Kaiju Preservation Society(81)

“Yeah, all right, but why?” Kahurangi asked. “What good does bringing a kaiju over do you? You can’t control them. You can’t harness their energy. They can’t survive here more than a few days. What’s the point?”

Sanders smiled at this. “Dr. Lautagata, I would think of all people you would understand.”

“I don’t.”

“Then let me help. Which is your pack?” Kahurangi pointed out his pack. Sanders rummaged through it and fished out a spray bottle. “What is this?”

“Kaiju pheromones.”

“Which you use to keep the parasites off you.”

“Mostly.”

Sanders waved at all four of us. “Which is why the four of you currently smell like fermented gym shorts.”

“Yes.”

“So you are less interested in the kaiju than what you can get out of the kaiju,” Sanders said. He sniffed the spray bottle nozzle, made a grimacing face at it, set it down on the ground, and continued to rummage through Kahurangi’s pack. “For you, the kaiju isn’t the kaiju. It’s a bunch of compounds and smells and pheromones that you can fiddle with to give you what you want.” He pulled what looked like a remote control out of the pack, puzzled at it, set it down. “I’m the same way. Just not about smells and pheromones.”

“You want the reactor,” Aparna said, suddenly.

Sanders smiled at her. “Dr. Chowdhury, clearly the smartest of the four of you. Yes. My family’s been in nuclear and nuclear-derived power generation since just after the end of World War II. Imagine the competitive advantage we could have if instead of building viable nuclear reactors, we could just grow them. Safe. Effective. Organic. Wind and solar are only going to get us so far, you know. I don’t care about the kaiju one way or another. I just want to know how their bodies make their reactors.”

He looked over to me. “Although you should have figured that out by now. You caught me trying to smuggle out kaiju genetic information.”

“I didn’t know this was plan B,” I said.

“I’m glad you didn’t figure it out,” Sanders said. “But that does bring up the question of how you figured out how we were here at all. When my people went in, the first thing they did was take out the aerostat.”

“And the helicopter,” I added.

“We weren’t expecting the helicopter,” Sanders admitted. “Or your staff. We thought getting the aerostat and then the instrument packs would be enough. Even with the downed helicopter, you still should have thought it was Bella attacking, not us. What happened?”

“You were sloppy,” Niamh said.

“Evidently, but how, is what I’m asking.”

“You remember Tom Stevens,” I said.

“The guy who said we went to Dartmouth together.”

“That’s the one. Your people murdered him.”

“That will be an awkward note in the alumni magazine, but continue.”

“Before that happened, he hid a camera,” I said. “We caught your people. We saw your perimeter.”

“Trans-dimensional portal,” Sanders corrected.

I ignored this. “And we knew it wasn’t an accident or the result of a kaiju attack. We know. Our people know. And as soon as the gateway at Honda Base comes back online, people on this side will know, too.”

Sanders looked up to one of the men who had weapons on us, the one who asked which one of us zapped Dave. “You said the site was clean.”

“I thought it was,” the man replied. Now that I knew, the voice matched what I remembered from Tom’s video.

“Well, obviously it wasn’t,” Sanders snapped. “This complicates things.”

“There’s nothing that ties this to you or your company,” the man said. “We don’t have any identifying clothes. The portal doesn’t have brand marks. They can’t know.”

“Except that you’ve done this before,” I said. “Your company, I mean. Eventually KPS will figure that out.”

“No, they won’t,” Sanders said, almost distractedly. “They were never told what we were doing. It was between us and the Department of Energy.”

“Then they will know,” I said.

Sanders smirked at me. “You know who’s in charge of the United States right now, right? Do you think they’ll care? Especially if I give them an excuse to declare martial law and scrub the election? Dude, I’ll get the Presidential Medal of Freedom for this shit.”

I ground my teeth. “I hate that you’re right about that,” I said.

“I know you do,” Sanders said, placatingly. “But I don’t think it will get that far. Evidence or not, we can make sure it doesn’t come back to us.” He turned back to Aparna. “We’ve spent the last several hours extracting genetic material from Bella’s eggs,” he said. “And we’ve taken some of the eggs themselves, to raise in a controlled environment. We’ll be able to look at the young kaiju as they develop.”

“But that’s not going to help you,” Aparna said.

“I know that,” Sanders said. “I know that because you told me how the parasites are needed to spur the development, and I know that because of our company’s own research. All the more reason to bring Bella over. We’ve been harvesting her parasites, too, both for their genetics and for individuals.”