Kaiju Preservation Society(85)

My pheromone’s run out, I thought.

It leapt over me, catching Sanders in the chest.

He shouted in surprise and terror as the parasite knocked him into the hole. I lost sight of him in the fog.

Somewhere on the other side of the fog, Sanders stopped yelling and started screaming.

I got up, testing the soundness of my ankle, and looked up just as Bella stopped her beam. The hole around the beam started to close up, and something came through it, disrupting the fog.

A helicopter. Chopper Two.

“Fucking Martin Satie,” I said, and started waving for him, hopping as I did so.

Bella spotted Chopper Two and took a swipe at it. Satie avoided it and put distance between himself and Bella.

Bella stood up, slowly, reaching her full height.

She unfurled.

And then she started to go. In my direction.

I decided I could worry about my ankle hurting later. I ran ninety degrees from the direction Bella seemed to be going.

Her first steps took her out of the perimeter of the capacitors.

Her second steps crushed most of the containers that Sanders’s people had been using as labs.

With the third steps, a noise like jet engines started coming from Bella.

Bella flapped, huge wings hoping to find purchase in our planet’s thin air.

Eventually they found it.

Bella was airborne.

I looked back down to the ground and saw three forms running toward me: Aparna, Niamh, and Kahurangi.

“Mate, you okay?” Kahurangi asked, reaching me first.

“My ankle’s shot, but I’m fine,” I said. Aparna and Niamh had reached us. I showed them Sanders’s USB key. “We can fire up the perimeter now,” I said.

“That’s great, but there’s a small problem,” Niamh said. “Our bird has flown the coop.”

“The longer she’s out, the harder it is to send her back,” Aparna said.

“I have an idea,” I said. I turned to Aparna. “How long was Bella’s interval this time?”

“A little over twenty minutes,” she said.

“How will her flying affect the interval?”

“She’s putting in a lot of effort to fly, expending a lot of energy. It’ll be a lot shorter.”

“How much shorter?”

“I don’t know.”

“Guess.”

“Ten minutes at most.”

Niamh looked up. “Is that fucking Chopper Two?” Satie was coming down where we were.

I gave the USB key to Kahurangi. “You and Niamh get down to the generator and be ready.”

He took the key. “Ready for what?” he yelled, as Chopper Two got louder around us.

“To send Bella back,” I yelled. “We’re going to go get her for you.”

Kahurangi grinned. “You’re mad and I love you.”

He grabbed Niamh, showed them the key, and motioned toward the generator. They set off.

Satie hovered low enough for Aparna and me to get in, Aparna in the passenger area and me in the copilot seat. “I thought we agreed you were going to go back,” I said to Satie, once I was strapped in and my headset connected.

“I decided I could wait to get into trouble,” Satie said. “And then I noticed that when our Bella burped, she made a big hole. I wanted to see how big it was. I found out.”

“You know what we’re doing now, right?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” Satie said.

“I haven’t asked, yet.”

“Sure you have, you just phrased it badly. Now, let’s go chase down our lady. Dr. Chowdhury, we have about ten minutes, am I right?”

“Less than that now,” Aparna said.

Satie swung us violently into the early morning, chasing Bella.



* * *



“She’s not very fast,” Satie observed as we came up on her, laboring in a northwesterly direction. She was heading in the direction we thought she would, toward Goose Bay.

“The air here isn’t giving her a lot of support,” Aparna said. “She’s compensating with her airflow systems, but they’re probably faltering, too. It’s amazing she can fly at all.”

“You’re saying she could drop out of the air at any second,” I said to Aparna.

“It wouldn’t surprise me.”

“That’s no good,” Satie said. “She’s not going to be able to walk back to where we need her.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Let me try being polite first,” Satie said. He flew ahead of Bella and, once he had enough distance, turned and hovered in her path.

“Playing chicken is polite?” Aparna said, alarmed.

“As polite as we have time for,” Satie said.

Bella flew directly at Chopper Two, tacking at the very last moment to avoid it. We were buffeted by the turbulence of her wings and airflow systems. Satie evened us out and went to follow Bella, who had resumed her northwesterly direction.

“So much for being nice,” he said.

“You’re not going to do what I think you’re going to do,” I said.

“I don’t know what you think I’m going to do, but yes, probably,” Satie said.