Kaiju Preservation Society(31)

He handed me the field glasses. “Check for yourself.”

I took the glasses and trained them on the kaiju. I didn’t remember the face, but I did remember a chunk of kaiju flying into the air during the fight. This kaiju had an impressive chunk of it missing in its midsection. “That’s the one, all right,” I said, and handed the glasses back to Kahurangi. “It covered a lot of ground between then and now.”

“It got its ass kicked and hasn’t stopped running since.” Kahurangi put the glasses back up to his face.

“You saw this thing get in a fight?” Satie asked us.

“Yeah,” Kahurangi said. “We were almost in the middle of it. We had trees flung at us.”

“And this one was injured?”

“We saw chunks come off. Big ones. Why?”

“Because—” Satie stopped because the kaiju let out another stream of plasma. This one traced up the edge of the lake, making trees burst as it did so. I stopped the timer. Satie looked at me. “How much time?”

I glanced down. “Two minutes, eight point three eight seconds,” I said.

“Okay, this is weird and gross,” Kahurangi said. “Things are dropping off the kaiju.”

“Like what?” Satie asked.

“I don’t know. It looks like dandruff the size of small animals.” Kahurangi looked around the glasses at Satie. “Are those its parasites?”

“Most likely,” Satie said.

“So why are they falling off the kaiju?”

“For the same reason rats leave a sinking ship.” Satie opened up a line back to base. “Base, this is Chopper Two.”

“Chopper Two, go ahead.”

“Spotted untagged kaiju, can visually confirm venting. Kaiju is currently at a two-minute interval and parasites are abandoning, over.”

“Acknowledged, Chopper Two. Recommend RLH protocol.”

“Acknowledged, base. Initiating RLH protocol.” Satie switched off. He glanced at Kahurangi. “You can put those glasses away now.”

“What’s the RLH protocol?” I asked.

“It means run like hell,” Satie said, turning the helicopter.

“And we’re running like hell because—”

“Because the kaiju is probably about to go up.”

“Define ‘go up,’” Kahurangi said.

“You two were told about how kaiju are nuclear, yes?”

“Yeah. I’m still not sure how that’s supposed to work or if I really believe it.”

“Believe it. They’re nuclear, and it’s not a problem, until it is. A kaiju hits puberty and its bioreactor formed badly, or it gets into a fight and the integrity of the reactor is compromised. And then it goes very, very bad, very, very quickly.”

A light went on in my head. “Venting,” I said. “That plasma beam isn’t something it’s doing on purpose.”

Satie shook his head. “No. It’s something it’s doing to try to get its reactor back under control.”

“Does it work?”

“Sometimes. You can tell how bad it is by how much the kaiju vents. Once every couple of hours, it might survive.”

“That one was two minutes between vents,” I said.

Satie shrugged. “That’s not so survivable.”

“How do the parasites know that?” Kahurangi asked. “They’re not leaving because they’re counting the intervals.”

“No,” Satie agreed. “They’re leaving because they’re starting to burn.”

Kahurangi opened his mouth to say something, closed it, and opened it again. “I’m going to ask a really stupid question here—”

“Yes, the kaiju is a walking nuclear bomb,” Satie said. “That was your question, yes?”

“Actually I was going to ask something else about the parasites, but, uh, I guess, never mind that now. A fucking nuclear bomb?”

“How are you surprised?” Satie said. “What did you think we were talking about?”

“We were told these things had reactors!”

“Yes, and?”

“A nuclear reactor is not the same as a nuclear bomb! There are actual, like, safeguards in a nuclear reactor!”

“He has a point,” I said.

“No, he doesn’t,” Satie said. “These things weren’t built. They evolved. Evolution doesn’t overengineer. The kaiju nuclear bioreactors work well enough. Until they don’t.”

“And then they wipe out all life over a hundred square kilometers,” Kahurangi sneered.

“They don’t go up that big,” Satie said.

Kahurangi started to say something, but I held up a hand. “How big do they go up?”

“Your average kaiju will go off like a ten-or fifteen-kiloton bomb,” Satie said.

“I don’t have any sense of that,” I said.

Satie checked his instruments. “It means that if that kaiju went up right now, we’d be just beyond the light blast damage radius.” He glanced back briefly at Kahurangi. “Which means we’ll survive. This helicopter has shielded electronics and instrumentation so it’s resistant to being fried by an electromagnetic pulse. This is not the first time we’ve had a venting kaiju. Every minute we fly takes us farther away from it.”