by Greg Keyes
She turned and jabbed a finger at him.
“If you’re even thinking what I think you’re thinking—”
“No,” he said. “This isn’t about Kong stopping Godzilla. It’s about us stopping him. It’s about Hollow Earth.”
“Then I don’t follow,” she said, pulling the hood of her rain slicker to better protect her face from the downpour. “You said this has something to do with genetic memory. I assumed you meant Kong’s memory of an ancient feud with Godzilla’s species.”
Nathan shook his head. “I don’t want to throw Kong into a fight with Godzilla any more than you do. I’ve seen some new satellite scans of Hollow Earth. Good ones, taken by Apex. Life needs energy, Ilene. Plants use sunlight. Animals and fungi and bacteria break energy out of chemical compounds, from either living or non-living material. Like slow-burning fires. But in Hollow Earth, well—there’s an energy source, almost unimaginably powerful. I think the wellspring of life is down there, at least some of it. Waiting for us to discover it.”
Honestly, at the moment, she wouldn’t have been that unhappy if a flood swept Nathan off and buried him in the salt marshes. She’d been right about not liking what he would have to say.
“A power source?” she snapped. “In Hollow Earth? This sounds nuts even for you, Nathan.”
“It’s there,” he insisted. “We just need Kong to bring us to it.”
“The second you bring Kong out of containment Godzilla is going to come for him. You know that. Camazotz proved that beyond any doubt.”
They reached the biodome, cycled through the airlock. They were out of the rain, albeit soaking wet. Nathan gazed around, his face full of wonder. And purpose.
“This is amazing,” he said.
“Don’t change the subject.”
“You said yourself, you can’t keep him here forever,” Nathan said.
“No!” she said. “Our meddling has already wreaked havoc on Kong’s habitat—no way am I letting you drag him halfway around the world to use him as a weapon.”
“An ally!” Nathan insisted. “To protect us—lead the way down there.”
“And what makes you think he’ll go in?” she demanded, holding her palms up toward him. “And how do we get him there?”
Nathan paused. “I’ve seen what’s going on out there,” he said. “The storm is here to stay. This island will not recover from this, not as it was. Life will survive and adapt, as it always has, but the ecosystem that nourished Kong—it’s gone, and it isn’t coming back. And there is no place like it on Earth, at least not above ground. You always believed Skull Island was like the Hollow Earth come to the surface. This could help him find a new home. And it can save ours.” He glanced meaningfully at Jia. “And hers. That power source may be our only hope. Please, we’ve gotta stop Godzilla. This is our only chance. We have to take it.”
She sighed, then turned her gaze up to where Kong’s makeshift spear was still hanging from where it had punched into the dome. Nathan was right. This place was and had always been a temporary measure. And Godzilla was on the move again, which meant there was a good chance politics was about to become involved once more. Walter Simmons and Apex had a lot of political clout, maybe enough to have Kong taken away from her whether she agreed or not. Worse, there were plenty of people in important positions who still held to the idea that the Titans should all be summarily executed. Godzilla’s seemingly heroic actions had muted their voices, but now that Godzilla was public enemy number one, they would be heard again. Some would demand Kong be put down while he was still Monarch’s captive.
Nathan was right about another thing. Skull Island was ruined. Even if things returned to normal this afternoon, it would take decades for its ecosystem to recover.
“Okay,” she relented.
“Yes!” Nathan said.
She stuck a finger in his face. “But when it comes to Kong, what I say goes.”
Nathan’s face lit up. “You name the terms!” he said. “Thank you! You won’t regret this!”
His kissed her cheek and then sprinted off, presumably to radio Walter Simmons the good news.
“I already regret it,” Ilene said.
She looked down at Jia.
This is our home, Jia signed. Ours.
“Our home is together,” Ilene replied. “You and me.” In the distance, Kong grunted, then growled, very low. Agitated.
You have no idea, big guy, Ilene thought. However things turned out, in the immediate future Kong was going to be a very unhappy Titan.
Russell House, Pensacola
Madison’s dad showed up late, looking tired and carrying a pizza, which he laid on the table. She acknowledged him with a bare nod. It had been a full day since she had seen him, since their fight at the aid site. She had spent the night with her aunt, but had received a text to return home after school. The pizza said he might be trying to make amends, but she wasn’t sure she was ready to play along.
“Look, Madison,” her dad said. “I’m sorry. Just when you showed up, things were—you saw. And you’re down a letter grade in three subjects.”
Right, she thought. This isn’t about Godzilla at all. It’s about homework.
“Two,” she said. “I took the make-up quiz in Chemistry.”
“You shouldn’t be down in any of them.” He sighed and pulled some plates from the cabinet. “You know that,” he said. “I don’t have to tell you.”
“Then don’t,” she replied, and was immediately sorry she’d said it. “I shouldn’t have bugged you the other day,” she said.
“I get it,” he said. “After last time. But I just… If I could have kept you away from all of that, I would have. And maybe I could have, if I had been around. I wasn’t. But I’m here, now, Maddie. I don’t want to see you pulled into this mess.”
“I just know I can help,” she said. “I have as much experience as anyone with these things. I learned a lot from Mom. I know you may not want to hear that…”
“Maddie, I loved your mom. I still love her. But that situation—with Jonah and his men, all of those murders, Ghidorah … you shouldn’t have been involved with any of that. You were a kid. And as much as you may hate to hear it, you still are.”
“Dad—”
He bent his head down. “For me, Maddie,” he said. “I can’t … the idea of you getting hurt, or worse. I can’t take it. So please.”
That sounded suspiciously like he was leading up to something.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“They want me at command and control,” he said. “I’m supposed to fly up there in the next couple of days.”
“Great,” she said. “I’ll go pack.”
He shook his head. “You’re staying here. Cassidy is going to sleep here and keep an eye on you.”
Madison stared at her plate for a moment, torn, angry, and at the same time on the edge of tears.
“It’s not fair,” she said.
“You need to keep up with school,” he said.
“No, not that,” she said. “You’re blackmailing me. With your fear. I’m supposed to cower at home for the rest of my life because you’re afraid something might happen to me? It’s not fair.”
“Maddie…”
“No,” she said. “That’s fine. You go to command and control. Save the world. I’ll stay here and … go to school. But you’re going to owe me.” She forced a smile.
Her dad nodded. “Are we through fighting?” he asked.
“Truce, for now,” she said.
“Pizza and a movie.” “That sounds good,” he said.
But secretly, she was already making plans. No more asking permission. She would just have to count on forgiveness.
Skull Island
The goal was to put Kong on a ship and sail him to Antarctica. Finding a ship that could carry him and restraints that could hold him turned out to be the easiest part of that equation. Getting him on that ship and in those restraints—that was the quandary.
Nathan grew increasingly nervous about the huge task as the day approached.
“We learned a lot from the disaster of 2019,” Araya said, studying the feed from Kong’s enclosure. “We had a one-size-fits-all approach to Titans, and put far too much trust in our containment fields.”
Araya was the head engineer on site. He had read her profile; she had a list of degrees and accomplishments as long as Nathan’s arm. She almost as tall as he was, powerfully built. Her eyes were a remarkable shade of brown, almost gold.
“You were in Brazil, with Behemoth, right?” Nathan said. “One of the few survivors.”
“Yes,” she said.
“But that was sabotage,” Nathan pointed out. “Not a fault in the technology.”
“Of course,” she replied. “But that goes to the trust issue. What can be turned on can be turned off. Even the best door only works if it is closed. But it wasn’t just containing them I’m talking about; it was the conceit that we could control them, kill them if we wanted. Meu Deus, the hubris. Understand, we found most of the Titans quiescent to begin with. We just built containments around the places they had already chosen to sleep. In several cases, the termination protocols were applied when they started to wake—and failed, anyway. Titans have an ability to sort of … ramp up when they need to. Exceed what we calculated about their resilience from their resting capacity.”
“And how is Kong different?” Nathan asked.
“He isn’t,” Araya replied. “But we’ve had a long time to study him, and since Ghidorah, we’ve learned a little humility. How do you think we got him into his enclosure in the first place?”
“I hadn’t thought about that,” Nathan said. “I guess I figured you built it around him.”
Araya shook her head. “Back in 1973, a lieutenant colonel named Packard tried to take Kong down with napalm. He almost succeeded. Of course, Kong was still relatively young then, about a third of the size he is now. What dropped him wasn’t the fire but the fact that the napalm sucked up all of the oxygen from the immediate atmosphere. Kong needs a lot of oxygen to function. His lungs are bigger in proportion to his size than ours are, but that doesn’t matter if there isn’t anything to put in them, right? But what Packard didn’t realize—if he even understood what happened—was that it also takes time for the oxygen reserve in Kong’s blood to completely deplete especially if he’s active and angry. Because there is also a lot of blood. You ever hyperventilate before diving underwater?”
“Yes,” he said. “My brother and I used to see who could stay under longer.”
“Right. You enrich your blood with oxygen before holding your breath. When Kong is active, his blood is always enriched.”
“I assume you didn’t napalm him to get him into the enclosure?”
“No. We sequenced his DNA, and we built models on how to subdue him with an odorless chemical that is both a gas and water-soluble. It bonds with his blood like oxygen does, but it isn’t oxygen. That’s combined with a general soporific to keep him down after his oxygen levels return to normal. We introduced it when he was already naturally asleep. The first three times we tried it, it failed anyway. No one was killed but … it was close. The fourth time we got the dosage right. Then we used choppers to move him into the biodome and sealed it up while he was still snoozing. So we’ve done this before. We’ve got this.”
“And it won’t hurt him, depriving him of oxygen?”
“There’s enough oxygen left that there’s no risk of brain damage,” she said. “Believe me, nobody here wants to hurt him.”
“That’s commendable.”
“Yes,” Ayara said. “Also, if we hurt him, there is a spectacularly good chance he will kill us all. The lieutenant colonel I told you about? Packard? Kong crushed him like a bug.”
* * *
Pacific Ocean
Ilene experienced the whole thing like a nightmare she couldn’t—or rather, was unwilling—to wake from. When they doused Kong with the gas, he woke, briefly, feebly pawing at his face before succumbing. Techs swarmed over Kong as if he were Gulliver, and they Lilliputians, building a harness around him for the helicopters to fasten to.
Then they opened the biodome with shaped charges, and the rain came in, pounding the last remaining fragment of the Skull Island ecosystem mercilessly, lashing it with lightning, tearing limbs from the trees. She cried, then; Skull Island was a place of great beauty and bloody horror, and it was like nowhere else in the world—and now it was gone, all of it. It sank into her how irrevocable her decision had been; there was no going back now—not for Kong, not for Jia—not for her. Skull Island was as lost to the world as the age of dinosaurs.
For the first time since she had known the girl, Jia wept, pulling into herself and refusing Ilene’s attempt to comfort her. If her heart had not already been broken, that would have done it.
The ship was a modified bulk cargo vessel equipped to handle close to 100,000 tons of Titan on its broad deck. The scaffolding had been stripped away and replaced by huge reels to spool on the chains needed to hold the Titan down.
There was nothing to see of the island as the ship pulled away; just the storm, reaching high into the heavens. But as the ship started moving, the giant storm dwindled with surprising speed, until there was nothing to see in any direction except ocean and ships.
Though the expedition’s route took them through the Southern Pacific and its inhabited islands, they didn’t pass within sight of any of them. This was by design, as they were trying not to draw attention. On the surface, given the size of the fleet accompanying them, that seemed ridiculous. But in practice, the South Pacific and the Antarctic Ocean they were bound for were so vast, four times as many ships wouldn’t draw attention unless someone knew where and when to look.
Jia came out of her shell after the first few days. She stayed on deck. When she wasn’t looking at the bound form of Kong, she stared out at what for her must have been impossibly distant horizons. Even before the storm came ashore, there had been near-constant tempests surrounding the island. In ten years, Ilene could only remember about four when the ocean horizon was visible, and then usually not for long. She had spent one of those days observing Kong, who had done little but stare at that unusually clear sky and far horizon with what she believed to be intense curiosity. She had watched a rather spectacular sunset with him before the black clouds closed back in. But Jia’s people didn’t live on the coast. She may have never seen such a distant skyline.
The world is so big, Jia said. Is this all of it?
No, Ilene told her. Not even close. There is a lot more.
Is it all water? That’s all I see.
No, there’s plenty of land, Ilene assured her. You will see it one day.
Jia shrugged her ambivalence, then pointed at Kong with her lips.
He doesn’t understand, she said.
I know, Ilene replied.
TEN
“So you gotta ask yourself, loyal listeners. What is it about Pensacola that attracted not only a Monarch watchpost but also an Apex Cybernetics facility? If you ask that question, they’ll tell you it’s because of the Naval Air Station. That Monarch and Apex both like having the infrastructure of a military base around. And you know, that makes sense for Monarch. But Apex? Why do they need military protection? Because more than half of their income comes from the military–industrial complex? Or because they do contract work with Monarch? If there was only some way to know who came here first. Oh, wait, listeners, there is. Public records. The NAS had been here since 1913. Monarch is trickier, because they were covert for so long, but I have it on good authority they put in a station here in the 1970s. Apex? They built their plant seven years ago. A.G. After Godzilla.
“It goes in a pattern, people. Show me an Apex facility and I will show you a Monarch base nearby. The question is … why?”
Mad Truth, Titan Truth Podcast #212
The South Pacific
Let me go to him, Jia signed, for p
erhaps the hundredth time.
Ilene sighed and put her hand on the girl’s shoulder.
It’s not a good idea, she replied. He’s angry, confused…
Sleepy, Jia said. Sad.
They gave him something so he wouldn’t struggle. But that’s also making him confused. He might not know who you are. You stay here, with me.
She and Jia stood on the ship’s bridge, looking through glass at the heart-wrenching sight of Kong stretched out, manacled at his ankles, wrists, and neck by chains whose links were larger than most trucks. He was conscious, barely, his glassy eyes shifting now and then in their sockets. Beyond the transport, an armada of ships, both military and civilian, cruised the South Pacific, the largest navel expedition since the fight with Ghidorah and the Titans under its control.
Nathan approached from behind them, timidly, as if fearful Kong would not only tear loose at any moment but would know who to blame for this degradation and where to find him.
“Whoo,” Nathan said, as he came onto the bridge. “I can smell him from up here.”
Outside, she heard the clanking of chains, and saw Kong was dragging himself to a sitting position and looking up toward the bridge.
“He can smell you, too,” Ilene replied. “Still not a fan, huh?”
Coward, Jia signed.
Nathan noticed. “What’s she saying?” he asked.
“It’s just an Iwi expression,” Ilene replied. “It means you’re very brave.”
Nathan smiled at the girl. “Oh,” he said. Then he looked back out at Kong. He glanced at the control panel. The display indicated Kong’s level of sedation, which she knew to be over eighty percent. “Use a light touch on the sedatives,” Nathan said. “He’s our escort. We can’t have him comatose when we reach Hollow Earth.”
“What happens if Kong won’t go down willingly?” Ilene asked. “What do we do then?”
He shied away from her gaze, seemed to be searching for words.
The intercom saved him from having to voice his uncertainty.
“Dr. Lind, please report to the forward deck, Dr. Lind.”
