Titan Wars: Rise of the Kaiju

by M. C. Norris

  A dance of death was composed with inside Krupin’s mind. A lifetime of fighting and killing had transformed his brain into a computer of violent choreography, where every strike, every contortion of his flying form accounted for all possible reactions and counterattacks with automatic precision, until each enemy was neatly dispatched—all but one, anyhow. Krupin’s eyes came to rest on the broad back of Jochi, lingering at the front of the room like a spellbound ape. His thick knuckles were still ruddy with blood, stained from the beating he’d inflicted. Jochi would die last of all, and he would die in some spectacular fashion. Krupin smiled, as dark artwork splashed against the walls of his mind.

  Dr. Wu probed his stew with a measuring stick, frowning down into a reaction that had stilled to a simmer. As though he’d already arrived at some conclusion, he relocated to a table dedicated to a large manifold of glass filters and funnels. He fussed with the complex system, opening and closing valves, switching on little vacuum pumps, and releasing flows of distilled water through coiled tubing.

  “Okay,” he said, placing his thin hands on his hips, and scrutinizing over his contraption. When no one moved, Dr. Wu spun around and glared at Jochi. He threw up his hands. “What you wait for? Bring me it.”

  “Oh,” Jochi replied, lurching into motion. He retrieved the steaming tub from the floor. Grimacing, he turned his nose, and transported the awkward sloshing container over to the filtration station, where the doctor instructed him which vessel was going to receive the dolphin slurry.

  Pinkish froth slopped against the glass as the level rose. Fragments of bone clinked musically against the bottom. Dr. Wu used a water wand to rinse the vessel walls, as a vacuum pump pulled the thick amalgam through coiled tubing into a magnetic separation chamber. He flipped a switch, and a centrifuge began to spin, pulling all of the solids down into the vessel’s concave paunch. After solids and liquids had been separated, the dregs dissolved, separated, and filtered through several stages, the end result that was captured in an ordinary test tube appeared to be nothing more than a shot of clear water. Dr. Wu inserted a hypodermic needle into the final test tube, and drew back on the plunger. Once the syringe was filled, he held the gleaming needle aloft before Volkov’s digital image.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “Nanobots.” Dr. Wu smiled up at the screen.

  “Looks like nothing to me. How can you tell?”

  “Because I talk to them.” The doctor tapped his temple with his index finger. “Mine talk to them.”

  “You’re communicating with them? Right now?”

  “Of course.” Dr. Wu nodded. “I the master. These slave.”

  Volkov’s jade eyes widened. His image moved a little closer to the screen. He tapped his chest with two fingers. “I want to be a master.”

  Dr. Wu’s smile fell. His gaze hardened on Volkov, as though some silent judgement was being passed. After a moment, he turned away from the monitor, and he strode over to a refrigerator located at the back of the laboratory. Disappearing inside the open door for a moment, the doctor reappeared with a second hypodermic syringe. He held it up to the monitor. “This one make you master.” Lowering the new needle, he held aloft the first one. “This make you slave.”

  “Can I enslave something other than a dolphin?”

  The doctor scowled. “You don’t like dolphin?”

  Volkov cleared his throat, and pressed his fingertips together. “Dr. Wu, you were the best and the brightest in this field of study. For over a decade, you were head of the College of Neurology at the University of Glasgow, where all of the major breakthroughs were being made. You were standing at the top, on the cutting edge of nanobot technology, and then, something happened.”

  “What happen?”

  “You tell me.” Volkov leveled his eyes at the doctor. “You left Glasgow and returned to China, leaving behind a good life and an outstanding reputation. After you left, Glasgow’s nanobot program fell into ruin. Why?”

  Dr. Wu shook his head, clinging to his two syringes. “I don’t know.”

  “The Allied Navy shut you down. Once they’d stolen your technology, your ideas, they made sure that no one else would ever get their hands on it. They took your work, your inventions, and even your best and brightest students, and they poured all of those stolen things into the heads of dolphins.” Volkov narrowed his eyes. “That’s why I don’t like dolphins, and neither do you. We need something superior to the Navy’s swimming clowns. Something bigger.”

  “Kaiju,” the doctor whispered. His eyes returned to the quivering hypodermics in his hands. Their needlepoints were reflected on the lenses of his glasses. “You want Kaiju.”

  Twisting, twisting, Krupin rotated his wrists against their bindings, working the plastic straps down against bone. This was a silent performance. His expression never changed, even as meat peeled away, and blood flowed from his wrists and ankles. He felt warm droplets falling from his fingertips, but bone wouldn’t give. Bone was something that he could pull against with all of his might. Twisting, twisting, he replayed the steps to that deadly dance inside his mind, visualizing every violent change of partners.

  “I want to see your technology work,” Volkov said. “I want to see it work here, now, before we ever take it out into the field.” Squinting one eye, Volkov pointed a finger at Mr. Krupin. “Test it out on the Russian. I want to see you enslave his mind.”

  Dr. Wu glanced back at Krupin, and then implored the looming face on the screen. “Helmet,” he said, gesturing to the sides of his own head. “Must have helmet. Too much data for human mind.”

  “What sort of helmet are you talking about?”

  “Receiver. Data filter.” The doctor frowned, shaking his head, still frustrated by the limitations of the linguistic barrier. “Protect mind’s eye. Too much data. Must protect mind’s eye with helmet. Too much data cook brain.”

  “You can build me one.”

  “I don’t—” Dr. Wu stammered, backing a step away from the monitor. “Don’t know make helmet.” The needles trembled in his hands. He backed into the central island where Mr. Krupin was still and prone.

  “You can get me a helmet, then. Steal one. I don’t care. You can get me whatever I need.” Volkov turned his head to one side. A hitch of his chin prompted the agonized wails of a woman who was evidently staged somewhere just off-screen. Dr. Wu folded his needled hands, begging, pleading, but the Moscow Mongol appeared distracted. Volkov’s smug expression had just plunged like a hanged man through a gallows. Volkov leaned forward until his face filled the monitor. His bulging eyes searched the laboratory, as though he’d just lost track of something of real importance. “Mr. Krupin?”

  Blood and snapped plastic ties were all that remained of the subject on the examination table. The room shook with rhythmic concussions before a flashing muzzle. A rifle bolt snapped back. A stolen pistol joined its former owner on the floor. A second barrage commenced before the Red Brothers’ collective minds could even grasp what had just transpired. Groveling bodies fountained blood from red cavities. One dragged loops of glistening entrails away from the source of the destruction. Not a single scream was emitted, as bullets shredded lower cabinets to tear hot tunnels through cowardly flesh. Gore painted the walls like a gallery of abstract artwork. One hung quivering in the filtration apparatus, missing the better part of his head. The crawling were stilled, the vocal silenced, as Mr. Krupin paid brief visits from a rifle’s length to each Red Brother, until the fat head of Jochi at last filled his sights.

  “Please,” the giant said, hiding behind those softball mitts for hands.

  “Mr. Krupin,” Volkov said, in a voice broken with uncharacteristic cracks, “I brought you here to be a part of this. This is something much bigger than you or I. This was all for you, Krupin. I did all of this for you.”

  Mr. Krupin whipped his wired head in the direction of the monitor, laughed, and licked the blood from his bared teeth. This was just the sort of situation where his mecha
nical mask provided him with a peculiar advantage, because he could not speak, and therefore, was rendered unable to negotiate. He was a beast, a force of nature that could only run its course. Blood streamed from his lacerated wrists and ankles, spattering the floor at his feet as though he walked through a shower of rose petals.

  “You were the only one I could trust to deliver the dolphin here. You’re my best, my very best, and I need you now more than ever.”

  Krupin glanced down at the shuddering form of Dr. Wu. Still hunkered at the base of the examination table, the scientist clenched his pair of quivering needles as though they were the antidote to death itself. However, all Krupin had to do was to start swiveling the barrel in Wu’s direction, and the needles were extended as a peace offering.

  “Mr. Krupin?” Volkov said, his voice rising in timbre by at least two octaves. “Would you like to be the master?”

  Licking his teeth, he flicked his gaze back up to the looming face of his employer. There was the man for whom he’d risked his life on so many occasions, the one to whom he’d delivered so many gifts, for whom he’d suffered so much to please. In the end, no matter how hard he’d fought, no matter what lengths he’d traveled to earn that bastard’s respect, Krupin would never be anything more than a Russian, like Volkov’s mother.

  “You can be the master. You deserve that honor, for all your years of service to the Brotherhood. I want to prove my sincerity,” Volkov said, displaying more emotion than Krupin had ever suspected the man had in him. “What better way could I prove my trust in you, and my respect, than by placing the most powerful weapon in all the world right into your hands? It’s yours. I mean it. Take it.”

  Keeping the rifle trained on Jochi, Krupin outstretched his hand. Red droplets quavered and fell from his fingertips, as they encircled the thin hypodermic that was still cold from refrigerated storage. Strange, that something so immensely powerful could hide itself in a shot of what looked like pure water. Krupin held the syringe to the incandescent lights for a moment to admire the invisible monster within. Satisfied, he rotated the instrument in his fingertips until the needle was inverted, and then he slammed the steel point into his rump and depressed the plunger.

  “Now, I can get you safely out of Nantong.” Volkov’s voice had lowered to a steadier pitch, as though he was feeling assured of some incremental return of control over the situation. “If you’ll take Dr. Wu out back to the loading docks, I’ll send over a drone.” Volkov cleared his throat. “Just hop aboard the drone, and come back to me. Things will be different between us from here on out. That’s a promise. You have my word.”

  The face of Volkov disappeared. The monitor faded into blackness. The only sounds in the laboratory were the buzzing of overhead lights, and the rattling breaths of a dying man. A queer sort of intimacy had fallen over the laboratory where Krupin now reigned king, and after so much drama, the new quietude amongst corpses struck him as being kind of funny. A naughty child who’d just committed some terrible mischief might’ve experienced a similar giddiness, having realized that there weren’t going to be any repercussions, whatsoever. Emitting a chuff of laughter, Krupin tossed the spent syringe over his shoulder. Things had worked out rather well.

  Dr. Wu rose to his feet, and relinquished the second syringe. Holding it up to the light, just as he’d done with the first, Krupin squinted into the living emptiness of the slave serum. Although teeming with wonderful things, once again, there was nothing to see. Slightly pink with dolphin essence, this one felt warmer to the touch. It also felt somehow corrupted. Krupin’s gaze slid down the point of the needle, and at its end, he found the cowering mass of Jochi.

  ***

  “What are you doing boarding our ship?”

  J.J. slammed the periscopic viewfinder against the ceiling. He rose from his battle station to meet the Mad Hatter in the center aisle. From this stark perspective, and for the first time, it was possible to compare the men in size. Collin was surprised to see that J.J. was in fact much larger than their rival, whose indomitable persona and violent reputation had always made him seem much bigger than he actually stood, lean, wiry and unwavering.

  “This hovercraft is the property of the SWCC,” Bent replied, with a voice coarsened by boat exhaust. “You’re civilian support, subordinate to field command, and I’m the tactical field commander in these waters. I own you.” He strode right past J.J., deeper into the Devil Ray, as though any threat that J.J. might’ve thought he’d presented was dismissed.

  The dog began to bark, flashing its teeth at the invader with every snap of its jaws. Collin collared Hotspot, and pulled the animal close. His eyes fell to Bent’s uniform, where the blue bars of a chief warrant officer had been replaced by the silver leaf of a field commander. He wasn’t bluffing. During their two-year hiatus, the Mad Hatter had evidently earned quite a promotion. Although Captain Roswell still outranked him, by entering the Yellow Sea, they’d left the underside of Roswell’s protective wing. Here, Bent could and probably would stymie their fledgling program into irrelevance. However, unbeknownst to Bent, Collin had just flipped his power toggle, and was back in the game.

  While J.J. and the Mad Hatter roared in each other’s faces, Collin spurred his dolphin in the direction of the bloodfin, circling its vanquished prey. Daisy’s oxygen readings were normal, and her stress levels were back in the green. Cresting over waves, and plunging through the valleys between, Collin angled his animal for a perpendicular attack on the target’s vacillating gill. A flick of his thumb unlocked the weapon guard. He armed the nanobot harpoon. The weapon snapped into forward position. The familiar sight of those digital crosshairs nucleated his private screen, as he entered shooter mode.

  “Who’s doing that?” Bent’s voice was a sawblade through rusty metal. “Who’s doing that, up there on that screen?”

  Collin had forgotten about the overhead monitor, where his dolphin’s perspective was being broadcasted for viewing by the rest of the crew. He could only imagine what Bent must’ve been thinking, as he veered in alongside the writhing wall of flesh, but it wasn’t going to take the Mad Hatter long to determine who was in control. Leaping through the monster’s wake, he closed the distance between Daisy and her intermittently exposed target.

  “Well, I guess if you sit down, we could try to explain all of our technology to you,” J.J. replied, with a condescending inflection, “but I’m afraid it might take all afternoon. Kind of complicated.”

  “Is that a drone? I told you to shut it down!”

  “It’s not technically a drone. I don’t know how you’d classify it. What would you call it, Takashi?”

  “It’s way cooler than a drone.”

  “Shut it down! Ground it, whatever it is!”

  “I can’t.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t?”

  J.J. had run out of ways to stall him. The mission was coming down to a matter of seconds, and Collin knew it. If he didn’t squeeze off the shot, then a decoy had just been scuttled for nothing, and another a golden opportunity to prove themselves would be squandered. He gritted his teeth and bore down, driving Daisy just as hard as her body could take it, until the monster’s yawning gill slit was within range.

  The gill slammed shut, extruding gouts of seawater like a clam. Then, it relaxed, and began to reopen. Collin locked the crosshairs onto the slot of crimson innards, and squeezed the trigger on his handset. The weapon’s discharge blew the dolphin askew, filling the viewfinder with a kaleidoscopic whirlpool of darkness and light. Collin lost all orientation, and didn’t know whether to bring her up, or take her down. The animal’s stress levels had pegged the vitals meter, sending Daisy’s biomonitoring system into a cheeping chaos of alarms, until the whole screen crashed to black.

  “What happened?” Jill asked. “Are you still with her?”

  Collin gasped for breath, feeling as though he’d suffered some vicarious blow in the dolphin’s stead. This was a hard point of separation, ripping loose from the psy
che of another being after you’d just become one. It left you feeling disoriented, drained , and disconnected from the rest of the living world.

  “You!”

  Collin felt the Mad Hatter seize two fistfuls of his shirt, before being hauled straight up from his pilot’s chair. Hotspot lunged. Clamping his teeth on the cuff of Collin’s flight jacket, the animal began tugging with all its might. Collin dropped the wireless handset to the floor with a clatter, and spat the mouse-piece from his lips. The headset swiveled around sideways, until he was staring into an earhole, wondering what on earth he was looking at.

  “Let go of him now, or I’ll knock you out,” J.J. said. His voice was close enough that it made Collin’s stomach do a flip. It felt like he was caught in the middle of a bare-knuckle brawl between two heavyweight contenders.

  “What did you say to me, pogue?”

  “Let him go, now.”

  Collin was released the same instant that arms began to grapple. Boots squeaked against rubber flooring, and huge bodies crashed into seats. He struggled to straighten his stupid headset and crawl out of harm’s way, when he noticed that a new window option had appeared in the tiled selection of available hosts. A new host had just come online.

  “Stop it!” Jill shouted.

  This view stream was different from a dolphin’s. Instead of the usual submarine view of an oceanic world, this feed was a bird’s eye view of the situation. Collin was a floating eye looking down at the Devil Ray and the SEAL gunship, sistered by boarding planks and ratlines, five-hundred feet above the sea. Far below, he noticed the transected pieces of a mutilated bloodfin thrashing mindlessly in a spreading stain of monster blood. It didn’t make sense.

  Collin popped the mouse-piece back between his teeth. He crawled between a couple of seats where he wouldn’t be crushed by the brawlers. Toggling past the new aerial perspective, he re-selected the stream of Daisy, who was still swimming near the surface. He double-clicked to drop back into her stream of consciousness, and the sight towering before his borrowed eyes stole his breath away.