And she had a sense of apprehension. And need.
The clouds had been gathering above, and now a harsh, cold rain began to fall. Ling continued to stand in it, ignoring the chill, listening to Mothra hurry toward her second birth.
