“Why are we still here, you mean?” Tom said.
“Yes.”
“Well, there’s the science of it, of course.” Tom waved to the rest of the newbies. “Your new friends here are going to be doing work that has never been done before. It’s literally a whole new world, and we’ve just scratched the surface of it. We’re doing things here that no one else gets to do—will never get to do. That’s awesome.”
“But we won’t get to share what we do,” Aparna said. “We’ll be doing science in a vacuum.”
“You get to share it,” Tom said. “Just with a very small number of fellow scientists for now. In the future, that might change. In which case each of you is going to become a rock star in your respective fields. That won’t suck.” He turned back to me. “This is where lots of our funding comes these days, by the way. Governments still fund us, but less so than they used to. But the same billionaires who are racing each other to get to Mars are bankrolling us in the hopes that something we learn here will be applicable back home, in a general this-doesn’t-look-like-it-came-from-another-planet way.”
“Or they’re funding us to have somewhere to go if things go to shit back home,” Niamh suggested.
“I’m sure some of them might have thought about that,” Tom said. “I’m not sure it’s going to work out for them the way they’d planned. They’d be better off with Mars.”
“Why’s that?”
“It has a lot fewer predators, for one.”
“It’s not just the science, though, is it?” I said, bringing the topic back round.
“No,” Tom said. “We’re not called the Kaiju Preservation Society just because it’s a catchy name. It turns out the kaiju really could use some help.”
“What does a creature the size of a small mountain need with humans?” Kahurangi asked.
“I promise you that you will find out,” Tom said. “But what we do is more than keep the kaiju on this side of the fence. We also keep others out.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“It’s like I said, nuclear energy thins the dimensional barrier.” Tom motioned to show off Honda Base. “We keep Camp Century humming along because it’s nicely positioned, for various reasons I don’t understand, to make it easy to open the door between our worlds, and then to close it back up again, each time in a predictable fashion. It and a couple of other sites on the globe, run by the other signatories to the Kaiju Defense and Protection Treaty, are the only official ways in and out of Kaiju Earth. They are tightly controlled and secured. There’s a reason we’ve managed to keep this all a secret for so long.
“But nothing is that secret anymore,” Tom continued. “Governments and companies know Kaiju Earth exists. They have to, in order for us to do our work and get our funding. We control the doors to this world. But if you’re ambitious, you can slip past the guards. Or, if you’re ambitious enough, you can blow a hole in the fence if you want to. You just have to know how. And when that happens, and it has happened before, both our worlds are in danger. Kaiju are a danger to humans, sure. But it works the other way, too.”
“They could step on us and not even notice,” Kahurangi said.
“Mosquitoes kill more humans every year than every other type of animal combined,” Tom said to him, “including other humans. And to flip that around, humans have wiped our version of Earth clean of almost every single animal much larger than we are. We hunt them to extinction, and we put ourselves into their environments. Size isn’t the issue. It never was.”
“So we’re the monster police, too,” I said to Tom.
“Correct,” he replied. “The only real question is, who are the monsters?”
“They ask that question in every monster movie, you know. It’s an actual trope.”
“I know,” Tom said. “What does it say about us that it’s relevant every single time they ask it?”
CHAPTER
6
We newbies were all thinking it, but this time it was Niamh who got to it first. “We’re flying in that?”
That in this case was an immense dirigible that looked like it was prototyped by a kaiju-size Leonardo da Vinci in the fifteenth century, and minimally maintained since then. Everyone else on the Tanaka Base Gold Team was going up the gangways like it was no big thing.
“What were you expecting?” Tom, who had directed us to the airfield, asked Niamh.