Kaiju Preservation Society(33)

“You should have caught the live show,” I said.

Aparna nodded. “I’ll bet it was something. Unfortunately, it’s on the back burner for a while because of the exploding kaiju. It’s a huge disruption to the ecosystem.”

“A nuclear explosion will do that,” Kahurangi said.

Aparna shook her head. “It’s not that. Well, it is that, just not the way you think it is. The creatures here have a different relationship to radiation than we do, or life back home does. It scrambles our DNA and is lethal to us in high doses.”

“Turns us into tumors,” Niamh said, toggling fingers between me and Kahurangi.

“Here they use it,” Aparna continued. “It’s not a danger to them like it is to us. A nuclear event happens, anything that isn’t immediately killed by the blast starts heading to the blast site.”

“To do what?” Kahurangi asked.

“To feed, basically. A kaiju going up like that is just part of the life cycle here.”

“So, you’re saying there’s a migration of life to the blast crater.”

“There is. From small insects all the way up to other kaiju. They’re all on the move.”

“Which is the other thing,” Niamh said. “You remember how they said something as powerful as a nuclear explosion thins the wall between this reality and ours?” Kahurangi and I nodded. “Well, we just had a big damn nuclear explosion, and right now the barrier between our world and this one is tissue thin at that location.”

“What’s there on our side?” I asked.

“Apparently, nothing,” Niamh said. “It’s part of a Canadian provincial park or something. No people and nothing larger than a moose, and I’m sorry for any moose who wanders over here. But on this side, we’ve got kaiju. Lots of them. Fucking Kevin and Bella and Edward, and some others, too, all starting to head in that direction. They can accidentally push through to our side. So our job until the breach seals enough to block them is to keep them away. Which means you”—she pointed at Kahurangi again—“will be making lots of your time brewing avoidance pheromone to keep them out, and you”—they pointed to me this time—“will be spending lots of time taking helicopter rides to spray it into their faces.”





CHAPTER

12




So here is what happens when a kaiju explodes with the force of a nuclear bomb.

First, there’s the actual explosion and what comes immediately after.

To start, there’s a nuclear fireball about 250 meters in diameter vaporizing anything inside of it, including the kaiju in question. This made an impressive crater on the shore of that unnamed lake, which because it was on the shore, was now filled in by the lake itself.

After that, a kilometer-wide zone of heavy damage: trees shredded and on fire, animals turned into charcoal, everything literally a smoking ruin.

Beyond that, four kilometers of trees knocked down and everything in the zone receiving what on our Earth would be a decidedly fatal dose of ionized radiation. Kaiju Earth creatures were hardier, as Aparna noted, but it’s not to say that those in this area were happy, because there was still thermal radiation to consider. Everything alive in that zone got burned, fatally or otherwise.

The kaiju exploded near the surface, and the mushroom cloud sucked up a vast amount of dust and debris, launching it thousands of meters into the air to be distributed by the prevailing winds—fallout. That fallout would eventually spread itself over more than a thousand square kilometers of the Labrador Peninsula.

The Kaiju Earth atmosphere was thicker and more oxygenated than the air back home, which offered special considerations concerning the damage of the blast—the initial shock wave from the blast had more pressure behind it, creating a wider radius of destruction, and the extra oxygen gave fires more fuel to burn. This was counteracted by the fact that the place the kaiju went up at was effectively a swamp jungle, and the trees on Kaiju Earth have evolved rather better fire resistance than the ones back home. Which meant the firestorm resulting from the blast was relatively brief and limited. A storm that came up from the west in the evening dampened it further.

At no time was the Tanaka Base threatened by the blast or its aftereffects. All the action happened almost a hundred kilometers southeast of the base, and the prevailing winds in the area blow generally toward the east, driving the fallout away from the base in any event. We were fine. It was fine.

This felt … weird.

“Of course it feels weird,” Niamh said to me the day after the explosion, after dinner, when I confessed my feelings about it to them. “Back home, a nuclear explosion is an existential threat. Here, it’s just Tuesday.”

“It’s Monday,” Aparna said, from the couch, where she was reading a report on the day’s events.

“It’s just Monday,” Niamh amended, then turned back to Aparna. “You sure it’s a Monday?”

“Pretty sure.”

“It feels like a Tuesday.”

“I think every day feels like a Tuesday here.”

Niamh snapped their fingers. “That’s it exactly. And my point to you”—coming back to me—“is that you’ve drunk up decades of cultural angst about nuclear explosions and nuclear power. It’s a big bad back home.” She pointed at Kahurangi, who was also catching up on his reading. “This one’s whole damn country is a nuclear-free zone.”