Kaiju Preservation Society(53)

Sanders glanced over to the copilot’s seat. “General Tipton—”

“You’re not talking to him,” Satie interrupted. “You’re talking to me. He’s not going to say a goddamn word. He’s not in charge of this mission, or this aircraft. I am. And I’m telling you to get out.”

Sanders was visibly confused. “I don’t see what the problem is here.”

“You insulted me, Mr. Sanders.”

“Offering you money is an insult?”

“You didn’t insult me by offering me money. You insulted me by thinking I could be bought.”

Sanders blinked silently at this. He clearly didn’t understand the distinction.

I looked out the window. In the medium distance, away from the wash of the rotors, creatures were looking in the direction of the helicopter, curious about it, wondering if it might be food.

“When you made your first offer, I was willing to let you pass it off as a joke,” Satie said. “You’re not the first billionaire I’ve ferried around. I know how you all like to wave around your money dick to see who might be willing to suck on it. If you had let it go when I gave you the opportunity, I was willing to ignore it. But you had to push it. You wanted to see how much it would cost for me to compromise the safety of everyone on this aircraft, me included, to assert your dominance. So, now here is my answer, Mr. Sanders. I will let you out for free. And there is no amount of money, on this planet or the other, that you or anyone else could pay me to let you back in.”

Sanders gaped at Satie, then looked at Tipton, then at me, and then out the window, where, I believe, he saw the curious creatures for the first time.

“Now. Out you go.” Satie pointed to the door.

Sanders looked back at Satie. “I’ve changed my mind.”

“You still don’t get it,” Satie said. “It’s not your mind you have to change here.”

“Martin—”

“Dr. Satie, if you please,” Satie said, and this is how I learned how he had a doctorate. I very briefly wondered if in fact I was the only one on this whole planet who did not possess a terminal degree of some sort.

Sanders gathered himself. “Dr. Satie, I have clearly offended you, and for that I am profoundly sorry,” he said. “Please accept my full and unreserved apology for what I said to you.”

“I accept it on the condition that for the entire rest of this trip, I do not hear a single goddamn peep out of you,” Satie said. “Not to me, not to General Tipton, not to Jamie. You just sit there, Mr. Sanders. Do you accept? You can nod if you do.”

Sanders nodded.

“Well, then, we have a deal,” Satie said, and turned away from Sanders. “Now let’s go look at a big damn creature, what do you say?” He lofted us back into the air and back toward Bella.

I looked at Sanders, who was pale and sweating.

Damn, I thought. I could have won a dollar.





CHAPTER

18




The tour of the site over, it was time for things to be explained.

“Here’s a thing I’m confused about,” Rob Sanders said, at the first of the briefings we had set up for him, General Tipton, and Colonel Jones with our scientists and staff. If Sanders was showing any residual psychological damage from being humiliated by a helicopter pilot a couple of hours earlier, he wasn’t showing it now. The resiliency of the billionaire ego was truly something to behold. “We know that the kaiju, the big ones, have organic nuclear reactors. But when we were flying over Bella today, looking at the field of eggs, it occurred to me that I’ve never heard of baby kaiju having the reactors in them, too. Do they?”

“Yes and no,” Aparna said. Because she was the one gathering the data from the nesting site, and this meeting was ostensibly about that, she was the one from the biology lab leading the briefing. Aside from her and the tourists, the briefing included Brynn MacDonald and Tom Stevens and me. We were holding it in the very small conference room in the administration building. It was a very cozy meeting. In addition to my role as visitor liaison, I was also, once again, supervising snacks.

“That’s vague,” Sanders said, smiling.

This got a head shake from Aparna. “Not vague at all. Yes, because even at a very early age—even as an embryo in the egg—there are certain precursor structures in the kaiju body that will develop into the reactor in later stages of life. No, because those precursor structures are not yet a reactor. There are other things that have to happen first.”

“Like what?” Tipton asked.

“Certain hormonal changes, to start.”

“The kaiju has to hit puberty,” Sanders said.

“If you like,” Aparna said, in a tone that suggested that she didn’t, in fact, like. “It would be incorrect to imagine kaiju development being an exact analogue to mammalian or even earthly vertebrate development, however. It’s much more complex than that.”

Sanders nodded. “Tell us how, please.”

“All right. As just one example, the nuclear reactor development is not only contingent on the age of the creature—that’s where the puberty metaphor goes wrong—but also contingent on parasite load. If a kaiju doesn’t have enough parasites, or enough of a certain sort of parasite, then the nuclear chamber development doesn’t happen.”