Kaiju Preservation Society(64)

CHAPTER

21




“So, where did she go?” Brynn MacDonald asked. We were in the administration office conference room: Brynn, Jeneba Danso and Aparna, Niamh and Kahurangi, along with Martin Satie and I. Satie and I were there because we’d taken the trip to the site and reported back. My friends were there because they had been the leads on the site data, and because, in the case now of Niamh and Kahurangi, after the apparent deaths of their colleagues in the Chopper One crash, they were nominally in charge of their labs.

It was fair to say we were all still in shock, as were all of our colleagues across the base. MacDonald and Danso informed the Tanaka Base personnel as soon as Satie and I returned about the apparent accident; by that time the rumors were already flying, even with my friends keeping their mouths shut. There was no point in allowing them to continue.

Everyone was grieving. In a base as small as ours, everyone knew everyone, and we had just lost five of us. Those of us in that conference room at least had something to do to keep us busy.

“We don’t know,” Aparna said to MacDonald’s question. She had her laptop casting an image onto the conference room’s larger wall monitor; it was a map of the “local” kaiju, spread out across hundreds of kilometers of the nearby Labrador Peninsula. “Bella was marked and tagged, and even without the aerostat that appears to have gone down at the site, we’re still getting readings from the rest that we know about. We have a small blind spot where the coverage from the downed aerostat isn’t overlapped by the others. So it’s possible she’s in there. But if she is, Martin and Jamie should have been able to see her.”

“We saw nothing,” Satie said, and I nodded. After we had sur veyed the site from the air, recording as we did so, we made a wide circle of the area to see if we could locate Bella. “She isn’t there. And there’s nothing to indicate where she might have gone.”

“She does fly,” Danso noted. “She wouldn’t leave a trail or take a path like some other kaiju do.”

Aparna nodded at this. “She wouldn’t have left a trail, but she would have shown up on our map, whatever direction she’d gone. Even to the southwest, where we have the fewest aerostats, she would have been pinged for least a few minutes.”

“Her tracker could have fallen off,” Kahurangi said. “That happened to the kaiju we saw when we were coming to base the first time.”

“Kevin,” I said.

“That’s the one,” Kahurangi agreed. He didn’t smile when he said it. For the first time, the commonplace names of the kaiju just weren’t that funny.

“So you think she flew the coop and her tracker fell off,” Satie said to Kahurangi.

“I don’t know, but it seems possible.” He nodded to Aparna. “She said we have a tracking blind spot right now. If it fell off there, that would explain a lot.”

MacDonald looked at Satie. “How long until we can bring another aerostat into the area?”

“We can assign the one immediately southwest at any time,” he said. As head of Tanaka Base’s aviators and aircraft, he was also responsible for the aerostats under the base’s control. “But they move slowly. It will take most of a day for the nearest one to move.”

“We need answers faster than that.”

“I can’t make them go faster than they go,” Satie said. “But in the meantime, if you like, we can assign the Shobijin to act as a temporary aerostat. It’s not doing anything else at the moment. Put aerostat guts in it and float it there until we can move a real one into place.”

MacDonald looked at Danso, who nodded. “Let’s do that, then,” she said.

Aparna raised her hand. “There’s another issue.”

“What’s that, Dr. Chowdhury?”

“It’s possible Bella is either hiding in our blind spot, or maybe her tracker fell off in it,” Aparna acknowledged, “but that doesn’t answer the question of where her eggs went. They’re gone. All of them.”

“Other creatures ate them after she left,” Danso suggested.

“I’m sure they would,” Aparna said. “But not that fast.” She turned to me. “You said that you saw no eggs, no natal jelly at all.”

“No,” I confirmed. Satie also nodded. “We were up pretty high, so maybe we didn’t see everything. But where we knew Bella had been, there’s nothing. No Bella. No eggs.”

“Bella wouldn’t have left her eggs except in case of an emergency or imminent threat,” Aparna said to MacDonald and Danso. “We know that’s basic roosting behavior for her species. But if she did move out of her roosting posture, she wouldn’t—and she couldn’t—take the eggs with her.” She pointed at the screen. “Bella is missing, and that’s strange. But her eggs are completely gone, and that’s impossible.”

Danso looked over to Niamh. “Unless,” she prompted.

“Unless Bella went through the dimensional barrier,” Niamh said, finishing Danso’s thought.

“Is that possible?”

“It shouldn’t be,” Niamh said, slowly. “Her nesting behavior kept the dimensional barrier thin, but not thin enough to get her over. And her physical state hasn’t changed since she started brooding. No data we have indicates any change at all. And even if there had been a change”—Niamh pointed at Aparna—“she’s right, the eggs would still be there. The eggs wouldn’t have gone with her.”