Titan Wars: Rise of the Kaiju

by M. C. Norris

  Titan Wars: Rise of the Kaiju

  M.C. Norris

  Copyright 2017 by M.C. Norris

  For Annie, Jill & J.J.

  Love always,

  Me

  Chapter One

  Skyler dragged her ruined legs through a lake of blood and champagne. Didn’t know where she was going, and didn’t matter. Just obeying basic instincts. Instincts that kept her crawling away from what had so briefly been the greatest moment of her life. That moment had passed. So had the lives of all of those people who’d shared in her celebration. All of them were dead. All that remained of Skyler’s research team and their project was one bloodstained sack of canisters. She just kept crawling. Kept dragging that burden into the boat’s darkest recesses where, she supposed, she would die.

  The mutilated thing in front of her was Paul, the project’s technical director. It was he who’d first welcomed her aboard the team. Lover of Kansas City jazz music, Italian food, and his dachshund, Peanut, he was now recognizable by his watch, and by the smell of his aftershave. Just another obstacle in her path. Skyler clawed her way over his corpse, and through the shards of a dropped champagne flute.

  An empty bottle of the most expensive stuff that a team of government scientists could afford rolled side to side with the boat’s rhythmic pitch, clunking dully against the cabin baseboards to the sluice of China’s Yellow Sea. Lancet beams of sunlight pierced the scads of bullet holes ripped through the cabin walls. The collective whine of drones was growing louder, as greater numbers of the floating cameras converged on the scene like a swarm of agitated hornets. Every second of the carnage was being recorded, and piped live to the Internet. Their multitudes were grim assurance that Skyler’s life was still hanging in jeopardy, and that millions of viewers worldwide were gawping at their screens, straws to their lips, drinking deeply of the last moments of her life with morbid fascination shimmering in their eyes. Cruel memes were probably already popping up all over social media, mocking her fate, her attackers, and prompting endless threads of inane commentary.

  Skyler screeched when something slammed against the steel door that she’d bolted shut behind her. They were coming for her. Another impact struck with such force to brighten the room with a flash of sunlight around the seam. Again and again, the cabin strobed with light as the steel door bent around its deadbolt from the blows of what sounded like a swinging axe. They were smashing their way in.

  Hitching her way across the cabin floor like a crushed insect, she painted a bright trail of blood wherever she crawled. There was no place to hide where they couldn’t track her. Scooting behind a console of scientific instruments, she pulled the sack of freezing cylinders onto her lap, wrapped her arms around the bundle, hugged it tight, and stared at the buckling door. Beyond the crash of steel and humming drones, there was yet another sound that added to the chaos. It was a noise that Skyler couldn’t identify, and she hated it. Every deafening roar-grunt was punctuated with the rasp of claws against steel, and what sounded like clattering chains.

  “Open the door, little girl. You will live.”

  Not likely. Not after what she’d just seen happen to an entire crew of unarmed scientists. Popping corks and jubilation were snuffed by the massive shadow that had spilled across their deck, until a rising wall of blackness eclipsed the sun. As though their scientific triumph had disturbed some oceanic horror from its slumbers, the thing emerged from the briny depths until it loomed against the sky. Awestruck, her team stood paralyzed as their boat was dwarfed by the shimmering tonnage that soaked their decks with cascading water that streamed from its back. Once the massive thing became identifiable as a hull of steel, the submarine’s portholes swung ajar. Men clambered out, and began dropping like a hatch of spiders from their ratlines. Others racked the bolts of mounted chain guns, and swiveled the huge weapons onto Skyler and her paralyzed crew. Without demands, explanation, or a hint of warning, a thunderous fusillade began hammering the flesh of talented scientists into red mist before spewed jettisons of flame and jingling brass.

  A hovering drone eyed Skyler through a bullet hole. The little spy studied her through the punctured steel wall with benign curiosity, before whizzing away. Skyler plunged her hand into the wet sack, and encircled her fingers around one of the twelve frosty cylinders. She could feel the precious liquid sloshing against the container’s insulated walls, and her emotions threatened to overwhelm her. This wasn’t fair. She didn’t deserve to die like this. None of them had. They’d worked so damned hard for so many years, and it was right there in the palm of her hand, the answer to the ultimate scientific question: are we alone in the universe?

  Another roar-grunt, raking claws against metal. Skyler jammed the canister amidst a rabble of cleaning products, and slid the cabinet door closed. There, her most precious thing of all would hide. Its cooling system contained enough fuel to keep the water sample as cold as the depths of space for another decade, if that’s how long it took for it to be discovered. Skyler’s last and only hope was that her orphaned canister would one day be recovered by someone honorable, and that she and the others wouldn’t have died in vain.

  “Oh, God.”

  A tremendous blow folded the top corner of the cabin door inward, bathing the room in sunlight. A shaved head filled the triangular aperture. Crazed eyes leered from a face that Skyler didn’t understand. The lower-half of the man’s face was peeled away, showcasing a skeletal grin. The pirate extended his tattooed arm through the opening, fumbled the deadbolt, and flipped it aside. The door exploded inward before a rush of fur and straightening chains, and those roar-grunts escalated to primal screams. Twin beasts, favoring their handler in the skinless aspects of their protruding muzzles, gnashed their bared fangs, and reached for her with splayed claws.

  Drones floated into the cabin. The expensive toys of faraway voyeurs jostled one another in their haste to secure positions that would afford the best cinematic angles from which to capture whatever was about to happen to her. Skyler clutched the frigid bundle to her breast, backing into the corner. Nowhere else to go, she could only glower up at the nightmarish face leering over the tussock heads of his leashed baboons.

  At this proximity, she could see that the pirate wasn’t exactly disfigured. The skinned aspect of his face was in fact owed to a masochistic system of steel wires that radiated from lip piercings to a common anchor point on the backside of his head. It was like a mask—or rather, it was a mechanism by which his face itself was stretched and twisted into a mask.

  “What do you want?” she asked, knotting the bag’s fabric between her fingers. “I have nothing at all.”

  It was true. She had no money, and she never wore jewelry. No one aboard this vessel ever carried anything more valuable than a phone or a calculator. Scientists were not wealthy people, and they gave no illusions to the contrary. It seemed a senseless risk and a waste of life for pirates to attack such a boat when the only cargo to be plundered was the treasure of knowledge.

  Unable to speak through his facial contraption, the pirate glared down at the bundle in her arms. He hitched his chin, and emitted a throaty bark. The demand was simple enough. He wanted the sack. Whether or not he had any practical use for its contents, it was pretty evident that if she dared to resist him, she would die.

  “No,” Skyler replied.

  This was supposed to be the day of the big payoff. She’d dreamt of this day, and the validation it would bring to her four years of crushing calculations and code to ensure the safe return of an unmanned probe from the depths of outer space. Today, with the whole world watching, Skyler’s team had managed to recover the cargo pod containing twelve canisters of water drawn from beneath the icy crust of Europ
a, Jupiter’s frozen ocean moon.

  The madman’s jaws sprung wide, and he roared at her face. Loosening his grip on the baboons’ chains, he allowed the vicious animals another foot of slack. This was her last chance, and she knew it. Violent impulses electrified the demon’s eyes.

  “I said, no!”

  Skyler gritted her teeth, as the thing in the web of wires let chain more links slide through his fingers. Apes lunged at her throat, fangs red and slick with the gore of her fallen teammates, but Skyler refused to relinquish her water samples. She only tightened her embrace. Those canisters were as close to being her children as anyone married to science could ever hope to hold, and if anyone intended to steal them away from her, they would have to pry them from her cold and lifeless hands.

  ****

  Turbines winding down, the Devil Ray settled upon the sea, until the supersonic hovercraft’s underbelly was lapped by the waves. Her stealthy profile was reduced to a razor’s edge on the horizon. In the distance loomed the black mass of the target. The piratical submarine dwarfed the little patrol boat whose crew of scientists had just been slaughtered. A billowing column of smoke spewed from the crippled vessel. It was an ominous beacon that could be seen as far away as Shanghai.

  Collin sucked a deep breath through his nostrils, and exhaled through gritted teeth. This was it. The big day had finally arrived. The Nautical Experimental Weapons Team was going to prove to the Allied Navy, and to the world, that the NEWT program was no laughing matter. If everything went off without a hitch, the military would be forced to recognize their little geek squad as a formidable assault force deserving of some respect, in addition to some continued funding. This test would be pass or fail. Botch the first mission, and they’d be handed one-way tickets right back to their civilian lives.

  “Nailed that landing, buddy,” Takashi said, as J.J. emerged from the cockpit, and joined the rest of his team in the hovercraft’s control room.

  “What do you got, Takashi?” J.J. asked. “Any swimmers out there?”

  Although their team leader’s voice remained steady, the sheen of perspiration on J.J.’s brow betrayed the anxiety gripping his emotions. Collin could relate. He suspected that they were all feeling the same squeeze. Up until now, their program had always seemed like little more than a realistic video game. Not anymore. Things were about to get very real.

  “I’ve got two,” Takashi replied, anticipating J.J.’s next question by opening a pair of hologram windows with his fingertips. The pale glow of his ocular implants often widened and narrowed, but those artificial eyes never blinked.

  “Which ones you seeing?”

  “Disco and Rowdy.”

  “Alright,” J.J. said, clapping twice. He smeared the sweat from his face, and dropped his hands onto his hips. “That’s not a bad start. Let’s go, Rowdy.”

  In an instant, tensions throughout the team relaxed by some palpable measure. The first bud of collective confidence began to swell with the assurance that Rowdy was down there somewhere, rocketing toward the scene. Rowdy was the most dominant of their animals, so wherever he went, the others usually followed. Getting them all to a specific location in a short amount of time was the only aspect of a mission that was out of the NEWT’s control. Just like human beings, they could be distracted. Something more interesting than the mission could capture their attention, and there were occasionally those days when they’d rather just fool around than go to work. That didn’t seem to be the case today. Rowdy’s speedy response to the coordinates made it feel as though half the battle had already been won.

  “Wait a sec. Here come a couple more.” Takashi’s fingertips manipulated thin air, conjuring brilliant imagery out of nowhere like some sort of a technical sorcerer. Those bionic eyes of his only added to his wizardly visage. “Looks like we’ve got Pepper and Moxie.”

  “Four will work. Let’s do this thing. Piece of cake.”

  “Initiating sync.” Jill switched on her laptop controls. “Stand by for the feed.”

  “Roger.” Collin squinted behind the visor of his Mindbender Rift headset, as the choppy video stream began to flicker before his mind’s eye. He fought to control his heartrate and breathing before Takashi had a chance to point it out. Nausea passed within a minute or so, but the psychosomatic effects of a deep dive into a host’s stream of consciousness could be more serious than a case of vertigo. In Collin’s opinion, it was worth enduring a little neurological turbulence for a chance to rocket beneath the waves at fifty kilometers per hour inside the hijacked mind and body of a dolphin.

  “Testing streams, one through four,” Jill said, as she prepared to switch feeds from one armed dolphin to the next.

  Collin relaxed his mind, allowing Jill to hack the implanted network inside his head. It always felt strange being out of control, but he trusted her. Jill knew her way through the whorls of his brain perhaps better than he did. Collin grimaced as she shut down one relay and activated the next, derailing him from one dolphin’s sensory stream to another. There was no transition between subjects, just a jarring drop between different bodies. “Check two, Disco. Check three, Moxie …”

  “Weapons check, one through four.”

  Each of the team members had received the same cerebral nanobot implants, the same headset, and the roughly same amount of initial training, as dolphin pilots, but none had taken to the water half as naturally as Collin. As a result, Collin was nominated to be the sheepish star of their show. There didn’t appear to be any love lost amongst the others, since each of his teammates had openly expressed their own reasons for relinquishing him the spotlight. J.J. was a physical person, who was more comfortable with the controls of an aircraft in his hands. Jill didn’t have the stomach for deep streaming, and Takashi’s ocular implants inhibited the visual stream, so he was flying blind.

  “You ready to take some pirates to school, Aquaman?”

  Collin clicked his tongue, and gave Takashi a thumbs-up. He always maintained a professional level of modesty, but the truth was that whenever Collin was dropped inside the head of a dolphin, the whole experience felt wonderfully natural. He believed that the source of his strength in the streaming seat was his emotional connection to the dolphins. They were more than test subjects to Collin, who enjoyed playing amongst their pod until his hands and feet shriveled into prunes. Being a lifelong introvert, some of the best friends he’d ever made were those dolphins. When a training exercise was over, shutting down the cerebral sync was just the worst. From the point that Jill killed those relays, and yanked the plug on his ocean world, his inglorious return to an awkward human body felt like a small death. There were times when he thought—and he never thought it too loudly—that he might’ve even been born the wrong species.

  “Looks like we’ve got a couple of inflatable boarding crafts grappled to the bulwarks of the damaged vessel,” J.J. said. “We need to take out those chain gunners first, and then focus all our firepower on the inflatables.”

  “What about the sub?” Takashi asked.

  “Looks like a millennial-era model. Double-hulled Russian, if I don’t miss my guess.”

  J.J. never missed his guesses when it came to being a military geek. For having never enlisted in the armed forces, it sometimes seemed incredulous that J.J. should know so much about the military. His expertise occasionally invited teasing from uniformed soldiers and sailors, until they heard the story of his father’s sacrifice during the End War, and learned—oftentimes, the hard way—how that particular subject was a can of worms best left unopened.

  “I’m saying—can we blow it up?”

  “No. No torpedoes. We’re authorized to kill pirates, not sink subs.”

  “Major bummer.” Takashi narrowed his bionic eyes to burning slits.

  Takashi was just eager. Like the rest of them, he was dying to show the Allied Navy the full power of the NEWT’s destructive capability. Their pod of killer dolphins could sink that Russian sub with no more difficulty than if it had be
en a child’s bathtub toy. However, today’s mission was a bit of a balancing act. Drones were everywhere, recording everything, and the last thing that any of them wanted was to wind up in some viral video compilation of military fails, right before losing their jobs.

  “First target in sight,” Collin said.

  The NEWTs quieted. All heads swiveled to the monitor that displayed Collin’s perspective. Green abysms were rushing by, as Collin maneuvered Rowdy’s sleek form alongside the massive submarine. Everyone was surely tingling with the same temptation. Sending that hulking machine to the ocean bottom with one well-placed torpedo would’ve been just as easy as jabbing a sleeping hog in the butt.

  “Oxygen levels?”

  “Seventy percent,” Jill replied.

  The well-being of his dolphin was a top priority, because Collin didn’t need to wonder what it felt like to be cerebrally hijacked. Through training simulations, he’d found himself on the receiving end of that transaction more times than he cared to remember. Having your mind commandeered by an outside presence could be a pretty terrifying experience. You had to learn to trust your phantom puppeteer to bring you up whenever you needed a breath, and to release their control whenever the stress levels in your bloodstream indicated that you were having a panic attack. The big difference between dolphin and human hosts was that the dolphins never understood what was happening, or grasped the danger into which they were being thrust.

  “Alright,” Collin said, “I’m bringing Rowdy up into firing position.”

  “Permission to fire, when ready,” J.J. replied.

  Trained dolphin programs in the military were nothing new. Naval forces worldwide had dabbled for more than a century with the notion of transforming the so-called clowns of the sea into living torpedoes. In the end, these earlier programs all fell to the wayside when trained dolphins proved inferior to war machines. Dolphins didn’t always follow orders to the letter, and they liked to play around. That was the root of the prejudice that the NEWT program struggled to overcome, despite the fact that their fantastic spin on an old idea was unlike anything that had ever been imagined before.