by Greg Keyes
“Sure,” Bernie said. “In this business you have to try every road. Some of them are dead ends. But you’ve gotta look at everything to see anything.”
“Like bathing in bleach?” Josh said. “That seems like something you should have looked at twice.”
“Shut it, Tap Water,” Bernie said.
“Tap water is clean, inexpensive, and disease-free!” Josh said. “There are people all over the world who would give anything for that luxury!”
“Sure,” Bernie said. “That’s the idea. Then, bam. Docile pets.”
“I’m not a docile pet,” Josh grumbled.
“What’s that?” Bernie said. “What’s that, Tap Water?”
“Never mind,” Josh said.
Bernie glared at him for a moment, then turned his attention back to Madison.
“So you’ve been up close and personal with Godzilla,” he said. “Tell me about that.”
Madison told him, and then they knocked around the Skullcrawler theory a little longer. She had to admit, given the evidence, it now made more sense than her ORCA theory.
She checked her phone.
“You won’t have reception here,” Josh said.
“I know,” she replied. “I’m checking the time. That readout over there gives our speed, so I’m trying to calculate the mileage. It might be useful for Monarch to have that information.”
“You don’t think Monarch knows about this?” Bernie asked. “You don’t think they’re in on it? C’mon.”
“No,” Madison said. “I don’t think they know anything about this.”
“Not everyone,” Bernie said. “Not your dad, I’m sure. But at the top. Monarch has used Apex as a contractor plenty of times. I mean, did you never wonder why Monarch put a base in Pensacola, of all places? And like, years later Apex built a base? You think that’s coincidence? You want me to name all of the cities where Monarch and Apex both have facilities?”
“Bernie—”
“Hong Kong, for instance?”
“Monarch and Apex may have some of the same interests,” Madison said. “But they’re not the same.”
“They both do shady, covert things with Titans,” Bernie said. “But I see this is bothering you. I’ll stop. I just ask questions. It’s what I do.”
“I get that,” Madison said. “But I’m not so interested in questions right now. I want answers. If you have any, please stop hinting around and just say them, okay? Do you have any actual evidence of what you’re suggesting? And don’t answer my question with another question.”
Bernie drew back a little. “Touché,” he said. “No proof, no. I get it, I get it. A hundred questions don’t add up to a single answer. You think I don’t know that by now? You think if I really had the answers…” He broke off and put his hand on the flask in his holster.
“Okay,” he finally said. “But I’m trying to get them. I am. I’m tired of questions too.” He nodded at her phone. “What time is it?”
“I don’t know,” Madison said. “It’s not working.”
“Is it out of charge?” Josh asked.
“No,” she said. “It’s on. It’s just not working.”
“Electromagnetic fields,” Bernie said. “From the train—more likely the tunnel. Oh, man. We’ll probably all have brain cancer in a week.”
“Yeah,” Josh said. “I’m sure they didn’t think of that when they built this.”
“You see any other people get on, Tap Water?” Bernie asked, caustically.
“Oh,” Josh said, frowning. A few minutes later Madison noticed him pressing on his head with his fingertips.
Apex Facility, Hong Kong
Madison knew they were approaching their destination by the incremental deceleration of the train. Josh felt it too, enough to wake him from his nap.
Bernie, studying his notes, looked ahead, down the tunnel.
“Okay,” he said, as their deceleration intensified. “Okay, slowing down.”
They came to a stop in front of a door identical to the one at the Pensacola end. It slid open, and another crane picked them up and lowered them toward the floor.
“Attention,” loudspeakers blared. “Shipping pods arriving.” Then the message repeated in Cantonese.
Yeah, Madison thought. But with some unexpected cargo.
After they were settled to the floor, the doors opened. The three of them peered out. A ramp rose to meet the car, leading down into yet another gigantic chamber, although the light was so low it was difficult to see exactly how big it was. Behind them the wall seemed to be stone, but everything in front of them was metal, and the place had a distinctly industrial feel. But there didn’t seem to be anything in it except the maglev cars that had just arrived.
“Going in?” Bernie asked.
“Yup,” Madison replied.
They stepped out, and almost immediately the car doors slid shut behind them.
“No!” Josh said. “I swear, every time. Doors hate us.”
“Oh, yeah,” Bernie said, staring out into the shadowed space.
Madison continued to examine the chamber, or hangar, or whatever it was.
Bernie suddenly shouted; echoes came back as if he had yelled into the Grand Canyon.
“Oh, my God!” Madison said. What the hell was he doing? The point was not to get noticed here, right?
“It’s so massive. It’s stupid,” Bernie said, as if that explained something.
“What is this place?” Madison wondered.
“If there’s a corporate-friendly term for sacrifice pit,” Bernie said, “I’d say we are in it.” He waved his hand at something on the floor.
She had been wrong; there was something else in the room, lying just a few feet away. It looked like an eyeball the size of a cantaloupe that had been ripped out of its socket, along with about a yard of optic nerve.
“Oh, God,” Madison said. “That smells.” She knelt down to look at it, realizing as she did that the stink was far too pervasive to be just the whatever-it-was. The air was heavy with the sickly-sweet metallic scent of blood she was all too familiar with.
“Smells like an abattoir,” Bernie said.
“A what?” Josh asked.
“A slaughterhouse,” Bernie said, pulling his finger across his throat. “Look.”
Madison saw it, too. In the dim light you could miss it if the place didn’t stink so much.
Bloodstains, and lots of them.
Loudspeakers suddenly came on, belling out an alarm, the kind that made Madison think of heavy equipment operating or a warning to get the hell away from whatever was making that sound.
“That’s not good,” Madison said. “Bernie—”
“I already hate this place,” Bernie said, walking forward. Red warning lights were now flashing everywhere—and then brighter lights snapped on.
“Warning,” a woman’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “Project M demonstration will commence on floor A in one minute. All personnel are to stay clear of the arena area.”
In the brighter light, Madison saw there were a number of large metal doors set in the walls, each numbered in large white letters. Higher above, observation windows. Higher still, in the ceiling, a panel was opening, revealing an industrial fan. Not too far away, a little bunker was sunken into the floor with glass observation ports all around.
Arena, the voice had said. Somebody was about to watch something happening here, but what? Sports were played in arenas, but somehow, she felt there was not about to be a pick-up game of indoor soccer starting up. Fights? Fights happened in arenas. Boxing matches, wrestling, mixed-martial arts. Who—or what—was fighting here?
Her eyes returned to the bloodstains on the floor. There was a lot of blood. Not just buckets, but dump trucks full.
She thought about the maglev cars, and their cargo of Skullcrawler eggs, and did not like the picture that was emerging.
First she felt a hum and then an aggressive vibration in the floor beneath her feet, and then a huge
circular hatchway opened, near enough to them that they had to stumble back. And from below that cavernous opening, a platform began to rise. With something on it.
It was big, but Madison couldn’t make out what it was through all of the steam surrounding it. What she could see was sort of a mound, with strange squared-off bristles or projections sticking up from it. Like a metal hedgehog, rolled in on itself.
Vents opened and began sucking up the steam; the air began to clear. And whatever it was started to unfold from its crouched position. It began to stand and become decidedly un-hedgehog-like.
* * *
From inside of the control room, Ren Serizawa watched as the machine that was far more than a machine rose into view on the screen. His gaze flitted around the command center, but it came to rest on the focus of everything: the skull.
He climbed inside, where a Titan’s brain had once been, imagining the massive nerves that must have depended on it, witnessed by the size of the stem opening in its base. The organics were long gone, rotted away, but they had been replaced by wires, conduits, fiber-optic cable and strands of superconductor. Some tracked in from supercomputers outside; others were grounded in the skull itself. But all of it snaked itself to the equipment at the crux of it all. The control helmet.
He ran his fingers across the interior of the skull. It had been love at first sight when Simmons showed it to him, but his affections had further deepened as he studied its structure, the fine lacework of rare metals and minerals that ran through it. And even before he began experimenting with it, he felt the power sleeping in that mysterious bone. The fierce sentience that had once burned behind those empty sockets was gone, but some of what had enabled it remained. The skull had not just been a case for the brain inside, but an integral part of the creature’s sentience. And while the neurons and nerves had decayed, what remained in the skull itself was still potent; a natural set of hardware waiting for the right hand to bring it back to life, to harness the essence of it.
And best of all, there had been not a single cranium, but two. Together, the skulls had allowed him to create a radical new technology in a few short years that might have otherwise taken him decades to perfect.
Simmons was over in the observation room, waiting. He thought this was his moment. But it had been he, Ren, who had made this possible. Simmons was good at what he did, but this—this was beyond him. Simmons’s true genius lay more in his vision, and in knowing who to bring in to get the job done than on original invention. And of course, he was quite good at taking credit for the work of others.
Ren was clear-eyed about that, and he didn’t care. The only person he might have cared to impress had abandoned him.
Would you be proud of me, Father? he wondered. To his father, the Titans had been gods to be trusted—served, even. Ichiro Serizawa had never understood the true potential of the beasts he spent his life studying.
Humanity had always been beset by animals stronger, more deadly than its feeble primate members. Tigers were faster and had sharp claws and teeth. A rhinoceros or a bull aurochs could break any man in one charge. A tiny virus or bacteria could wipe out entire populations.
But humanity had risen above all of them. They had fashioned spears longer and sharper than the claws of any predator. Rhinoceroses had been hunted to the brink of extinction for their horns. Aurochs had been tamed into cattle to furnish meat and leather. Bacteria and viruses were still worthy enemies, but for the most part the worst infectious diseases had been eradicated, and many of these organisms had been repurposed for genetic engineering. All this done by the physically weakest of all of the great apes, creatures possessing no natural weapon other than their brains.
The Titans, for all of their size and power, they were just more of the same. The only question was whether they would be driven into extinction or repurposed for human ends. They were not gods; they were not worthy of worship—or of sacrifice. They were animals to be mastered, nothing more.
His father could never have understood that. Let them fight, he had famously said. Only a man who did not care about human beings could say such a thing; only such a man could brush aside the untold casualties that “letting them fight” always led to. When he heard those words—in the media, of course, not from the man’s own lips—he had not been surprised. A man who could neglect his own family so thoroughly was not likely to care about the human race as a whole.
His mother—his father’s wife—had been dead for a week before his father even knew of it. He had been off on some expedition, out of touch with them. He had shown up two days after the funeral—a funeral Ren had been forced to organize himself. At the age of eighteen.
“She understood,” was all his father said to him when he finally came home.
Maybe he was right. Maybe his mother had understood. But that was irrelevant to him, because he had not. Where before there had been a divide, afterward was a chasm. And his father had never supplied so much as a plank to try to bridge it.
Ren took a breath, realizing he had allowed himself to become upset, when he should be celebrating. He took up the helmet and placed it on his head.
Outside, he saw, Simmons was almost in rapture. Of course. But with Simmons it was all about his ego; he didn’t see this moment as the culmination of human potential, but of his own success. Not content to be the master of a corporate empire, he sought to control it all. Ren did not care about that, either. The god-kings of Babylon and Egypt and Tenochtitlan had come and gone, as had countless conquerors and dictators. All were dust now. But the human race itself always moved on, growing in knowledge, in power, in mastery of its world, and someday soon, other worlds. Let Simmons have his moment. Ren’s achievements would outlive him. Whether anyone knew that or not, he did not care.
He sat in the reclining chair and considered the control helmet, with its dozens of connections snaking off into the surrounding machinery.
Ren settled the psionic helmet on his head. It ran through the colors of the rainbow and back again; he felt the colors in his brain and smiled a little. The control helmet was not only his invention, but also his new favorite toy. Each time he put it on, he felt it had expanded him in some way. At first, he had used it merely to manipulate shapes on a screen, but eventually he had developed to moving the fingers of a mechanical hand; and he had felt the hand. But it was interfacing through the skull that was truly amazing. The granular control; the insights into his own psyche—unsought, but incredibly valuable. In these last several months he felt like he had finally truly become the man he was meant to be.
“Commence uplink,” Simmons said, over the comm.
“Engaging uplink,” Ren confirmed.
And as energy began to course through the hardware and the skull, it all poured into him. He reached out with invisible senses toward the other bone in the machine. They touched, united, and in an instant the senses of his own body dropped away.
* * *
At first Madison thought she was looking at a machine—wires and gears, metal and synthetics. But there was something organic about it; in places Madison thought she saw muscle and sinew, nerves instead of wiring. And up there, on the head, a robotic eye, whirring, dilating—the thing, she realized, that Bernie had described seeing in the lab in Pensacola. The missing object.
Now found.
Of what it was supposed to be, there could be no doubt. The squared off-fins clicked into place as Madison watched, forming a ridge down the middle of the back of the construct, following down to a long, armored tail. Standing on colossal legs, waving far smaller arms, the thing was almost a parody of Godzilla, a child’s attempt to make a Titan from an erector set.
But when the eyes began to glow, it didn’t look silly in the slightest. It looked incredibly dangerous.
“It’s like a … robo-godzilla…” Bernie said.
“No,” Josh said, slowly. “That’s Mechagodzilla.”
So I guess they aren’t building a Skullcrawler army, Madison thought. The
n why all the eggs?
The machinery supporting the construct retracted; then the giant robot—cyborg?—began running through a series of motions; lifting its arms, opening and closing its claws, and so forth, like a series of check-ups, Madison realized. If the “eye” Bernie saw just got here, that probably meant this monstrosity had just been completed. They wanted to see if it worked.
And they were in an arena with it. Her bad feeling about this situation was just getting worse and worse.
SEVENTEEN
From the notes of Dr. Chen:
The cuneiform texts unearthed at Ras Shamra tell of a battle between Yahm-Nahar, whose names mean “sea” and “river,” with Baal, whose name means “Lord.” Yahm’s palace is in the Abyss, where he lords cruelly over the other gods. Baal travels to confront him. He is beset by various sea-monsters and is in danger of defeat, but then Kothar-wa-Khasis, Craftsman of the Gods, steps in:
Thereupon answers Kothar-wa-Khasis: “As I have been telling you, and as I tell you again, Cloud Rider. You must annihilate your foes. Then you shall reign as king forever.
Then Kothar brings down two weapons and names them: “Your name is Yagarush, Banisher. Yagarush, banish Yahm, banish Yahm from his throne, Nahar from the seat of his authority. Spring from the hand of Baal, like a bird of prey from his fingers. Strike Prince Yahm between the shoulder blades, between the shoulders of Judge Nahar.
The club springs from the hand of Baal, like a bird of prey from his fingers. It strikes Yahm between the shoulder blades, between the shoulders of Nahar. But Yahm is strong; he is not beaten, his joints do not quiver, he does not fall.
Kothar brings down two weapons and names them. “Your name is Ayamar, Driver. Drive Yahm from his throne, Nahar from his seat of power. Fly from the hand of Baal, from his fingers like a raptor. Strike on the skull of Prince Yahm, between the eyes of Judge Nahar. Let Yahm collapse and fall to earth.”
The weapon flies from the hand of Baal, like a raptor from his fingers. It strikes the skull of Prince Yahm, between the eyes of Judge Nahar. Yahm collapses, he falls to the earth. His joints tremble. His spine shakes. Then Baal drags him out to finish him.
