For most of human civilization, we believed that we were Earth’s most dominant species. We believed that life could only exist on the surface of the planet. Well, after a certain point you have to wonder—what else were we wrong about?
Today’s new frontier is not outer space. It’s right beneath our feet. We have mapped less than five percent of Hollow Earth, but our ecosystems are linked in ways that we never could have imagined. We are not two separate worlds. We’re one. The answers to some of life’s fundamental questions are waiting for us down there. But only if Hollow Earth is protected.
—TED Talk, Dr. Ilene Andrews
He sleeps, but he feels the world on his skin and in his bones, in the rivulets and rivers of his nerves. He tastes the atmosphere and the water, the iron, the salt, the life, the death. He feels the pulse of the planet’s magnetic field, the sleet of solar radiation it turns away from the delicate life beneath.
The surface and shallows of a world are dangerous. The life-giving sun could become scorching death. The very winds could carry poison around the globe. Masses of metal and ice might be hurled down at speeds lethal to the thin film of the biosphere, disrupting it for millions of years. Longer.
But all was relatively well, now. His sleep has been peaceful, for a time. Because the others were in their places, also resting. The ones above, the ones below. His territory is unchallenged, and it is thriving. But lately, things have begun to change.
Now something stirs on his skin. Something amiss, a distant call, the pulse of energy where it should not be. This happened before, not long ago. He stopped it, and there had been no greater threat. So he had returned to rest. But now this had to be dealt with.
And now he knows another has felt it, too.
He feels the pricks of her six legs as she begins to walk. He rouses to the next level of wakefulness. Maybe she is just moving from one resting spot to another. Maybe she will settle back down. She understands her place. She will not challenge him again.
And yet she continues to move, striding across the ocean floor. She feeds at the hot places where the rocks grind together, where sustenance seeps up from beneath. She is not only healed from their last fight, she is growing stronger. But she is not moving toward his resting place. She does not seek to challenge him yet.
But she will. The threat he feels—to her it is sustenance. She will feed and grow stronger. He is not pleased. He made an example of her once, but he let her live. He saw her purpose in his territory. But she has not learned. She will not learn.
And so he uncurls himself. He leaves his resting place and begins to swim in the deep waters with long, powerful sweeps of his tail. He stretches his senses. He experiences the rise and swell of tides, the crawling ice at either pole of the world, the subterranean vibrations of the other place, beneath the waters, beneath the stone. He feels the other, whom he did battle with. Whom he fought with against something far worse. That one is where he should be.
The others, too, are still obedient to his command, still in their places.
And yet, there is something else besides the source she now seeks, the faintest tickle of something wrong. The sound of something coming in the distance, perhaps not very far away.
But this is in front of him. This must be done first.
Monarch director Hampton switched the monitor to the television, found the channel, made herself a cup of tea, and settled down to watch. She got through the nonsense at the start of the show, mostly by ignoring it. Then they started rolling clips of Titans.
A moment later, Dr. Andrews appeared on-screen. Much as she really did dislike doing these appearances, she was quite adept at it. She made a good impression. Today she had on a black suit and white shirt. Simple. Professional without being stuffy. And as always, she sounded credible. And she had a new haircut, short. It looked good.
The interviewer, a youngish fellow also in a black suit, had a pleasant enough demeanor. He started easy, as they had discussed.
“My guest today is Doctor Ilene Andrews, a Monarch scientist and director in charge of the Kong Research Division. She’s the foremost expert on Kong and Titans in general. Welcome to the show, Doctor Andrews.”
“Thanks so much for having me on today,” she said.
“For those of us who have been sleeping under a rock for the past few years, would you mind bringing us up to speed on Kong? We all know he’s a Titan, we all know he had a bit of a tussle with Godzilla a while back, but what else can you tell us about the big guy?”
“Sure,” she said. “Well, our exploratory team discovered Kong living on an isolated island in the South Pacific—”
“Skull Island,” the host put in.
“Yes,” she said. “We discovered that he was the protector of a group of people called the Iwi. His kind and their kind had been living in harmony for generations. When they were menaced by the monsters of the island, Kong stepped in. We decided it was best not to try and fix what wasn’t broken. We set up an observation post and tried to intrude as little as possible.”
“You said Kong’s kind? There was more than one?”
“He had a family. There are skeletons of other Great Apes on the island. But when we got there, Kong was the only one. The last of his species.”
“And then there was another tragedy.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “The Island was surrounded by a constant storm that protected it from the outside. It’s one reason it took us so long to even learn of its existence. During the cataclysmic event surrounding Monster Zero’s attacks, and the global disruption of weather patterns he created, the storm around the island became unbalanced. It moved ashore, the tides rose: despite our efforts, the Iwi were wiped out.”
“Except for one.”
She nodded. “My daughter, Jia,” she said.
“And Kong survived all of this, of course.”
“He did. We built an artificial environment for him, sheltered from the worst of the elements. That could only last for so long. Eventually, we had to find him a new home. When we discovered Hollow Earth and how to reach it, we knew we had our answer. To keep this short, after his fight with Godzilla in Hong Kong, we took Kong to Hollow Earth, where we believe his species originated.”
“And he’s there now?”
“Yes. He’s still settling into Hollow Earth.”
“So the big guy likes his new home?”
“We think so. His species was a very social one. It’s not natural for Kong to be so alone. He’s the last of his kind. Every day he searches for a family he’ll never find.”
“You’ve said that only a small part of Hollow Earth has been mapped. Could it be possible that he just hasn’t found them yet?”
“We can hope,” she conceded. “Everyone needs family. Even Kong. But so far… well, it’s been a little disappointing. But Kong keeps looking. It’s not impossible.”
If Godzilla and his mob didn’t finish them all off ages ago, Hampton thought. The fight Kong and Godzilla had had a few years back hadn’t been a first-time event. The evidence was clear that at one point there had been a full-on war between Godzilla, the Titans he controlled, and the Great Apes. There were a couple of reasons a war might end: one of them was if one side were all dead. Kong and his handful of ancestors on Skull Island might well have been all that remained of that species, and then only because they were stuck on an island Godzilla didn’t care about.
“Well, we all wish the big guy the best of luck. Wouldn’t it be great if in a few years you had a little Kong to show us pictures of.”
“I… Well, sure,” Andrews said. “But, you know, let’s not put the cart before the horse.”
“Or the baby before the life mate, I guess,” the host grinned. Then his expression changed back to serious as he switched topics.
“What about Godzilla?”
Yes, Hampton thought. What about him? The memory came with photographic clarity—the jagged edges of what had, a moment before, been a solid hotel-room wall, hot humid air rushing to fill her lungs, the reptilian outline of the Titan’s head eclipsing the sky. His eyes, seeming to stare right through her. And the fear, so primal and powerful she didn’t even understand what it was until later…
Snap out of it, she told herself. She tried to narrow her focus back to the interview.
“Godzilla is on the surface,” Andrews said. “Kong is below. As long as they don’t venture into each other’s territories, we’ve got nothing to worry about.”
Yeah. Not a thing, Hampton thought as the show cut to commercial. Except that he had recently attacked an offshore oil derrick for no reason anyone could discern. At least it had been abandoned, so there had been no casualties. No other Titans involved either. That was what bothered her about it. It seemed random, but Godzilla didn’t do random. If you looked hard enough, you could always find a reason.
Well, almost always.
When the program came back, Andrews and the moderator had been joined by another guest, a U.S. Senator, to discuss the Hollow Earth Conservation Bill, which would hopefully be coming up for a vote in the House in a few weeks. If it passed there, this nimrod was saying he would shut it down in the Senate. Andrews was doing well—sounding reasonable, collected, and passionate. She was sticking to her talking points. The other guy… Hampton just prayed she could watch the whole thing without breaking into an epic session of swearing and blaspheming in front of her subordinates.
She made it, but she worried she might have incurred a small stroke in the process.
Hampton was two hours into what was never going to be more than six hours of sleep when her phone began demanding her attention. She groaned, practiced her Te Reo by swearing a bit, and picked up the phone. It was pounding rain outside, she noticed, wondering if it would let up today at all.
“Yep,” she said. “Hampton here.”
It was her new assistant, Laurier. She let the young woman talk for a moment.
“Okay,” she said, when a break came in the torrent of words. “Calm down. Repurpose a satellite—we don’t want to lose her, God knows. I’ll be in in ten.”
She hadn’t counted on the rain. One of the walk-overs was a foot deep in water. She didn’t have time to go around so she just went through, soaking her shoes and pants legs. When were they going to get the bloody drainage fixed? This was the Caribbean. Rain happened here. Four years, and this place was still under construction. They were still welding things in the halls.
She reached Control, stripped off her poncho. Everyone was watching her come in, of course. She nodded at them and moved up to the monitors. The central one showed a scattering of islands off the southern tip of South America. One of them was marked with a Monarch symbol.
A red dot, which ought to be on the island, was not. Instead, it was moving out into the Atlantic Ocean.
“Heading?” she asked.
“Northeast,” Laurier responded.
“Any discernable destination? Sources of radioactivity? Other Titans?”
“The rest of them are right where Godzilla sent them,” Laurier said.
“And Godzilla?”
“We’re not sure where he is.”
“Ah, great,” she said. “We’re going to find out soon enough, with Scylla on the loose.”
“What do we do?”
“If she continues straight the way she’s going, where will she end up?”
“Western Africa. Maybe Sierra Leone.”
“Hmm-huh,” she said, studying the map. “Then she’s not a danger to anyone yet. A few days, maybe.” She frowned. Then she pointed to a dot in the Atlantic. “What’s this?”
“Ilha de Trindade,” Laurier said. “It’s a Brazilian possession. In fact they have a small naval station there.”
“Ah, super,” she said. “We’d better let ’em know then, and right away. Get us cleared to get in there, too. We need to get her contained before Godzilla finds out.”
“On it,” Laurier said.
Nodding, she took out her phone and called Andrews, who answered immediately. Did she not sleep either?
“We’ve got a situation here,” she said.
“What?”
“Fricken’ Scylla. She’s not playing ball anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean she’s taking a swim in the Atlantic. Without a hall pass.”
“Godzilla?” Andrews asked.
“Not yet. Still in the South Pacific as far as we know.”
“Only a matter of time,” Andrews said. “Okay, I’m on my way.”
“Nah,” Hampton said. “Get your kid to school first. Then I’ll see you. We need to brainstorm this, though.”
Hampton pulled up their profile of Scylla. She was a nasty one: a Destroyer, a Titan that just liked to break things. From a distance she looked like a massive spider-crab, albeit with only six legs. Up closer you noticed her head, which was more squid than arachnid or insect, complete with tentacles. She fed on most sources of energy but had a sweet tooth for nuclear fission.
“Okay,” she murmured, moving her mouse. “Let’s see where our assets are.”
Monarch didn’t have any subs near enough to make a difference, but they had a M.U.L.E prepped, and pair of Osprey Mark III aircraft. It looked like they could get to Ilha de Trindade before Scylla and hopefully set a trap, put her in a containment field to give them time to figure what the next step was.
The ever-so-slight problem with that was that containment fields were tailored to individual Titans, and Scylla had never been in a containment field. The tailor, so to speak, didn’t have a pattern. She had first been found sleeping underneath an area near Sedona, Arizona, and showed every sign of staying dormant. In fact, a few of their scientists thought she might even be dead. She wasn’t high priority. But when Monster Zero called up the Titans a few years back, Scylla popped right up out of the sand. After that, she didn’t want to go back down.
When Godzilla cemented himself as the dominant Titan on the surface, most of the other Titans went along with it. Not Scylla. She headed to the Georgia coast and wreaked havoc, searching for an old atomic bomb that had been lost there in the 1950s. She found it, but Godzilla thrashed her pretty decisively before she could do anything catastrophic. He let her live, though, and she seemed to finally agree to play nice. She settled down in a frozen pool on one of the far South American islands and had stayed there. Her presence there had had a positive effect on the global environment, helping reverse sea-warming.
But now here she was, on the move again. And according to satellite data, she was no longer cooling the global climate, but warming it. Not a lot, but if it continued over time, it would add up.
When Godzilla found out, he was gonna be pissed. So they had to get her back into hibernation, pronto—or at the very least, keep her in the middle of the Atlantic until Godzilla showed up so they could have their little tiff far from playgrounds and skyscrapers.
“She still on course?” Andrews asked, when she showed up.
Hampton glanced at her.
“Like the new hairdo,” she said. “Very professional.”
“Thanks,” Andrews replied. “I’m not quite sure about it. But it’s done. Scylla?”
“Just making a beeline to… someplace,” Hampton said. “She’s stopping now and then—probably to feed. But she clearly has some idea where she’s going.”
Andrews scanned the data from the other stations. “Every place else is quiet, including Hollow Earth.”
“Let’s hope this is just a one-off,” Hampton replied. “I always did think Scylla had scorpions for brains. She’s just fricken’ nuts.”
“Right,” Andrews said. “Not an intellectual like Godzilla.”
Hampton laughed at that. Probably because she hadn’t had any sleep, more likely because the whole subject of Godzilla left her feeling… she didn’t know. Vulnerable? Which at least partly accounted for her recent lack of sleep.
The next ten hours were tense. They were still tracking Scylla, and the team arrived at Ilha de Trindade. They set up one of their biggest containment nets. When the Titan arrived, they would either drive her or lure in the right direction. Once contained, Monarch’s “veterinarian” would deliver an anesthetic he believed would immobilize her long enough to haul her up with multiple M.U.L.Es, transport her back to her little island, and cage her up there, if that was what was required.
Hampton had her doubts any of that would work. She thought the evidence was pretty clear that you couldn’t contain a Titan against its will, at least not indefinitely.
“This part always makes me nervous,” Hampton told Andrews as the dot representing Scylla closed in on their trap.
“You’ve done this before?” Andrews asked.
“Yeah. In my head. About five hundred times since this morning.”
“It’s going to work,” Andrews reassured her.
“It had better.”
Together they watched as the dot got closer, closer—then vanished.
“What the—” Hampton sputtered. “Containment team, report.”
A young man appeared on-screen “We had visual, Director,” he said. “I didn’t think she knew we were here. Then she dove. And she didn’t come back up.”
“That makes no sense,” Hampton said. “Even underwater, we should still be able to—oh, dammit. Completely dammit.”
“What?” Andrews said.
“Laurier,” she called. “The island. What kind of island is it? Please tell me it’s a coral atoll or something.”
“No, Director.” she said. “It’s volcanic, pretty recent geologically. It’s part of a chain of volcanos, most of them underwater.”
“A hot-spot chain?”
“They used to think so. But the islands aren’t lined up right with the continental plates.”
“It’s a vortex,” Hampton sighed. “One we didn’t know about. Remember during the Monster Zero crisis when Godzilla kept disappearing from our instruments and then just popping back up someplace else? Scylla’s doing the same thing. She was never going to Africa. She was always going right there, to charge up and disappear. Dammit!”
“Let’s be sure, anyway,” Andrews said. “If Scylla’s in Hollow Earth with Kong, I pity her.”
Five hours later they were sure. The containment team confirmed the existence of what had been dubbed “a lateral vortex,” a tunnel that dove down to the space-time distortion membrane separating Hollow Earth from the upper world. Instead of punching through, though, it ran along the membrane and likely popped out somewhere else on the surface. Without entering it themselves, there was no way of knowing where it went. The fastest option was to rig a drone and send it in, but they were only halfway prepped for that before the other shoe dropped. A big one.
Godzilla had been sighted in the Java Sea. His wake had already flipped a ship. An hour later Scylla appeared in the Bay of Bengal. Godzilla’s projected path was aimed straight at her. Or… maybe they were both aimed at a third thing? The same thing that had attracted Godzilla to that oil platform?
“He knows she’s there,” Andrews said.
“Yes,” Hampton said. “He certainly does. Now let’s just hope Scylla doesn’t intend to make landfall.”
She didn’t hold out much hope for that scenario, though, as Scylla began cutting a wake straight toward the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent. It didn’t take long to figure out why.
“She’s going to the Kudankulam nuclear power plant,” Laurier informed them.
“Yep,” Hampton said. “Of course she is. I suppose we should start calling people now. Presidents, senators, prime ministers. Do you think Paul Bunyan might be available?”
“I have it on good authority Godzilla killed him in 1887,” Andrews replied. “I can see if Babe is available.”
Hampton glared at the screen.
Predictably, the Indian military scrambled fighters. Just as predictably, Scylla knocked them out of the sky, unaffected by their munitions. She tore the coastal plant to ruins. It melted down, of course, but Scylla literally ate radiation, using some sort of polluting cloud she emitted. Although she left a smoking, smoggy ruin behind her, it was at least clean of toxic fallout.
But the average temperature in the region had ticked up four degrees; worse still, the ozone layer high above her path showed signs of weakening.
Godzilla was still playing catch-up. By the time he surfaced off the coast of India, Scylla was long gone, skirting up the western coast of the subcontinent, making landfall in Pakistan and cutting a trail of destruction north and west through Iran, where she stopped to wreck a nuclear enrichment facility. From there she continued through Azerbaijan, across the Black Sea, Ukraine, and Poland. She crashed through Berlin, but didn’t slow down enough to properly destroy the city before leaving the continent and taking a swim to the United Kingdom, where she did stop to gobble up a uranium pellet manufacturing plant in Preston. Godzilla missed her by six hours. He was closer when she stopped at the Aviano Airbase in Italy to feast on a portion of the United States’ nuclear arsenal.
In Rome, he finally caught up with her—although Scylla reached the Eternal City first.
“And here we go,” Andrews said.
Godzilla had also entered Rome.
Scylla stopped her rampage and turned to face him. Hampton reflected that they looked like gunfighters in the weirdest Western ever, squared off at high noon. The basilica of St. Peters was in the background between them. It was dusk, the moon was rising. It was a still moment, almost beautiful.
“Get her,” Hampton said under her breath. “That’s why you’re there, right?”
Scylla shrieked like nothing else on Earth, and Godzilla roared back at her. Then they charged each other.
Scylla’s six legs struck through roof tiles and paving stones, filling the whole city with an awful scritch-tik-tik-tiking. Godzilla’s footfalls were almost subsonic; she could feel them in her bones even through the monitors. She watched in horror as masonry from more than two thousand years of Italian history was shattered, scattered, and trampled to dust.
Then they met with the force of two tsunamis, but one of the waves was bigger than the other. Godzilla heaved Scylla into the air and threw her, sending her smashing through several city blocks. Then he ran forward and leaped into the air, crashing down on top of her. Scylla was on her back; her tentacles writhed up and clamped onto his mouth. He pushed down, steadily, and his mouth opened, even against the pressure of her attack.
A blue beam shot out, point blank, into Scylla’s maw. Her legs kicked wildly, but Godzilla bore down with the azure flame.
And Scylla exploded, her green blood drenching an area of ten city blocks.
“Oh.” Hampton said. “Wow.”
It wasn’t the first time Godzilla had killed another Titan, of course. The insectile MUTOs and Monster Zero, to name two. But he’d fought Scylla before, beaten her soundly and chosen not to kill her. The same could be said of other Titans, like Amhuluk. His main goal since his victory over Monster Zero seemed to be controlling the other Titans, using them to keep the Earth in proper balance—not eradicating them.
But he had totally just executed Scylla.
Maybe it was because she was starting to have a negative impact on the global climate? Or maybe Godzilla had a “two strikes and you’re out” rule.
“Something’s going on,” Andrews said. “He’s acting… different.”
“Agreed,” Hampton said. “But what do we think that means?”
“Godzilla responds to global pressures,” she said. “The MUTOs and Monster Zero were both on track to destroy the world as we know it. But most of the other Titans, whatever you think of their dispositions, had some positive effects on the planet. Godzilla beat them into line but he didn’t kill them. But some of them are easier to manage than others, and all of a sudden it looks like Godzilla is willing to make examples of those that don’t recognize his dominance. Eliminate them from the equation. Because the equation has changed.”
“Like there’s a new factor added,” Hampton said. “Shit. Like another Monster Zero. Another World Ender.”
Andrews nodded. “One we don’t know about.”
“That’s a cheery thought.”
“What he does next may tell us something,” Andrews said.
“Watch and wait,” Hampton agreed. “That’ll be fun to sell to the powers that be.”
Hampton had a number of things she expected of Godzilla in the aftermath of the fight. He might move straight on to another possible rogue Titan. He might go on patrol. He might vanish into some hidey-hole.
He did none of those things. Instead, he stomped his way to the Roman Colosseum, stepped inside, curled up and took a nap.
The calls started coming in, from everywhere.