“Holy shit,” I said.
Satie grinned. “Cute like a panda, right?”
Kahurangi made a noise at this. “Mate, if you think that’s cute, you’ve been on this planet too long.”
“Seconded,” I said. “That thing looks like H. P. Lovecraft’s panic attack.”
Satie nodded. “Wait ’til you see his cloaca.”
“We’re not actually going to see his cloaca, are we?” Kahurangi asked.
“Dr. Lautagata, by the time we’re done, there’s not much of Edward we won’t see.”
“How close are we going to get?” I asked.
“Pretty close.”
“Is that absolutely necessary?” Kahurangi asked.
“Did you put missiles on my helicopter?” Satie asked him. “Filled with pheromones?”
“No.”
“Then it’s absolutely necessary. Don’t worry, Doctor. Getting up close to him is the easy part. It’s the getting away that’s going to be the trick.”
CHAPTER
10
“Why isn’t he eating us?” I asked. We were now close enough to Edward that this was not an entirely irrelevant question.
“He’s asleep,” Satie said.
I glanced over at him. “Asleep?”
“They sleep, yup.”
“How can you tell when he’s asleep?”
“He’s not eating us, for one,” Satie said. “You can’t see his eyes, for another.”
I looked out at Edward. “He has eyes?”
“We call them eyes. I’m sure by now someone explained to you how it’s all more complicated than that. Trust me, you’ll know them when you see them.”
“No real eyes, but an actual cloaca,” Kahurangi said, from the back.
“I don’t design them, I just fly to them,” Satie replied.
“Well, let’s douse this thing with pheromones and go,” I said. I kept looking at Edward not being awake and was reasonably certain awake would be a bowel-loosening state.
Satie shook his head. “Not how it works. We spray now, he’ll just sleep through them. Then Dr. Lautagata will have nothing to report, and Dr. Pham will be angry with you.”
“I’m willing to lie,” Kahurangi said.
“Today’s your first day on the job, so I’ll tell you something you don’t know, which is you don’t cross Dr. Pham,” Satie said. “She will come for you in the night, son. This is a tip I am giving you for free.”
“She seems pretty nice.”
“She is nice. Wonderful person. And also if you lie to her about these pheromones, she will gut you and leave you for the tree crabs.”
“There are tree crabs?” Kahurangi asked.
Satie ignored this. “We have to wake him up,” he said to me.
“And how do we do that?” I asked.
Satie moved the helicopter closer to Edward. Much closer.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Kahurangi said.
“I’m with him,” I added.
“Getting this close is usually enough to get his attention,” Satie said.
“You’ve done this before.”
“Sure.”
“And you think this is wise.” I gestured to us being mere meters away from a fleshy wall of kaiju.
Satie snorted. “If we were wise, we wouldn’t be on this planet.”
“Hey, what are those?” Kahurangi pointed at the wall of kaiju flesh. I followed his finger to a spot on Edward where things were, for lack of a better word, squirming.
“Parasites,” Satie said.
“The size of rottweilers.”
“If we stick around, you’ll see larger.”
“I think I’ve already cast my vote on sticking around.”
“It doesn’t look like he’s waking up,” I said to Satie. Edward’s parasites might be moving about, but he was not.
Satie grimaced. “Okay, well. I have one more trick up the sleeve.” He took us vertically up the wall that was Edward, until we were hovering over the top of him. There was enough room on the top to land, if we wanted to. I hoped that we did not want to.
“You ready with that switch?” Satie asked me.
I grabbed it. “Ready.”
“Okay. I’m going to do a thing, and then I’m going to count to three. When I get to three, you flip it on and count to five, then switch it off.”
“We’re not going to just let it run?”
“Why would we do that?”