Kaiju Preservation Society(34)
“Go, Aotearoa,” Kahurangi said, absentmindedly, pumping a fist. He didn’t look up from his reading.
“Now you come here,” Niamh continued, “and not only is it not a big bad, it’s part of the actual ecological setup. A kaiju going up here is like a whale fall back home.”
“A what?” I asked.
“A whale fall,” Aparna said from the couch. “When a whale dies its body sinks to the bottom of the ocean, where it feeds an entire ecosystem for months or even years.” She looked up at Niamh. “Not a perfect one-to-one metaphor, but okay.”
“Thank you for your qualified approval,” Niamh said, and returned to me. “It feels weird because not only are you being forced to look at this terrible event in a whole new way, and in a way that’s positive for the world it exists in, but you’re also not allowed to have it completely rewrite your opinion of the event in our world. Because back home it’s still a terrible thing.”
“‘One nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day,’” quoted Kahurangi.
“Yes, that. You’re feeling cognitive dissonance, Jamie. Two contradictory-yet-entirely-valid-within-their-contexts thoughts about the same subject. And humans hate that shit. We hate it so much. The worst answer for us for anything is, ‘It depends.’”
“You’ve thought about this a lot,” I said, after a moment.
“Mate, my entire professional life deals with nuclear energy in one way or another,” Niamh said. “You’re damn right I’ve thought about it. And now all of our professional lives deal with it. The cognitive dissonance you’re feeling right now? It’s just the start.”
So that was the first thing. The second thing is that everyone at Tanaka Base gets very, very busy.
As Niamh noted, exploding kaiju don’t happen every day, and exploding kaiju near enough to a base to do useful science on happens even less. Schedules get thrown into the air, projects are shuffled, and resources are reassigned in order to take advantage of the opportunity. I knew this because I spent a lot of time hauling materials and equipment to and from storage for the bio, chem, and physics labs; at one point I picked up lab materials Val had just dropped off because the chem lab changed its mind about which projects to prioritize. Kahurangi looked a little sheepish when I came through the door just as Val was heading out.
Martin Satie and Yeneva Blaylock, the pilot who flew Chopper One, were inundated with flight requests for observation and experiments. There was general outrage that the Shobijin had not yet returned from dropping off Red Team and would additionally need at least a few days for maintenance when it returned. Administration had to step in and take over assigning flight time to keep various science divisions from knifing each other to get priority. They also ended up re-tasking an aerostat to float over the explosion site as a stopgap, to have constant aerial observation, and to allow Satie and Blaylock to sleep and maintain their vehicles.
It was reassigning the aerostat, in fact, that revealed the thing that upset some proposed missions and created others.
“Bella is nesting at the explosion site,” Ion Ardeleanu, a Blue Team biologist, told a meeting of the Tanaka Base scientists and administrators, four days after the explosion. I was there because I was catering for the meeting, which meant I had wheeled in platters of rolls and cookies and jugs of water and tea, along with plates and napkins, and was expected to wheel them out again at the end.
Ardeleanu projected images from his laptop, taken from the aerostat. The image up right now was of Bella wandering through the shattered landscape of the lakeshore and then plopping herself down right at the edge of the small inlet of the lake created by the blast crater.
“That’s not good,” said Angel Ford, a Blue Team physicist.
“Well, that depends,” Ardeleanu said.
“We have a flying kaiju that has decided to make a new home in the one spot where the dimensional barrier between our planets is the thinnest right now,” Ford replied. “This is exactly how we’ve had incursions before. Tell me how this is a good thing.”
“Because she doesn’t want to go over,” Aparna said. She was sitting next to Ardeleanu and was clearly his support team for the meeting.
Ford gave Aparna a once-over. “You’re new,” she said.
“I am new,” Aparna agreed. “We were all new here, once.”
“My point is that maybe you don’t understand how easy it is for this kaiju to breach into our world, and how bad it would be if she did.”
“I do understand it,” Aparna said. “I mean, it’s just physics.” This got a chuckle; it took some nerve for Aparna, who was new, to dunk on Ford like this. She pointed to the screen, which had been looping the video of Bella sitting and making herself comfortable. “This is biology, and there are some things going on here that aren’t obvious.” She paused and looked over to Ardeleanu. “May I?”
Ardeleanu looked tolerantly amused. “By all means,” he said.
“Yes, I’m new, but I can read, and I can research,” Aparna said. “When the mission to get Edward and Bella to mate was a success, I checked the KPS database to find out what we know about their particular species after mating. It turns out that for them, once mating is over, the male of the species is done. He has no additional part. The female, however, immediately selects a nest site. And because this species does some nurturing of their young, which other kaiju will see as snacks, the female becomes intensely territorial. More than they already are, I mean.”