by Greg Keyes
“Excuse me,” Nathan said. “New arrivals.”
Coward, Ilene signed as he walked away. Jia smiled.
* * *
The woman from the helicopter carried a titanium briefcase and a lot of attitude. She had straight, glossy black hair; he guessed her to be in her late twenties. If she was impressed by the sight of a zillion tons of ape strapped to a freighter—or anything else for that matter—it did not show. Nathan felt dismissed the instant she laid her gaze on him, but he was determined not to get off on the wrong foot.
“Welcome—” he began.
“Wow,” she interrupted, taking off her sunglasses, staring at Kong. “Who’s the idiot who came up with this idea?” Then she looked at him, implying she certainly knew the answer to her question. Her eyes were so brown as to be nearly black.
Wrong foot achieved, he thought.
“I’m Maia Simmons,” she said. “My father sent me. I run point for Apex.”
“I’m Nathan Lind,” he replied, stretching out his hand. “Mission chief.”
She took his hand and gave it a perfunctory shake.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m just here to babysit.”
She was already moving past him. Nathan followed her, confused and embarrassed, as the well-armed mercenaries she’d brought with her trailed behind him.
“The Hollow Earth vehicles are on their way to Antarctica as we speak,” Simmons said. “I know you people are cutting edge, but these prototypes we’re loaning you will make what you’ve been flying look like used compact cars.”
“I love compact cars,” Nathan said.
She plowed on as if he hadn’t spoken. “Forget about the price tag, which is obscene, of course. The anti-gravity engines alone produce enough charge to light up Las Vegas for a week.” She glanced over at him. “Feel free to be impressed.”
“Wow,” Nathan obliged. He had never been to Vegas, but he figured that translated to a lot. He had seen the blueprints, and he was impressed—but also uneasy. Why did Walter Simmons think he needed babysitting?
* * *
Night fell, and squalls blew in. The sky groaned with thunder. Curiously, Nathan’s spirits picked up; the darkness and the rain made the world feel smaller, as if he was holed up in his house on a stormy day, talking to friends instead of lecturing people he hardly knew. Gloomy days were sort of his element.
He presented them his map of Hollow Earth and then got into the details. Maia Simmons was there, along with Admiral Wilcox, commander of the fleet. He was a stoic-looking man in his fifties with high, pronounced cheekbones.
“We’ll be at the Antarctic entry in forty-eight hours,” Nathan told them. “This path will get us into Hollow Earth. Once we’re inside, Kong should lead us to the energy source.”
“Is that all we have?” the Admiral asked. “The imaging drones didn’t survive the trip?”
Nathan shook his head. “Something down there pulverized them.”
“Hence the monkey muscle?” Simmons said.
“Only if we get there in the first place,” Nathan said. “The gravitational inversion is like nothing we’ve ever encountered. Our best guess is on entry it’ll feel like bungee jumping—just with the cord tied to your lower intestine. But if your helicopters are as good as you say—”
“HEAVs,” Simmons corrected.
“HEAVs are as good as you say, I believe we can do this.”
“They’ll do their job,” Simmons said. “You just gotta do yours.”
“Excellent,” Nathan said.
With that, she left the bridge, leaving Nathan with the Admiral. Wilcox ran his hand through his closely cropped black hair. Then his gaze rested intently on Nathan.
“Yes, Admiral?” Nathan asked.
“Do you have a military background, Dr. Lind?” Wilcox asked.
“Um, no,” he said. “I pretty much went from being a nerd in high school to a geek in adulthood. I never did the whole—no, I wasn’t in the military.”
“It isn’t for everyone,” Wilcox said. “Not even for everyone in it, if you take my meaning. I have been in the Navy most of my life, Dr. Lind. Just a sailor to begin with, you know. My parents immigrated from Nigeria when I was young. They had big plans for me. Doctor, or lawyer. But I wanted to serve, and that’s what I’ve done.”
“I admire that,” Nathan said. “I really do. I just don’t think I ever had the stuff for it.”
“You never know what ‘stuff’ you have until you’re tested.”
“Sure,” Nathan said. “That makes sense. I—”
“I see you as untested, Dr. Lind.”
“Oh,” Nathan said, now realizing where this was going. “I—ah—I have been tested, Admiral. It did not go that well.”
“People died under your command.”
“Well, technically, my brother was in charge so—” He stopped, cowed by the Admiral’s unwavering stare.
“Yes,” he said. “They did what I told them to do and they died.”
The Admiral nodded. “All those ships out there. You see them?”
“Yes.”
“Every man and woman on each of those ships, they look to me. They expect me to tell them what to do. They expect me to get them through this alive, if it is at all possible. I am sure you understand this is a great responsibility, Dr. Lind—one I do not take lightly.”
“I’m sure you don’t,” Nathan said.
“I, on the other hand, look to you,” Wilcox said. “You’re the civilian in charge of this expedition. I take my orders from you. But that isn’t all there is to it, Dr. Lind. That … Titan out there. And the others. These are far more your realm of expertise than mine. I rely on you. I am counting on you as these people under my command are counting on me. Does this make sense to you, Dr. Lind?”
Nathan regarded the other man for a moment, feeling that weight settle on his shoulders.
“I’ll do my best,” he finally said.
Wilcox shook his head. “You must do better than that, Dr. Lind. Much better. I expect it of you.”
* * *
Ilene stood on the bridge, looking past Kong, through the rain to the lights of the other ships and the dark interstices between them, looking for … nothing, she hoped. And so far, so good.
Admiral Wilcox, who had finished chatting with Nathan, joined her.
“Dr. Andrews,” he said. “We’re avoiding Godzilla’s known territorial waters, according to your guidelines.”
“Good,” Ilene said. Although it wasn’t. Godzilla’s patterns had changed in the past, usually in response to the presence of another alpha. His most recent activity was a bit puzzling, as his attack on Pensacola hadn’t been driven by the presence of another Titan, at least not in an obvious way. But that just pointed out what a volatile creature he was. How Godzilla could know Kong had left Skull Island, she didn’t know. But she was willing to bet he did. Avoiding his mapped patrol routes was the very minimum—and probably the only—thing they could do. She was keeping up with Monarch telemetry, of course, but as he often did, Godzilla had managed to drop off the map again.
The Admiral must have read something in her response, or perhaps her expression.
“Do I need to be concerned?” he asked.
“Yes,” she told him. “They have a way of sensing threats. And we believe that they had an ancient rivalry. The myths say they fought each other in a great war.”
The Admiral nodded knowingly.
“So if they meet again, who bows to who—is that it?”
“I spent ten years on that island,” she said. “Studying him. I know this for sure … Kong bows to no one.”
* * *
The ship lurched, snapping Ilene out of what had been an involuntary nap. She was wide awake now, wondering what could cause such a huge ship to jump like a canoe on whitewater. She was on the small bridge, along with Nathan and Maia Simmons.
“Should she be out there?” Simmons asked.
At first, Ilene wasn’t sure wh
o the executive was talking about—or to, for that matter. Simmons was gazing through the window of the bridge, out toward Kong. It was night and pouring rain. She remembered the Admiral saying something about a squall on the radar, and apparently, they were now squarely in it. Kong had pulled himself into a sitting position against the platform at the bow and was yanking on the chains and manacles that held him. The chains were wound into winches, so that his movements would not translate directly to the ship, but the effect was still bone-jarring.
She, Simmons had said.
Then Ilene saw the tiny form of Jia, padding along the deck toward Kong. Her stride was unhurried, her back straight; nothing in her carriage suggested fear.
Swearing under her breath, Ilene bolted toward the hatch and down the stairs leading to the deck. From there, she saw Jia, now very close to Kong, who still venting his anger and frustration. But as Jia drew up to him, he saw her, and calmed.
Jia reached out her little arm toward the Titan. Kong leaned over, gently extending his hand toward the girl. She reached up and touched his finger—a tiny point of contact for Kong, like a person touching the foreleg of a gnat.
But the effect was undeniable. Kong was no longer struggling. He didn’t seem angry anymore so much as … melancholy.
Ilene closed the gap between her and the girl, shivering in the rain. However calm Kong seemed at the moment, she still flinched involuntarily when she got close.
“Come on,” she told Jia. “Come on.”
Jia ignored her, and she realized she was so flustered she had spoken aloud.
It’s not safe out here, she signed.
Jia turned toward her and started moving her hands.
Kong is sad. And angry.
Join the club, Ilene thought. She flicked her eyes toward the mountain of muscle and bone stooping over them. It didn’t matter if he was chained; from here he could crush them both without trying.
That’s because he doesn’t understand, she told Jia. We want to help him.
He doesn’t believe that, Jia signed.
It was the way she put it that jarred her. The Iwi and Jia in particular did not tend to project their own feelings into words. She was blunt and literal when she said something. If she was speaking for Kong, she was either guessing at his thoughts, or—she knew them.
How do you know? Ilene asked.
He told me, Jia replied. Ilene looked up at Kong as Jia’s words began to sink in. He told me.
Rain cascaded down Kong, flowing around his thick brow ridges. Rivulets coursed through his fur. Southern Pacific or not, the rain was cold. Her breath caught in her chest as Kong lifted his hand, brought it up to his face. His hand formed a shape.
A sign.
Home, he said.
Ilene gaped in amazement. There was no mistake. But as if to prove it, he lowered his hand and raised it again, and again.
Home. Home.
She didn’t notice the rain anymore, and her fear dropped away, replaced by awe.
I knew it, she thought. But to see it made real, to know for a fact was quite … overwhelming. She was watching the dawn of a new world.
* * *
Nathan stood next to Maia Simmons on the bridge, watching the strange tableau, the little girl and the immense Titan.
“Did the monkey just talk?” Simmons asked.
Nathan was too awestruck to answer.
Russell House, Pensacola
Madison closed the door of her room behind her and locked it. Then she gazed around her office, her sanctum, her war room. Newspaper clippings, Post-it notes, photographs and magazine articles were pinned all over the walls, along with a big map of the world with all purported sightings of the Titans for the last three years marked on them. She studied it for a moment, and then placed a Post-it note next to Pensacola.
Apex, it said. Why?
She sat on the bed and looked over at the alligator skull she’d found by the creek in the woods behind the house.
Why? And why wouldn’t Dad listen to her? Or better yet, why had she even gone to him?
Fighting with Dad—or Mom, for that matter, back when that was possible—had never gotten Madison anywhere, and that was now truer than ever. Her father did not trust her. He didn’t trust her opinions, her feelings, or her capabilities. Maybe it stemmed from the trust issues he’d had with her mother—he might have just shifted those onto her after Mom died. Or perhaps it went even deeper than that. All that she knew was that she had proven in the past that her instincts were good, and he had somehow convinced himself of the opposite. He’d said it himself: he only saw her through the lens of what he wanted in his life right now. Someone who would just do what he said. Someone he wouldn’t lose.
But if life had taught her anything so far, it was that losing people was part of life. Everybody died. And some people died way too young, for no reason. And maybe some people who should die survived. The universe didn’t weigh you in the balance before deciding to kill you or spare you, it just did what it did. If you worried too much about that, you would never achieve anything at all.
But even so, she did not make the decision to act on her own right away. If Dad wouldn’t listen to her, she reasoned, someone would. She had some credibility, didn’t she? So she had taken to emailing or DMing everyone she could think of—she still had contacts in Monarch—and anyone who might have some sort of pull, laying out her case.
But she should have known better. They were all nice, and encouraging, and told her they would take her input into consideration and meanwhile she should keep safe and do her schoolwork.
Keep safe? From Titans? The only way to do that was get ahead of them, take the initiative. Act.
But how? There was no ORCA to steal this time, no obvious course of action for her to follow as there had been before.
Or maybe there was.
Apex was obviously at the heart of this, and there just so happened to be a mostly ruined Apex complex right down the road. That was the place to start, if she knew what she was looking for, but she didn’t. What she needed was a guide.
And that … she might be able to find.
She listened to Mad Truth’s latest podcast, and when that didn’t give her a starting place, she pored back through his archives.
“Okay, class, listen up. There’s dozens of Apex facilities up and down the coast. Why’d Godzilla target Pensacola? Wanna know my theory? It’s all about patterns and variables.”
So, on many levels Mad Truth was pretty far out there, she thought, as she went back through the earlier stuff about crop circles and chemtrails, alien visitors, and the works. But when he talked about the Titans, and Apex, he mostly made sense.
Mostly, she thought, as she scrolled past one entry, “Mothra Pregnant?”
She’d been present when Mothra was born—or at least when she went from egg to pupa—and his speculations on the details of a Mothra pregnancy were ill-informed at best. But his inside information about Apex seemed pretty solid and fit with a lot of what she knew or suspected.
“Stick with me, I’m gonna take you back to grade school with this. Godzilla only attacks when provoked, that’s the pattern. Pensacola is the only Apex coastal hub with an advanced robotics lab, and that’s the variable, and add them up and your answer is? That Apex cybernetics is at the heart of the problem.”
Right, she thought. Exactly what she had been thinking. Godzilla only attacked when triggered by something, or when there was another Titan looking to be the alpha. You could add to that at least one case in which he had attacked humans who were trying to capture a Titan. There had been no other Titan in evidence at Apex. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t one. What if Apex had a captive Titan, and Godzilla had been trying to free it?
But that didn’t wash either, because if that were the case, why hadn’t he freed it? The handful of jets firing on him would never have stopped him. It was pretty clear that whatever Godzilla was looking for, he hadn’t found it, and then he’d just left.
<
br /> Then it hit her. What if Apex had figured out how to build an ORCA?
The ORCA was a bioacoustic device her mom and dad had invented together to try to communicate with cetaceans. When they tried to use it, it had been a horror show; a pod of killer whales had beached themselves. They had decided to abandon the whole project—or at least, Dad thought they had. Later on Mom started tinkering with it again to try to deal with Titans that were hunting Godzilla and just generally wreaking havoc. Later, after her mother and father split up and she was living with Mom, she had perfected the device as a way of communicating with Titans. And if you tuned the thing to sound like an Apex Titan, it tended to control the lesser ones and attract the alphas—like Godzilla and Ghidorah.
Her father had shelved the device after Ghidorah was dead and the threat was over. He and Monarch had deemed the technology too dangerous to fool around with. But a lot of people knew about it, knew what it could do, and there were plenty of recordings floating around on the internet of the ORCA working; after all, she had played it over the broadcast system at the ball park to disrupt Ghidorah’s hold over the other Titans. Enough clues for a genius like Walter Simmons to reverse engineer the device, right?
Why? She didn’t know. Simmons seemed to have a real hatred for Godzilla. Maybe he had lured him to trash his Pensacola facility to frame the Titan. Or maybe he had a deeper, more devious plan.
Or none of that. She didn’t have enough information.
But she knew someone who might.
Mad Truth. She had to find him. In person.
And she might know how.
She called Josh.
“Hey,” she said. “I’m gonna need a favor, okay?”
“Yeah, of course,” he said.
She told him the favor.
“I meant of course not,” he said. “You know you can ask me anything—except maybe that. Yeah, definitely not that.”
“Uh-huh,” she replied. “Make it work. In about an hour, okay? Before my aunt gets back.”
She hung up on his objections, then went back to her computer. She found her Mad Truth files, clicked on “episode transcripts” and began parsing through them. As she listened to the latest installment, she thought she remembered something, about bleach…
