Kaiju Preservation Society(87)

“Happy to,” Kahurangi said. “But why are they going to listen to you?”

“Because of who I am,” Satie said.

“It matters to them that you’re a pilot?”

“He also has a doctorate,” I said.

“They won’t care that I’m either of those,” Satie said. “They will care that I’m a colonel in the Royal Canadian Air Force.”

“Which means what to them?” I asked.

“Among other things, it means I outrank the base commander here.”

“Look at you,” Niamh said, admiringly. “Slumming all this time.”

“Not slumming,” Satie said. “Official Canadian liaison to the KPS. You can ask MacDonald and Danso when you get back.”

“So why do you fly Chopper Two?” I asked.

“I fly Chopper Two because being a liaison is boring,” Satie said. “This is much more fun. Now, you all stay in here and shut up. Let me do my thing.” He got out of the chopper and went to talk to the soldier in charge. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet, took out a card.

He showed it to the soldier.

The soldier saluted Satie.

So did the rest of them.





CHAPTER

28




We did not have to go to Canadian military prison. Or any prison, for that matter.

We didn’t go back to Tanaka Base right away, either.

First, because we couldn’t; the gateway at Honda Base was still down and would be down for the full length of time. Satie—Colonel Satie, I should say—had relayed the information to the crew of the Shobijin, who forwarded it back to base, albeit waiting for him to go through the barrier in Chopper Two before they did so. As soon as he made it through, the Shobijin hightailed it out of the area.

This was a good thing, because once Bella came back through, she set fire to most of the surrounding jungle. For a week, it was unclear whether she would be able to restore her internal function and her complement of parasites. Then she settled back in, splashed out a final clutch of eggs, and brooded for several more weeks.

She survived. We had, indeed, preserved her.

The second reason we didn’t go back right away was because KPS had to investigate the incident, and we were the star witnesses. After we left CFB Goose Bay, we spent two weeks in a St. John’s hotel, having Zoom meetings with KPS higher-ups and various other stakeholders, explaining what Rob Sanders had done and why, and how it related to Tensorial, his family’s company, and its predecessors. We were backed up on this by Dave Berg, a.k.a. Dave-barely-above-an-intern, who survived thanks largely to being unconscious and sprayed with kaiju pheromones. All things considered, he forgave Niamh for the zapping.

The new information about the destruction of the first Tanaka Base, it turned out, had not come as a complete surprise to the folks at KPS. There had always been a suspicion that the Sanders family had not been entirely forthcoming. The information, however, appeared to come as a surprise to the representative from the U.S. Department of Energy. It’s possible the representative had other things on his mind; the United States election had happened, without a rogue nuclear explosion to derail it, and this fellow would likely be out of a job in a couple of months. He seemed willing to let KPS handle it however they liked.

KPS handled it by doing what it does—by having the event not officially exist.

The mission to bring Bella over stuck with its official cover story of being a group of scientists trying a new method of radio interferometry.

Which went horribly wrong.

And exploded.

As radio interferometry projects sometimes do.

“They do not,” Niamh had protested, as they were an astrophysicist. But they were overruled.

As for the tech billionaire Rob Sanders, who had funded the project out of his passion for science and knowledge, it was assumed he was killed in the explosion and his body predated before it could be retrieved, possibly by Labrador wolves.

“Labrador wolves?” Kahurangi had asked. “Are those a real thing?”

“Oh, yes,” Aparna had assured him.

While Tensorial could not officially be held accountable for Sanders’s activities, or the activities of the company involving KPS over the years, at the turn of the U.S. government in January, the Department of Justice announced that Tensorial and its past and current CEOs, all members of the Sanders family, were being investigated for a decades-long pattern of fraud involving the Departments of Energy and Defense, among others. It would be a long and uncomfortable process for the company.

Which, well. Good.

While we were away, Tanaka Base held its memorials for those it had lost from Sanders’s taking of Bella. The official cover story given to family and survivors was close enough to the truth: While doing research on the animals they were tasked with protecting, they were ambushed by poachers and killed. KPS’s survivor benefits were always generous, and its grief at the loss sincere.

We learned that everyone at Tanaka Base held their breaths until they learned whether Aparna, Kahurangi, Niamh, Martin Satie, and I had survived. When they learned we had, they collectively celebrated, and swore to murder us for making them worry.

They did not murder us when we returned. Instead, they declared a holiday. One whole day of partying and feasting and drinking and karaoke.