Kaiju Preservation Society(32)

“Unless it decides to chase us,” Kahurangi said.

Satie shook his head. “It’s not chasing anything anymore. It went to that place to die.”

“How do you know that?”

“When kaiju know they’re dying, they try to head to water. The ocean if they can get to one, but any large body of water will do. Don’t ask me why; I’m a pilot. But it’s definitely a thing. The KPS learned that the hard way.”

“What do you mean?” Kahurangi asked.

“This Tanaka Base isn’t the first Tanaka Base,” Satie said. “The first one was about forty klicks east, on a peninsula on the inlet there. This was in the sixties. Juvenile kaiju with a bad reactor came through, walked right up to the base and went off. Eighty people dead before they knew it.”

“Why’d it come into the base at all?” I asked.

“I’m not a kaiju, I don’t know why they do things. But now we keep bases away from large bodies of water, and”—he motioned with his head to Kahurangi—“Dr. Pham and now Dr. Lautagata here make the ‘stay away’ pheromones to mark our territory around the base.”

“And that works,” I said.

“It’s like everything about the kaiju,” Satie said. “It works until it doesn’t.”

The world in front of us got very bright, which meant the world behind had gotten even brighter. The kaiju had gone off.

“It’s about to get very bumpy,” Satie warned us. “Dr. Lautagata, if you want to throw up now, you go right ahead.”



* * *



“I did not throw up,” Kahurangi said, at dinner that night, as he recounted the day’s events to Aparna and Niamh. He and I had just gotten out of an hours-long meeting with Brynn MacDonald, her Blue Team counterpart, Jeneba Danso, Tom Stevens, and the leads of the biology and physics labs, going over everything from our helicopter ride. Martin Satie had been excused to tend to his helicopter. Apparently, he would be going out again soon.

“No, you just got enough radiation passing through your body to spontaneously turn into a tumor,” Niamh said.

“I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work like that,” Kahurangi replied.

“That’s just what a person who has spontaneously turned into a tumor would say.”

Kahurangi turned to Aparna. “You’re the biologist here. Help me.”

“I’m not saying you are a sentient tumor,” Aparna said. “But I would have to run some tests to be sure.”

Kahurangi pointed at me. “Jamie was in the same helicopter! Where are the tumor accusations there?”

“I am definitely mostly tumor at this point,” I admitted.

“I thought we were friends,” Kahurangi said, narrowing his eyes at me.

“Tumors have no friends,” I replied. “In other news, I found out today that Kahurangi has a doctorate.”

“I mean, we all have doctorates.” Aparna pointed to herself. “Dr. Chowdhury.” She pointed to Niamh. “Dr. Healy.”

“Fun fact, Healy means ‘scientific’ in Gaelic,” Niamh said. “I am Dr. Scientific. You may bow to me now.”

“I think I won’t,” I said.

“Look at that, the tumor is jealous it only has a master’s.”

“I am not. Okay, maybe a little.”

“We still like you,” Aparna said.

“And by like, we mean ‘pity,’” Niamh added.

“If it makes you feel better, you have added a whole bunch of stuff to our workload,” Aparna said.

“Well, good,” I said. “How did I do that?”

“Technically, you didn’t, the poor exploding kaiju did,” said Niamh. “And not just us, everyone. Turns out exploding kaiju within traveling distance don’t happen that often.”

“They do for us,” Aparna noted.

“Yes, strictly going by numerical averages it happens to us four far more often than most people here,” Niamh agreed. “Today has been all about looking at the data you two tumors have brought back, plus the material we got from the aerostats.”

I nodded at this. Aerostats were what we had instead of satellites—Balloons with instruments, up where the kaiju won’t try to fight them or eat them. It’s how we knew about that kaiju in the first place. An aerostat picked up the radiation from the kaiju venting.

“See.” Kahurangi pointed with a fork. “They definitely did not need us there. They could have covered it all with an aerostat.”

Aparna shook her head. “No. Your video of the kaiju was useful. A much better angle. We got a better look at the parasites running away.”

“Not that it did them any good,” I said. “It’s hard to outrun a nuclear blast.”

“You did,” Niamh pointed out.

“We didn’t outrun it, we outflew it.”

“Barely,” Kahurangi added.

“Oh, come on,” Niamh said. “Stop with your whining already. Today you outran a horny kaiju and a mushroom cloud. If you can’t enjoy that, there is a problem with you.”

“Thank you for the horny kaiju footage, by the way,” Aparna said. “That was … interesting to see.”