Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee.
Job 40:15
Apex Facility, Hong Kong
Shortly after the shower of Skullcrawler guts covered their hideout, the arena shut down and the lights went out. Mechagodzilla, however, did not withdraw into the floor, but remained where it was, inert now, slumped over, all the fire gone out of its eyes.
“This is why Godzilla attacked the Apex facility,” Madison said. “They’re trying to replace him.”
“Yes,” Bernie said. “Yes. The eye I saw. That’s it up there, on the robo-Godzilla.”
“Mechagodzilla,” Josh corrected him.
“Really?” Bernie said.
“Bernie,” Madison said, “I think you have to let that one go. And I need you to focus. What now?”
“Now?” Bernie said. “Now?”
“I think it’s time to go,” Madison said.
“Yes,” Bernie said. “Yes, I think that’s entirely appropriate.”
Madison turned the valves, cracked the hatch slightly, and looked out.
“Coast is clear,” she said. “Come on.”
“Yeah, let’s get out of here,” Bernie said.
Madison glanced up at the observation balconies overlooking the arena. Whoever had been controlling the mechanical Titan must be up there someplace, along with an explanation. It wasn’t enough to know that Godzilla hadn’t just gone rogue for no reason; she needed to be able to prove it.
They climbed out of the bunker, trying to avoid the Skullcrawler guts as best they could.
“That’s probably an exit down there,” Madison said. “Let’s check it out.”
“Yeah,” Bernie said, stepping over some sort of organ. “I really, really hate this room.”
The scale of the place had fooled her; what she thought was an exit looked more like a freight elevator. The door was closed, and the keypad next to it suggested getting on was not going to be easy.
“You’re a hacker, right?” Bernie said to Josh. “You think you can open that?”
“Maybe,” Josh said. “Or we could take the stairs.” He pointed to a smaller door.
Madison pulled on the handle, and it opened easily. Inside, stairs led both up and down.
“Huh,” Bernie said. He looked around. “You see another door?” he asked. “Maybe one that just says ‘out’?”
“What are you talking about?” Madison said. “It’s here. It’s all here, like you said. All of the answers.”
“Yeah?” Bernie said. “Stealing memos and shipping manifests is one thing. All this…” He pointed at the resting Mechagodzilla. “That’s another. Look, you may be used to almost being eaten by these things. I am not. I am a journalist, a truth seeker. I am not a Titan entrée.”
“Not an entrée,” Josh said. “Not even an appetizer, really. More an amuse bouche.”
He shrank back a little as Bernie leaned over him.
“What?” Josh said. “I like food television.”
“Do what you want,” Madison said. “I’m going this way.” She hesitated for just a moment. Did they want to go down? That’s where the big mechanical Titan had come up from. But while it might have been built down there, her strong feeling was that whoever was controlling it was up.
The first five landings with doors didn’t look promising, just darkened access corridors that seemed to service the building’s infrastructure. Eventually, though, they did come to a more promising exit. She was just starting to push the door open when she heard footfalls outside. She eased the door shut and they all flattened against the walls as the steps grew closer and then began to recede. She pressed the door open and peered out just in time to see a pair of armed guards turn a corner.
“Okay,” she said. She slipped through the door with Josh and Bernie behind her, padding down the corridor, glancing through the doorways as they passed them. She felt as if she was going the right way—toward the viewing areas above the arena—but she couldn’t be sure. The place was like a maze, and they might have gotten turned around.
They reached a dead end, but there was another door and more stairs. They went up them to the next level, where they entered another corridor.
Madison looked up and down it and started to the left.
“Hang on,” Bernie said. “I think—”
He was cut off by more footfalls, and a couple of voices chattering in the distance. Madison pushed open the nearest door and they all ducked in, waiting for the guards to pass. When they finally did, Madison breathed a sigh of relief and cracked the door.
Bernie got ahead of her. “Hey guys,” he said. “The exit is this way.”
“Madison!” Josh said, from behind them.
She turned to look and so did Bernie.
They hadn’t stepped into just any room. They had stepped into a really weird room.
To begin with it was a sort of technological nightmare, a mad scientist’s playground. A mass of computers and machinery connected by freeways of electricity, complete with blinking lights and glowing components and a generally neon feel. But in the center of it all was something decidedly non-technological, at least on the surface; an immense horned skull, suspended by wires and fiber-optics and tubes of some kind of goo and who knew what else.
Even without the scales and skin, Madison had no doubt what it was. She had been too up close and personal with its former owner to ever forget.
“Oh my God,” she said.
“What?” Bernie gasped.
“A Titan skull?” Josh said.
“No, no,” Bernie said. “Not just any Titan skull. That’s Monster Zero.”
“Ghidorah,” Madison said.
Bernie seemed to have forgotten he was trying to flee the scene. He approached the skull almost reverently. “They hardwired its DNA,” Bernie said. “Self-generating neuro-pathways capable of intuitive learning…”
“Uh,” Josh said. “So, like—I’m smart, but I’m in high school?”
“It’s a living supercomputer,” Bernie clarified.
Bernie drew even nearer and ran his fingers over the skull, the wire embedded in it like filigree.
“It had three heads,” Bernie said. “Its necks were so long that it communicated telepathically. There’s one here—there’s another one inside of that thing. It could be a psionic interface.”
“Which is?” Josh asked.
“Mind-to-mind connection,” Bernie said. “The two skulls are still in contact. I think that’s how they control the…” He looked at Josh and sighed. “Mechagodzilla.”
With a jolt, Madison realized someone else was in the room. A man, seated in a chair inside the skull, wearing a cap with hundreds of wires and cables connected to it, running out into the machines and the skull itself.
“It’s the pilot,” Madison breathed.
Bernie peered in, then hid once more behind the skull.
“He’s in a trance,” Bernie said. “Psionic uplink. It follows his will. Oh, Apex, what have you done?”
As if in response, the man shifted a little. Bernie moved back, waving them back, too.
“Hide!” he whispered, as the pilot reached to remove the helmet.
With no time to reach the door, they did the only thing they could; they ducked underneath the skull, scooching toward the middle.
Monarch Command and Control, Hong Kong
“This is the day we feared,” the director said, as Mark rushed from the helipad into the command and control. “I’ve given the order, Doctor. The city is being evacuated.”
“Where are Apex’s defenses?” Mark asked.
“They’re not responding,” Guillerman said.
“Maybe we were wrong,” Mark said. But he didn’t finish. What was there to say? The monster was here.
Mark watched, stone-faced, as Godzilla emerged from the sea. The monitors were full of the evacuation, some of it orderly, much of it characterized by the screams and hysteria that were inevitable when a three-hundred-foot-tall lizard came wading up to your metropolis. Fortunately, Hong Kong, like most major cities, had spent the past three years building secure bunkers just in case something like this were to happen again. Unfortunately, Mark knew that no shelter built by human hands could withstand the full force of Godzilla’s attack. Their best hope was that they were right, that Godzilla was headed straight for the Apex building and would ignore everything that wasn’t between him and it.
For Mark’s part, he felt a sort of grim déjà vu.
He had spent years hating Godzilla, blaming him for the death of his son, the dissolution of his marriage and his family. But in the end, he had come to believe he was wrong, that Godzilla was on the side of humanity, that his hatred and anger were misplaced. And three years ago, he had felt vindicated. Even now it was hard to imagine how Ghidorah could have been defeated without the aid of Godzilla.
But now, maybe because of something Apex was doing or maybe just because, Godzilla had turned on them. That meant they had to do whatever it took to stop him.
Of course, he didn’t know what that might be. The only thing that had been able to stop Ghidorah was Godzilla, and Godzilla had proved pretty definitely that there was no other Titan that could challenge him, most recently by making an example of Kong. So what was their plan?
Maybe Simmons had something up his sleeve. If so, Mark hoped whatever it was wouldn’t be as destructive as Godzilla already was.
“Landfall,” one of the techs said.
Mark nodded, watching the familiar silhouette advance into the city, the monitors capturing him from various angles.
Then, the Titan suddenly stopped, jerking as if something invisible had arrested him. He screeched and then began whirling around, his tail cutting through buildings. The entire city shook, and in the harbor, boats, swamped by miniature tsunamis, began to sink.
What the hell was he doing? Mark wondered. More than anything, it reminded him of a Titan’s reaction to the ORCA, or the call of another Titan. If the call was centered on him.
He’s confused, Mark thought. But what…?
Then Godzilla stopped and faced toward the earth. Blue light crept up his dorsal fins, and then a cerulean bolt of energy blasted from his mouth, tearing into the asphalt and concrete at his feet, and then deeper, into the very stone the city was built upon. Mark felt the earth shuddering through the concrete of the bunker and the mountain it was embedded in.
He had seen Godzilla do this before. For seconds, for tens of seconds maybe, and always directed at an enemy.
But now his enemy seemed to be the Earth itself, and he did not stop. He kept going, drilling toward the core of the planet.
Kong Temple
Ilene and Jia wandered around Kong’s temple, and found more ancient art lurking in the shadows; like the building itself, Ilene suspected much of the painting and sculpture had been done by the Kongs themselves. Dozens more handprints graced the walls, all huge, but still of different sizes, reflecting different members of the race—different sexes and ages. They also found hundreds of smaller, human-sized prints, virtually invisible until you went looking for them, lost in the cavernous space. Most of the small prints were low, near the floor, but once they started looking for them, they saw some were much higher, and far from any ledge in the stone that might have given a human purchase.
Kongs lifted them up, Jia said. Ilene knew the girl was speculating, but it made sense, especially when she thought about the relationship between Kong and Jia.
They found more images of warfare, too, one fairly spectacular. It depicted a Kong and a Godzilla-like creature grappling. Below the Titans were smaller figures, human. And not just human; she was sure from the depictions, and some she had seen before, that they were Iwi. Jia’s people.
Jia had known it before she had. The girl was shaking with emotion, and Ilene gathered her in and held her tightly.
Family, the girl signed. Family.
There were more painting and carvings, with the two Titan species clashing in a variety of poses and situations; but in none of them did Ilene see a figure similar to Godzilla missing a dorsal fin. That seemed unique to the floor mosaic, and so she was eventually drawn back to that, wondering what it could mean. Kong continued to sit in his throne, examining his new toy now and then. Although at first Ilene had thought it was ceremonial, she was now starting to wonder if it was actually a tool—and, more specifically, an axe. Chimpanzees made weapons of stones and branches, but the thing Kong held looked like a blade had been hafted to a large bone, the kind of complex weapon only humans were known to make.
Of course, chimps did not build temples for themselves, or work in abstract art. The time for comparing the species that produced Kong to other great apes was probably long past. There was evidence of great intelligence here, of a complex culture. What else had this species created? Were there lost cities scattered through these jungles and wastes? They had only seen one small section of Hollow Earth. If they explored far enough, they might find living members of Kong’s species.
When they returned to the mosaic, they found Maia Simmons standing near it, with an odd-looking device in her hand.
“I don’t understand,” Simmons said. “The energy source is right below our feet.”
Ilene glanced up from the carving. The energy source—in her fascination with the temple, she had almost forgotten what they were here for. Considering it, though, she felt somehow that the carving on the floor around the throne was the key. There was something there, she knew, that she did not understand. Something the pictures were trying to tell her. And Simmons and her device were pointed right at it.
They all gathered closer, surrounding the ancient image.
A faint blue glow fell on the mosaic, but Ilene quickly realized it wasn’t coming from there. When she looked for the source, she saw that Kong’s scepter was glowing. Kong looked at it, puzzled at first, then a little angry. He scowled at it.
If it was an axe—and Ilene was increasingly inclined to think it was—it wasn’t the whole thing glowing, but just the blade. It was not metal, or stone, but something else, like crystal, but not exactly. The light pulsed inside of it, stronger each second, as did the sense of familiarity, the feeling that she had seen something like this before.
Kong figured it out before she did; she saw the light switch on behind his eyes. Brandishing the axe he rose, took a step, lowering the huge weapon onto the carving encircling the throne, placing the axe blade so that it rested in the hollow where the missing fin should go.
Ilene understood then. Kong’s axe was made from the dorsal fin of something like Godzilla. And now it was glowing more brightly, the same light, the same color as the energy that Godzilla exhaled in his most devastating attack.
“It’s the axe,” Ilene said. “It’s drawing radiation from the core like it’s charging it. The myths are real.”
Even as she said it, the blue energy began spidering outward from the axe, filling first the carving, bringing it to a semblance of life, then spreading on across the floor.
“There was a war,” Ilene said. “And they are the last ones standing.”
Everything began to shiver, then tremble, as the blue light waxed in brilliance.
Apex Facility, Hong Kong
Walter Simmons watched as Godzilla crushed his way through Hong Kong, toward him. He knew he ought to be worried. His creation was still powered down and, even if it weren’t, it would never last long enough to defeat Godzilla. He had other weapons systems online, but zero confidence that any of them would even slow Godzilla’s advance, so he disdained to use them. It would seem desperate. He might well be looking at his doom approaching; if that were so, he would meet it with dignity.
But he believed what he had told Serizawa: his daughter would come through in time. There was more at work here than the plan and his genius. Destiny was also on his side; he could feel it. It was time for Godzilla to join the fossils of his ancestors. The time of the Titans was done, and his time was just beginning.
As if on cue, Godzilla suddenly shrieked and jerked to a halt; he spun as if confused, leveling the buildings around him.
“Whoa,” Simmons said. Then he understood. It’s beneath your feet. How long before you figure it out?
His question was answered a moment later when Godzilla stopped and set his stance. Blue radiation ran up his back.
Then he began blasting a hole into the Earth itself. Simmons felt the building shake beneath his feet as the Titan drilled through the mountainous foundations of the city. In the distance, on one of the monitors, he saw the Tsing Ma suspension bridge shudder and sway until the huge cables snapped and it crumpled into the Ma Wan Channel.
Fantastic, he thought, taking a sip of his Scotch. Better than I could have ever imagined.
He grinned, because it could only mean one thing.
“Godzilla’s responding,” he crowed. “They found it!” Maia had come through, as expected.
Kong Temple
As her scanning device began beeping close to a steady tone, Maia Simmons gestured to her men. Nathan watched as they lifted something from the cargo area of one of the HEAVs and brought it toward the mosaic. It looked like a spider crossed with a power drill and maybe a three-dimensional printer, and it walked across the floor until it was near the axe, settling over a part of the floor effulgent with a pure blue light. Then it locked down and began drilling into the stone. Kong growled, deep in his belly. Nathan was about to ask Maia exactly what she was doing when he was distracted by something in the darkness behind Kong’s throne. He had noticed movement on the ceiling earlier; creatures that reminded him of bats. But they had not shown any interest in leaving their dark resting place, at least not after they saw Kong. Maybe it was the weird play of blue light, tricking his eyes, but he thought he saw them moving around up there. Or possibly it was just the general sense of unease he was beginning to feel. Maia’s team was acting awfully quickly, with no particular care taken to determine what they were dealing with.
He hesitated, trying to frame his words carefully, but Ilene beat him to it, and with no attempt at diplomacy.
“What are you doing?” Ilene demanded of Simmons.
Simmons nodded at the machine. “Extracting the sample,” she said.
“This is power beyond your understanding,” Ilene said. “You can’t just drill into it.”
Maia shrugged, unimpressed with Ilene’s outburst.
“My father gets what he wants,” Maia said. “That’s Apex property now.” She looked at the core of glowing stone now inside a little reservoir in the machine. The digital readout began running numbers; it was uploading something.
“We should be able to replicate this now,” she said.
Apex Facility, Hong Kong
Ren was running another series of diagnostics when the needle moved on the energy signature. A lot. It was like a nine-volt battery had just been replaced with a nuclear power plant. This was it. This was what they had been waiting for.
“Energy upgrade incoming,” he reported.
On another screen, a string of figures indicated DNA code uploading. The system around Ren began to respond immediately, incorporating the data, ramping up. Waiting to become.
“Good girl, Maia,” Ren heard Simmons say.
Ren turned to the monitor, watching Gojira, sizing him up. He had watched countless videos of the Titan, read everything he could find, including his father’s notes. He had finally seen him for the first time in Pensacola, but then it hadn’t felt as if Gojira was coming for him.
But that’s what the Titan was doing. Not for him, but for the Mecha he had designed. He had come for it in Pensacola when they first tested some of the components, but by shutting the test down and then shipping out the parts, they had managed to stop him. Gojira had still destroyed half of the factory, but the thing calling him was no longer there, so he had eventually gone on his way. For Simmons, it had actually been a boon, despite the destruction of his facility. It had made Gojira out to be a capricious monster, no better than Ghidorah. People’s fear of Gojira had once been tempered by the belief that he was on the side of humanity. No longer. When the Mecha destroyed him, no one would weep. Simmons would have everything he wanted.
So would he. Defeating Gojira and thus surpassing his father was only the beginning.
But staring at the incoming data, he was starting to sense a problem. This time, they knew the cost of testing the Mecha; they knew it would draw the real Gojira. And Simmons believed they were ready for that. He was ready to bet everything on that. Even his own life.
Ren was not so sure, and he was growing even more uncertain as he watched the upgrade and the odd readings that came with it. The system had been designed to make use of the Hollow Earth energy without knowing exactly what that energy was. And it would work—there was no doubt the Mecha would reach its full potential as designed.
But it might do more. The new data suggested a whole series of uncertainties from the quantum level up. They had harnessed the telepathic potential of the two Ghidorah skulls without ever really understanding how and why they worked. And this new genetic information, so intimately related not just to the energy, but to Gojira and how he metabolized that energy—all of this was introducing a series of X-factors that ought to be explored, quantified, understood. If they kept his creation shut down, if they turned off all of the ancillary systems connected to the skulls—chances were Gojira wouldn’t know exactly where to look. In fact, Ren thought, they could probably relay a false signal elsewhere, to draw Gojira away—give them more time to truly perfect his creation.
But he had a sinking feeling that he would never convince Simmons of any of that.