Kaiju Apocalypse (16 page)

“Well, that sucked,” Fritz complained over the comm. “I thought I’d at least kill one of them.

“I’m not that surprised, not really,” Handley stated. “The Hellfire was obsolete before the fall of Nor-wic. And Mag cannons? Dogkiller suits carry those. Worthless on something our size. You’d think we’d have more updated weaponry on these pieces of–”

“Phoenix Flight, this is
Argo
. Those Mothers barely slowed down!”

“Kinda noticed,
Argo
. Hope you have something you can drop on them,” Handley suggested.

“We have kinetics, Phoenix Flight, but they’ll wipe out everything – including the men you’re about to extract.”

“Yeah, let’s hold off on that for a moment,
Argo
. We’re gonna do all we can,
Argo
. Three, clear.” Handley killed the transmission.

“So now what do we do?” Fritz asked, as they circled back to get another look at the trio of Mothers who were now drawing dangerously close to the city.

“What do we do? We pray, and hope that McCoy and the rest of his team are at the extraction point when we get there.”

*****

“I’m sorry, Kitty,” Dr. Mera Babineaux said through the speaker. “The contagion is too widespread. There’s nothing we can do. I can’t even isolate any individual enzyme in it to know where to begin. This...
stuff
has nothing I’ve ever seen before or anybody else on the Medical Board. I’m truly sorry. Do you have any... religious preferences for your... you know.”

“No.”

“I’ll keep looking, because we might come across something like this again,” Dr. Babineaux said in a soft tone. “But... sweetie, there aren’t even any protein compounds I recognize in this thing!”

“Thanks for doing your best, Doc,” Kitty sighed. She turned and shuffled back to the small cot. She picked up her tablet and continued work on decoding the space station’s codes and data information. After a few minutes of trying to stare at the dancing numbers and symbols on the screen, Kitty powered down the tablet in her lap.  She couldn't work anymore.  The data was just swimming around the tablet's screen before her eyes, her brain refused to process the information on the screen. Her skin was slick with a sticky sweat that matted her hair to her scalp.

Her bowels burned like the fires of a furnace, and yet nothing she ate or drank came out. Her joints ached and throbbed constantly, though it was the low-grade fever she had developed over the past two hours that scared her more. Kitty had watched several of the other members of the group that had returned from Tango Zeta 3 break due to the fever and began to undergo the change. Scales had replaced their flesh, the pupils of their eyes becoming swirling pools of endless darkness. Only one soldier had broken free of the decontamination unit’s restraints so far. Kitty thanked whatever deity was watching over the
Argo
that the guards on duty had been ready for it. They had cut down the poor escapee mere feet from her shattered decontamination chamber. Their guns had done a number on her already twisted and rearranged body, severing one of the two large fins that replaced her arms.

Even in death, the malformed rows of razor-sharp teeth that lined her mouth snapped and chewed at the
Argo's
artificial atmosphere from some lingering twitch of the woman's mutated nervous system. It had terrified Kitty to watch that, to know that the transformation would be her ultimate fate.

Regret stung Kitty. She knew she would never finish decrypting the logs and sensor data from the station that Captain Whitmire so sorely needed. Sure, she knew that someone else on board the
Argo
might do it eventually. However, it had been
her
task, her responsibility, and it hurt her to know that she had failed. Her life was over.  In less than an hour at the average progression rate, she too would become one of
those
things like Fletcher and all of the others who had set foot on that cursed space station. They had all died on Tango Zeta 3, and nobody had known it at the time.

Fletcher began to hammer a spiked fin against the Plexiglas of his decontamination unit, long strings of saliva hanging from the extra mouths that covered the bulk of his face.  His tan skin had become a dead gray and his rage nearly uncontainable. Spider web cracks were beginning to form in the Plexiglas of his decontamination unit from his relentless attack on it. Soon, the doctors and guards would be forced to put him down before he broke free and endangered the rest of
Argo's
crew, as they had with all of the others.

So far, only Kitty was still in control of her higher functions and not being driven by the baser urges which seemed to compel the others. She just wished there was something she could do, something to help the
Argo
and the rest of the colonists and crew who were still in hibernation. She hated the helpless feeling, which threatened to overwhelm her.

“No.”

Her own voice startled her. She hadn’t realized she had spoken, or that she had stood up. She glanced at the tablet in her hands and wondered why she had picked it up. A command sequence had been started on the tablet, one she was intimately familiar with: a direct link to the ship’s AI, Medea. She glanced over the command/control sequence and nodded. Not only what she was doing was right, it was necessary. It was for the greater good.

She activated every single fire suppression system in the isolation chambers, including hers. Medea tried to stop her, but Kitty easily forced the AI to accept her command. Thick, treated liquid began to fill all twenty decontamination units, causing the scientists and guards to step back in surprise. Shouting began as it became evident that no one knew what was going on. No one but Kitty, at least.

Once the liquid was at knee-level in every occupied cell, and every single contaminated soul was touching it, she knew it was time. She closed her eyes and wished that the
Argo
would make it to wherever humanity was destined to rebuild, and that all those who were sure to look into the matter after the fact would understand her actions.

She pushed the “execute” button and every single electrical conduit in the decontamination cells overloaded. The liquid, in contact with the conduits, turned into a conductor as electricity coursed throughout the cells – causing over one hundred thousand volts of electricity to pass directly through every single infected’s nervous system, overloading their bodies and causing each and every one of them to fall into the liquid, dead before they landed.

*****

Deep beneath the Earth's mantle in the outer core, a great being stirred. It rolled over in the flowing ocean of magma that it embraced, consciousness finally returning. The core’s heat was comforting, but it knew the time had come to leave and take to the stars once more. It had slumbered enough. The body of the creature began to spasm as it pushed through the outer core and into the Earth’s mantle. It delayed there for a minute as the environment changed around it.

It would delay no longer. The ocean floor split and heaved upwards as she rose from her nesting place. The water was superheated and flash-boiled the instant the billions of tons of magma pushed through in the creature’s wake. The ocean floor split and heaved upwards as it rose from the nesting place.

Magma turned into lava and the super-heated liquid rock poured into the black, frigid depths of the ocean. The lava began to explode as the magma interacted with the ice cold waters, triggering a chain reaction all across the length of the Marianas Trench as thousands of detonations began to daisy-chain for over 2,500 kilometers. The kinetic energy from each explosion was equivalent to three megatons of TNT per explosion. The entire region began to shake and collapse as more magma filled the Pacific Basin, triggering more explosions.

Giant wings unfurled and pushed the creature through the water and into the sky. Underwater blasts began to trigger massive tsunamis, pushing water away from the source of the eruptions and causing massive underwater swells that had not been seen in thousands of years to rush across the broken seabed.

In the air above the turbulent oceans, water, lava and mucous dripping from the massive wings, the creature slowly turned to the east and began to fly. The world crumbled and burned in the Kaiju’s wake. The sky turned to ash, the waters boiled, and on the bridge of the
Argo
, Captain Nathan Whitmire could only stand and watch helplessly.

The Mother of All had risen. Humanity’s time on Earth had run out.

*****

McCoy raced after Yeltsin, cursing himself for allowing the old man to get away from him. His respect for Yeltsin had kept him from seeing just how mad the former Minister of War truly was. Sending the Gunny up closer to the surface to direct the extraction on the Phoenixes had allowed him time to talk one on one with the old man. McCoy thought he had managed to convince Yeltsin to come with them, but Yeltsin had merely played on his trust, admiration and respect. McCoy rubbed at his jaw while he ran. The old man sure could still throw a mean punch. He was lucky he wasn't unconscious on the floor.

Time was running out. The lieutenant needed to get Yeltsin, drag the old man, if necessary, to the bunker’s main door, and haul him onboard one of the shuttles. Yeltsin was fast for his age, which surprised McCoy. Panting, McCoy rounded another corner in the mass of seemingly random hallways that composed the interior of the bunker and saw Yeltsin outside a new set of blast doors, ones that he had not seen before. The old man was fiddling with a set of key cards, trying to open them. He managed to activate the doors just as McCoy reached him. Plowing into Yeltsin like a runaway train, he slammed the old man into the corridor's wall, pinning him there. Yeltsin struggled against him, fighting back like a cornered, rabid animal.

“Look!” Yeltsin screamed. “Look in there! That weapon is humanity's only hope!”

“Son of a bitch,” McCoy growled as he fought with Yeltsin. The Minister left him no other choice. McCoy head butted the old man. The front of McCoy's combat helmet smashed into Yeltsin's forehead.  The old man's eyes rolled up to show only whites, before falling closed and the former Minister of War went limp in his arms. McCoy caught his collapsing form. He started to drag Yeltsin back the way they had came, but as he did, he noticed the strange light pouring from the doorway that Yeltsin had opened.  Placing the old man's body gently on the floor, McCoy moved to look inside the room.  In the center, a glowing orb of pure energy spun, hovering a good seven feet off the floor.

“Oh. Oh, holy crap,” McCoy breathed. He had never seen anything like it before. Energy danced and crackled about the orb, sending miniature lightning bolts to strike at the room's ceiling and floor. Four guide rods were around it, which seemed to attract most of the lightning bolts being tossed throughout the room. There was a control console just inside the doorway. 

McCoy’s eyes widened as he realized just what he was staring at. It had to be the weapon that the old man had kept going on about. Seeing it with his own eyes, it was easy to believe that the orb could destroy a planet, if its energy was unleashed. He backed away from the room and returned to where Yeltsin lay. 
Was the old man's crazy ranting real?
He wondered. He shook his head. Even if it were, it didn't matter. The
Argo
was waiting, and it was past time to get the Hell off this planet.

McCoy heaved Yeltsin's limp form over his shoulders and ran through the corridors to where the other rest of the soldiers were waiting for him. The Gunny appeared relieved when as he saw them approaching.

“Did you hurt him much?” the Gunny asked as he picked up the Minister’s limp head.

“I don’t know,” McCoy admitted. “You tell me. Is he concussed? Did I do any permanent damage?”

“Damn it, Jim,” the Gunny growled. “I’m a Gunnery Sergeant, not some doctor!”

All the soldiers stood ready at the door to the surface and the streets of Lemura beyond. Outside, every single one of them knew that the Kaiju would be waiting. They would only have one shot at getting through them and to the shuttles which hovered nearby. If they missed their window of opportunity, the Dog Kaiju would tear them to shreds and eat their twitching bodies as they died.

“We’re ready, sir,” Kirby said from the point position. The young man was sweating profusely, but his voice was filled with iron resolve.